How many lights? What was the polycount?

There are 3 lights with only light two casting a shadow at value of 1 Mesh totals: 109 meshes, 248863 vertices, 401384 polygons The model is made in Rhino1.1 and the guards, tyres and mags are kept at a high polycount to stay smooth.

There is a ray trace bounce option box. Try setting that to 1. Also try turning on remove back faced polygons. Also, if you don't need all 3 lights rendering shadows, turn shadows off.

Without diving too deep into rendering theory - there are two kinds of renderers, one kind is good at fine displacements, the other is good at raytracing. Both kinds can do what the other can, but they don't excel at it. It's a trade-off - there's no renderer that is fast in both disciplines, it's either one or the other. Renderers that are great at displacements but slow at raytracing are REYES renderers like Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan, 3Delight or FireFly/Tempest. Renderers that are fast at raytracing but bad at fine displacements are for example Mental Ray, Cinema 4D or Final Render. Bottom line: Poser 5 can do raytracing, but it's not its favorite discipline. In exchange, its displacements or depth of field put C4D to shame.

Stewer, there's a few renderers that seem to go against that theory. Vray for 3dsMax can do micropoly displacement extremely well, and is still lightning fast at raytracing. ;-) I'm not sure why people consider C4D among the great renderers, because I found it way too slow for me as well. Results are good, but it doesn't even come close to the likes of Brazil, MentalRay or Vray. If Poser could somehow speed up it's rendertimes, or at the very least allow us to network render a scene, then I might use it more often than I do. Rendering long animations (10,000 frames or more) with it is virtually impossible since it's so slow and unstable. Plus I usually render to targa images instead of AVI for animations, which Poser doesn't seem to allow.

No, 3ds max is not a micropolygon renderer. 3ds displaces geometry only at its vertices, so if you want subpixel displacements you need to pass a huge number of polygons to the renderer, resulting in a very high RAM usage and slowdowns. Even more, you as the user have to take care of providing geometry that is fine enough by adding extra subdivision modifiers to your objects. PRMan or FireFly on the other hand receive coarse geometry data and subdivide it as required. They only create micropolygons for the current bucket they're rendering, so while the whole image is being rendered from millions of micropolygons, they hold only a few thousand of them in RAM at a time. About rendering as targa - why not TIFF?

"No, 3ds max is not a micropolygon renderer. 3ds displaces geometry only at its vertices, so if you want subpixel displacements you need to pass a huge number of polygons to the renderer, resulting in a very high RAM usage and slowdowns. Even more, you as the user have to take care of providing geometry that is fine enough by adding extra subdivision modifiers to your objects." You're incorrect Stewer. No offense, but you simply don't know about the micropoly features of Vray. Vray has a true micropoly displacement modifier that allows you to add a highly detailed and complex displacement map to very low-res models (even single-polygon planes) in 3dsMax to create complex displaced geometry only upon render, while never having to add a subdivision modifier to the object. And it renders incredibly fast. Vray's micropoly displacement modifier is considered one of the best in the biz. Brazil is coming out with their own version of this I hear, and Mental Ray has one as well that's pretty good. All of these are of course for 3dsMax, and do not depend on Max's standard displacement to work. In fact, you can combine it with Max displacement if you want.

"About rendering as targa - why not TIFF?" Because targa is more widely used by video editing software than the TIFF format, which some software do not like. Also, I can do automatic alpha channel seperation in targa format, and I don't think that's possible with Tiff (not positive about that). Will poser render a video as individual Tiff images rather than AVI?? Anyway, these are things I need as an animator that Poser simply doesn't have that I'm aware of.

To my knowledge, VRay is not part of 3ds max but costs additional $299 to $799. I have never used Vray (I don't own 3ds max), but I'd be very surprised if it were able to deliver displacements at speeds similar to a REYES renderer while still retaining it's raytracing speed. I can only gather information from web sites, and there I read things like " Displacement really is a hog on the system so it will require a healthy dose of.. patience." - which is something you'd never hear about a REYES renderer. Also, it looks like VRay requires you to determine the micromesh resolution before rendering (at least it looks to me like that in the screenshot) where a REYES renderer is dicing the mesh based on how many pixels it occupies, so the resolution automatically matches the object size on the screen. And again, my point was not that displacement is impossible in 3ds max or C4D - but in such renderers, the overhead over non-displaced rendering is significantly higher than in REYES renderes like PRMan (just try with Poser 5 - the speed difference beetween a scene with and without displacements is close to none). P5 can render animations as a series of still images, no problem. And IIRC, both TIFF and PNG files are being saved with an alpha channel.

Thanks people, only one of my lights runs a shadow and I didnt think the polycount was too high. Poser5 just makes me feel like Im using my old 333mhz machine lol.

What are your other render settings? What is your shading rate set to and what quality did you set in the reflection node? These significantly affect render times in P5. Also, as others mentioned before, a lower value for the raytrace bounces can also speed up things (try 2).

