i've heard a lot of debates about poser 7, and while i'm interested in several features (the new morph tool and the animation palette layers, for instance), the big issue i want to know about is rendering and out of memory errors.  right now i'm fighting poser to render what is a pretty simple scene with 3 figures (one is a robot, and i'm not using any textures on it, and the third is a unimesh figure with no textures or morphs).  and i'm completely fed up.  as much as i've had daz | studio crash about as frequently, as much as i've already paid most of the price i paid for the poser 6 upgrade in d|s plugins (and i don't have that many), and as much as i love what the material room can do, i'm just about ready to give up on poser all together.  i've got all my settings so low as to be almost useless, and it's just barely rendering.

is poser 7 any better?

and why oh why is this so much easier in d|s?  i actually don't find d|s faster, but it will do two things poser simply won't for me: render true sss and render anything even vaguely taxing.  d|s will take hours on a render if it needs to.  everytime i have poser try to do anything taxing enough that it would take hours, it dies.   is it because (for no apparent reason) poser has no render to disk and has to put the whole image in memory?  i've had no problem rendering up to 4800 px in d|s, where poser seems to choke the moment i go above 1000 pixels.

when will this become top priority?  i appreciate greatly all the hard work that went into poser 7.  i know the community asked for everything and the kitchen sink, and perfect figures on top of that, and that the developers did their absolute best to supply that before the end of this year.   but if they had implemented absolutely no new features whatsoever and just made firefly able to handle print resolution renders with several clothed and coiffed figures in a scene, i for one would have been absolutely ecstatic.

or did they already do that?  can anyone say how far the rendering abilities have been improved?

oh, and for the record, i presently have 3 gigs of ram and an athlon 64 dual core 4200+.  not the top, but it should be enough to get the job done.  and is enough in other programs.

Taken largely from my post in another thread, I hope you find it informative:

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.

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.

The way it handles textures has been changed too. Uli explained it better than I can, but it boils down to something like this when it's rendering a "bucket" it only load the bit of the texture visible in that "bucket" this allow a seen to have tons of HR textures without bogging the render down.

I am totally impressed with the render improvements.  I posted a thread to that effect: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2677264.  In that piece that I am working on I have a heard of cows (50) which take 14 min. to load into P7 (I timed it).  I was hoping P7 would handle it as EF promised in their advertisements because P6 froze like a teenager trying to add 2 + 2 without a calculator.  To my amazement, it rendered in about 4 min.  Just for that alone I am pleased with the new version.  I've noticed a couple of minor bugs, nothing to annoying which I am sure will be fixed in time.  But for now, I am happy with it.

thanks so much for responding.  i've read such conflicting accounts regarding poser 7 performance, i thought it would be good to have a thread just about render power. 

Larry-L - thanks for the link to the pun inspiring thread.

so, let me turn the question around.  would you say that the improvements in rendering ability are good/stable enough to be worth the upgrade on their own?  i'm less asking for reasoning than how stable it is.

does anyone out there have the grim armor by sanctum art and poser 7?    can anyone show me if one (or even more than one) can be rendered in poser 7?  or actually anything that's actually multiple figures and not multiples of one figure?

What's the difference between 5 V4s with different textures and materials, compared to some mix of any other types of figure?  Polys and texture maps are not shared between the figures even though they're built from the same base figure.  Giolon's example is pretty good imo.

Quote - so, let me turn the question around.  would you say that the improvements in rendering ability are good/stable enough to be worth the upgrade on their own?  i'm less asking for reasoning than how stable it is.

YES

there seems to be some debate over whether p7 does instancing or not (one of the reasons was duplication of objects).  basically, you're talking about several cr2s that all reference the same mesh.  and look like one texture with different diffuse values.  that's different than, for instance, the mill dragon, cp's chinese dragon, the mill horse, v4, v3, and apollo in a scene.  i'm not saying that it's different to poser.  it might not be.  but if i only see multiples of one figure, i simply don't have any comparison to see if poser handles it differently.  it probably won't.  but that's supposition and extrapolation based on marketing copy and actually conflicts with information from some experts over at rdna.  and i've heard nothing on the instancing subject from any of the p7 programmers, which would still be theory but at least from a prime source.

