I've never been able to create an animation fully rendered, even if the movie's screen size is small, out of poser 5. It's just too slow.. perhaps the only thing i could render movies with is a simple SARU( A monkey character found somewhere in a japanese poser downloads site). he is a funny character and very simplistic so it renders fast. But i'm missing the point, is poser only for people who can afford the latest and greatest PC ever? I doubt most of us hobbiests have that kind of money. So why can't i even make a simple movie with Poser...Yeah they (Poser makers) market it as AFFORDABLE and whatever crap,, but what does affordable mattter, if we need high end systems in order to have it perform fast? So we would buy poser, yees affordable . But then we have to pull out 4 thousand dollars for a Brand new top of the line PC.

No you dont need the TOP end PC to do animations .. but you can't ask for realistic lights and fx and 100.000's polygon's in the image..

So if you have a low spec system make low spec animations

You wanna do High spec animation gues what you need  not only a high end system but several of them... to make it time wise workeble...

Strange that people buy a cheap car never complain it can't do 300KM a hour :}

 

Chris

I doubt many people make actual full-length movies with Poser 5.  As you noticed, it's too slow. 

You can make short videos, with a little planning and patience.

Consider using the P4 renderer instead of Firefly.  You may not notice the difference in a video. 

Use smaller figures - V3 RR instead of the regular V3, or even Posette.  Use smaller textures, or shaders instead of texture maps.

Render a series of still images, instead of to AVI.  That way, if the render crashes part-way through, you can just continue from where it left off. 

Also, the fewer lights you use, the faster it will render. If possible, turn off shadows for as many lights as you can, too. All of that adds up to a lot of "set up" time for Poser for each frame. You can definitely go with smaller texture files, too, especially if the characters are moving quickly between frames.

Be sure that you're rendering to a realistic frame size, too. For example, if you're planning to post the result onto the web, you may end up having to reduce the results to 320x240 or so anyway, so you might as well render at that size.

If you do use the FireFly renderer, turn off ray tracing. You really only need that for ray traced reflections and a few other things that shouldn't make much of a difference in the quality of your animation. Ray tracing really slows down each frame's render time. You can also try increasing your bucket size if you've got a good amount of RAM in your machine.

Lastly, considering going with a lower frame rate. NTSC video (American and others) frame rate is about 30 fps, PAL video (European and others) is 25, and most commercial film is 24. However, American TV typically uses 12, prints each frame twice in post-work for 24, then stretches it to 30 (well, 29.97, to pick nits) and the quality isn't awful. Some Japanes anime shops even go down to 8 frames per second (tripling the results to 24) so they can concentrate on higher quality artwork. These are all options for reducing your render time, and sometimes these methods can generate some interesting effects.

The bottom line is that Poser isn't really the best animation tool in the world, but a lot of people make really nice animations in a reasonable amount of time by trading off the above parameters. You also need to keep in mind that ALL computer animation takes a long time. Even the big boys that make Hollywood hits spend hours and hours on their high-end machines rendering those huge frames. Just the nature of the beast, really.

Captain Jack

They also use 'Render Farms,' thirty computers linked together, eachone rendering one fame in, say a thirty fram seris.  But not everything has to comply to 'Hollywood' standards.  A film can be low budget aswell, and still be good.  Stallone made Rocky 1 for under a million dollars.  Everyone bitched about the lousy working conditions, but the film was a blockbuster.
So, take this as an object lesson.
David P. Hoadley
PS: Language tag set because I used the word 'Bitched,' someone mioght havevirgin ears.

Only thirty?  I've seen some where they have a large room stacked from floor to ceiling with computers (several hundred!!).  ILM has 500 - that's 16 seconds of render per pass - which may take hours or days in some cases one supposes depending upon the complexity and realism being targeted.

