So I am guessing if one wishes to have a multi character raytraced poser animation rendered within one's lifetime it should be ported over to Max or the like and taken to a "render farm"? E V S

Some of us have longer lifetimes than others. There are a few ways to speed up the process, and not all of them require investment in faster hardware. If you have plenty of memory, have you tried increasing the bucket size in your Render Options? Welcome to the wonderful world of animation, by the way. I recommend a comfortable chair and a good book while you wait.

Before you start spending thousands of dollars on 3ds plus a render farm, you may want to try optimizing your render times in P5 first. Increasing the bucket size, as Little_Dragon mentioned, is one starting point. Another would be avoiding ray tracing whenever possible - reflection can be done just as well with environment maps (see the fish tank in "Finding Nemo" - no raytracing). Lower resolution models also render much faster, you can produce details with bump or displacement maps. And don't use excessively large textures - no need for a 4096x4096 texture on a background character that'll take only 10% of a NTSC animation frame. Objects in motion are very forgiving anyway - a lot of details that look not quite perfect in a still image are not being noticed at all in animation.

Message edited on: 06/17/2004 07:24

What Stewer said, plus remember good camera movement covers a multitude of sins.

"So I am guessing if one wishes to have a multi character raytraced poser animation rendered within one's lifetime it should be ported over to Max or the like and taken to a "render farm"?"

That depends. Seriously. How big is this animation? How many frames, and at what size do you need to render? Will it be for broadcast or film quality? Do you have a set deadline or is it just for fun?

If it's a commercial job, where you forsee more jobs like it coming in the future, I'd suggest taking it to a render farm or investing in a high end app for sure. If you don't know how to render in PRman or the like, then the only other way to get network rendering from Poser is to bring the animation into a high-end app or some other app that supports DR via a plugin that will load the entire animation.

Do you absolutely need raytraced reflections? I don't see why you would, but if that's what your client called for, then you must do it. I'd suggest a high-end solution for this as well if you can't talk your way out of it.

If all you really want is to produce a short film for distribution on the web or CD, then just follow the aforementioned suggestions, which should help you complete the job before your hair falls out. Message edited on: 06/17/2004 10:42