i'm very grateful for the examples so far.  i'm asking for more information because i can't test it myself (i don't think there's a demo version?), not because i don't believe everything people have posted.  i just want to know more.

 in my experience, i've found it best not to take anything for granted with computers.  i've run into tons of situations that should have been similar and where theoretically there should have been no difference, but one worked and the other didn't.  there's always a reason (it's not magic, i know), but without testing, i wouldn't have found the discrepency and begun to look for a reason.

if no one's done images with several different figures yet, then i'm not expecting anyone to go out of their way.  but it would be nice to know if someone has and hasn't had trouble.

jfbeute - that's really good to know. with all the complaints i've been reading (universal poses, general performance issues, bugs, etc.) , i'd begun to feel that maybe p7 wasn't much of an improvement after all.

The rendering is improved so much that in my opinion you will stop using P6 once you have used P7. It will now render scenes that were impossible to render before.
Add the morphing capabilities (to fix those poke throughs) and you have a very good and stable environment to render.
Of course there are still a few problems (I'm sure most of these will be fixed with SR1). Most of the problems have no impact on rendering and limited impact on other things.
Overall the current software is very stable and a major improvement over previous versions.

I don't have the Grim armour, but I've got enough different meshes to run a reasonable test.  I'm at work now, but I'll set something up when I get home and I'll let you know the results.

So far everything I've done in P7 has been a vast improvement.  I have not had it choke on anything, including scene I had made in P6 and P5 that would never render.  I've got scene that has choked Carrara that I'm thinking of bringing in and seeing if P7 can handle.  Not to mention a monster scene (as in huge, not as in monsters) that I created a long time ago in P5.  When that scene, which took me forever to set up, wouldn't render I walked away from Poser for about 8 months.

Anyway, I'll do a really good test and let you know.

I will add, that despite the huge improvements in memory handling (finally writes to disk and such), I have come across scenes that take forever to render.  But, they are ones where I am using every last piece of quality, rendering at 3200X2400, HDRI, 4 raytrace bounces, 6 pixel samples, etc.  The scenes render, they just take time.  (Which is still faster then P6 which cannot get past the rendering shadow maps step!)

Oh, and one more thing.  the longest render times I've had in P7 so far were before I started using the "Render in separate process" option.  That right there gave me a marked speed improvement.

Yeah, i have to say that it is an overall vast improvement that is long overdue.

i'm so glad to hear this.  i really did feel about ready to give up on poser and either turn to d|s primarily or seriously start investigating other 3d applications.

i will say this: i don't know if i can wait as long to get p7 as i was hoping to now. 

reading the bug thread is actually kind of comforting.  it seems like there are a lot of quirks and hiccups, but they're primarily the type of details i'd expect to get hammered out after release a major new release.

Quote - The way it handles textures has been changed too. Uli explained it better than I can, but it boils down to something like this when it's rendering a "bucket" it only load the bit of the texture visible in that "bucket" this allow a seen to have tons of HR textures without bogging the render down.

Correct. The number of textures and their size has close to no influence on the renderer's memory usage. If you ever wanted to use multiple 8000x8000 16bit tiff textures, now is the time

Quote - The rendering is improved so much that in my opinion you will stop using P6 once you have used P7. It will now render scenes that were impossible to render before.
Add the morphing capabilities (to fix those poke throughs) and you have a very good and stable environment to render.
Of course there are still a few problems (I'm sure most of these will be fixed with SR1). Most of the problems have no impact on rendering and limited impact on other things.
Overall the current software is very stable and a major improvement over previous versions.

Not for me it hasn't. I loaded the P7 car from the casino pack, one other car, and a low poly building in P7 and it simple couldn't render no matter what settings I use. I had saved the scene as a pz3 so I decide to load it in P6 and P6 rendered the scene. I was totally surprised and disappointed with P7.

But that bl**dy P7 car is a bad example, too. It's so ridiculously high poly that it's close to useless as far as I can tell (I haven't bothered loading it myself yet)

I've noticed that Poser 7 takes incredibly long time rendering reflections, at least if it ws reflecting materials made for Poser 6. But then again, Poser 6 flat out refused to render a pair of glasses I'd saved with Poser 5 refraction... So I guess there are a few backwards-compatibility issues at play here. Whenever I removed the materials on the glasses AND added them again from scratch in P6 I had no problems.  I suspect something similar is at stake with the reflection.

