every program i try has raytracing much much faster poser raytrace is so......slow..... why?-_-

anxcon....i've asked you this a couple of times...are you trying to put raytrace on hair?

no, i know what the time cost is to do it, i use it or i dont i mean in general, any raytracing period, adds a much bigger cost in rendertime, than other programs, why?-_-

i don't know

IT's the nature of ther rendering engine. Pure Raytracers can be fast, but they generally don't do things like displacement and are limited in a lot of ways. Firefly is a hybrid engine -- that is, it combines various sorts of rendering types into a single one that is capable of doing several things at once. IT is a slow ray tracer. However, the trade off is the other capabilites it has (displacement and other surface and geom properties, notably) which it does better than a solid raytracer. Basically, its a choice: you can have a fast raytracer that does only sharp edged shadows, a fast reyes that handles softer shadows and surface deformation, or some form of combination that does both, but will tend to do one better than the other. (Note: this is an extreme oversimplification, but it gets the gist across) In general, raytracing is going to be slower than other sorts of rendering, chiefly due to the fact that it has to calculate all the rays. oh -- and I have recieved your messages, btw, but I'm unable to do anything at this moment.

If you want an in-depth description of how a raytracer works, and a little math can noy shy you away, check out the documentation of PovRay at www.povray.org It explains it all.

The PovRay documentation doesn't translate that well to FireFly. Much closer are the descriptions in the books "Advanced RenderMan" or "Production Rendering". Excerpts from Advanced RenderMan can also be found in the SIGGRAPH 2000 RenderMan course notes.

I would suspect that the port from Pixel3D's Mac render system to Poser's PC Firefly may have something to do with it.
How they managed to make the Mac firefly renderer even slower (by about 20% to 40% in P5) then the PC is just beyond me ;-)

Message edited on: 02/12/2006 07:34

Are there tips on speeding up raytrace renders? Obviously the number of bounces, but what other devils lay in the details? I've got a IBL-AO image with a mirror, 3 raytrace bounces and it takes nearly a day to render on a 3.0GHz 2GB PC4200 machine.

Whether there are tips on speeding up raytrace renders?

Check your processor load. When it is below 100%, your PC may need access the disk when rendering. You will see the light flash constantly. If that happens, buy more RAM.

Otherwise, split up your work: render the background separately and postwork it together.

Message edited on: 02/12/2006 14:56

I've got 2Gig of RAM and taskmgr says there's plenty left, but the CPU's at 100%. I was more interested in things that made rendering each pixel more computationally expensive.

i do not have a direct answer, and I do not use raytrace lights. But let me ask this: is there a shadowcam with a raytrace light? If so, maybe you can fine-tune the target area of the light's cone so that it only calculates reflection to/on areas that are actually seen by the camera. Just a wild stab. ::::: Opera :::::

i've never seen my cpu over 50% :( 2gb ram maybe due to poser not using hyperthreading? carrara will use 100% of my cpu, uses ht must be that -_^ but poser raytracing still slow

Not sure, I'm still new to the game, so I don't know what all the ins/outs are about what really cranks up render time.

The most I've every seen Poser take, during the most intensive renders, is 1.2 Gig as the highpoint, with the average hovering just below a GIG. If I were the engineer with authority on Poser 7 Dev team, I'd fight for OS 64Bit support and the accompanying over-2Gig useage, plus dual core/processor support. That would put Poser in a new class. ::::: Opera :::::

now now, we're talking about poser here it'll surely come on its on in the next release!