I am running Poser 7 on new imac, and I generally render my poser images to 18x24 in. @ 300 dpi. This can take anywhere from 2 or more days to render a single image. I've been looking into building a small render farm to help cut down on rendering time... any helpful information anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. Again, all I'm looking to do is cut rendering time, I don't render multiple images, or do animation, or anything like that... Thanks in advance.

You could look at Poser Pro and see if that has anything that would suit you. I dont believe Poser 7 has any rendfarm ability. You could try Pose_ray and povray raytracer to render outside of Poser but that may be more work than its worth .

Working with several machines on the same images isn't supported in Poser-Pro.
Part-Rendering cold be possible, if S-M sometimes gives us the possibility to initiate part-rendering and to script the frame to render via Python.

Under normal circumstances you would only those kind of times in a final render. So a render farm like solution can help if your work flow allows you to set up a scene and do some test renders while doing a final render on the previous one. Personally I always have multiple projects going, some requiring just a final quality render when there is going to be some spare computer time, others are incomplete scenes or under test.
Reducing render time shouldn't be the goal, finding a work flow that works for you should be. Yes a final render can take its time but if you can move it to another machine you shouldn't care. Of course a final render will show some issues, so you might need to repeat it after fixing those.
If you have P7P you could get several machines working at the same time, each on a separate picture. You could check the pictures as they become available, fix the issues and requeue them. All this while working on a new scene at your main machine.

For poser to do this, you would have to have poser break a rendered area up into segments, each segment sent to a node, node is rendered, sent back to mothership (main system) and reassembled.

It'd be cool if you could do this with python.

Another option is to export it over to Vue and use Vue. Vue has a Render farm program called rendercow. I have not used it in awhile but should do the trick

 jfbeute:
Reducing time is my goal because I do not use ONLY poser to produce my image... poser is just the base for all of the post-work I'm going to do in Photoshop. I cannot do this final photoshop work until my poser image has completed rendering, so, yes, time is an issue for me. Thanks so much for your reply though :D

markschum:
According to my research, Poser 7 DOES have render farm capability. Might be off, but that's what I've found.

Everyone else:
Thanks sooooo much for all of your help. I will look into all of your ideas.

Quote -  markschum:
According to my research, Poser 7 DOES have render farm capability. Might be off, but that's what I've found.

One of the big selling points of Poser Pro is the introduction of network rendering. Poser 7 (non pro version) does not have it. I've seen people call Poser Pro the new poser 7, or Poser 7.5. That may be a possible point of confusion.

Doesn't really sound like you need a whole render farm (which is several computers tied together to make one render or one animation). Sounds like you just need one additional computer with good graphics and a fast processor to do the renderings - quad core or better - while you're able to work in photoshop on another.

You can just network the two computers together, and also hook them up to a KVM switch which allows you to use one monitor, keyboard and mouse on two or three computers.

I used Netwoprk rendering setups in the past, with different applications (Max), and I find the network rendering a PITA to set up. Usually delegate it to IT people in the office, and even then there would be issues left and right. This is mostly because when I need to get something done, I hate having to stop and troubleshoot network issues.

pharie, I looked at yer renders and I can see why they take so long in poser/firefly.
the same renders might take about 2 hours in carrara 6 pro, which would be cheaper
than buying some new machines.  but render farms are usually for animations
(multiple frames/range of frames) AFAIK.  in case the others didn't already say that.

Quote - pharie, I looked at yer renders and I can see why they take so long in poser/firefly.
the same renders might take about 2 hours in carrara 6 pro,

How much extra tweaking and stuff would I have to learn how to do in Carrara once I import my figure from Poser?

Quote - > Quote - pharie, I looked at yer renders and I can see why they take so long in poser/firefly.

the same renders might take about 2 hours in carrara 6 pro,

How much extra tweaking and stuff would I have to learn how to do in Carrara once I import my figure from Poser?