Of course, we're not ILM are we? ;)  Poser could really gain a boost by having built-in net render support.  At least then you can do something beyond the one frame at a time utilizing one cpu only.  I hope they also get the hint that quad-cores are going to be available soon - two of those puppies is 8 processors.  3D rendering is perfect for utilizing them.

e-frontier: the word of the day is 'thread'.  't-h-r-e-a-d'.  Multithread the render process and then pass the threads to each available cpu.

also do one shot at a time, if you watch TV or Movies closely you will notice that every 'shot' is 4 - 6 seconds long, then a camera switch, very rarely is it one continuous shot (except for ER where they use those in a cool way)

just to agree with kuro. one guy with poser 4/5/6 on one machine is not a realistic plan for a commercial animation. it's quite usual to see posts here and elsewhere in which they said they spent 6 months or 1.5 years doing a clip anywhere from 15 - 30 minutes long. and even then it may be full of technical errors and deadpsace. if ya wanna do it in commercial timeframe, ya contract it out to a korean animation studio, in which case yer now the producer or director, not the animator. they can churn out 15 minutes in a month, or maybe even in a week, if low-quality (video game, toon channel or handlebar-barian) is o.k.

I once made  Vue-"renderfarm" with the computers of my wife and kids (wow! renderfarm of three computers that's more a children farm) But it actually worked and it saved me about triple the time it would take me on my stand-alone computer which isn't a state of the art one, just a modest celeronD 2,8ghz with 2Gb of RAM. but my family started to compain about funny little cows in their taskbars and slowing down their games. So I have to wait untill my ship with money arives so I can buy a quadro-core processor computer. But don't  despair... perhaps one of the not revealed secrets of Poser 7.1 is multicore rendering

... perhaps children farm is not the correct translation for the dutch word "kinderboerderij" but its a playground where you cuddle with baby-goats, vietnamese pigs, chickens and rabiits and if you're lucky they even  have donkeys or ponies, I think "mini-zoo" is more correct but it that case I have to refrase my whole reply, and does that remark doen't make any sense at all.

Quote - ... perhaps children farm is not the correct translation for the dutch word "kinderboerderij" but its a playground where you cuddle with baby-goats, vietnamese pigs, chickens and rabiits and if you're lucky they even  have donkeys or ponies

In the US, we usually call those "petting zoos", but I think your term is much more apt for the computer world.

Captain Jack

 

I do a lot of animation clips, most of which use multiple figures, pretty realistic looking rooms and props, and fairly realistic lighting (raytracing, ambient occlusion, etc).  Several important tips have already been mentioned: turn off shadows on most lights, use as few lights as possible.  A few other strategies which can be helpful for reducing render times:

-- increase the shading rate as high as you can while still getting details in hair and fabrics which are acceptable to you

-- use object-based rather than light-based AO

-- if the camera is static for a scene and shadows aren't important for that camera angle (e.g., don't need to see the shadows or AO for a figure standing on a floor), consider making a background render with the polygon-intensive elements turned off (i.e., invisible).  If a polygon-intensive element is actually static, you can include that in the background too.  Then turn off everything which shows up in that background shot (i.e., everything which isn't animated) and render the animation frames in a format like PNG.  Should render much faster since it isn't repainting the background every frame.  Afterward, you can use photoshop to import the animation sequence as one layer and the background as another layer.  Batch processing speeds that up immensely.  Use a program like VirtualDub to load the composited image sequence.

--  oh, and always make body parts hidden by clothing invisible (e.g., if a figure is wearing jeans, turn off the thighs... but only after doing your cloth simulations)

--  also, I haven't tested this, but I suspect you'll get faster render times if you don't use displacement maps (or at least turn off "use displacement maps" in your renders).  However, I don't use this strategy much since I think displacement maps greatly improve the look of fabrics and allow me to get things like a dynamic dress' shoulder straps sitting right down on the collar

Good luck...

I think the longest Poser animation I saw was a Star Trek movie for about 10 minutes or so. Person said they'd been working on it for months. It can be done, but it do take patience, as I understand (never tried it meself).

