Quote - Using JPG as an intermediate format is a bad, bad idea. The quality loss seams like a waste to me. That aside, renderign to TIF shoudln;t take any longer than JPG. Output format doesnt come into play at the render stage.

That has not been my experience.  I've found the quality makes a difference in speed, at least when using the "make movie" options.

JPG is NOT an intermediate format for me when I'm animating.  It's the only format my animation software accepts.  So if Poser can't do it, I have to convert each frame with Photoshop. 

I mostly make small animated graphics for Web sites and such.  It's pointless to render to TIFF format, when I'm only going to convert the frames to JPG anyway, and then convert to something even more lossy.

Might be a strand hair issue - that's hair room hair you've got on that render there, and that really slows things down, even in P6. Try the third or fourth hairs for Syd instead

Just throwing in my 2cents.

1.  Graphics cards have no effect on rendering from what I understand.  They effect display, and that's all.

1. I haven't hunted around too much and I'm at work right now, but from what I've found so far testure filtering is no longer a render option in P7, it is instead controlled on a texture by texture basis in the material room.  Texture filtering really slows down a render and is not always needed depending on what you are doing or your own style.  (PS, does anyone know of a way to just shut off all texture filtering?  I hate the idea of having to go through a million textures on by one!)

2. I no longer use jpg, I only render to tiffs, but there is no technical reason that the render speed would change.  The system has no clue what you are going to save to until after you render!

Just a few thoughts.  Still, good to know about the bugs.  I'm glad I read this, because far too often if I run into a bug I figure its just me.  (Tech support on any application always treats me that way, at least and I'm more then just slightly computer literate. lol)

Hope they will resolve these issues soon.

Quote - Just throwing in my 2cents.

1.  Graphics cards have no effect on rendering from what I understand.  They effect display, and that's all.

Graphic's card drivers can affect things all through out a system.  Updating a driver can fix or destroy a multitude of things.  I kid you not...even printers can appear physically broken with a bad graphics driver.

that's why you hear the "have you updated your graphics driver" alot when dealing with computers.  Poser is one of the few programs any more that does not rely on graphics card alot, except for display but it is leading that way with more hardware acceleration and opengl displays.

Crazy I know but graphics cards can make or break a system in ways that just don't make any kind of logic. 

Quote - Might be a strand hair issue - that's hair room hair you've got on that render there, and that really slows things down, even in P6. Try the third or fourth hairs for Syd instead

You are probably right that that would probably make the situation worse,but.....

I think it was the Syd 3rd Hair IIRC....
Certainly was one of the default hairs anyway.

Haven't dared open the door to the Hair Room yet! LOL

Klutz :0)

Teyon...I have notified support as requested.

Many thanks for your time on this.

Klutz :0)

No problem. It's always good to log these things instead of just letting them fly by or making cumbersome work arounds. If it's logged and we can repeat it, we do our best to fix it. :)

The hair model in your render is the third item on the Sydney hair list, SydneyG2Strand_2, which is a hair room hair. One is the skill cap for the hair room, two and three are hair room hairs and four and five are prop based hair - 3 minutes isn't bad for hair room hair, at least for me!

This one has about 16,000 strands in it as initially set up.

Just done a quick timing test to get an idea of the difference the strand based hair should make (quite late in the day and with a big project taking up lots of memory in the background, so ignore the actual figures and look at the difference between them).

Sydney with hair three (prop hair), standard render settings: 63 seconds
Sydney with hair two (strand hair), standard render settings: 12 minutes 20 seconds!

It's not normally that slow, but the ratio is about right.

Keep in mind that the FireFly Renderer in Poser 5 and Poser 6 had the option to turn "texture filtering" on or off. If you turned it on, textures would look sharper, even in the distance.
 
ThrommArcadia is correct: in Poser 7, this is no longer a user-changeable option. The manual says that tetxure filtering is turned on by default, but I'm seeing blurry textures in my scenes, especially when I compare the same image I rendered in Poser 6.
 
Also, the File > Export (to image) feature has been changed: you can no longer set the compression rate for any file types. I suggest saving the image as Photoshop, and then opening the file in either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and using those programs' "Save for Web" command.

