Okay, just venting... it's not that I object to how long it takes Poser 5 to do a good quality final render. I expect rendering to take a long time, especially when I set various quality settings really high. What I hate is that it doesn't really say what it's doing... When I left the house this morning, the program had been sitting at "Adding Objects" with the progress bar maxed out for over three hours. Dunno if it's locked up or working it's little pea-pickin' heart out. Hopefully, it's the latter and I'll get home tonight and find a beautiful final render all ready for a light post-process and posting. Keeping my fingers crossed, anyway. :)

I check "Task Manager." If CPU usage is zero, I assume it's locked up, and kill it. If it's 100%, I keep waiting. :-)

I checked that, and it was hovering around 53%... it's as though it wants to keep me guessing. :)

This sounds like a problem most P5 users, including myself, have gone through. It is most likely locked up. I have had it happen to me on several large scene renders.

That's what I'm afraid of... the scene has four hi-res character figures five lo-res costume figures, the DAZ cyclorama, massive textures, and probably even a partridge in a pear tree. it's a wonder my computer didn't just explode. :) Maybe this a good excuse to get Bryce installed... I wonder if it can handle the pic? (He asked, sliding dangerously close to the OT zone.)

After reading about what you have in your scene, I am 99.9999% sure it is Frozen. Sometimes certain render settings like ray trace or displacement maps can cause problems. However, with that many objects in your scene, I just don't think P5 can handle it.....That's why in the last year I have gotten a lot better with photoshop. Have to piece my scenes together....Good Luck!!!

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I've got displacement on for several of the props in the scene, and I'm sure the hi-res textures are biting me. I turned off ray-tracing, but that obviously didn't help. I'll kill it tonight and try it again in layers. I wish Poser had a way (or I knew of one) to render over an alpha channel instead of a background color; it'd be a lot easier to layer pieces together that way. I've done that before with POV-Ray; traced an image over an alpha channel then composited the resulting layer with a Poser render.

There is a way, or at least how I do it. Save the image as a Tiff file, than in photoshop you can strip away the background. It just leaves whatever you rendered.

3 hours for a render?..as a Bryce user, what's the problem?..;) good luck.

There is a way, or at least how I do it.

Cool, I'll give that a try. The main problem I have is when I've got an object in the Poser scene with transparency; it'd be nice if the variable alpha could be saved out.

3 hours for a render? The longest I've ever let something go that actually finished was about 27 hours, but that was just playing around... I loaded the image with so many fully reflective, partially reflective/refractive, and twisted transparent surfaces that you could practically hear the pixels grinding against each other. :)

I don't know how bryce copes with large scenes (don't have it) but I know Vue is very capable of handling them :D

it's an inside joke; 3 hours for a Bryce render is quite common, especially with real of fake radiosity (I've heard of 2-week renders, my longest was 6 hours..;)

Okay, just checked, and after more than fourteen hours I'm fully convinced that Poser is on the verge of a nervous breakdown with this scene, so I'm going to re-boot and render it in pieces and call it good. :)

I have rendered scenes which in poser took 24 hours in les than 1 hour in Vue Pro. The lights in Vue are also much better than those in poser and easier to adjust. If you have Vue import your scene and give it a try Alberto

No, don't have Vue, more's the pity. I've got Bryce but I've never used it, and I'm not sure how long it'll take me to get it unpacked and figure out how to import Poser content. I could render it in POV-Ray, too, except that it's such a pain in the nether regions to convert the meshes and re-do the textures.

However, following the suggestion of cappy3 above, I rendered the image in pieces (three, total) and the overall total render time was only about 45 minutes. Go figure, huh?

So, the image has been happily posted in my gallery, and I surely did learn something about Poser today. :) Thanks to everyone.

Jack

Post the link to the image, I'd love to see it

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=738077&Start=1&Artist=jevans69&ByArtist=Yes

I think my longest P5 render time was 31 hours, but it was an animation, and I allowed the computer to take a short break every three hundred frames or so.

I have the same trouble...and I dont know if when I will have a more powerful machine it solves then... but... I have installed PPP and P5, and... in three hours, I can create any effect in a PPP render with PSP7 and exceeds me time to eat a pizza... or two...