Some tweaking, especially getting the shaders just right, but most definately worth the effort!!!

phari, it will take approx 6 months to learn how to use carrara well enuff to open and render
yer scenes in carrara.  the main advantage to users of poser 7 and earlier is that carrara
can open said scenes (pz3 files), and its shader tree and runtime structure are similar
to poser 7.  I don't know how much tweaking would be involved, but mark bremmer and
the other experts in the carrara forum will be able to assist, if problems arise.

no news yet on what rendering engine will be used in poser 8.  if FFRender is an evolutionary
dead-end (like Mac OS 9 and Windows XP), then they may well jettison it, provided they
get sufficient cash inflow to finance said rewrite.

This is somthing I have been working for the past few months.
I have Poser Pro running on MS Server 2003 x64 on Quad dual cores Opterons 2.4, 8 cpus, and 8 gigs memory and a Dual dual core Xeon 3.2 system with 6 gigs memory. I can render about 5000 frames a week on each system. I have tryed to work with SmithMicro on building a render service for Poser peolpe  who have long animations  and dont want to tie up there own system, but I get stonewalled. Smithmicro will proabley be the death of Poser they will milk it to death and then dump it as it takes a drop in sales. thats there MO, and only my opinion.
To get the best advantage from Posers FFR you should have a 64bit OS and at lest Dual dual core system with 6 gigs memory. I have Carrara as well and to import in pz3 files and then render them in Carrara is not as good dosent like Poser lights or cameras. You could build you scene in Carrara using Poser content and then you can do network node rendering.
I think a Rendering Services for Poser users would put Poser in a new level.

Quote - I have tryed to work with SmithMicro on building a render service for Poser peolpe  who have long animations  and dont want to tie up there own system, but I get stonewalled. Smithmicro will proabley be the death of Poser they will milk it to death and then dump it as it takes a drop in sales. thats there MO, and only my opinion.

Should be possible to program something that works over the net. Without Smith-Micro :)
If you are interested to start a project, feel free to contact me via mail.

Sent you a Renderosity email with my personal email address in it.

Thanks, allready answered. 

Quote - Sounds like you just need one additional computer with good graphics and a fast processor to do the renderings - quad core or better - while you're able to work in photoshop on another.

a rendering machine only needs a fast multi-core processor and enough RAM. any modern onboard video is more than sufficient (and will save you $150-300ish), the only thing a video card has any effect on in Poser is your viewport speed and some of the advanced OpenGL viewport features, none of which are necessary to work in Poser, much less to just render scenes.
i have a remote renderer that sits in the corner and doesnt even have a monitor or keyboard attached, just a power cable (no ethernet either, just an internal wireless adapter) -- i administer it remotely from my main PC's desktop. these days you could slap together a nice quad core/8 gig DDR2 (DDR3 is still too pricey IMO) 64-bit rendering machine for quite cheap. while its not a renderfarm by a long shot, you could at least let it render away for however long it takes while you can work freely on your main desktop without any lag and with the ability to restart/sleep/shutdown.

i would guess that if images are taking you 2+ days to render you would get far more mileage from actually optimizing your shaders, lighting/shadow and render settings than you will from any hardware upgrades (assuming your PC is relatively up to date to begin with).  Poser seems to make the poorest use of hardware upgrades of any program i have ever used, but some tiny changes to lighting or render settings can increase your render speed exponentially. that said, the 64-bit 'background render' in Poser Pro seems to be much faster (2-3x) than the standard renderer.

Quote - Smithmicro will proably be the death of Poser they will milk it to death and then dump it as it takes a drop in sales. thats their MO, and only my opinion.

i agree. this has been the MO of every company that took over Poser in the past few years: prey on customer hope to sell the next overhyped, buggy, hastily-slapped together version then quickly dump it to the next group of entrepreneurs. they have absolutely no long-term interest in Poser and are just want to milk as much money out of their investment in as short a time as possible.

i never thought id be saying this, but thank god for D|S and Carrara. luckily it is in Daz's best interest to keep the Poser market thriving so as a worst case scenario there is always D|S as a fallback.
i havent seen any major improvements in Poser since Poser 5 (and all of the new Poser 5 features were 3rd party utilities/programs hacked into the Poser 4 engine like the Tempest renderer, FaceGen Studio, etc). most of the changes since then have been either bug-fixes or features that have been industry standard for 1-2 decades and should have been included in the first place.