Right...I must admit I wasn't aware those were styles created within the program.

Thanks for your trouble, JR.

It doesn't sound bad then for working on the default manual settings.

It is just the auto firefly settings which are giving me lock-up grief, bu the sound of it! 

Once again thanks for the input, folks! 

Klutz. :0)

Quote - ThrommArcadia is correct: in Poser 7, this is no longer a user-changeable option. The manual says that tetxure filtering is turned on by default, but I'm seeing blurry textures in my scenes, especially when I compare the same image I rendered in Poser 6.

It may be on by default, but you can now set it on each texture to either "None", "Quality", or "Fast" using the new Filtering option on the Image_Map node.
A "change Filtering setting for all Images in a material" Wacro is probably going to be wanted.

Quote - Keep in mind that the FireFly Renderer in Poser 5 and Poser 6 had the option to turn "texture filtering" on or off. If you turned it on, textures would look sharper, even in the distance.
 
ThrommArcadia is correct: in Poser 7, this is no longer a user-changeable option. The manual says that tetxure filtering is turned on by default, but I'm seeing blurry textures in my scenes, especially when I compare the same image I rendered in Poser 6.
 

Texture Filtering is under the imagemap node now and can be set for every texture...I plan to play a bit with it at home

If not animating it's always best to use a lossless file format to save your images, especially when working on them.  Any computer graphics book will advise you on that.  You can then output the final image to JPEG of GIF if posting on the web.  TIFF and PSD will allow you to save layers, also a big point if you ever want to change anything in the image later.  You can't save layers with JPEG.

I have always saved in jpeg, in every other version of poser, sure hope they fix it in p7 soon.
Using p6 and p7 collecting virtual dust till they do. :mellow:

Quote - I have always saved in jpeg, in every other version of poser, sure hope they fix it in p7 soon.
Using p6 and p7 collecting virtual dust till they do. :mellow:

Why not save in a lossless format and convert to JPEG with another program.
It's usually best to convert to JPEG as the last step before uploading somewhere to avoid problems due to the lossy compression.

How about just render in p6 and save time and space? No render speed diff  between p6 and p7 if not using raytrace.  Cannot see why I would  want play with broken toy rather then the one that works.

@Klutz: 3 minutes with one core is okay. Turn your render settings until the right-end, with P7 now it´s for me possible with 2 GB Ram (in P6 I´ve got an error with 70-80%).

By the way:
@pjz99 thanks for your hind with dual-core. It´s great! (maybe sometimes it´s for sure good to read the manual).

Merry Christmas
Frank

The best true image export I have been able to export/save is by coping image from the
edit drop down menu and pasting in new file in photoshop all save as options were showing
quality loss. Must be something in the export script.

I've rendered several images in Poser 7 and have had no quality loss at all saving is PSD.  I'll have to try a test render in jpeg and see it I notice a decline in image quality saving at the highest quality setting.  It could be some conflict on your computer that's causing the degredation, every computer is different and therefore we can't completely rule this out.  I'd also try email e-frontier and ask if they have any more data.

Try pasting in compared to saving as is a bit of a difference here.
I would not expect a reply from e-frontier till later this week.
I just had a lil time to play today with export tests.
Now back to texture work.

e-frontier already confirmed that JPG compression setting isn't doing anything. I guess no one of the testers used that export option (why would anyone use it? ;-))

Well, I did. I used it to see if it exported.  Never thought to use it for dpi testing becuase I usually render out at 72 dpi regardless but with higher dimensions anyway.  I'll take some of the blame on that one, though I wasn't the only person testing the program.

 The engineers will most likely have it fixed by the first service release. For those needing higher resolutions, I suggested (until the fix is ready) to do what I usually do out of habit: multiply the desired height or width in inches by the desired dpi to figure out what my dimensions would be.

Let's say I want an image that's 11 inches tall and 14 inches wide at 300 dpi. So the equivalent  would be 11x300 =3300 and 14x300=4200 which means I'd render out at 3300x4200x72 dpi to get the same resolution. 

Suggest they do away with any compression on export. I only use dpi option when zooming in and out when doing area renders when texture testing so i don't have to change camera.
Never tried saving in higher dpi before as I agree no need unless your watching the paint dry.