Is there a way to do network rendering in Poser 5? Personally, I think that it is impossible to make a movie without this. Is there a way to set up Poser 5 to do this?

There's one way. You can export your animation to RIB format and render with a PRman compatible renderer. Otherwise, P5 can not do network rendering by itself, which I feel is a considerable downside to the software.

If you have Vue with Mover it will network render - trying to see if it's mac/windows cross compatiable. It does a very very nice job of rendering Poser... downside is cost though.

You can export your animation to RIB format and render with a PRman compatible renderer.. What program?

Oh, you could still assemble a Poser render farm, of sorts; it just wouldn't be networked. You'd need a separate copy of Poser (and all content) installed on each machine. Have them all load the same scene file, then each can render a different segment of the animation at the same time. For example, machine #1 renders frames 1-30, machine #2 renders frames 31-60, etc. The more machines you have, the more you can divide the workload and shorten production time.

You'd need to manually splice the segments into a single animation using video-editing software, but it's all achievable, albeit somewhat unwieldy.

Max, when you export RIB, do you get a complete, successful export, all material room node proceedurals, all morphs on models, textures and bump maps, etc.?

And yes, what are the Renderman-compatible software options?

NOTE: I HAVE Vue4Pro, which includes 5-node render farm cross-platform capability, and yet I am so happy with my poser results right now, and so daunted by the fact that going out to VUE for network render does NOT drag with it the procedural materials (Vue is not ready for that power, yet), that I am considering a pure poser pseudo-render-farm. I currently have two seats of poser, and each new one costs $99.00 I have four computers, two mac, two PC. I would simply create identical Runtime folders on each computer, send different .pz3 files to each, and have the individual computers chew on independent scenes from the project. You could also have two (or more) computers work on the same scene, with one rendering frame 1-1000, the seconde 2001-3000, etc.

The reason I am even contemplating such a setup is: at least with pure Poser5, you are 'in what you are in." Exporting to ANY foreign program to render is going to give you grief, more or less, no matter what.

::::: Opera :::::

Little Dragon and I posted the same idea at the same time! Great minds think alike. Happy New Year LD! ::::: Opera :::::

Operaguy, What macs and ibms are you using? do you notice the ibm is much faster then the macs?

Macs:

G4 Dual 475 MHZ 750MB RAM
G5 Dual 1800 Mhz 2500MB Ram

PC:

AMD 2400 512MB RAM
Pentium4 2.4Ghz 1GB RAM

I recently performed Jim Burton's benchmark extensively on the two top systems mac/pc (See attached link)

At first the G5 was abysmal, really bad. But there is a quirk: you can and should kick up the bucket on the Mac. I went to 300, then to 512. This had a noticible effect, and the G5 caught up to the times on my P4. So Id call them 'even' under those circumstances. [BTW, kicking up the bucket on PC has a small effect, but not like that on the G5]. Now, I have NOT tried Poser5 on my Dual G4, which is closer in line in price to the P4 I have. You never know, I might get good times on the G4. At any rate, getting this even-steven time on the G5 has given me the belief that I can set up a 4-node Poser5 RenderCondo on the computers I already possess, and all the nodes will do just fine in render time.

Now for my 2 cents thrown in:
One would not likely deliberately go out and purchase a G5 for rendering Poser, or working with Poser, unless you are Mac-dedicated for other reasons (not that there is anything wrong with that!)

Reason:

1. You are talking at least $1200 premium, perhaps $1600.

2. the Poser5 OSX product is NOT optimized for this great G5 computer. And I am not talking about the 'dual processor issue.' Forget dual....just the 1.8GhzG5 period. Even though I got my time up to P4 performance on a render, actually WORKING with Poser on this G5 is SLOW. You move the camera, ball spins for a second or two. You change actors, yikes, it takes at least 2-5 seconds for everything to settle down and the parameter dials to change. In general, you cannot grab/spin a dial, grab/spin another, grab/spin another. You have to click on a dial, wait half a second, then grab it/spin it. I cannot work like that. On my modest P4, you grab a dial and immediately spin, you change actors, you grab/spin a dial, you grab/spin a dial, you grab/spin a dial, continuous flow. Changing from the head to the body or body to head on my extremely morph-heavy EJ rig on my PC takes about 3/4 second TOTAL, everything settled in.