Quote - But that bl**dy P7 car is a bad example, too. It's so ridiculously high poly that it's close to useless as far as I can tell (I haven't bothered loading it myself yet)

I've noticed that Poser 7 takes incredibly long time rendering reflections, at least if it ws reflecting materials made for Poser 6. But then again, Poser 6 flat out refused to render a pair of glasses I'd saved with Poser 5 refraction... So I guess there are a few backwards-compatibility issues at play here. Whenever I removed the materials on the glasses AND added them again from scratch in P6 I had no problems.  I suspect something similar is at stake with the reflection.

The scene wasn't set up in P6, it was set up in P7. When P7 wouldn't render, I tried the P7 saved scene in P6 and P6 rendered it.

I must admit that the bonus content isn't useable. The car is so big in poly count that it takes forever to load and render. The casino room will always show artifacts (like false shadows) regardless of the render setting. I have not had these problems with any other content.
I have had my share of wierd problems but none of these caused any major mishap, most resolved themselves after saving the scene and restarting P7. Rendering in a seperate thread does have the advantage that a crashing render has little impact on the rest of the program (I have always been able to save the scene).
You do have to remember that the render is much faster and a better quality setting is often selected, this will have a great impact on complex operations (like reflections).

Quote - > Quote - But that bl**dy P7 car is a bad example, too. It's so ridiculously high poly that it's close to useless as far as I can tell (I haven't bothered loading it myself yet)

I've noticed that Poser 7 takes incredibly long time rendering reflections, at least if it ws reflecting materials made for Poser 6. But then again, Poser 6 flat out refused to render a pair of glasses I'd saved with Poser 5 refraction... So I guess there are a few backwards-compatibility issues at play here. Whenever I removed the materials on the glasses AND added them again from scratch in P6 I had no problems.  I suspect something similar is at stake with the reflection.

The scene wasn't set up in P6, it was set up in P7. When P7 wouldn't render, I tried the P7 saved scene in P6 and P6 rendered it.

Yes, but as I mentioned, Poser 7 apparently have a problem with reflective surfaces. And whoever set up the car MIGHT have used a poser 6 shader. Not saying it's the case but it sounds probable if it rendered better in P6.

mmmm

that's slightly disturbing. i often like using mapps', ajax's and templargfx's shaders as starting points on glass, metal and reflective paints.  still, it sounds easy enough to get around.

stewer - that's very good to hear.  thanks for telling us more about the renderer.  if there's anything else that's changed about how it works, please let us know.

I have to admit that I find relfections awefully slow to render in P7, but I figured it had more to do with th fact that I've A) jacked up my quality rendering settings and B) I leave texture filtering on (where I rarely used it in P5 or P6).

The big difference in P7 is that you cannot turn off Texture filtering for a scene, you have to do it node by node in the material room.  The option has been moved from a global one to an option on each individual texture map.

Still, I have never had P7 crash out on me.

I find it hard to believe that a scene would render in P6 and not in P7.  Not everything is equal in the render settings is my guess.  Or, like TG said, there is some weird incompatibility issue.

That's distressing news, in anycase.

But, if this is the case, then you should put it in the bug list that we've been compiling (It's in the forum somewhere close.)  We want them to fix these things for the first service patch!

I'm going to run some tests today.

I haven't even looked at that damn car yet.  Now I'm scared to.

I've redone two images that I'd done in P6 in P7 and I was able to max out the settings and render them with out any problems, so I'll vouch that from a renderability standpoint, P7 is lightyears ahead of P6. 

I'm rendering a single OBJ that totals over 750,000 polys with three lights using 1024 shadow maps each, fast scatter on the larger part of it,translucency on two other parts and all at 3284x5000x72dpi with the automatic settings maxed.  No problems doing it.

