What can i do to make poser render faster?

 will more memory work?

more memory may help you, but chances are you need to upgrade your exsisting processor.  Also, I have found that the Poser 4 render engine is faster for me than the Poser 6 Firefly one is.  I have a fairly new, well built machine here that gets upgrades whenever something new comes out to replace what is currently on my system, however even with a gig and a half of memory - without a good processor, the memory wouldnt matter any because its the processor that handles the workload.

For Poser, and most would agree I think - 512 is a good place to start.  These are the system requirements for Poser 6 from the e-frontier website:

• 500 MHz Pentium class or compatible (700 MHz or faster recommended)
• 256 MB system RAM (512 MB or more recommended)
• 500 MB free hard disk space (2 GB recommended)

Among other requirements that I didnt list.

I always take that (____recommended) statement to mean that YES it will work with such and such, but if you want it to work at it's full intended capacity, then get the (recommended) items.

Also, one thing to consider when rendering images in Poser the amount of items in your scene, the backgrounds etc.  Also, rendering with a very high resolution, or rendering a very large image will slow almost any system down somewhat.  Firefly's texture filtering option will also slow you down a bit.

Hope some of this helps.

Quote - What can i do to make poser render faster?

 will more memory work?

Uncheck Raytracing if you don't need it and set Raytrace bounces to zero.

Make sure Texture Filtering is turned off (unchecked)  You almost
never need it.

If you don't require Shadows, uncheck it.  But the renders do look better
with shadows. For test runs you could uncheck it and then check it
for your final render.

Don't go much smaller on Min shading rate than 0.50

Don't go higher on Pixel samples than 3 unless you are doing something
that requires higher pixel samples.

Don't use a Max tecture size larger than the size of your render.
1024 is usually good enough.

Set Max bucket size to 64.

If you aren't using displacement set Min displacement bounds to zero.
and uncheck displacement maps.
Also don't use more displacement than you need if you do use it.

If you aren't planning on using Depth of Field or 3D motion blur
make sure those are unchecked.

See if these help speed up your renders.

In the attached image, I've rendered Jessi, hair, and some clothes at exactly the same render settings, but for one change. The image on the left has max texture size set to 512, because the suggestion was "Don't use a Max texture size larger than the size of your render" and the render was 512 by 512. On the right, the same render was done with a Max texture size of 2048. You may disagree, but I see a really big difference. The scarf texture is totally muddied on the left, and totally clear on the right. The details on her face, lips, eyebrows, hair, all improved by using the larger texture size. Please click the image to look at it in full size. You should easily be able to see the differences. If I were doing a large render, over 1K, you'd REALLY see a difference.

Render times: Left Image = 1 minute 27 seconds, Right Image = 1 minute 29 seconds.

That's a 2 second difference :)

Carefully examine the hi-res skin texture for Jessi's head. The image file that comes with Poser 6 is 4000 pixels by 2110 pixels. If you tell Poser to limit that to 512 pixels, then the part that has all her facial details ends up being only about 150 by 150 pixels. If you are rendering her face in a picture that is 512 by 512, then her face texture is being reduced to 150 by 150, then blown up in the render to 512 by 512. This grossly ruins all the details.

So if you really are trying to optimize memory use, which only loosely translates into speed, then you have to calculate the effective area of the texture file that is being displayed, and scale accordingly. In the unmodified texture file, Jessi's facial details roughly occupy the center 1000 pixels of the image. So if you're rendering a closeup of her face at, coincidentally about 1000 pixels, then you want the full 4K image, otherwise you'll lose detail. If you're rendering her face at 500, then a 2K image size works fine. But don't go below that.

Of course, if her face is only a small part of a large scene, for example her face is only occupying 100 pixels in the render, then a max texture size of 400 (1 / 10th) works great. But be aware that is not the only texture you're shrinking - the setting is a global one and applies to all textures in the image. Basically you have to take into account all the elements of the scene and adjust the setting to the one that needs the most detail. But I don't bother unless I've used up all of memory.

Texture size loading is only a small part of the render time, so reducing it makes only a couple seconds difference. However, if you are out of memory, then a totally non-linear problem occurs and you must reduce the texture size. The issue is that if Poser needs to hold more stuff in memory than you have, it will start swapping pieces to disk, which HUGELY slows it down. But, if you are not swapping, then there is very little speed change, because all your textures fit into memory at the same time.

A far larger effect on render time is the "Min shading rate" parameter. When you set this to below one, Poser does extra samples to decide what color to make each pixel. This produces more accurate rendition of your detailed textures. I did the above render with Min shading rate set to .25. If you raise it to 1, you'll get nearly the same amount of detail, but here and there individual pixels will be wrong. But this does cut the render time to 45 seconds, about half. However, really busy textures, like on Kozaburo hair, will end up showing artifacts.

So for test renders you're just trying to get the overall lighting and colors adjusted, use a high Min shading rate, like 2 to 4. When you go to make your final image, drop it to the range of .25 to .5.

One other thing - turning off ray tracing to save time has no effect unless you are actually using some feature of ray tracing. For example, if your scene uses no ray-traced shadows, no reflection, and no refraction, then it doesn't matter if you turn ray-tracing on or off. Every timing test I've done confirms this. On the other hand, if you do use ray-tracing elements, like reflection, refraction, or ray-traced shadows, and you turn it off, it will go faster, but it won't be doing the same image at all.

