"I am not sure how rendering in color and then post in PS or Bauhaus will cut down render time, however. In fact quite the opposite. I have the full hit for a color render, then the attention to detail in the post and the run of the stills."

Opera, if your main concern is cutting down on render time, you could still do that when using color textures. Here's a few things that will work:

1. Most texture makers save the texture at an obscenely large file size. This is to retain as much detail as possible, but for animation purposes, most of that goes to waste anyway. So one thing you can do to start with is take your original color textures and just recompress them to make the file size smaller. Here's an example:

I had a great texture by 3Dream that was originally a whopping 903KB. I recompressed it in photoshop, and got it down to 375KB without much noticable loss in quality at all, and it looks as good as the original did in my animations. I could have probably even brought it down a little more.

2. Like all your color maps, your bump maps are usually saved by the texture creators in RGB color mode. The original texture is simply desaturated, tweaked in some areas like the eyebrows and pubic hair, then saved as a large, RGB file. One thing you can do immediately to reduce the size is convert all your bump maps from RGB color to Greyscale, then recompress them again.

As an example, I took a bump map that was originally 882KB, turned it greyscale, and saved it as a JPG, and it brought it down to 222KB with almost no noticable loss in quality.

Overall, I saved a good amount of overhead by doing those simple things. Just be sure you don't overwrite the original textures... save the recompressed ones as another file name in case you aren't happy with how the results look. Even with all that overhead saved, however, the difference in rendertime wasn't extreme. Most of the render time was still consumed by P5's tendency to take absurdly long times generating shadow maps. ;-)

"Mirage is going to be even more useful with Poser 6's shadow catcher."

It would be even better if P6 has some extended G-Buffer output capability (which I'm thinking it might), so we could run a shadow pass, diffuse pass, keylight pass, specular pass, reflection pass, refraction pass, depth pass, and ambient occlusion pass and save them all as seperate layers. Then you have ultimate control in post. :-) Message edited on: 02/15/2005 13:12

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.