What are the best render settings for P7 to get the best detail for Poser Characters ? I see the texture size is gone.
cheerio  lululee

I'm pretty much done with the P7 renderer except for spot checks.  On my 5th hour now trying to render a simple portrait, one V4, one Aery_Soul strand based hair, black background, two lights, with middle quaility.  It bloats up to 2GB and dies.  Marginally better than P6 but really not tremendously so.  Time to start learning to do it in Vue I guess, I just wanted to give the new Firefly a chance first.

Odd, pjz.

Does it literally die or is it just rendering very slow?

All my renders have been a LOT faster than they ever were in P6. I've made my own render settings, more or less based on the ones I used for P6 (can't quite use those as the texture size isn't there and the Texture Filtering is now per texture) and the new Irradiance slider doesn't have a P6 counterpart.

I would suggest looking in the manual and see which setting/slider does what and then set them to whatever is suitable for your system. The auto setting usually suck IMO.

Quote - What are the best render settings for P7 to get the best detail for Poser Characters ? I see the texture size is gone.
cheerio  lululee

I'd like some input on that also. As it stands now I have my settings set as this:
Cast Shadows - checked
Raytracing - checked
Raytracing bounce - 1
Irradiance caching - 50 ( not so sure what this Irradiance caching is)
Pixel sample - 4 for preview 8 for final render
Min. Shade rate - .50
Max bucket size - 64 for preview and higher for final renders
Smooth Polygons - checked
Use displacement Maps - checked

Lighting is another issue as well that I'd like to know more about.

"Rendering Slow" is fair enough to say, although when it sits for three hours on one unit of render, is busy in one thread only (50% CPU on my 2 core machine), I am not interested in keeping on with it when I have Vue 6i I can do it in.
Sealtm2 I have an urge to try to answer your question but I'm too noob, I like to think I have a decent grip on simple rendering situations but I'd only muck up trying to explain it, I'm sure there are many better-informed people who will follow up.

Quote - Irradiance caching - 50 ( not so sure what this Irradiance caching is)

I'm sure the manual will tell you all about it ;) Or, in a nutshell, it's the "quality" slider for AO and gather. Low values make it go faster, high values make it more precise. In many cases, so far, the visual difference was very small, but the speed difference significant. There should be barely any reason to put this up all the way, and in many cases you can get away with settings between 20 and 60. If you're not using AO or gather, just ignore that slider. > Quote - Max bucket size - 64 for preview and higher for final renders

This is, frankly, suicide. You should lower it for final renders, otherwise the memory usage will go through the roof and eventually slow down your renders tremendously by forcing the system to swap to disk or you'll end up with renders that don't even finish. This is even more so true for multithreaded renders, as there the renderer is treating multiple buckets at a time, therefore requiring more memory.

Thanks stewer Now I have a starting point. I do in fact use a dual core processor and didn't know about the bucket size. I read the manual as far as Irradiance caching but really didn't get it.

That's odd pjz, I have found Poser 7 to be using less than half the memory that P6 did.  I've tried loading up V4 in P6 w/ her high res textures and tried to render it.  P6 just laughed at me and said "are you kidding!?" before complaining that it didn't have enough memory to load the textures.  P7 takes it all in stride and says "here look at this nice image!" :)

It uses less than half at the same low quality settings - but if you put a lot of polygons in e.g. one V4 and one of Aery_Soul's beautiful hair items (at least, that's a lot of polygons by Poser standards), and then try to render at higher quality, like say with AO turned on for a few spots and with raytracing on, then it becomes problematic.  It's better than P6 certainly, but I like things like shadows and not having nostril glow.  I know these things can be fixed with postwork, but dammit, the renderer is supposed to be able to get that right the first time.  :cursing:

Ok, forgive me for the noob question, but, I'm at work (the manual is at home) and now this is driving me up the wall!

What exactly does the "Max Bucket Size" mean and do?  I've never touched it for anything, simple because I didn't know what it would affect, but, I've never had any problem with renders in the past...I'm going to be so torched if altering the numbers make my renders look better! :scared:

As far as I understand, bucket size only affects performance, it has no effect on appearance.  Basically smaller bucket size is safer, larger bucket size is faster (but as Stewer explains it can be too risky).

 The Poser 4 renderer renders one 'scan line' at a time.  The Firefly renderer renders little squares across the screen.  Each of these squares is the width and height of a bucket.  Firefly has to allocate memory to handle everything related to rendering the pixels contained within a particular bucket.

So basically, it figures out which polygons are going to be rendered in this bucket and if smoothing is enabled, it creates all the micropolygons for those and (along with the shadow map and other things) it renders that section of the image.  Each rendering thread needs it's own bucket (memory).  pzj99, check your bucket size... if your renders are 'hanging' for long periods of time, try a smaller bucket size.

To my understanding, the Bucket size is the size/number of grouped pixels it processes to render. The higher the bucket, the larger square of grouped pixels rendered at once, and smaller amounts, smaller size square of grouped pizels rendered.