And launching/saving on the G5??? GO TO LUNCH.

I love this Mac. I am a composer, and it is the centerpiece of my DAW running the great LogicPro software. My buddy runs both Logic AND FinalCutPro on his with tremendous success. What a fantastic workstation.

But until Curious Labs treats Poser5 right on the Mac....

::::: Opera :::::

See I do the opposite. I usually work on the G5 (I have a dual 1.8) since I have dual widescreen monitors (The 20 inch cinema display and a Sharp widescreen). The work area speed is bareable though I do hate losing my camera view window - it goes blank and I have to minimize and then maximize the program to get it back - but the trade off is I am on the same machine I have email and chat etc running. I then save it to a network share and make the IBM actually render. This leaves the main mac open again to work with any changes I am thinking about while it goes. I love the vue rendering with my G5 and my powerbook, but I really want ALL my computers to share in the load. I might buy two of those sub $500 macs that are rumored to be announced on Jan 11. just to use in a render farm.

Yes I saw that rumor also. It's exciting. My 16-year old son said "if they get Halo2, Half-Life2 and Grand Theft Auto to run on a $500.00 Mac they'll sell a billion." He would not touch a Mac, but he loves his iPod. There are MILLIONS of kids like that, even really young kids like six or seven with iPods...if Apple is smart, they will do for the iMac what they did with the iPod, and a whole generation might go Mac. We'll see. Remember, the $500 is no monitor...which is okay for a RenderCondo or RenderFarm. They need to come in below $800 with 17" flat monitor, IMO, to make an impact on the kid world. They should also make ITunes "work a little better on mac than on pc." All's fair, Bill. I noticed that disappearing camera view...just grab the 'name' of the window, which remains visible...and move it. Window oomes back. ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.stewreo.de/poser/poserman.html

*And yes, what are the Renderman-compatible software options?* Aqsis, Pixie and jRMan are free, open source RenderMan renderers. 3Delight is free for non-commercial use, as is the discontinued BMRT. Then there are Air, RenderDotC, PRMan and I think a few other commercial RenderMan renderers in various price regions. There's a program called Project BORG that provides network rendering for BMRT, planned is support for 3Delight, RenderDotC, PRMan, Air and Entropy. I also wrote my own RIB export for P5 that exports dynamic hair and comes with a custom RSL shader. You'll need to recompile the shader for the renderer you want to use, the file on my website is for an expired version of 3Delight.

WOW! Checking..... ::::: Opera :::::

stewar, Cripes, now I have to think thru this possibility. You are opening an entire window onto Renderman for Poser5. That is huge. Meanwhile, previously short that option, and with no procedural materials out to Vue, I have been seeing how far I can push Poser5 for animation. You do say this about your script: Limitations of this version: No shadow maps. No Material Nodes. No environment maps. Limited bump mapping. But most of those things can be made up for with Renderman options. But that's another learning curve, of course. Meanwhile I consider it highly fortunate that face_off has come up with his Skin Shader python script that pushes the Material Room node/procedurals. This would not go over to any Renderman compatible program. I went to school on your material room page. Also, your note and script on Depth Of Field is perfect timing...I have been trying to figure out how to latch onto that power in Poser. ::::: Opera :::::

Anybody get 3dlight to work in osx?? Keeps erroring out for me. dyld: renderdl can't open library: lib3delight.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2) Trace/BPT trap

You might want to consider POV-Ray for rendering. Since you can have multiple instances, you should be able to make 'better' use of a dual processor system! www.povray.org POVray is available for MAC, windows and Linux To get poser files into POV Ray I use POSE-Ray. It reads the pz3 file directly! I have tried poser v3 and v4 and also the "obj for Bryce" that DAZ|studio exports. http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/ POSE-Ray is windows but will run in an emulator. If you can get the scene transfered to your satisfaction (and thats a big IF) then POV-ray has several render farm solutions written for it.

Well I got 3dlight to work, but poserman is a windows only app.

Message edited on: 01/02/2005 15:37

So under POV-Ray I could have two instances each on my two Dual CPU Macs. Interesting. Checking your links today, thanks prixat. ::::: Opera :::::

But virtual pc doesn't see two processors on dually macs.

