I tried it today for the first time and had trouble with it on its first go. My first render yielded a crash to desk top, the second render a blank gray document window. It wasn't until I closed P7 and opened it again did I finally get a render and then loaded up a scene I had and it rendered in the seperate process until I final quit.

I don't know why I had so much trouble with the first go around. I set it so my firewall wouldn't block it and I think maybe the bucket size was too small because after I increased the bucket size from 6 to 20 I would get it to render.

I think I like rendering in the separate process but still unsure about it's performance on much more complex renders. The scene I had was one figure and room full of a few odds and ends that were not high in textures.

So how many of you use the separate process in your renders? Now it's nap time 'cuase I have the late watch and thanks.

Um...yeah..okay

A blank render indicates that your firewall (or similar) is blocking the external renderers communication with Poser.
You'll need to change the settings to allow it access to the network (it's only connecting locally).

I've noticed a big performance boost since rendering in a separate process. I had renders take 4-24+ hours to complete for a 1024x1024 render with only three figures, three spotlights and a prop, but I didn't have anything to compare the speed with because I only used Poser for animation before this version. After moving FF to a separate process it takes less time, and after giving it max multiple threads it takes no more than 15 mins for the most complex scene I've done so far.

You'll notice the difference just having it on a separate process, because the OS will give it more CPU and memory to run, whereas if it's on the same process with Poser it has to share a max limit with the application. If you have a dual core system, it's well worth it, and you can run a half-dozen applications in the background without them noticeably slowing.

I am running Poser on a dual, dual core xeon PC. Rendering in a seperate process
made it possible to render much more complex scenes and others much faster!

However, I was running into some problems when setting the number of threads to the max
of 4. But everything is rendering fine at 2 or 3 threads.

Martin

Usually my firewall will ask me if I want to let P7 threw it. It didn't do that which was strange but since then all seems to be working really great! I have a dual core system and have P7 set to the max thread wise and at a higher bucket size and the renders just fly. Thanks for the input!

Some tidbits from the readme:

• 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.

• Rendering in separate process: This feature currently does not support Adaptive Bucket Size. Please choose your bucket size wisely if you plan to render in a separate process. A value in the range of 16-32 is a good starting point.

• Rendering in separate process: In some cases, Area Render might fail when rendering in a separate process. If you encounter this problem, please retry, render a full frame, or consider rendering internally.

It gave me too many problems, so I quit trying to use it.  You also can't do the trick of minimizing the process the render is running under to force it to shed un-needed memory when you render in a separate process.

I was rendering in a seperate process until things went quantum.

here's how it runs :

pre SR 1: Poser and Zonealarm get along fine.

post SR 1 : Poser renders fine. Zonealarm gets along fine. then...

next render Poser comes up blank as if blocked. Zonealarm looks worried and checks it's settings. nothings changed.

so trying a couple more things, but reporting this to techsupport in the morning. I'm not sure why it's not working when it was working fine...

Quote - - Rendering in separate process: This feature currently does not support Adaptive Bucket Size. Please choose your bucket size wisely if you plan to render in a separate process. A value in the range of 16-32 is a good starting point

Hm, I must've overlooked that, I've been running in the default bucket size of 64. But performance hasn't been bad.

Performance won't be bad due to bucket size, where it will cause you problems is when you have a very large or complex render - it will be quicker to fail.

ok i dont mind looking stupid so long as i get some thing out of it.
so just how do you render in separate process?

Quote - ok i dont mind looking stupid so long as i get some thing out of it.
so just how do you render in separate process?

Not stupid at all IMHO. If you go to  "Edit>General Preferences and then to the "render" tab you'll see a box that says "Separate Process" right under the slider for thread numbers.
If you check that box P7 will render in a separate process.

Here's an even stupider question. What the heck IS a seperate process?????

that was my next question, but didnt want to push being stupid to far in one night ;)

A separate process means that Poser launches ffrender.exe which actually does the rendering rather than it being done inside poser.  Means that the ffrender process gets all the OS lovin' (ram - cpu) which it otherwise wouldn't.

If you check your process list, you should see FFRENDER.EXE running and sucking up RAM and CPU cycles as you render

Ah so that's what happened.

Last night I had my first blank render. I thought I was going mad because I'd made lots of renders post SR1 - but after I tried inporting an obj (to verify the problem with obj imports on european systems) everything rendered black. All lights were turned off, and although I could turn up the light on two of the three lights (with one of tem turning out to be GREEN, I also expirienced that one of the lights just wouldn't be "brightened" at all. It slammed back down when I let go of the mouse.

I reestarted Poser, and it looked fine. But now it renders blank. Not white though but just the default grey background colour....

I think I'll reinstall Poser 7 without the SR1....... Too bad because it did solve some other problems...

TrekkieGrrrl It was my understanding that there were problems with the SR1 release in Europe. I've read were other folks in Europe have had trouble with the P7 SR1 update.

I've never seen FFRENDER take up even half the RAM and CPU that Poser does, but that could be because I'm previewing on fully textured mode. Either way, it's best to run FFRENDER separately, because if it does hang or crash, you can still cancel from inside Poser and keep it running, and it both can run on more power.