The moral of the story is, I leave ray-tracing on all the time. When my scene doesn't need it, Poser ignores it and goes the fastest possible speed. When my scene does need it, it's on like it should be and I get the right picture.

Same here.

I hate lowering quality for speed, and unfortunately that results in week-long renders...  :-/

My only solution to speed Poser up, except from using the latest CPU and 2 GB of RAM, is to raise the bucket (chunk Poser calculates at a time) as high as possible. It's maximum size depends on memory requirements (scene complexity, textures, available RAM), and memory management isn't Poser's best side either...
Why raising the bucket? Poser seems to do calculations between each bucketfull, so less buckets you have, the faster it will render (check it on a simple scene). Adaptative bucket is your friend here, it allows you to start with a 512 bucket, and let Poser scale it down if at some point it chokes on memory issues (you'll see the bucket squares get smaller all of a sudden).

If despite the adaptative bucket you get the dreaded "no memory" message, it means Poser reached the bucket =32 limit, and even that wasn't small enough. In this case you can forget about speed and start using very low buckets (16, 8) hoping Poser will be able to gnaw itself though the scene. It will take ages though.  :-(

Note: Despite a quite popular legend, bucket size does not influence render quality. It's just the size of the chunk of picture Poser will load and calculate at once (since it isn't able to load the whole scene).

if ya hafta turn off shadows, turn off ray-tracing, turn off most of the rendering features just to churn out an image, then my suggestion is not to bother rendering it in poser. those are exactly the reasons why 3D snobs hate poser renders (that and not bothering to add facial expressions, set up proper lighting, fix deformed joints and fix bad bends because it would take too much time and effort). if poser is too slow and hard to use for renders, then use something else (maya, lightwave, carrara etc. ad infinitum) that was programmed for better renders, long before poser had any advanced rendering capabilities.

OK, alot of what  you guys are saying make sence and is helpfull

and i will def follow alot of your tips but, will more memory make a diff?

and is that what you mean with RAM?

The late and very much-lamented Irish comedian, Dave Allen, had a good explanation for why you should take care when asking directions in the Irish countryside.

"I wouldn't be starting from here," you'd hear.    "I'd start from that hill over there."

You have just bought Poser 6.   At CP prices, that's $279.99.   Now, in order to exploit the functions which your Poser is supposed to provide as supplied, Miss Nancy recommends that you buy an entirely new programme:  Carrara, or Lightwave, or Maya.   I think that the current price for a new user of basic Carrara is $249 (as against $549 for a new user of Carrara Pro).   Well, compared to the prices for Lightwave, or for Maya, I suspect that Carrara will be a bargain.

Is there any reason, though, to suppose that Poser will be slower than, e.g. Lightwave,  running on the same equipment?.   I have Carrara and I am not at all sure that a Carrara render is quicker than a Poser render.    As for Lightwave and Maya, which I don't have, given that the initial question concerned the speed of renders, is there any reason to expect Maya or Lightwave to make the slightest difference?   I am not talking about quality of renders, here, but merely about speed, which was the original subject of the thread..

Quote - will more memory make a diff?

Yes, if you mean physical memory (the chips on your motherboard) and if you have less than 2 GB of those.
Because more memory means bigger bucket = faster rendering, and anyway Windows gets very slow when having to us the swap file (virtual memory).

Quote - and is that what you mean with RAM?

RAM, "Random Access Memory" is the name of what we call "memory" on a computer.

A computer has 2 types of "memory":

There is RAM, also called physical memory, and the virtual memory, also called Swap or paging file, which is actual memory written temporarily to the disk to free some real memory for some other task.

Since the disk is much, much slower than the actual RAM chips, the Virtual memory is very slow, and you'd better not have to use it. Thus the need to have as much "real" memory as Windows can handle, and that's 2 GB.

BTW, Poser's renderer is slow.  Take a Poser scene, import it into Vue Infinite, and render it: It will take 5-10% of the time Poser itself will take, on the same computer...  :-/

i will buy more memory then. ;)

rty, thanx.

Quote - if ya hafta turn off shadows, turn off ray-tracing, turn off most of the rendering features just to churn out an image, then my suggestion is not to bother rendering it in poser. those are exactly the reasons why 3D snobs hate poser renders (that and not bothering to add facial expressions, set up proper lighting, fix deformed joints and fix bad bends because it would take too much time and effort). if poser is too slow and hard to use for renders, then use something else (maya, lightwave, carrara etc. ad infinitum) that was programmed for better renders, long before poser had any advanced rendering capabilities.

I say just use the P4 rendering engine if ya want to go that far.

huggles to Miss nancy

Quote - > Quote - if ya hafta turn off shadows, turn off ray-tracing, turn off most of the rendering features just to churn out an image, then my suggestion is not to bother rendering it in poser. those are exactly the reasons why 3D snobs hate poser renders (that and not bothering to add facial expressions, set up proper lighting, fix deformed joints and fix bad bends because it would take too much time and effort). if poser is too slow and hard to use for renders, then use something else (maya, lightwave, carrara etc. ad infinitum) that was programmed for better renders, long before poser had any advanced rendering capabilities.

 

I say just use the P4 rendering engine if ya want to go that far.

huggles to Miss nancy

True. But the question was how to do faster renders, not how to do renders
equivalent of the quality of Maya, Lightwave, Carrara.  If you want that kind
of quality, it will take longer.  If you want faster renders, use the P4 engine,
if you want better renders, use Firefly. If you want more expensive renders,
use Maya.  Faster, better, cheaper, take your pick.