I have tried really hard to like P6 but some of the features (or lack of them) just plain annoy me. One such feature was the ability to scroll around your render (when it was larger than the preview window) while the rendering was still taking place. This allowed you to at least see if the render was still happening or if Poser had just crashed.
In P6 they removed this feature and all rendering is done in the preview window (no matter how large). You can only scroll round it once the render is complete. I am rendering a complicated scene at the minute with lots of reflections. The render has been going for 9 hrs and the progress bar is just stting 3/4 finished. If it was Poser 5 I could see where the last piece of screen that Poser had rendered to and see if it rendered past that point to check if it was hung.
With P6 all I can see is the part of the image in the Preview window. Why oh Why CL did you have to remove this ability. As P6 renders an order of magnitude slower than P5 this would have been one feature you really should have left in.
Does anyone know how to tell if Poser is hung or not. Really don't want to stop this render if possible since its been going so long

Message edited on: 04/03/2005 13:01

I'm really going to have to agree with this. I too liked being able to watch a render as it was going. The preview window, if you're rendering bigger than the preview window itself, is useless for the comparison feature (which I really like) unless you just want to compare the upper left hand corner of the picture. Oddly enough, I have only had a few "silent hangs", and in all cases I was using a certain prop from Daz. Taking out the prop stopped the render freeze. Sorry I can't remember which one at the moment, but will post when I do remember it. Other than that, P6 has always popped up a box about memory if it fails. So chances are your render is still going, just really really slow.

I couldn't even figure out how to scroll around when it was finished. How do you do that? But yeah, it majorly stinks.

GhostOfMacbeth - just put your cursor inside the window, hold the left mouse button down and drag around to scroll around the picture. You can also display in a new window by clicking the icon that looks like a picture with an arrow coming out of it. Of course you can only do this when the render has finished which is my frustration above!

Thanks .. I tried it last night but maybe I didn't move it enough. I really can't tell what any of the icons are suppossed to be but I will look again when I go back.

If you are using XP, you can normally tell if Poser is still working by pressing ctrl-alt-del, then going to the Processes tab. Find Poser on the list and see how much CPU time it is using. When it is actively rendering expect Poser to be using 80-90%. To scroll around a finished picture, point at it with the mouse, hold down LMB and drag. If the picture is bigger than the preview window you can then scroll around it.

Sounds like the old 'render to another window' was a feature whose time had NOT passed! Stealth, you are very frustrated and my smpathies. I hope the render finishes okay, and hope you post it for us to see. About the 'order of magnitude slower' tho....1) remember you are rendering in a wounded app...there is a known problem and the solution has not yet appeared and 2) if you applied new features such as IBL or AO or ? then comparing speed to P5 without those features is not fair; they cost. I never render anything so complex, being an animator, but let me ask this...before you go to final render at full size, what test render do you do and how long does the test render take? ::::: Opera :::::

operaguy, the test render did take a long time and I aborted halfway through since I was heading out for the day and wanted to get the main one started thinking it may be finished by the time I came back. Just would have been nice to be able to tell if it was still going- even a %complete value would have helped - its so hard to see whether a bar has moved along any. JR, I tried the Alt-Ctrl-Del as you suggested and the value for Poser is 50. Do you think its still going?

Probably - I've had surprising low numbers on very slow renders. This little python script should help in future. It will force Poser to render into a new window in Poser 6. Run the script, then set your dimension size and render as normal - the picture will render into a new window at full size. The only problem is that it shows you the bottom right of the render, and the scroll bars are present but not apparently working. A slighty odd bug gets round this a litte bit. Swap to something else (IE for example), then swap back to Poser. If the part of the scene being rendered is outside the window, then the last bucket rendered will be tiled across your display! Once the render reaches visable areas, it will work as normal Hope this helps somewhat. (save the attachment to the PoserPython directory then rename to newwindow.py and run it however you prefer)

THANKS JR!!! This will come in very handy - will try it out when my render eventually finishes (probably in about a weeks time!!!) :-(

My next gallary posting took about 12 hours to render. After the first hour I was forced to cancel and discovered another use of the area render. Export your half finished picture as a png. This will be transparent where the render did not reach. When you have time to continue, use the area render to pick up from where you finished last time, then export the rest of the picture. In most paint packages, open both pictures, then select the first one, with the top left corner rendered, and paste it into the second one. They should line up perfectly. Networked renders anyone? My final picture was stitched together out of seven fragments.

JohnRickardJR, This is great, thank you for posting this! I'm going to try this out as soon as my current render is done.

That python script works great. Thanks again JihnRickardJR!

But if the script doesn't allow you to scroll through the rendering window anyway, what is the benefit of it?

Gareee, who ALSO used the scroll around the render window during renders.. and wants it back in the first patch!

Message edited on: 04/03/2005 15:20

Glad you found it useful - it came up because I'd written a script to time renders in P5, which required the render to be done in a seperate window otherwise printing the time destroyed the render! When I tested in it P6, the render window popped up

Actually, on further experimentation it does allow you to scroll around the render window during the render, althought the response speed is fairly slow, which is why I hadn't noticed before. Click a few times in the scroll bars and one of them will be noticed. (I test this as I type)

Cool.. I'll have to try this.. maybe CL can adopt it (or something similar) and include it in the update? Maybe it could be one of those new modules they have?

Ironically, I'll probably never use it - I tend to render to about 1000 by 800 for screen use, which my monitor can handle in the preview window, but glad it works for you

I always render larger then needed (sometimes double desktop size, which is 1280x1024, and then I downsize in photoshop.. I get sharper more detailed renders that way.

I'm probably too impatient for that - I want to see my results quickly, then move on to another idea. Probably why there is only one picture in my gallery so far

Please note that there is an issue with the "render to new window" thing that people using Python shoudl consider. One can render to the new window quite easily (as is shown by the script above), but one cannot use the PoserPython "SaveImage" function on the resulting image (it will save a blank image instead of the recent render). So while it is good for the purpose that spawned this thread (user interface issues), it cannot be used for automating renders of a movie out to "image-per-frame" directories. One still needs to render this in "preview render" window for this to work.

Can the script be modified to save to a file?

No. That is the problem. You can either have it rendered in a new window OR you can save it to a file. Not both. Poser 6 allows you to render to s specified image size and save to a file, but not with the "Render To New Window" option. I have notified CL of the issue, but have no idea if anything is being done about it shug

All this script does is turn the Render to Window option on - the actual rendering you then perform outside the script. It remembers the setting at least as long as you are using that scene.

Please note - the problem I described exists solely in the PoserPython functionality. If you turn on the Render to Window option and then close said window after a render - you can still save the image. What you cannot do is something like the following: poser.Scene().SetOutputRes(640, 480) poser.Scene().SetRenderToNewWindow(1) poser.Scene().Render() poser.Scene().SaveImage("png", "C:test.png") The last line above will save a blank image instead of the expected render.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2197870

just saw Lululee's post above about rendering as single frame animation, -- which permits scrolling around frame during oversized renders.

I see that render window is just as unresponsive as the one my script forces - I never did this is Poser 5 - was it about the same there?

Yup. Same problem exists in P5 (which is where I discovered it actually).

Pser 5 is a little bit odd about the render window scroll bars. I never have been able to get a smooth scroll while rendering, it's been click-and-jump. It sounds like P6 is the same. Unfortunately, scrolling, in my experience, can stall Poser if you do it too much. So be careful: P6 sounds a bit too much like P5.