I got a chance to use Poser 6 recently, and i'm annoyed by how long it's taking to render an animation to PNG image files. Just recently i was doing the same with P5 and it was fast, full rendered png images without anti-alias, and it was like 1 frame per 5 seconds..but just tried it with p6, and it's like 1 frame per 15 ore more seconds. What the?/ why is this?

Who cares? it's the old P4 renderer. You keep complaining about render quality... STOP using the P4 renderer!

(To give you a clue, the P4 render was available when people were using Windows 98.. you don't sttill run THAT, do you?)

Actually, I've noticed the opposite in Poser 6: The P4 Renderer seems to be significantly faster than the Firefly Renderer. Here's an example:
I set a scene to render to the main window, at 400x600 pixels (72 dpi).
The P4 renderer (with the "Ignore Shader Trees" option checked) took about a minute or maybe less.
Using the Firefly Renderer at the third-highest quality setting took ages: I stopped it after 20 minutes of waiting for Poser to go through it's "Adding objects" and "Calculating lights" routine.
(And unlike many versions of Poser 5, the cancel button worked nicely: it stopped rendering and I could get back to work.)
 
I then changed the dimensions to 4800x7200 pixels, 200 dpi (for a large print),and the same third-highest quality using Firefly. I started rendering at 12:45pm Sunday afternoon. Poser was still rendering when I went to sleep at 11:50pm Monday night. When I woke up Tuesday morning, it was finished and I was able to save the rendered image.
Did I make a complex image with 20 characters? Did I have a million polygons? Nope, this is the image that took over two days to render: Against the Wall 2005.
Unfortunately, the maximum render size for the P4 Renderer is 4096x4096, so I have no choice but to use the Firefly Renderer for large images.

Hi Tebop!

I have noticed the same as I own both P5 and P6, i usually  render with the P4-engine so P6 is just gathering dust on my machine.

I do have a fast computer so I could easily render using the firefly engine but the P4 render engine is not bad (IMHO) and it is very fast.

Regards / Jonny

As JHoagland points out, be sure that "Ignore Shader Trees" is checked in the Poser renderer options.

I keep my shader trees pretty simple, mainly using textures to modify the various channels.  That means I rarely use more than one node per channel.  I've compared renders with and wihtout disabling shader nodes and the results were as I expected.  Turning off the nodes I had no bump maps, and the transparencies seemed different.  Turning them back on gave the results I wanted.  I assume it was because I'm using textures and not procedurals.

I've never thought of rendering anything that high until a few days ago.  It must take ages!

You know, I use the P4 Engine from time to time still and it really does a similiar job to Firefly in certain cases, and I never use the "Ignore Shader Tree" Option.

The only cases where Firefly is truly needed in P5 is when you want to use displacement or true reflections.  I use Face off's Skin Shader, which is a really complex node set up and it comes out almost exactly the same as in Firefly under the same lighting.  The only difference is the displacement maps, which don't really add much unless you are doing a Close up render.

In Poser 6, you can't use the fancy lighting options of IBL and AO in the P4 Engine, but not all art needs that.  A night shot of a thief in a street picking a pocket (for example) might not require any of that.  If you do a lot of postwork painting, then I'm sure that the P4 Engine is all that you need.

I almost always only use P4 for animations, my clients have never known there might be something better.  (and nine times out of ten they want the thing done the day before they hire me!)

I haven't noticed a significant difference in performance of the P4 engine from P5 to P6, but I haven't used it for anything other than a few quick preview renders.

The nice thing about P6 is that you can do spot renders and save them.  this means you could render something with reflections, once in P4, then reset for Firefly rendering, and just render the reflections, compositing them in later in Photoshop or some such.

Well, all that said, I do have to concede that Textures turn out much cleaner in Firefly, but the final call all depends on your personal style and what you do in your postwork.

Just my opinion.