Check around Youtube, and maybe get some ideas for that.

Just to clarify one point, the new ILM/LucasArts campus at the Presidio has a render farm of 5000 processors - that's five thousand...!

there are many many other trix that you can use in animations, but the main concept to grasp is that only what people think they saw is important. You have to get far away from literal reality and just use what works to convey the story. You don't need a 37kPoly car parked on the street when a still image texture of a car on a square poly & transparent surround will suffice. etc, etc, etc.

storyboard, storyboard, storyboard and then go back and storyboard some more so that you only ever render what that shot actually needs. Use cutaways to simpler shots. Move in to medium closeups to minimize what needs to be seen in the background. If it isn't seen, you don't need to render it and if it is seen, it can often just be a billboard.

Shrek2 had 300 people working on it and there were shots that took over a year from concept to completion. By comparison, render times are the fastest part of the process!

<"))%%%><<

I have just started to do animations, but one trick I've found that helps tremendously is to render the foreground elements seperately from the background elements, then composite them in a program like Vegas. If your background is static, for example, there is no need to render it in every frame.

As noted above, rendering each frame as a still really helps if you run into trouble. I've also found initially that I was rendering far more frames than were required, so experiment with Poser's Key Frames control in the Make Move dialog.

Peace!

To make an animation with Poser in anything like a reasonable timespan, you have to have some kind of distributed rendering. My preference is to use Vue Infinite, and P6 is the animation system. An option to use just Poser would be to set up several systems, each with a Poser install and matching runtimes, and break the render into discreet sections, letting each machine chew on its share of the scene. Something that tends to get missed is the -other- uses a rendergarden can be put to. This is my current beast; all assembled by me mostly from saved upgrade components. 5 of the seven are Athlon 64's; one an old socket 754 from 3 upgrades ago, a 3200+ 939 that was my last mobo and chip, and the top 3 boxes are all 64-3000+'s bought since the price war started (you can get a retail boxed A64 3000+ 939 for $55 at newegg: an Asus A8V-VM micro atx board with onboard video for $54), the other 2 are old Athlon XP's. The 4 socket 939 boxes run WinXP, so that they can do distributed rendering for After Effects 7. So just by choosing carefully, you have a system that can either do production or post production distributed rendering. Plus it's wonderful on long winter nights..... :P

awwwwww....it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!!!

dale, that is a fantastic set-up you've got there. I'm impressed! I agree on not rendering in poser, anyway. but is there a location where one can view the results of your renderfarm?

Not at the moment; that is next on the list of projects, getting a website set up and scenes re-rendered or resized for web access. Everything I've done to date has been 640x480 or larger (and frankly, the early pieces were done when I first started with Vue 4 Pro, and show it. Badly.... :P ). Plus the earlier ones were rendered in DivX, and compressing already compressed video usually doesn't yield acceptable quality. Losing a 30 hr render session to the mosaic bug that was in DivX 5 was what taught me to render to uncompressed bmp or targa....

I see the need for a how-to techie tutorial from Dale B! All in favor say, "Aye!"

<,"))$$$><<

"Aye!"
David P. Hoadley

That old saw about CG: "fast, cheap or good, pick any two..." pretty much says it all here...

Poser is awesome value, it has cloth, hair, shader nodes, IBL, displacement etc for a very affordable price. Which of course means that speed has had to be let go. Even so Firefly isnt bad at all for what it does and it works quite well for most non commercial renders if you have patience and work with it a litle. Its perfect for those only doing this poser thing as a hobby since it produces nice quality and has sufficient 'tweakability' in the form of the nodes that you can get pretty much what you want. And of course once you do get to a place where you are doing commercial stuff, there is a very well defined line starting at inexpensive rendering apps all the way to full featured 3d suites that cost thous of dollars. And you can pick any one of these depending on what your clients are willing to pay/what your budgets are like. Same with hardware.

eg any of the advanced render engines out there like PRMan, mentalray, VRay etc chew through multi million poly poser scenes in minutes/seconds and they render very high quality hair, textures, reflections, IBL etc. But you are also looking at high cost and significant amounts of work in loading the poser scene into the app. Which may be viable if you are rendering a 3000 frame anim for an ad and the client wants it yesterday, but probably not if its just a funny still for uncle fred on a weekend.

