hi,

i'm writing this little thread because i think it must be helpful for many people.
Moreover, i just finish to render a scene, and it took.....12.5 hours whereas i forecast 3hours !!
Yes, you read right ! Even the scene is just long as 10 seconds, and made of 300 frames, in 640x480 resolution.

The scene i build is there : My Poser7 French Video Thread, only me...:-(
The video in normal resolution is just there, the file is a little 6MB xvid format.

So, when i see my clock, i say myself : Mike (it's me), you have to find a real girl, better to render a virtual one !
No, in fact, i said myself there must be something 's wrong or something must be better for rendering in Poser7;
Because my computer isn't a shXXt, even without be a last ferrari Core2Quad X CPU...
So i find a quick way to SPEED UP by x6 the render speed. i tested this method with a simple render, but tomorrow, i will rebuild the animation.

Before, a simple render took 2 min 50 sec
After the new setting, the render took 25 sec  ,
so an 6x factor without change hardware !!

My configuration is like that :

   
It is not useful for optimize, but maybe movie setting can be interested for someone :

The render setting , before :

after :

• i put it to the min, and i add 2 in Gosian blur to be more pretty

Manual setting :

before :

and after where i put up the bucket to 256 AND remove Smooth polygon (very expensive time) :

The main option,

before :

and after :

• switch off sparate Process (i heard it can speedup render but...not at home !!)
• and siwtch of memory bucket size auto (i have 2GB memory)

Some kind of consequences  :

before :

you can see even with 2 core, the process never up to 50%, and the memory used don't grow up too. I also kill unecessary other process, only 19 are running.

and with the new configuration : more memory used + more cpu used (whatever, i don't want to use the computer during rendering).

Final constation :

Here is the fastest render after optimize config/opton (25 seconds):

and that is what it took 2 min 50 secs :

so, i think the difference between AFTER and BEFORE don't deserve to wait 6x more time.
Moreover, i chose a high resolution for the render picture, in my video, it less 2x low, then i expected to render the animation tomorrow at least 12x more quickly, maybe 1h instead the 12.5 hours !!!

i hope the difference between the quality video should be less viewable than a higher single frame.

so, now, good night (for me it's 00:45 AM) !!!

minimum shading rate 4.00?
sweet jesus.
i would rather wait 6x as long than truncate 3/4 of the detail. there is a huge quality difference between your upper and lower render.

its no secret that if you turn off antialiasing, bump up min shading rate, etc you will increase rendering speed. but you pay for it - severely - in image quality.

still, for those that want to render a very long render on a slower machine, this might be useful. i would advise against such drastic quality reduction measures though. 12 hours for an animation is not that bad - just wait till the evening and hit render before you go to sleep. good things come to those who wait :)

In your two examples you can see a ton of lost detail in the first pic, and it is very pixelated.  If all that lost detail doesn't matter to you, go for it - however you are rendering without shadows and on far lower quality settings than most people care to use, this speed increase is not something a lot of people are going to care to trade that much quality for.  People outside poser-dom already make fun of Poser renders even on very high quality ;)

Totally agree with Blackhearted and pjz99's comments.  If the quality of my images was going to suffer that much I'd give up and hand draw the whole thing.

Actually for the difference in quality, why not just do a screen cap of the opengl? ;)

It's got a zero wait tme!

yeah, i know the difference between the two picture is large. the quick render looks like a video game frame !
but, in the case, in the context, of a animation (in 640x480, not HD), do you think people care about this details ?

moreover, as you have the 2 picture in front of you, you could easyly show the difference. If you would see only the quick render, maybe you could be satisfied...

Wouldn't you get the same increase in speed - and overall loss of quality - if you rendered the frames much smaller then enlarged them?

also,

new render jsut finished.

old one made 12 hours and 33 minutes to render 300 frames.
new one took 3 hours and 13 minutes

So, nearly a X4 factor whereas i expected 12x, 6x at least !!! So , render in Poser7 seems to be not lineared i guess !

it is strange the factor is smaller in animation render than single frame render; moreover resolution downpassed to 640x480 (1663x853 in single frame).
i would have think between the render of each frame, poser re-use some data from the previous one to compute the next one. but no.

maybe there is another task between each frame that i could have not expected (i remind you i didn't activate motion blur, and i don't think hard drive write system is this task).

Strange law of computer sciences.....
well i will check my financial account now....i hope with a QX9770 cpu, i will gain a x4 with the same quality oh the 12hours !

have a good weenk end !

Quote - Actually for the difference in quality, why not just do a screen cap of the opengl? ;)

It's got a zero wait tme!

yeah, and hit 'anti-alias render' first -- youd actually get a better 'render' :)

I second what everyone else has said - 2.5 minutes really isnt' tjhat bad for a single frame render of reasonable quality - I know a lot of people who are ahppy to wait for over an hour for a single frame render of good quality!

JontheCelt

Stepping up to a Q6600 quad core processor, you can expect to gain about 4x increase in speed in rendering (and that's the cheaper quad core option).

Also the "fast" rendered image is video game quality.. IF you look at games from 4 or 5 years ago. Look at games today like bioshock, crysis, and unreal tournament 3, and they are vastly superior not not only your first render, but in some cases far superior to your second render.

Also, if this is for video diplay, your rendered resolution is far larger then it needs to be. max high def would be 1080 across, and that would be of use only for people with high def televisions.

Most people still have a standard tv, and you are rendering 1663x853, MUCH larger then needed.

Quote - Also, if this is for video diplay, your rendered resolution is far larger then it needs to be. max high def would be 1080 across, and that would be of use only for people with high def televisions.

Most people still have a standard tv, and you are rendering 1663x853, MUCH larger then needed.

not to mention that if this is to be distributed at all, distributing even highly compressed video that size would be pretty impractical. video compression would degrade the quality even further.

I prefer to have my Minimum Shading Rate set at 0.0... I of course pay for it in spades by having to wait significantly longer, but I live. If I want something blurred, I trust myself to do it in Photoshop. :) That's just me.

I have a hatred for blurry stuff, I guess.. especially in videogames. I could go on for hours, ranting about how depth-of-field blur in videogames is horrible because they -make- you look at something, which isn't how I like to play. I'm one of those people who waits for long sweeping camera shots in-game and looks all over the scenery just to see the smallest details. :)

re-posting this from an earlier discussion.

Perfect example.
On a general note, I'm amazed so many people still don't have better render settings for still images.

I think it is a myth that it is "okay to render blurry frames" for an animation, no one will see the detail.

Yes they will. It tells in the overall.

The lowest I ever set the shade rate is .21, as I was told that 0.0 makes no improvement over .21 but still takes more time. I did not test that.

I will give voice to a completely different strategy. Render with low settings, perhaps even with shadows off, but take it into After Effects and create a highly stylized look. Lack of sharpness and shadows may not matter in that case.

::::: Opera :::::

Stormchaser, very cool animation.

DarkEdge - I wish I could take credit for it. But it is pretty neat!

Hmm. If you use the OpenGL renderer with hardware shading enabled, you can get the same (or better) quality than your "fast" render, in about a second or two (depending on the graphics card).