I know its been asked which is the best program for rendering Poser stills and the answer always is...anything but Poser. But what about animations? Are there programs where you can export Poser animations with dynamic hair, transparencies, lights, etc.???

Vue with the add-on Mover is the only one I know of that will take Poser dynamic hair and dynamic cloth. There isn't anything that will take Poser 5 procedural shaders AFAIK.

What about lights? I am unfamiliar with the term procedural shaders.

Lights don't transfer either, which is not really a problem since the main reason for rendering poser stuff in other applications is that Poser lights are terrible. If you want to do lighting in Poser, then you might as well stay in Poser 5 for the render too.

I am an animator. I say, stay in Poser, learn every trick you can to get the most out of it, be lean mean and learn/make tools. With that kind of intensity, if you still outgrow it...that's a good problem to have. When you actually have it. About the shaders...if you learn them, you can make up for the limitations in poser lighting WITHOUT the render time hit. Sure, Vue and others have "GREAT LIGHTING" but there is no free lunch....just because they 'have' them does not mean they magically provide them with no penalty. If you are an animator, that must be a persuasive argument, I would bet. ::::: Opera :::::

One point is the light in other programs is better than lithe in Poser. Shade is attractive and can import complete senes and animation but not dynamic hair.

Shade can import Poser animations with lights?? How's the render time for Shade comp. to Poser?

Before you start looking for other programs, find your limits in Poser. That'll help you a lot when searching for a render engine, as then you know what you're looking for. That said, P5 ain't that bad. 3D motion blur is neat, not many other programs have that.

Attached Link: http://www.reiss-studio.com/

Actually BodyStudio, a plugin for 3dsMax, Maya, or Lightwave, will also transfer complete animations from Poser including dynamic hair and cloth simulations, to any of those programs.

"What about lights?"

Again, BodyStudio can transfer lights made in Poser, but adjustments to the intensity and other parameters are needed.

I believe Transposer for Carrara is another plugin to transfer dyanmic cloth from Poser, but not the hair or lights.

Message edited on: 01/12/2005 20:27

Sorry I do not know if the light settings are imported in shade.

Message edited on: 01/12/2005 20:29

Message edited on: 01/12/2005 20:33

Lights do not go over into Shade. As for what to render in; there is much to be said about Operaguy's advice; you -do- need to stay with Poser, and learn how to squeeze out every drop of capability it has. The shader system permits rendered effects that you can't get otherwise. That said, there is as much argument for the VueMover combination....it really depends on -what- you intend to do. Vue shines as an environment builder. Doing interiors is...challenging. What I've found is that there are things that are best rendered in Poser, and things that are best rendered in Vue, and making sure that the outputs from both are in uncompressed numbered images. That way you can composite and create the actual animation file in an editor. Vue 5's lighting features do add a hefty time penalty to a render, but you also have the RenderCow network rendering system, which lets you spread the load over several computers.

The Poser to Poseray to POV-ray is a nice, easy combination to work with and POV-ray is a great rendering app.

How do you import poser animations in POV-ray?

Staying in Poser is not a bad thing. Don't think that Poser 5 has a bad renderer. It just isn't true. You will get a lot of use out of it. When you are ready for more advanced rendering move to something else. Cheers, Joe

The major thing missing in P5's renderer is global illumination, but chances are you won't use that in animation anyway for performance reasons.

For Still Imaging you can use the Lightwave-Render. Yust export your Scene in .Obj-Format. The Light- and Renderoptions in LW are second to none.

"The major thing missing in P5's renderer is global illumination, but chances are you won't use that in animation anyway for performance reasons." Stewer, there's really a multitude of legitimate reasons why Poser just isn't a good solution for animation, and it's not all based on the renderer. I'd say the major thing with P5's native renderer is it's slowwww raytracing (things like raytraced water and mirrors for high quality animation output is near impossible to tolerate without network rendering capability). I've also experienced some issues with pixel roping and flickering that occurs now and then on certain objects if you don't set high enough render parameters, which also in turn puts a big hit on rendertime. There's also no G-Buffer channel output options (such as depth or Zbuffer output), so things like DOF and atmospherics must be done within the renderer, which would be OK if it had network rendering, but without it, quality DOF makes a render crawl. On some projects that are heavy on raytrace materials, I would like to, at least, do DOF and atmospherics in Combustion or AfterEffects using a depth channel. ;-) Also (this isn't the fault of the renderer) Poser does not recognize multiple processors, so my dual Xeon workstation is virtually useless in helping with render output. I realize there's workarounds to the network rendering issues, like putting multiple instances of the application on different boxes and copying the PZ3 to each one, but that's not a very practical solution either. Outputting to RIB is good, but we're talking about Poser's native rendering capability.