To my knowledge, VRay is not part of 3ds max but costs additional $299 to $799. I have never used Vray (I don't own 3ds max), but I'd be very surprised if it were able to deliver displacements at speeds similar to a REYES renderer while still retaining it's raytracing speed. I can only gather information from web sites, and there I read things like " Displacement really is a hog on the system so it will require a healthy dose of.. patience." Yes, it does tax the system a bit. Using GI with micropoly displacement will slow down the initial calculation, but by saving the irradience map to a file and reusing it, it can help speed things up for animations. I haven't noticed a drastic speed decrease when using displacement without GI. Also, Vray is an additional purchase, but MentalRay is now shipped as part of 3dsMax. Anyway, getting back to Poser... when you save an animation as TIFF images, will it retain the alpha info for shadows as well as the objects themselves? And is there a way to do network rendering with Poser scenes? If so, then that would change the way I use the software, and would make me try it more for production purposes. I know you can't render the scene to elements (IE., seperate the specular, diffuse, and shadow channels into seperate render passes), but for compositing purposes, it would be convenient to have the shadow information retained in the alpha channel. Then again, it probably isn't possible, since Poser doesn't have matte surface materials, and MUST render the "ground" as an object in order to have shadows cast on it at all. What I need is the ability to cast shadows from a figure onto the "ground", but not render the ground, just the figure and shadow. In Max, all I have to do is apply a matte material to the ground, and then it accepts shadows and reflections, but will not render as an opaque object in the alpha channel, which allows me to composite the resulting render frames seamlessly into a video background.

maxxxmodelz, Poser 5 does render alpha shadows in tiff format with or without a ground plane in place.

ynsaen, how do you cast shadows without a ground plane? I have "render shadows" enabled in firefly, but without something under the figure to cast a shadow on, it does not render the shadow of the figure. I see a representation of a shadow in the viewport, but when I render without a ground object, or some kind of plane to represent the ground, then it just renders the figure with no shadow cast.

hmmmm I was basing my statement on a quick look through some of my older anims made in just the manner above (tiff images), and it's possible I could have added the shadows in AE. Possible, but since I hate AE, I normally would avoid it. Once my current render sequence finishes, I'll close out and open up a new screen and see what I can figure out there.

Let me know if you find out anything about this, but I'm thinking without a matte material of some kind or the ability to "occlude" objects from the render, it's impossible. Maybe there's a way to rig a matte material in the material room, but fully transparent objects don't receive shadows either.

Now THAT is a great workaround, stewer. That should work well for a lot of things I need to composit. Brilliant! Thanks for that.

oh, verrah cool, sir... goin in the SST's, that one is...

Behold the power of node-based shaders ;)

You definitely changed my mind about some of the possibilities with Poser 5, stewer. I won't even have to open 3dsmax for most of my figure compositing work now. Excellent. ;-) That's one damn powerful material room, beyond the scope of what most people realize (including myself)!

That's why it's my favorite. Hair room -- well, you know the issue there. lol Cloth Room -- Awesome. WHole new world for clothiers, there. Face Room -- underused as well, and lots more potential than the credit it's given. but the Material room? Dat's dis girl's favorite place to chill....

The hair room...well, the only real issue there IMO is the collision detection. Some complain about the hair looking like wire, but that's just the default settings and it can be overcome. The hardest part for me is styling the hair - I'm an engineer, not a hairdresser, and it definitely shows through :) RAM usage and render time - that's a problem common to all strand-based approaches, but if you look at current motion picture CG (Monsters Inc, Stuart Little 2, Matrix), strand-based hair is coming. About the face room - I'm only waiting for some of your fellow Frankensteins to put Don's head on Mike (we have seen all kinds of head transplantations, why not this one?). Once you do that, you have your long-requested face room-ready millenium figure.

The hair room just plain sucks right now. One of the original reasons I got P5 was the hair room, but as it turns out, that's one of it's weakest points. I hate to keep mentioning 3dsMax, but there's a strand-based dynamic plugin for it called Shag Hair that's absolutely incredible. The LEARNING curve is a bit steep, but the main thing is it's collision detection works flawlessly. That's the only thing missing in P5. On the other hand, I simply LOVE P5's cloth room, and the material room is quickly proving to be extremely powerful. Now the face room - I tried it several times, with decent results. But here's the problem... I think Don's mesh is too limited to get the accurate morphs needed for excellent results. You can only push and pull the vertices in relatively limited ways, which only makes for less than satisfactory results. However, one thing I use it for is getting a BASE texture for a face, then use the resulting map output from the face room and fix it up in photoshop a little. Works good that way, but as far as making digital clones from a photo, it's not very useful.. the millenium faces would be versitile enough to come much closer than Don is capable of. I'm assumig that's really what the face room is meant for, right? Digital clones from a photo? Like FaceGen does.

stewer, Im still new at Poser5 but getting used to it now, thanks for the help by the way. raytrace bounces was set at 4 now 2 test image at 1000 by 700 at 100dpi three lights with only light two having a shadow of 1 set to raytrace and shadow, now added hide back faced polys getting under the two hour render time now thanks 1hour 45mins. I also noticed Poser5 is lest forgiving with the way models are made, there has to be no faults at all.

Brilliant!

May I make one small suggestion for improvement, though?

Stewer, Clean up that dock or turn "hiding" on :-)