I downloaded the free version of Bryce 5 from Daz, as well as Poser 5 from CP.  Up uyntil recently, all my rendering was done in Pro Pack, and none of it was animation.  Would Bryce be a good render engine for animation, or is Poser 5 the better one?
DPH

I'm afraid the Bryce renderer is also pretty slow. There are some decent renderers out there for free or very little money, but off the top of my head I don't know of any that can directly process a Poser animation. I've done several exports from Poser to POV-Ray, for example, which is pretty fast for being a ray tracing renderer, but AFAIK the only export available exports one frame at time, which would be very slow indeed.

I'm not too up on Python scripts for Poser, there may very well be something available that will export each frame of an animation into some renderer's format, then allow that renderer to process each frame more quickly. Might be worthwhile to ask over in that forum, too.

Captain Jack

 

 

Carrara 5 can handle Poser animations. Anyone trying doing one with C5 as the renderer? I know the still images I've done seem to be a lot better & sometimes faster than what Poser can do. David

Aye!

That is one sweet looking home render farm. *D

Thanks for all your info. And render farms is something i'll never have so i guess have to forget it. That's why now i'm using Poser just to make Java games and not movies. I dn't kneed big animations .. just short animations that loop for character moves etc.

Dale B, I feel for that poor table! ;)

Quote - Plus it's wonderful on long winter nights..... :P

That's wonderful... man, my wife would have a cow (breech presentation) if I let my "computer area" get to looking like that. I try to explain to her that I need all those wires going every which way, but she doesn't always appreciate what's really important in life. :lol:

Captain Jack

 

Attached Link: http://www.stewreo.de/poser/poserman.html

> Quote - I'm not too up on Python scripts for Poser, there may very well be something available that will export each frame of an animation into some renderer's format, then allow that renderer to process each frame more quickly. Might be worthwhile to ask over in that forum, too.

If RenderMan is OK as "some renderer's format"...it's there already. http://www.stewreo.de/poser/poserman.html

Yeah I've been playing around with creating Poser animations in Carrara 5.  I'm still really new to Carrara and Poser, but I find that Carrara renders faster on my Imac G5 1.8 Ghz (non intel) machine than it does in Poser 6, but then again my current animation abilities are not very developed.

Sincerely,

David

tebop - what are your system specs vs. file size, and expecte output?

Quote - I see the need for a how-to techie tutorial from Dale B! All in favor say, "Aye!"

<,"))$$$><<

Actually, I'm working on one, using the beast in its various incarnations as the template. What's slowing things down is explaining all the little things I've learned to do over the years that speed up and stabilize an OS installation. Probably going to have to break it into sections, just to keep it to a reasonable size....

Quote - I downloaded the free version of Bryce 5 from Daz, as well as Poser 5 from CP.  Up uyntil recently, all my rendering was done in Pro Pack, and none of it was animation.  Would Bryce be a good render engine for animation, or is Poser 5 the better one?
DPH

As noted, bryce is one of the slower engines out there; the years that Corel left it moribund aren't going to be undone with a .5 release. The biggest issue is that Bryce never was particularly Poser friendly, in that you had to import the .obj file, and then convince the textures to apply themselves to the correct locations. It is slightly better, in that you can use the Daz Studio app as a loader, but you are talking a kludge under the best of conditions. It can be done, but speed is not going to be one of the hallmarks. But you do have Bryce Lightning, so you could assemble a rendergarden to help offset the 'number of frames per render cycle' part of the equation. It's the 'time per frame' that will be the killer with Bryce....

