I have a few questions pertaining Poser 7 and its ability to render.
Is there any way to network render with Poser 7 to increase speed and/or are there any ways to increase render speed yet maintain a good looking image.  I tend to use firefly with the settings at max.  Any suggestions would be great, thanks!

Poser does not support network rendering. Poser Pro, scheduled for release this fall, is supposed to support it.

Actually there is a product over at Content paradise by Sixus I believe that does network rendering (or something like it)

Quote - Actually there is a product over at Content paradise by Sixus I believe that does network rendering (or something like it)

sorry.. was discontinued sometime ago.

never knew that. i assume it didn;t work as advertised for some reason, or had issues?

Quote - Is there any way to network render with Poser 7 to increase speed and/or are there any ways to increase render speed yet maintain a good looking image.  I tend to use firefly with the settings at max.  Any suggestions would be great, thanks!

As stupid as it may sound, my first suggestion would be not using the max settings. In the majority of cases, the second to highest setting in the auto tab (the one labeled "final") will give you equal results in less time.

no, it worked just fine, infact I still use it on my setup :) ... I don't know the reason for it's disappearence tho

You'd think a useful utility like that woulda survived.. or if nothing else, Sixus would have added it to thier discounted products area.

does anyone know about the new DAZ Render program that is coming this Fri.?

It looks like their version of Poser's render cache, basically, with the addedd possibility to blending two renders together, as well...

JonTheCelt

@CappuccinoDavid
It's for Daz Studio only...

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=989517#989517

Three things to surely slow down Firefly renders:

1. Shading Rate <= 1. I personally don't believe smaller shading rates (0.2 for example) are necessary, with the possible exception of transmapped hair. Also Shading Rate can be set on a per-object basis. 

In fact, a very large and influencial animation studio usually uses SR of 1 for foreground objects, and SR of 5 or more for midground / background objects. You can increase the SR to 10 or higher for motion blurred or objects outside of the Depth Of Field.

1. Incorrect bucket size. Try powers of 2 numbers in the bucket size. Shading rates smaller than 1 will dramatically increase the bucket size and waste render cycles. Start with bucket size of 16, Shading Rate of 1 (which should be pretty speedy) and up the bucket size to 32, Shading Rate of 1 if you have gobs of RAM. 

(Bucket Size ^ 2 / Shading Rate) will determine how large your rendered tile will be, how much RAM is used per tile and how fast the overall render will be.

1. Large Pixel Sample value. Keep it small for drafts (3x3) and increase it for final renders (maybe 9x9) and only increase it if you still get anit-alias artifacts, especially if objects are affected by Motion Blur or Depth Of Field.

The main reason that we dropped it was that you needed a licensed version of Poser on each machine, so most people couldn't really make use of it.

Ah... makes sense. No workaround for that? Shame to have something useful like that disappear