I have scraped together my pennies and am now looking for a faster and better renderer for my poser files. I have a copy of maya but not bodystudios, and also thought using maya a little excessive for just rendering poser scenes (although the water, smoke, fire, hair etc. effects are great). Any one got any great renderers or programs that I can load up my poser stuff in and make it look damn good?! (and that are easy to use). All help would be great! Thank you in advance Rich

Attached Link: DEN OF THE DAMNED

I am using Bryce 5 as my renderer, but if you do animations, then you have to get Susanna , or Natural Pose to translate the animation from Poser to Bryce.

And Bryce 5 would let me open my *.pz3 files etc, and then just render them? Or would I have to load the models in and then create it all there? Do texture come across fine, and is it all simple to port? sorry about all the questions, but I wanna get the right thing. Thank you greatly for your help though

Attached Link: Poser figure in Bryce lighting

You will have to export in 3ds or obj etc. UV Mapped textures come out the best. Mike and Vicky work fantastic, but you usually have to spend some time assigning your textures, especially if transparency is involved. I have downloaded the free utility called "Grouper" to help with this, although if you just copy every texture to the folder where your exported obj file resides, then everything usually goes off fine. Here is a Poser figure lighting test I did in Bryce.

The renders definately look better, but do they render a lot faster than poser 5 firefly etc? If so I might look into this..

I cannot speak for 5, as I only have 4.

For optimised Poser to Bryce work, see my tutorial at http://phantast.comicbabecentral.com/tutorials.htm - you are better off not trying to export the materials from Poser, just apply them in Bryce. You get better results this way. I don't know how quickly Firefly renders; the speed of a Bryce render depends very much on how many lights and how many reflective/transparent materials you have. Complex transmapped hair can be slow to render also. Taking 800x600 as a standard picture size, a moderately simple scene usually takes me 2-5 minutes to render on a PC with a chip speed of about 1.8 GHz. Add more complex lights and reflections, and 10-15 minutes is more typical, and longer is possible. Also, Bryce is cheap right now. Check out Vue as well, which will open pz3 files. I find Vue more powerful than Bryce, but not so easy to use. Bryce looks difficult to use at first because the interface is unfamiliar, but once you learn how to exploit it, it's a breeze. It's one of the very few programs where I find myself consciously admiring how well it is designed.

I think (don't have it) That the program with the most support for Poser (out of the box) is Vue. and it's pretty cheap. If you want to do animations you can get Mover (4?) and have some real cool integration and some very neatoi built in features like camera shake. Also Vue with Mover supports network rendering if you have more than one comp. I've been tempted a few times I must say. Oh and from everything I've heard Bryce is a stone cold pain inm the butt to use with poser... but again that is hearsay.

I just started using mover4 for vue and it works great with poser animations. vue4 is a lot faster then bryce for renders from my understanding natural poser requires you to do a lot more work to import your poser animations where as vue does the work for you. The other programm susanna works some windows api to translate the poser information I think that this company also has another program that will let you translate poser characters into other software as well such as cinema4d, truespace or what ever. As far as rendering your poser characters cinema4d has a very fast rendering engine, many people are using this program lately because v6 ce was free on 3dworld mag and computer arts. hope this helps

Where can I see susanna ?
Does it work for Cinema4D v6ce?
Thank you.

Vue d'Esprit 4.2. Nothing is easier for the import of .pz3 files.

Pay a visit to the Vue forum and gallery. Take a look around. You'll like what you see.

how could anyone forget Carrara? Carrara works great with Poser 5.....i got Carrara 2.1 and it has a selection of render engines you can use.....it can do caustics too....Poser 5 cant.....and its pretty cheap to at $300......the render engines are faster than Poser 5 using the same figures..... but the shader nodes are a lot lot more complex than Poser 5....Poser 5 material room is like a micky mouse version of Carrrara.....you have to study this shader tree to figure out how to set maps......but the quality of the pic renders are definitely more natural than Poser 5...... you have to export your Poser scenes as individual OBJ files after posing them in Poser.....then you set up the maps in Carrara and render.....

Rich, what is it that you don't like in the Poser renderer? What do you expect from your new render engine? If you specify your needs, it'll be easier to find a new renderer for you. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, e.g. C4D is a lightning fast raytracer but is really bad at depth of field or displacements; Maya has really good motion blur, I'm told, and I keep hearing good things about Lightwave's HDRI implementation. And if you already own Maya - why not go for Body Studio? You do already have a good renderer in Maya, and with Body Studio, importing PZ3s should be a lot less hassle than with other applications.

There is just one "real" answer to your question and it is "Vue" (either Esprit or Pro). Then you can also use Bryce Carrara Cinema etc. but at the present time, none of these other applications offer the tight integration with Poser files that Vue offers. Orio

Vue 4.2 is the only way to go! In my mind much better than Bryce will ever be!

I use Bryce, and Vue.
Vue is very nice that it can read Poser file. In addition, the rendering is fast.
I use Vue with Poser figure.
However, I dont think that Vue rendering is better than Bryce.
In my opinion, Bryce is better for some pictures. May be it depends on our art style.
What do you think?

Attached Link: http://www.mentalimages.com/2_1_0_mentalray/index.html

What version of Maya do you have? If it's 4.5 or 5, I'd really really really recommend using that - Maya 4.5 and newer come with Mental Ray, which is one of the very top notch renderers out there that has been used in many well-known feature film productions. I hear that its integration with Maya is not as good as it could be, but this is really one of the best renderers you could possibly get and it sure is worth spending a little time learning to deal with it.

You might want to look into Max 6. The render engine is outstanding and it also has a tight and complete integration with Mental Ray. Coupel this with "Body Studio" and you can pull poser files right in, including cloth and hair, and just render em out. Max 5 was good, Max 6 totally kicks ass :)

I use Carrara for rendering now. I didnt much care for Bryce. My newer gallery images will show poser being rendered in Carrara3. Regards E PS. If you do go with C3, I did a step by step tutorial for importing into C3 in the Carrara fourms.

Stewer is right !! you already own MAYA so just get the body studio plugin from riess studio and import complete Pz3's dont waste your time with the ridicuous process of importing obj files into Bryce and retexturing them. plus bryce has the most Dog slow non adaptive ray tracer on the planet!! and for animation its so prohibitively slow that it not even practical!! and bryces "kai kraus" tinker toy interface will be extremely frustrating and limiting to a MAYA user especially when try to navigate with keybord shortcuts get the poser plugin from riess studio and add poser figures to your MAYA workflow

Berserga writes: "I've heard Bryce is a stone cold pain inm the butt to use with poser... but again that is hearsay." Not true. See post 7. Himico writes: "I use Bryce, and Vue. Vue is very nice that it can read Poser file. In addition, the rendering is fast. I use Vue with Poser figure. However, I dont think that Vue rendering is better than Bryce. In my opinion, Bryce is better for some pictures. May be it depends on our art style. What do you think?" I think you put that very well.