Hello all,

I tested some renders of the same picture, at 1024 x 782 size, in both P6 and P7, to see how much better P7 is.

Before rendering in P7, I edited the General Preference, reducing the number of Undos to 20, and changing the render threads to 2 for the first test, and to 4 for the second time.
Also, I have only Current Content of P7 installed (not Legacy Content), since I intend to keep my P6 and its Rumtime in my PC.

My computer stats:
PC Windows XP Home, Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86G w/ 2M cache, 1G memory, 256MB GeForce7900GS

Here are the results:

(1) Both rendered using Firefly, with only Using Displacement Map selected:
Poser 6: 85 seconds
Poser 7: 48 seconds, when rendered with 2 threads;
and 47 seconds, with 4 threads.

(2) Both rendered using Firefly, with Ambient Occlusion selected for all three lights, and with RayTracing and Using Displacement Map selected in Firefly:
Poser 6: 24 minutes 44 seconds
Poser 7: 2 minutes 1 seconds! when rendered with 4 threads

When only the Using Displacement Map option was selected, the resulting pictures looked almost identical in P6 and P7, while the render speed in P7 is almost twice as fast as in P6.

When Ambient Occlusion was selected for all three default lights, and RayTracing and Using Displacement Map were selected in Firefly, the resulting pictures showed obvious difference in the density of the AO shadows, with P7 showing more density, especially around the hair.
What impressed me the most is the dramatic render speed inprovement in P7 -- in this case, more than 12 times faster than P6!

BTW, the above data are all of the second (or third) time renderings.  When I  (re)opened either Poser 6 or 7 and rendered for the first time, BOTH versions took about 10 ~ 11 seconds (after I clicked the render button) to load everything before it started to really render.
From the second rendering on, Poser 6 took 5~6 seconds to load, while Poser 7 took 2~3 seconds to load everything before starting to render (or, before the caption changed to "Rendering" in the status bar).

I love Poser 7 (so far so good)!   

3DVim

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Clap, clap, clap, clap, applause, whoot, whistle!

yeah, we had a meeting with e-frontier yesterday, and the demonstration they did with P7 was great - rendered as fast as Poser 4, only with far more detailed characters (obviously) and IBL! Nice.