Quote - Dale B, I feel for that poor table! ;)

Hey, I put the heavy ones on the bottom, didn't I?? Actually, it's one of those pressboard elcheapo printer stands...the ones with a 25lb load limit. But some sheetrock screws and construction glue does wonders....not that I'm about to try and move the bloody thing, you understand....

Quote - > Quote - Plus it's wonderful on long winter nights..... :P

That's wonderful... man, my wife would have a cow (breech presentation) if I let my "computer area" get to looking like that. I try to explain to her that I need all those wires going every which way, but she doesn't always appreciate what's really important in life. :lol:

Captain Jack

 

Fortunately, my lady love is a much of a geek as I am, so she can tell the difference between Cat 5, ps2, video, and power cables... :) What's scarey is that the Athlon 64's are running cooler than the XP's did, and I'm only pulling around 100-110 watts per box, even in a hard render.

Quote - also do one shot at a time, if you watch TV or Movies closely you will notice that every 'shot' is 4 - 6 seconds long, then a camera switch, very rarely is it one continuous shot (except for ER where they use those in a cool way)

That is the only practical solution. Break it up into short shots and pieces that are easier to manage in rendering then put them together, that way it's all in the editing and it helps you reuse some of the elements to make it faster.

Even the major studios that have huge render farms do it in pieces and put a lot of different elements together. It all depends on the scale right?

Here are my tips, some of them have already been mentioned.  (I'm not sure if they're all useful, but my intuition said they were!)  Here they are:

Use simple figures when possible.  Poser4 has a few preclothed figures, and Poser3 figures are also simple. 

If creating characters, create a morph and delete the morphs you used to make the morph (not expressions, just the ones you won't be using again).  Poser 6 required for this(?)

Use jpg textures whenever possible.

If you absolutely need shadows, try using multiple shadow lights with very low (64-128) resolutons.  This help will keep your characters to appear on the ground, as well as provide the subtle tones that you miss when turning off shadow maps.

When using shadow maps of any resoution (especially small), remember that Poser calculates the map based on the total area of shadow casting objects.  So if you have two figures standing on the "ground", your render will look better if you turn shadows off for the "ground".

Get a copy of virtualdub and grab as many filters as you can find.  Try experimenting with your preview output.  Preview doesn't support shadows, smoothing (subdiv), or bumpmaps (or most anything else you need for realism) but the images can look great with a little post processing.  I've created a nice bloom filter that, when used sparingly, gave a real sense of atmosphere to the pics I tried it with. 

Avoid things alledged to be "dynamic"

Get a copy of Avid or Vegas and use still renders in your animation.  You can keyframe and output a simple pan and zoom (Ken Burns' effect) animation alot quicker in a video program if you don't need real motion.

Those are my suggestions.  Now I find I spend way more time setting things up than actually rendering them!

If it's any help, I render my Poser figures in Cinema 4D, using the old OS9 plugin, and I've started using Kuroyume's InterPoser Pro for some things. This renders Poser figures in a reasonable amount of time.--Tim example: http://www.auroratrek.com

Quote - When using shadow maps of any resoution (especially small), remember that Poser calculates the map based on the total area of shadow casting objects.  So if you have two figures standing on the "ground", your render will look better if you turn shadows off for the "ground".

I could have written this better.  What I meant to say is do not have your ground object cast a shadow.  If your two figures are in the middle of the ground your shadow map will only be calculated for the bounding box around them, so even a low res shadowmap will look OK.  However, if you turn the shadow casting on for the ground, then the bounding box has to include the figures and the ground.  So, even a high res shadow map would then look blocky.

I should point out that, in a case where you had for example a figure walking away from another, that your shadow map's bounding box will change as the figures become farther apart.  This will cause the shadow to become less sharp as the distance increases, and may cause a shimmering effect in your renders.  Still, I recommend a low res shadow map over no map in most cases.

 

 

 

 

Carrara can do in minutes what poser takes hours to do. Don't render complex scenes in poser; it will only depress you.