K..I am not new to 3D aps, but getting a grasp on its features for over a year now. Poser is the first 3D application I have ever owned. I like to expand my horizon, now I have a bit of understanding. Years of a Electronic technician, and repairing/Building PC's on my own and for others. I have an understanding of the electronic parts, also computer components. Now, me grasping poser, I noticed poser doesn't take effect of how much of a Video card you have, as long as you have the requirements. Before I owned a Ati Radeon 9200 128mb, then now owning a Ati 9600xt 128mb, upgraded my DDr ram to 2gb, I have noticed no difference, in renders or graphics. I thought increasing would help on renders, bring in more of the realism. I change my AA and AF to 8 and 16....and other graphic card features..Nope..nada...not a change. In games like Lock-on. you can adjust your features to get a better fps. Lower the water, increase detail and so on. But a 3D application like poser, their is none of these dials. I do not know what Poser goes by. OpenGL or Direct3D? Really confuses me. How can I increase detail in Poser? I know the render settings. Bucket size, Raytraces, Shadows, Lighting, filters and etc. But no matter how you adjust, the results are the same, or end up in a worse scenario. From what I have seen and done. So, how does poser or a 3D application take in graphic (card) consideration, like increasing performance and detail? Is it, once a 3D application program is made, it stays at its max?, and increasing your computer parts, like ram, HD, video makes no difference, 3D applications stay at their max and not the hardware?

Message edited on: 01/25/2005 02:29

Poser does not utilize your graphics card technology (openGL or Direct 3D). Unlike other applications, Poser relies solely on your system's CPU. So, the faster your processor, the faster Poser will be (theoretically). Ram will help with memory issues, but not if it's on your graphics card. Poser doesn't use more than 1 single processor either. So having dual or quad processors on your box won't speed it up.

I should point out also, that other 3D applications DO take advantage of the graphics card, but not for rendering. OpenGL is for onscreen display only. Applications like Vue (and others) can also take advantage of multiple processors to speed up things like rendering. Sadly, Poser has not integrated features like this into it's code.

Wow..thanks Maxxxmodelz..very interesting and I am on a curious situation about 3D aps now, wondering why Poser isn't speeding up, and why it is so hard on my computer, why my images do not look realistic enough. Thinking with the system I have, gosh...poser should do awesome..nope.

Message edited on: 01/25/2005 02:43

It would be nice if a system that can run Doom 3 or Halflife 2 well could also realtime render a poser scene with pixar quality. Also, it would be really nice if I had the aforementioned system. Sigh... I thought the same thing around 2000, I slapped in as much SDRAM that my system would take, put in a swanky Nvidia gfx card (I think it was a GF2 which was pretty primo around then) and Poser still looked and ran the same. Granted rendering was sped up and it didn't take so long starting up and all. but software rendering is kind of a bummer. Back then I was playing Quake 3 and getting 90+ fps and Poser was still Poser. Well we gotta take teh bad with the good. With all else we can do in Poser I'll gladly sacrifice DirectX or OpenGL support. Later! G

Your images not looking realistic enough, would not have anything to do with the computer per se, it would probably be caused by many things, chief culprit usually is the lighting. It is amazing what a difference a good lighting rig can make to a render. It's really a shame that Poser does not use hardware acceleration OpenGL, while my fancy graphic card happily spins thousands of polygons fully textured in Lightwave, it yawns in boredom while the Poser interface slows to a crawl. In this instance Poser is still in the stone age.

DominiqeB is absolutely correct. Lighting is key to getting good renders. IMO, you are best learning to use lights rather than relying on pre made sets. True, there are some good ones out there but you can bet that most will be totally inappropriate to your needs and, unless made in and for P5, may not give the results you expect. In truth, learning the basics of effective lighting ain't rocket science. Simplicity is often the key. A very good, basic light set can be made like this... Create a "dome" or a globe of between 12 and 36 lights around your scene. Use Infinite Lights for this; it's a damn sight easier. Make sure shadows are OFF for all lights. Set the intensity low and make the colour pure white. Pick one (and only one) to cast shadows. Increase the intensity on this light and make the shadow map 1024. The reason I've not specified an exact number is so you can experiment and see what you come up with. For example, if I use a lot of lights, I often make the lower rows very low intensity, around 2%, increasing as the lights get higher up the globe.

A little trick to speed things up. I pose my characters, props, etc... then i export all my figures & clothing as .obj(With only weld vertices on). Then, i reimport(Uncheck all options) those .objs in a new scene & work on my light setup & camera angles. When you render things will be a tad faster, cause you don't have all those morphs loaded in memory... :-) Note: When you reimport, You'll need to reapply certain mats. So don't bother setting them up before you export. Also, Delete the "Status45.avi" in the "...PoserScript" Folder, that will speed things up even more. ;-) The Status45.avi is that little guy that side-steps on top of the "renderBar" status. Note: this is for P4 & Propack, don't know if this applies to P5? Draco