I like it!  At first I was apprehensive about getting it but I am glad I did now just for the 64-bit firefly render engine. I watched a scene I had been rendering using the normal P7 firefly that dragged just take off on the 64-bit firefly. It only used 2.69 gigs of the 8 gigs of memory I have installed and used only 50% of the CPUs (Quad-core) and finished in about 8 mins as opposed to the nearly 15 mins in the 32-bit firefly. I know big deal to some but I was impressed BUT I find the older I get the more little things impress me LOL!

In the scene there was one V4.2 with all morphs injected, high rez figure texture, hair, fully clothed and in a full kitchen scene using 4 lights with ray traced shadows and AO. Pixel setting was 8, Min shade was 0.50, irradance caching was 100 and raytrace bounce at 2.

Often it goes even quicker if you set it to render in separate processes. You'll get closer to 100% CPU usage that way, because.... well, I don't really know why, but check it out anyway.

My renders with PPro are twice as fast than P7 on the same equipment.

What I am REALLY getting into is rendering out to HDRI and exporting my frames in openEXR mode, thus gain splendid control over exposure, contrast, balance, etc. in Photoshop and After Effects.

Not only does this result in better final, but it reduces the amount of tweaking needed in Poser on light intensity, etc.

::::: Opera :::::

By the way, I leave the gamma correction unchecked. (and that is the feature I though would be what I got the most out of!) Instead, I correct gamma in Post as per above workflow.

:: og ::

Quote - Often it goes even quicker if you set it to render in separate processes. You'll get closer to 100% CPU usage that way, because.... well, I don't really know why, but check it out anyway.

Yes I am set in the Separate Process and the pc starts off at 100% CPU usage and as the render gets to about half way it holds a 50% and declines at the end. Way cool to watch.

Quote - > Quote - Often it goes even quicker if you set it to render in separate processes. You'll get closer to 100% CPU usage that way, because.... well, I don't really know why, but check it out anyway.

Yes I am set in the Separate Process and the pc starts off at 100% CPU usage and as the render gets to about half way it holds a 50% and declines at the end. Way cool to watch.

Well, it would be nice if they got it to where the cores all cooperated together. As it is, one core finishes its task, and then sits there doing nothing as the others chug along.
In LightWave, for example, when one core finishes, it jumps to another part of the render and they all do that until it's finished, and the CPU stays at 100% the whole time.

IMO, if they want to be really "Pro", they need to address some of these issues. Hopefully a future release will be fully 64 bit and use all cores available to their maximum capacity for everything going on in the program.

Does anyone run PPro with a 32 bit OS?  I use 32 bit XP (unwilling to move to Vista) and wonder whether there is any advantage to PPro or not.  Presumably the speed advantage of Firefly would be lost without a 64 bit OS.

Kelbnor

Oh I second the request for them to make the render sequence smarter. You can accept one-core-one-bucket, becuase if nec. you can set the bucket size small, but the cores should be assigned THE NEXT bucket, not the way it currently works, which is to divide the entire render into four quadrants and set a core to a quadrant.

Inevitably, one quad contains hair, eye reflections and eyelashes, and all the other three are finished long before the lone straggler gets done, exhausted!

:: og ::

question:

If you have more than 8 GIG Memory and more than 4 cores (such as on a dual quad xeon) does PoserPro render engine become aware of all 8 cores and the increased memory?

::::: Opera :::::

poser pro is hardcoded to 4 cores max as far i know,and the memory gets allocated by windows anyways. so if you run vista 64 it should be ok

 I'm in the process of upgrading my PC to Vista 64 and 8 gigs of memory to better run Poser. From what I have read, I should consider upgrading to Poser Pro also. Two quick questions: is the interface for Poser Pro the same as Poser 7 -so it is essentially the same program but with a 64-bit engine? Will it handle the Poser 7 runtime libraries fine, importing saved figures etc?

Thanks!

The interface is the same as Poser 7 and there are no problems linking to other runtimes. I use my old poser 5,6 and 7 runtimes plus 20 external runtimes.