Pixat said POV-Ray is avail for Mac, but POSE-Ray is Windows. I would move the pz on Win, but pass to DualMacs for render with POV-Ray. So, no problem for me. ::::: Opera :::::

"But virtual pc doesn't see two processors on dually macs. " -Barry w I just checked on that again... POV-ray comes in MAC flavour, its POSE-ray that will need the emulator. Can a program inside an emulator pass control to a program outside the emulator?

Can you use the mac's runtime in the vpc's copy of poser or do you have to copy it all. My runtime is like 20gigs.

How about using Shade Pro to do the network rendering and getting the Poser Project there via Poser Fusion? I realize that is a very costly option vs the other ones but at least it would be within one company and there is some hope likelyhood of future version of the software would be based on this... Anyone tried this? Does sound go over also? I really don't like the idea of having to "designate" render frames to different posers. The POV example will not preserve the sound unless it has changed a lot over the years. The only options that seem viable are either using Shade or using Vue.

Hey, OperaGuy... I tried your "Bucket Size" idea on my system. I have a Athelon 3000+ wtih 1 gig of ram. The render I was doing was taking a good 15 - 20 min under the default settings as DRAFT and turning on Shadows (using Firefly)). I changed the Bucket size to 320 and the render was done in about 5 min! The render size is 640x480. So, I am still using "Draft" settings adding in the shadows so I get about 20 frames per hour. It will still take several days to finish this (I have 4800 frames). At least this way it will actually finish! One thing, if I turn on the Textures, my system chokes completely! You see the Kernal usage around 30-40% and of course, the CPU is pinned.

Glad to see the bucket kick helped, I was certainly helped by it. And on a Macintosh it is a life and death issue, even moreso than on Windows. But what do you mean by "turn on the textures?" Texture filtering on/off? ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2026124

See above link for a thread I started in the Shade forum. Shade is definately an option. The renderfarm is cross platform mac/pc, and as nightmage80 pointed out, you are "staying in the family", not to mention Shade's modeling capabilities.

However.....if you don't need the modelling so much and you DO need some sort of vegetation propagation, Vue is a strong alternative. ShadePro is $1000.00 ($700.00 for Poser owners.)

::::: Opera :::::

Sorry, I as talking about "Use Texture Filtering". I already have Shade Standard so I don't need any more modeling capability, just need to speed up rendering. Vue pricing: $70 for Vue 4 download $100 for Mover 5. Total= $170... Then add upgrade to Vue 5 ($130) = $300 for everything you need. Compared to $700 for Poser to Pro Upgrade or $800 for Shade Std to Pro upgrade... The cost don't justify Shade. Thanks,

You need VuePro4, soon to be VuePro5 for the render farm. No renderfarm unless you go to Pro. ::::: Opera :::::

After all these possibilities...Renderman, Vue, Shade... For the current project I am still favoring a pure Poser5 'rendercondo,' for the reasons stated above...stay in one app, no tweaking each scene in a 'foreign' app, Poser5 proceedural materials driven by NaturalSkinShader, poser render times acceptable. Perhaps in my next I will go to Maya. They have a Renderman plugin now for under $1000.00 and plugins for ThePixelFarm's MatchMove and facial motion capture software or the same from Famous3D proFACE[video]. ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/mover5/index.php?Page=3

I just checked their site again... Mover 5 comes with Hyperview. Below are the notes on that from their site (on link attached): **Mover 5 for Vue Esprit supports up to 5 render nodes. Mover 5 for Vue Professional will support as many nodes as you have licensed.

I guess I stand corrected. Either I did not grasp this in November (when I thought E'Sprit was non-renderfarm) or they have changed their policy. I believe they have changed...and I am not sure if it is for the better economically in one respect. If you go up from VuePro4 to VuePro5, will that include the first 5 nodes of the Renderfarm? If you read it one way, the language of that ** statement seems to imply that you have to license SEAPARATE SEATS of VuePro5 for each render node??? That can't be right. They must mean (or at least I HOPE they mean:) you can use Mover with E'sprit and go up to five nodes, and also the same for Pro, but if you want to go higher you MUST be in pro and you can license aditional COW nodes, not full VuePro5 seats. ::::: Opera :::::

You can license additional rendercow nodes seperate from Vue licenses I think. But I don't think that you are limited on Vue Infinte Pro 5 or what ever the new top line copy is. Think it's unlimited rendercow nodes.