Higher bucket sizes for preview renders is okay, but final renders should use lower buckets. In some cases, it speeds things up.

Still learning the quirks of P7 Firefly. It went poof the last night when I enabled Raytracing. I don't recall what my bucket size was set at. I just tried again, without raytracing. 

-- Jeff

aaaaahhhh!  How very cool!  I'll have to experiment with that and see what my system does with it.

Thanks much for the explanation!

Since it's bed time, I kicked off one 1600x1200 render similar to what I've descrived, with auto quality set 1 notch below Final.  I'll let you know when I wake up

ps: now set to 8mb bucket size/adaptive, it was 64 and probably that was my problem

If you are rendering with Separate Process (General Preferences > Render tab) turned on, please note that when you render in a separate process, the render engine cannot automatically reduce bucket size to counter a low memory situation. Therefore, please start with a lower bucket size (for example, 8-16) and see if that eliminates the issue. Regards, -Brian

If you knew me, you would know that I never render with low quality settings, or at low resolutions.  I rendered this in P7 w/ Separate Render Process on and 2 threads with FINAL quality settings:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1347644

That is V4 w/ High Res Texture Maps, Summer Fashion for V4, Amarseda Hair, Spa of Juturna, with 4 lights, 2 w/ 2048 Shadow Maps, all rendered at 4000x3000 resolution.  Poser 6 laughed at me shortly before dying when I tried to have it render that out as a comparison.

Similarly, I don't think you could call 5 V3's low poly:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1186515

That was rendered in P6 and the best I could get it to do was ~2000x1900 with texture size set somewhere around 1536 and texture filtering turned off.  In Poser 7 on Monday Night, I was able to render that out at ~4000x3000 on Final Quality settings w/ Quality Texture filtering set on every texture.  It also rendered at about 3/4 the time that the original smaller P6 render took.

Now, I'm not saying that YOU are not having problems with the P7 renderer.  However, in my experience, it has been nothing but lower memory usage and faster render times, even when using extremely high resolution textures and high poly models.  I even rendered out my Max character w/ Scorpio Rising, which is notorious for being rough on systems, and P7 handled it far more gracefully than P6 ever did.

---

Finally, to answer lululee's question, while the texture size slider is gone, that setting seems to be linked to the "Min Shading Rate" quality setting.  It appears that P7 will automatically use better resolutions for textures the lower you set the "Min Shading Rate".  I normally use 0.10 in all my final renders.  See the top example that I linked above to see what this looks like on V4 w/ hi-res textures.

maybe shading rate 0.2 would also be better, if nobody mentioned it. adaptive bucket size would be better as well, but apparently they didn't put it in this version yet. so 32 or less, just as in previous versions, depending on machine.

P7 does have Adaptive Bucket Size, *but it does not work with rendering in a separate process. * If you have Poser render within the same process as the program itself, Adaptive Bucket size does work.

That was a good suggestion, thank you.  It did not occur to me that Adaptive wouldn't work the way it purports to (i.e., it doesn't adapt when you run in a separate proc - nothing in the manual leads one to suspect this). This completed in something like 2.5 hours, whereas previous attempts would choke and bog down at a small fraction of the way through.  I don't think I'll be junking Vue 6i just the same, but thanks to those who suggested this setting. souvenir attached, originally 16x8 reduced to 800x600

Quote - It did not occur to me that Adaptive wouldn't work the way it purports to (i.e., it doesn't adapt when you run in a separate proc - nothing in the manual leads one to suspect this).

It's in the "Poser 7 ReadMe.txt" file. :)

Ah, those things are just trash, nobody reads them!  :tt2:

That's about the BIGGEST strand based hair I ever saw...;) You did not mention it was rendering in the neighbors yard. Hair is usually the culprit. I have a hair prop that weighs in at 160,000 verts. Almost 3 V4s in a wig. Sometimes the node(hair) settings are demanding too. Big texture calls... Bet that one is a big one too. I have a few renders that clocked 8 hours just to clear the hair prop...Dynamic hair can go waaaay bigger. Then there is "visible in RayTrace" which in most cases should be clicked "off" in (hair)parameter. It still catches a shadow. You should use manual settings. "Final setting" just ramps up everything. Even things you should not be using. Max texture at 4096 with shading rate at .100 (for example). ...not that you used it,,, but this is a sure sloooowdooown....na.

It isn't too bad, I think it's 60k polys.  AS has it on the product page.
edit: or maybe not, but I recall it was something like 60k from loading it into Vue. That ponytail is the funnest thing I've ever had, I sit there and pose it for hours.  I know, that's sad.  But I love it.  :wub:

I also have noticed in my testing that the Irradiance caching can be an element in slowing a render down as well. Having it set at a much lower value helps a lot and there is not much difference in the image appearance had the slider been set at a higher value. Well, at least from what I can see anyway.