For me Poser 5 animation is bad. Its slow. I use to use the P4 render instead. Both P4-render and firefly offend get bad shadows. I looking for a alternative rener engine. Thinking of get shade. Its not expensive for poser owners. Maybe POV-ray is an alternative?

torulf, are you satisfied you made a good effort to solve all your Poser issues? That 'bad shadow flicker' issue is well known, there is a solution. ::::: Opera :::::

max, can't you kill the flicker by scaling up, not increasing shadow map, etc. and there is no slow down with that solution. You other points are telling for your MO and content. That G-Buffer/DOF thing...I will have to ask you about that another time. Whew. I am so glad to be in depth shadow rather than raytrace. ::::: Opera :::::

"max, can't you kill the flicker by scaling up, not increasing shadow map, etc. and there is no slow down with that solution."

I tried scaling a scene up once just recently. It seemed to cut down on much of the shadow problems, but doesn't do much for pixel roping and texture crawling, which can only be solved by setting higher render quality settings. The same problems occur in 3dsMax's default scanline renderer, but since rendering is much faster over there, it's not a problem to increase parameters or supersample materials until it goes away.

In Poser, such problems are not so "easy" to tackle. For example, a checker pattern (or some similar detailed pattern) on a ground plane gets "mottled" as it extends into the distance from the camera. One way to solve this problem in Firefly is to turn on texture filtering, but doing so causes problems with other textures unless your shading rate parameter is set extremely low, which of course causes a dramatic overall hit to rendertime. I've also come across "pixel jitter", or texture crawling, when shading rate was not low enough. Sometimes you can get away with inconsistancies in an animation because things aren't so noticable as in a still, but when you're rendering for HDTV or DVD (where picture quality is very crisp), the small things become more noticable.

Another problem I have is that there's no targa output for rendering image sequences. Yes, TIFF also retains an alpha channel, but targa is more widely used in video editors, and it also has extra channels that can seperate the alpha for you, which is very convenient for compositing. Which brings me back around again to G-Buffer output. I do a lot of compositing, and always run a seperate shadow pass. Poser doesn't let you do that obviously, so it's pretty useless for compositing. You can create a "matte shadow" from the shaders, but it doesn't work good on multiple objects under different lighting situations.
Message edited on: 01/13/2005 09:05

Max that is all golden information about the limits, thanks for being so specific. I, for one, sucked it all up. I suppose I will eventually see the pixel roping/texture crawling problems and will remember your advance warning. Frankly, I will probably also write you for help. How much is one seat of Max?

You are one of the people whose admonitions are always accompanied by facts, I am sure hard facts gained by hard assed experiences.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/13/2005 10:01

"How much is one seat of Max?"

Well, it's $3000. However, I wouldn't recommend Max to you unless you were absolutely sure you would eventually utilize all or most of it's functionality (as just a render alternative to Poser, it's too expensive by far). As for affordable alternatives with network capability, things like Carrara, Vue, Lightwave, and even C4D are better choices.

I'm not saying Poser is a "bad" renderer, because it's really not. Firefly is excellent. I just find it's lacking some things which I consider invaluable to animation rendering, especially for lengthy high res output or compositng. Poser certainly isn't an app I would trust to commercial animation with deadlines, etc. Message edited on: 01/13/2005 10:21

I was kidding, but only partially. I really want to know about it, I am sure many poser people will end up there. I know one thing, you sure can get a million 3Ds models on Turbo Squid. Sheesh. ::::: Opera :::::

Max, are you only adjusting the shading rate or are you also tackling your texture problems with the number of samples and the filter? Before reducing the shading rate too low, you should as well increase the number of samples. And a 1 pixel box filter is IMHO a bad choice for AA as well.

