I have a 1ghz Apple g4 laptop and a dying 900mhz AMD Windows Xp machine... I have legal copies of Poser 5 on both. What I want to do is make a long form animated project. The problem is rendering takes forever (OF COURSE)... so I was looking into setting up a render farm or something similar. I realize now that my best course of action is to use poser to design the models and animated them but render it in something different. So how do I do this? My goal is to make the best rendered animation in the practical time frame. Price is somewhat an object since I will probably be getting a new computer and can't afford software after that :(

I use Reiss Studio's Body Studio and 3D Studio Max 5 -- these work excellently together. If you're a student, Max is expensive-- if you're not, its very, very expensive. The cheapest solution is probably to use Poser 4 (proPack) and Lightwave. LW is much less expensive than 3DS, plays nice with Poser geometries, and has a very fast, high quality renderer Poser 5 is less compatible, so if you're looking for the hair and cloth room stuff, you'll have more difficulty. If you're on a tight budget, I'd spend the dollars on the fastest Windows box you can buy with a lot of memory. . .and then render in Poser. Although LW is faster and better than the Poser render engine, you're still going to be going from a 900 Mhz machine to a 3 gigahertz machine (I bought mine from PC connection for under $1K)-- this is a big increase in speed. So that's your highest priority. Also, look very carefully at your render settings. Reducing the number of polygons in your scene is very important. Also, reduce the number of shadow casting lights.Poser artists tend to drop in a lot of props and models which have a huge number of polys. . .resulting in very long render times. Don't rayrtrace. Don't use giant textures. If a figure is in the distance and has a 1 meg texture, reduce resolution in Photoshop. . .loading and processing these giant textures slows everything down. My best guess without knowing more about your project is that with a new machine and optomizing your settings, you can probably get a 5X increase in render speed in Poser over what you're doing getting now.

Using PoserPro and Vue d'esprit with Mover 4, you can render pretty incredible animation; plus, Vue comes with RenderCow, allowing you to do distributed renders. I just have NO idea how Vue works with Poser 5; I went out and bought a copy, but since I primarily like to do animation, and I've NEVER managed to succesfully render any in Poser 5, I don't use it.

Thanks alot for the advice so far. I want to try Vue but it says you have to have poser 4 installed to use poser 5... I have heard that the installer is very very picky about poser installations, so I don't want to take that risk without further research. I am rendering only vickie 2 with a Stephyz (?) texture that is large. I don't want to give up that texture, and most of the stuff I am doing right now is facial closeups so I need to play with reduction vs. quality.

If most of what you're doing is facial closeups, consider deleting the rest of the figure. . .that is, you can have a "head, shoulders and hair" model for the closeups, and then use the larger model for the full shots. Poser's geometry processing isn't particularly optimized, so that in a scene where the bulk of the body isn't visible, the geometry is still calculated. If you think about it, movie cinematographers think like this. . .detailed makeup is unnecessary in a crowd scene, mandatory for a "two shot" Think of it another way: if the amount of image area that the rendered image is going to cover is only 100 pixels square, then having 200 pixels square of texture is unnecessary and wasteful. you can downsample your textures in photoshop and have a Steff HiRes Stef MedRes and Stef LoRes. . . use them in different shots depending on how close the camera will be

Attached Link: http://useless.originalplaid.com/final.jpg

How do you delete part of the figure? Is that the same as making it invisible? Another quick question. Final Cut Express is picking up a alpha channel from the white background (In poser -> render background color) Is this a real alpha channel or just something that Final Cut is doing on it's own?

I'm not sure how Poser's render engine is set up, so I can't say for sure that turning the body to inivisible will improve times Deleting part of the body: I do this as an OBJ export of the selected body parts. Not clear to me if poser will let you save the truncated figure as a *.pz3; it clearly allows you to replace body parts with props and save that way-- but total deletion is escaping me at the moment, maybe someone else will chime in. Poser definitely exports an Alpha, if you save as Tiff. The alpha channel is very useful in compositing. Not dependant on background color-- it reflects the Z-order (distance from the camera) of the objects in the scene.