Hello all,

I am completely new to Poser 6, which I just got and installed yesterday. I am having a very hard time with it. I am a total newbie with this, but I am willing to spend the time to learn my way around everything. My big problem is rendering. I tried to render the simplest thing, just Jessi with hair, and three lights. I don't know if it's my settings or what, but Poser freezes when rendering, and it took all night just to complete this one piddly render. I checked out the manual, but it doesn't seem to have much help or troubleshooting for rendering. Can anyone help me out, give me some tips, etc? I really want to learn, but it seems pointless if I can't even get any results to begin with. Thanks for reading.

Nancy

check render settings.....turn em to manual..

Quote - check render settings.....turn em to manual..

Okay, I will do that. But what should my settings be? As I say, I am totally new to all of this, so I'm pretty much clueless.

thanks!

Anyone?

Hi Nicall!

Try to use the P4 render that also comes with P6, what is the specifications on your computer?

Regards / Jonny

Okay, by specs you mean this, right?:

Intel (R)
Pentium (R)
CPU 1.80 GHz
1.79 GHz
265 MB of RAM

that's what I have. :)

Hi Nicall!

Its a bit low for Poser and firefly but if you stick to the P4 render engine you will do ok.

Set up your scene and choose the P4 render, then sit back and watch the magic :)

Regards / Jonny

I'm afraid you have much to litlle RAM to make renders in Poser 6.0, alltough the manual tells you you can run with 256Mb, you need at least 512Mb and for serious renderings you need at least 1Gb or even 2Gb, Poser actually doesn't freeze but it with take ages to render your picture with the firefly renderer.

256 MB RAM???!?!

Dude, that's not enough to run just Windows.Before I'm running Poser, I'm using 320 MB of RAM.

Poser is a serious memory hog. If you're using transmapped hair and 3 shadow mapped lights, you're going to need at least 640 MB of RAM. Any less than that, and your computer is going to have to use the hard drive as an extension of the memory, and this (called swapping) is excruciatingly slow.

Serious computer graphics needs lots of RAM. Plan on at least 1 GB, which I recently purchased for about $57.

I had a feeling I was pretty lax in the memory department. I still have Poser 5, maybe I should stick to that until I can afford to give my PC an overhaul. Thanks for all your help everyone! I really do appreciate it!

I personaly prefer P5 over P6, I also prefer P4 render engine over Firefly, maybe its just me being old fashioned :-)

Did you try the P4 render engine?

Regards / Jonny

Quote - I personaly prefer P5 over P6, I also prefer P4 render engine over Firefly, maybe its just me being old fashioned :-)

Did you try the P4 render engine?

Regards / Jonny

Yeah I tried it... still with the freezing. It must be my ancient computer. I can't keep up with technology! LOL

hi nlcall!!! if you try this to test your 'puter then report back what happened you may get more help!!! you are low on specs but try this: in your render options slide the render bar to the maximum(auto settings) then click "manual settings" and then "aquire from auto" then uncheck the "texture filtering" option!!! just render a nude jessie with a koz hair and just see how long that takes!! if it is over five minutes or won't render then you are gonna have to upgrade you 'puter i think!!

also if you have had that version of P6 for a while but only just installed it you may need the service release packs from E-frontier,which if you don't have them, will cause the render to not complete!! the second service release "SR2" addressed this and fixed it.

That 256 MB of memory is the main bottleneck. Upgrade with at least another 512 MB and your machine will be reasonably fast. Not only for Poser, also for just about every other application. Your system doesn't use Dual Channel, so you can buy just a single 512 MB DDR400 module and plug it into a free slot. There's no need for a faster CPU or graphics card.

I prefer Firefly - it'll render point lights, raytraced shadows, refraction and reflection, complex procedural materials, volumetric lights, and it is capable of "unblocking" surfaces that should be smooth - like Jessi's shoulders. The P4 renderer can't do these things.

The image displays the render settings I use for a fast preview render.

• Cast shadows: self-explanatory
• Texture filtering: will resample the textures. Takes a lot of extra memory and slows down the render. Usually it's best to leave this checkbox off
• Raytracing: needed for raytraced shadows (point lights), reflections and refractions in materials, ambient occlusion and subsurface scattering. Only turn it off when you use none of these effects - which translates to almost never.
• Raytrace bounces: set to 0 if you only have raytraced shadows, set to 1 for reflections and ambient occlusion, set to at least 2 when using refractions and subsurface scattering.
• Minimum shading rate: the lower this value, the more subpixels are calculated. A minimum shading rate of 1 is good for a test render (you might even increase it to 2), for production renders lower it to 0.50 or 0.20.
• Pixel samples: level of anti-aliasing. Set to 1 it'll result in a 'blocky' image, fast, but ugly. Set to 3 you'll have a nice compromise between sharpness and smooth lines. High values (5 or more) tend to smear out the colors and boundaries.
• Maximum texture size: Firefly resizes the texture maps to squares of maximally xxx pixels wide. High values will give more details in closeup renders, lower values will reduce memory usage and increase render speed. This value should be a power of 2. I usually use 1024 for test renders, increased to 2048 for closeup renders, and 4096 (the absolute maximum) for extreme closeups at large image sizes. The higher the max. texture size, the more memory consumption.
• Max. bucket size: Firefly renders the image in squares of this size. The larger the bucket size, the faster Firefly renders, but it'll use more memory. If the memory usage is too much, Firefly will halve the bucket size automatically. At least in P6 it will, in P5 the render will just crash.
• Minimum displacement bounds: if you're using displacement in your materials, this value 'clips' the displacement. If set too low, your objects could develop small 'holes' where the displacement 'peaks' get sliced off. It's a good idea to set this value at least equal to the maximum displacement value you have used in your material settings.
• Shadows only: will not render the objects themselves, but only the shadows they cast. Useful for compositing.
• Smooth polygons: will smooth the hard edges of polygon meshes. Useful when you're rendering organic forms, such as humans. Will increase render time, but it'll also increase the smoothness of the image.
• Remove backfacing polys: don't render polygons that face backwards. Never check this option when using transmapped materials such as hair!
• Depth of field: the foreground and background objects will appear 'out of focus', depending on their distance to the FocusDistanceControl. More realism, but it'll slow down the render dramatically.
• 3D Motion blur: only useful when rendering an animated scene. Slows down the render.
• Toon outline - for cartoon renders.
• Post filter size - best left at 1, with a box filter type. Higher values than 1 tend to smear out the colors, and the other filter types (sync and gaussian) increase the render times.

Good luck!

No one mentioned it yet that I can see, but freezes were also an issue before SR3 so make sure you've installed that too!

And you do need a serious injection of RAM I'm afraid!  1Gig is ok but I have 2 and it runs much better than it did with 1.

So Fixer,

I would need at least 1 GB to run Poser 6? The reason I ask is I thought about buying Poser 6, but if I don't have the resources, I'll save the $$.

I have Poser 5 and 512MB, and the rendering (Running on Poser 4 render engine) seems to handle okay, albeit I have only rendering people.

Well it's not quite as simple as that, a lot depends on what else you're running when using Poser, it ran fine on 1Gig but I wouldn't consider trying it on less but that's a personal thing, I often have Vue running as well and a lot of other things too so i find 2 Gig to be much better for me!

Of course in a couple of years time when I upgrade to a 64 bit system I'll be able to have even more RAM!!!!

According to the manuals it should run on 512Meg and probably would but not if you wanted to do complex scenes with big texture maps and such!  Just my opinion though!

Anyway, the extra 512 RAM would only set you back about £30 wouldn't it? Probably be worth it IMHO!

Cool, thank you!!