Message edited on: 01/13/2005 11:23

"Max, are you only adjusting the shading rate or are you also tackling your texture problems with the number of samples and the filter?" Yeah, I was messing around some with the Pixel Samples as well. I usually found setting that parameter at around 4 or 5 was good enough to give some decent aliasing throughout the animation, while anything higher didn't seem to make much difference, and I never went lower than 3 (default production value) because of edge jitter. As for Post Filter Size and Type, I had experimented with box and gaussian only, but I don't know what the third one does (sinc). I'll admit that particular parameter in general has me a bit stumped. Increasing the box or gaussian filter size past 1 caused a better edge aliasing, but also seemed to blur texture detail too much.

Attached Link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~mmp/chapters/pbrt_chapter7.pdf

Stew, I know box isn't the best, but I've been using it in Poser because it seems to be the quickest. I don't like how it weights the pixel samples evenly, particularly for DVD or output for use in HDTV, because it makes resolution more problematic.

Is the "sinc" filter equivalent to the Mitchell-Netravali filter, which is what I use most often in 3dsMax, since it's one of the most accurate? FYI: The Mitchell-Netravali filter is described as a two parameter filter: a trade-off of blurring against ringing and anisotropy.

Message edited on: 01/14/2005 09:28

The Mitchell filter I saw in textbooks is more or less a combination of two sinc filters - so the sinc filter in Poser is not the same, but goes in the same direction.

Thanks, Stewer.

Have to ask you something else... why do shadow maps in Poser seem to take a long time to generate in the pre-render (loading) phase? In tests I've run, it seems a single shadow map of standard 512 size takes a approximately 2 seconds to generate on my machine (even with one figure in an empty scene). Now, if I port that same PZ3 to 3dsMax, for example, with just one light of the same default shadow map size, it generates within a fraction of a second. Poser takes about 3 times as long to generate a shadow map, and it's another issue that slows down rendering time in animation. As you know, even a couple extra seconds per frame can mean substantial additional render time when we're talking about thousands of frames. Sometimes, I even find it more efficient to render a raytraced shadow rather than wait for a shadow map to generate (depending on how many objects I have in a scene), which of course defeats the purpose.

Message edited on: 01/14/2005 16:17

yeah, what he said. I'm sitting at my dev computer watching one of my nodes render my latest animation, and every frame..."loading shadow map" takes seconds and seconds. i am reading this thread with fascination and grateful the two of you are hashing it out in a forum where we can pick up the gist. Thanks. Lol, i have had to look about about five terms already. That's as it should be. can i get either of you some coffee? milkshake? How about a double shot of Knob Creek Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey 9 years old? ::::: Opera :::::

Oh, I should point out that the benchmark tests I've run are on a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 (single processor), not the dual Xeon I mentioned earlier. So it's not the hyperthreading in Max that's making the difference there. ;-)

Well, Poser is a REYES renderer, so it's splitting all the objects into pixel-sized micropolygons when rendering a shadow map. In addition, it supports displacements and transparencies in shadows, so it needs to evaluate the shader trees while creating the shadow maps. The 3ds max scanliner (I have no experience with Mental Ray, last time I touched 3ds max it was at version 4) is rendering its shadow maps with a very simple method, more like the Poser 4 scanline renderer or how Poser is rendering the preview in the document window. Also, don't forget that discreet is a much bigger company that can devote more human and monetary resources to speed optimizations. Of course, I would also like to have a choice here - it'd be cool if we could use a preview-style fast and dumb renderer for shadow maps and do the final pass on FireFly.

"Well, Poser is a REYES renderer, so it's splitting all the objects into pixel-sized micropolygons when rendering a shadow map. In addition, it supports displacements and transparencies in shadows, so it needs to evaluate the shader trees while creating the shadow maps."

Ah, there's the answer. Thanks. ;-)

Man, this thread got burried fast.

"Of course, I would also like to have a choice here - it'd be cool if we could use a preview-style fast and dumb renderer for shadow maps and do the final pass on FireFly."

Yep, I agree. :-) Message edited on: 01/16/2005 15:36