Please let us know the results of your test, ThrommArcadia. I may have to try doing a few renders using reflection as well. Keep in mind though folks that reflection and raytracing as a rule, is slow to begin with.

ok, i just gotta say this.  i was able to do animated raytracing with refraction and reflection on my 486 with 8 megs of ram in 1995 with free open source software (pov-ray).  there is absolutely no reason even a single processor of my athlon 64 box shouldn't be able to handle similar tasks. 
frankly, i'm not even asking for speed.  i'm asking it just not to give up and get stuck in some weird limbo.  right now poser 6's firefly is giving me a black screen and continues to try and render until forcibly stopped.  if i get it to render, even with a miniscule bucket size, it doesn't take up to an hour.   something is very frustratingly wrong with poser 6 at least.  

taking time is no biggie.  but something is being inefficiently handled if it needs to crash where other free renderers have no problem (pov-ray, yafray, etc.).   and have had no problem with 1/100th of the hardware resources to pull on.

This is where I'm at.

I'm almost done setting up my scene.  I figure if my computer is going to be tied up for a day or so rendering, it might as well be something worthwhile.

The Scene has:
V4
Sydney
Millenium Dragon 2.0
Kelvin
M3
James
Knight Errant Armor for M3
Transmapped hair and dynamic hair
Various clothing and props

I figure that's a good number of meshes and textures

I'm cranking up the settings, not allt he way, but pretty darn close.

The armour and some of the weapons have true relfections (not maps, but real reflections)
I'm not using IBL this time around, but I have AO on many of the textures.

I just have to tweak the set and lights and I'm ready to render.  I'll post the results.

The Machine (nothing special):  Athlon XP 2600, 1.25GB RAM, 128Mb Nvidia 5900 Video card.

Lots of work setting this up.  I hope it comes out.

wow.  yes, i'm terribly curious to see how that works out.  and i really hope it works, that does sound like a huge amount of work.

looks like we may need to make some Poser 7 based Shaders for teh free section :-) But it will still render slow, I've been encountering other problems with 7 based raytracing.

Recently, I created a scene in Poser 7 and saved it. The I tried to render the scene and P7 froze about halfway. I close the window and re-opened the same scene and when I tired to render it, I got a "Out of memory" error message (and by the way, my machine has 2GB RAM and a GForce GS 7300 video card with 256MB memory). It wasn't a very stressful render, a building and a couple of cars (and not the P7 car in the casino pack). 3 lights and the render was set at low raytracing. I closed P7 and opened P6, opened the saved P7 scene and P6 rendered it with no problems.

Yep seems to be a real problem. I am running a PC with 1.5 gig ram and a 512 meg video card and I am having similar problems or it will just render blank.

I too developed the same problem of rendering blank and emailed tech support about it.  They didn't offer much other than check the option "render as a separate process" in the preferences menu.  I've been to busy with work ever since to give that another try yet.

I decided to check that "Render in Separate Process"...it didn't work. Just rendered a blank screen. Closed that scene and opened a new blank one, loaded a simple primative (box) with no textures or colors and P7 couldn't even render that...got a blank screen again after the render window went away. Something is seriously wrong here.

I have already tried that one :-) If you open the render settings and click 'restore defaults" and render with those settings it should render fine but you don't get RayTracing such as shadows or Reflections. I like having those. though you can use Depth Que Shadows. But you can't use Point lights as they only use RayTrace.

Quote - I decided to check that "Render in Separate Process"...it didn't work. Just rendered a blank screen.

You don't happen to have a firewall running on your computer, are you?

Stewer--I know you didn't direct your question to me; but yes, I do.  Does that make a difference.  I am running NIS 2005.

to quote the Poser 7 ReadMe:

Quote - - New in version 7 is the option to render in a separate process. In order to communicate with the render process, Poser uses sockets. Some personal firewall software mistakenly reports this as an attempted connection to the internet. If you wish to render in a separate process, you will have to allow network communication on localhost (127.0.0.1) in your personal firewall software for Poser.exe and FFRender.exe.

Wow, thanks for the info.  I admit I did not read that.  Point taken.  Thanks for your diligence.

I have encountered that error message. I think I did allow it but will have to go back and try again to see if it works. Thanks.

Yep render as a seperate process does work :-) Firewall may flag as an attempt to connect to the internet even though it is not, if it does allow the process and it will work fine.

PS thanks stewer I can stop pulling my hair out now :-)