I want to know because if I try to render a file in P5 ( using the firefly renderer, production quality, 100cm by 75cm 100 pixels per cm ) it usually takes all day ( that is up to 10 hours ) So how many coups of coffee can you drink while your computer renders?

Too many! ............. ;=]

depends on what you put in the scene. Ive had some that take all day, and I've had some that take 10 min. I will tell you this, if your doing still shots you can make the total time shorter if you can break it up into different parts... i.e. left and right side or foreground, background bits rendered separately and put together in a paint program. This can sometimes make the difference between a 10hr render and a cumulative total of 1 hour. You just have to watch where your shadows fall.

I'd be curious to see just which renders take so long. Also, it would be nice to know about the computer, operating system, hard drive space, memory, etc. Most of my renders only take a few minutes. Hardly enough to make a cup of coffee, if I drank it. (Stopped drinking caffeine so I could sleep at night.)

When i did this one http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=679353 it would lock up my system after a few hours of rendering. I broke it into 4 scenes and stacked them. 1 the ship and sky 2 the trees 3 everything behind the dog faced woman on the steps 4 foreground it actually took longer to save the pz3s than for poser to render the scenes. XP-2.6ghz-512Mb ram

Wow, that's lots of stuff. I think your memory is a bit low for that kind of project. I have 640MB of RAM, and don't dare get overly ambitious. It would be nice to know about some variables that would make a difference: 1.) What render settings did you use? (A screenshot would help). 2.) How much free hard drive space do you have? 3.) What operating system? 4.) Any other programs running at the same time?

I run Windows XP ( professional ) 1024 ddr ram aproximatly 200 GB free, and a 3 Ghz processor. Posting the images is a bit difficult: it's a brand new computer, and to keep it clean from virusses and other trash I use my old computer to surf the net. I'l post them as soon as I can Me

I'd agree that 512MB of RAM is on the low side. It does help some to have a modern video card, but I suspect that to be more to do with the video drivers than with hardware details. Opinions vary on the best OS to use, but Windows 98 apparently has some internal limits on physical RAM allocation. A memory defragmentation utility can help.

I know 512 is low, but its a laptop, so it would be expensive to upgrade....I just work around the problem :) Bobbie: I have XP home the rest of the questions i cant answer, i did that image back in may and i either dont know or cant remeber. the hard drive is only a 40Gig, so i problaby dont have much free.

My longest ever render is 90 hours in Vue 5 :S (my own fault for turning on global radiosity and lots of volmetrics lol) In P5 I would say 9 hours is about the longest but that is the exception not the rule, on average I would say 1.5 hours for an A4 sized pic at 300 dpi. Your render seems to be quite large (poster sized) which is probably why it is taking so long. Spec: P4 2.2Ghz, 1Gb RAM, Quadro4 Pro750XGL workstation card. Oh, also if you have a new-ish computer with a hyper-threading processor then poser will only use one thread. To get the most from your processor you should disable the hyper-threading for poser rendering.

I had one that was 5 and a half hours long, but that was because I used black glass for floor, walls, and on the girl's costume. I've got a Dell laptop, one gig of memory, and the equivalent of a 2.8 Ghz processor. Sometimes you can reduce render time without effect to your render by turning of the smoothing function in Firefly's Production rendering. Liz

Anything more than 2 minutes is too long for me. Unless I'm rendering a movie.

I kept hearing about how long Poser 5 takes to render, and really thought it was time to get a clearer picture of exactly what was involved. I hate Poser 5 getting a bad reputation, needlessly. Graphics applications are very complex software, and every one of the items I mentioned has an immense bearing on our software's performance. If you're short on memory and hard drive space, you'll be lucky to render any image at all. The more complex your ambitions are, the more power you need. Then there seem to be some issues concerning stuff that works ok in Poser 4, but does not work well in Poser 5. Perhaps it has something to do with how some things are put together, or whether or not the artist "cheated" by taking advantage of some known or unknown bugs in Poser 4? Ok, I've rambled enough. I just won't accept any blanket statements like "Poser 5 takes forever to render," without hearing more details.

The problem is, that I use raytracing and texture filtering if I render. So that would explain why it takes so long. Now I aggree with Mr. Boucher here, but the reason I started this topic is because my computer never actually finidhes a render. ( yes they are poster size ) It seams to get stuck somewhere in the process. So, how do I turn of this hyper-threading, or find out if I hae such a thing in the first place??

Single shots rarely take me more than a few minutes unless I've got dynamic hair, shadows, ray-tracing reflections, etc... all going at the same time. I've got about 1 GB RAM, a P4 processor (1.8 GHz) and lots of hard drive space (not that that makes any difference, but I just installed 2 new 120 GB hard drives and I'm pretty proud of the fact that I did it without wiping out all my wifes files. If that had happened, I wouldn't be writing this right now.)

I dont know how relavent this is, but i have noticed with my various renders that the more lights you have in a scene, the longer it takes to render. p5's default lighting (which i know most everyone hates), has 3 lights. i had a relatively populated render a few weeks back (2 figures, several props and an environment) that took about 4 hours to render because there were somewhere between 40 and 50 lights in the light set that I was using. I got experimental and rendered the same image with the same render settings but only used the 3 default lights and it took about 30 to 45 min. to render. it creates a shadow map for each of the lights in your light set. and a shadow map can take a while depending on how many objects you have in the scene. so if one shadow map takes 10 to 20 minutes to be created, and you've got 45 shadow maps for poser to create, uhm, you're gonna be drinking a lot of coffee. Or just go to bed, or work, and hope that the computer doesn't freeze or the power doesn't flash durring the render process. Of course, I know there are plenty of other factors involved as well, settings, image size, etc etc. But light count, in my experience, is a big factor. just my 2 cents worth. Oh, and as a side note, the 2 images in my gallery both used the default lights and only took about 20 minutes each to render. if that. E.D.

Yep, the lights realy slow you down, but the problem is that you need a lot of lights to get your textures done real nice

you can turn off the shadows in the individual lights, that will help if you don't need those shadows. if your renders never finish, i suggest dropping your bucket size down lower.

If you're not doing reflections, you don't need raytracing, very rarely do you need texture filtering-- it can mess up a Vickie or mike texture pretty severly especially where the neck meets the head. Are you planning to print out posters that you render that large? I render between 1500 and 2000 pixels and, dependingon the complexity of the textures or props my renders take about 10 to 30 minutes. Much less now with my Dell laptop 3.5 processor. If I want them really fast with little possibility of crashes I grow the workscreen as huge as I can fit on my laptop-- pretty huge it's wide screen-- and render to screen. That's usually under 5 minutes. But I like a lot of props. Emily