There are so many options and variables in the P5 render settings, and the length of time it takes to render at high quality makes lots of experimenting too time consuming. I though I'd post the current settings I favor, and hope others do the same. I will say I'm not a fan of raytracing, but who knows? Maybe I'm doing something wrong with it.

I always use Production, and set Pixel samples to 3 or 6, only higher on close ups.

I'm an odd duck... I almost always use the P4 renderer in P5. I really don't like the amount of blur in the Firefly renderer, and if there's a way for the user to control it or step it down, I haven't found it. I've used Firefly for a few images, but otherwise it's P4 renderer, shadows and anti-aliasing on, render to a new window (usually 800x800 or so.)

Well if you are using good texture maps you don't want to use texture filtering as it will blur your maps (it is designed I believe to compensate for pixelation in low rez maps)also you are missing out on many of the benifits of the firefly renderer by not availiang yourself of Displacement maps (of course that also involves fiddling in the material room, which I love but understand many people don't). and you won't get better shadows than is provided by raytracing (you must turn it on in the lights that you want raytraced shadows on) as well as realistic reflection, refraction and other effects(though for those you also need to be comfortable in the material room) my settings are displacement(set at .5 usually), raytracing, and cast shadows.

Also , I find that that if you increase your bucket size to about 200 it seems to render faster .

I think the problem a lot of us have setting preferences is that we don't know what all the settings are for. I'm sure it's in the manual but, frankly, I don't always understand the explanations I find there. Anyone have a link to a straight list that is written to my idiot level????

we need someone to write "Poser5 for Dummies".... as long as it not Shamms Mortier ;)

I am uploading a pic right now that I used the P4 render settings because I am just learning P5 on a machine running WinXP...I hope to upgrade my OS real soon so I can actually run P5 on my main machine(Running Win98SE and Poser5 wont work),So I think I will try the settings you have above Tomorrow morning and will upload the Pic I get from the settings above,Now if someone wants to upload a picture of their RayTracing settings I will upload that pic...Or I can just compile all of the renders into one picture then we can see the difference...Note I will upload the render times too useing a AMD Athlon 1.9 with 1024DDR and a Geforce 3 64MbDDR....

The pixel samples setting is very important if you're trying to reduce pixelation on DOF blurs. I've increased that value only when using the DOF setting.

I never use texture filtering, as that blurs the texture. The same is almost true of the minimum shading rate as well. And for maximum texture size, I usually throw a 0 on the end of 1024 so that the full size of the texture gets used properly. Here's a good example. On the left is a render with the settings posted above, and on the right is no texture filtering, 0 shading rate, and 4096 max texture resolution. You can see the difference. It all depends on what you're rendering though. If you're rendering a close up image, use higher settings to catch all the detail. But if it's a further away shot, it makes sense to reduce things so that you don't crush your system :)

The "Remove backfacing polygons" option usually causes more problems than it's worth; any performance gain from this option is minimal. Setting your pixel samples to 12 is probably overkill, also. It'll certainly slow down your render.

12 pixel samples is a lot, they're more useful for depth of field and/or 3d motion blur in my experience. However, despite the additional rendering time depth of field is one of my favourite features. It adds a lot of realism to a scene.

Dialyn nailed it. The manual tells you what the dials and buttons do, but not why you might want to use/not use or increase/decrease them. I'm very happy with the results I've gotten from the above settings, but if I can make better renders, why not? :O) And perhaps Niles or someone else could explain what the production render quality button does differently than the draft quality button? All the real options seem to be down below.

Well do we see a Poser inDepth look at BOOK coming soon?Can I help in any way...

lol... anyone else find it ironically funny that 'Shamms Mortier's name has the word Sham in it? heh.. maybe subconsciously his parents were trying to warn us that hes a scammer :)