I see lots of people bashing P5. I was one of them when it came out. Since the SR4 patch came out it has been rock solid for me. I'm working on some animations right now and have been using my old server as a render box. (Celeron 800, 384 SDRAM) I don't know how many days Poser's been running, but it has churned out over 1300 rendered frames and has over 40 hours of CPU time added up. That's solid! Look at the peek memory usage, if there are any leaks they are tiny. Most of the sequences are short, under a hundred frames. So, it's probably opened and rendered over 10 sequences. I wish I'd been keeping track.

Nerd

Message edited on: 05/15/2004 21:41

Hey Nerd I've been using P5 pretty much exclusively too and agree it's rock solid. I'm running three Pentium 4's ranging from 2 to 3 GHz, 512 megs RAM and Poser renders Sooooo Sloooooow. I haven't even been messing with Firefly. Are you getting quick render times? Got a trick? Dan

There are lots of tricks to speed up fire fly renders. Turn shadows off on all but 2 or 3 cameras, turn shading rate up (around 0.750) set max texture rez to no larger than your render. Too high ot to low bucket size can slow things down too. Adjust the bucket size according to scene complexity and the power of your system. If it starts thrashing the hard drive during renders the bucket size is probably too big. Be sure you have the latest patch for P5 too. If you are using the P4 render in P5 set the ignore shader tree.

I never use the P4 render any more, there's just too much it can't do

Nerd

Message edited on: 05/16/2004 03:55

I've been rendering some lengthy animations lately, myself. No lockups or crashes. That's a refreshing change from my mirror-reflection projects back in Pro Pack, which typically could manage no more than 75-100 frames at a time before going down in flames.

Are you getting quick render times? Got a trick?

Got plenty of memory? Try increasing the bucket size in your Firefly render options. The default is 32, but I often use 64 or even 128, depending upon scene complexity. In addition to speeding up the actual render, it also speeds shadow-map calculations.

nerd:

Leela hair? Are you going into Futurama withdrawal and making your own episodes?

Attached Link: http://www.nerd3d.com/Forum/gallery/displayimage.php?album=5&pid=160

Cool.

I run poser 5 on 233Mhz pentium 2 with only 96 megs of ram, I don't have any of the service releases, and I have never had one problem with stability. Even when I have multiple hi-res characters with tons of props and full background, the firefly renders just as quick for me as the old poser 4, and that's with all the firefly's bells and whistles turned on. (Is that just fluke on my part?)

Oh I LOVE that futurama parody!! I hope there are more? :oD

Stay tuned. There will be more, though it will probably be posted at R'otica or The Turanga Pages. I hope to share the characters. If any body knows how to contact Curiosity Company please let me know.

Message edited on: 05/16/2004 06:38

I know Rotica. But the Turanga Pages?! Could you possibly throw me a link? On IM if it's not allowed in the open?

when you render animations, do you render as individual images or as avi?

Thanks Nerd & everyone else for the tips. I'll give it a try. Good Shtuff

Big helper for stability - small texture sizes! Can't say this enough and I want to smack some of those skin texture people and set texture people. 3000x3000 for the textures for a wall is ABSURD! Rendering that is like trying to flush 3 whole rolls of toilet paper at once. A 3000x3000 texture unpacks to 36,000,000 give 32 bit color depth. And heck I'm just being nice here. I don't even know for sure if Poser duplicates these resources when passing them to firefly plus it maybe constructing the final texture for render use from shader node operations so that's another duplciate right there. Having seperate lipstick, makeup etc add ons that are 3000x3000 each is beyond absurd. One face with seperate lipstick, face and eyes at 3000x3000 each comes to 96 megs just for a face! Irrregardless of hard drive packing, the texture is mostly likely decompressed and left in full size in memory. Also people don't realize that unless your final render ends up with the same textile resolution you ain't benefiting from enormous textures. A 3000x3000 texture render in a 800x600 pic is not going to show any more detail than a 1024x1024 equivalent. You don't get half a pixel or quarter pixel clarity. Anti aliasing occurs post render when the pixels are averaged. If I have low texture sizes I can render almost indefinitly and thats with 3 Vicky 2s, 6 Mike 2s, several Dystopia blocks, several buildings and several vehicles all in one scene.

I think that's why they put the Max Texture thing in fire fly. It resizes the huge textures before they get fed to the renderer. I always turn it down to a little bigger than the render size. Nerd

I couldn't agree more Mason and in fact I make a lot of 800x800 or 1000x1000 renders. I usually zip up my large resolution textures and then use a batch script in Photoshop to reduce them (from 50 to 60% depending) and put in a slight sharpen (Sharpen then fade to about 30-40%). Then you could always zip those adjusted ones up as a lower-res backup and go to the originals if need be.

No problems with P5 stability here. :) Silke

This post belongs up aroung #11, but since the edit message function no longer seems to work I had to delete it and repost it. The message was censored because I mentioned the former sister of this site.

I render images (usually PSD ir TIFF), I do this for several reasons. First with images I can peek and see how things are going in the animation. Second if I need to interrupt the rendering of the animation for some reason I can pick up where I left off. Finally It allows post work on the frames before assembling them.

I use Adobe Premier 6 and/or Quicktime Pro to assemble the images when done.

*********** is an adult Poser site. It used to be related to Renderosity, but that was during the Poser wars.

*** ******* ***** is a Futurama Parody site for those of us with dirty minds.

IM me for links to these forbidden sites, I guess the Poser wars aren't really over.

Nerd

Reposted from 05/16/2004 15:23

Hehehe I KNEW this would happen (which also was the reason why I asked for the link on IM) Whether it's war or not.. all mentioning of sites where you can risk seeing NEKKID people are verboten. Especially if you gasp could risk seeing a nude MALE. Ah well, the owners make their rules. Fine with me. And as far as I know you can mention the sites, as long as it is not with a clickable link. As I've understood it it is ok to say Renderotica as long as there's no link to it.

Not your fault Ernyoka1, I haven't been hangin out here lately because this place is less fun than a tax audit any more. I suppose a link to renderosity would be a viloation of the TOS? There's probably 10,000 pictures of nakid Vickys in the gallery. Doesn't tha make this an adult site? I say YES. Oh an i I beter say, "Poser Poser Poser Poser Poser" lest I go off topic and get censored for that too. I'm about to gather up my toys and go play somewhere else.

RAM is your friend. Poser 5 has worked like a freakin dream since getting my new comp with 2 gigs of ram. I had a brief problem with random crashes but that was due to me being a lazy ass and copying my P4 runtime straight over to P5 on my new comp. For what it's worth Poser 5, Firefly with raytracing on seems to render faster than Vue 4 or Truespace 4.3 for equivilent scenes on my new comp.