What is the best  render manual setting in Poser 7? 

Thank  you!

You've just got to play!
What works for one render may not work for the next.

I agree with **dlfurman. ** Different scene settings demand unique render settings to optimize your lighting balance and texture requirements.  There are many variables to consider, but those settings optimized to the max are not necessarily the best for your computer set up.  There will be compromises which will determine how long you are willing to patiently wait for a render to finish.  It is not unheard of having renders run through the night and then some.  Experiment  and see what works for you.

Exactly... Best = most appropriate for your needs, with the emphasis on your. For final renders, most people have to make a compromise between best quality and reasonable render times - unless they have a supercomputer.

But there are some rough guidelines... too many to go into all of them now, but just to touch on what works for me....

For setting up a scene layout, rough posing, lighting and camera positioning, I use a very quick render: no displacement, no smoothing, no shadows, no raytracing, pixel samples = 2 (you can even use 1 if you don't mind the edge aliasing), bucket size = 150px, minimum shading rate = 1.0 (I never go any higher than that). I saved this as a preset under the name "1 Layout".

I then have various other presets: "2 DM Shadows", "3 Raytrace minimum", "4 Interim" and "5 Final". These serve me well for most purposes, although I sometimes call up a preset and then make slight adjustments for a specific purpose.

My "5 Final" settings are not the best quality render I can get, but with my aging Core Duo iMac they represent a pretty good compromise between quality and render speed:

Smoothing on.
Use displacement on.
Cast shadows on.
Raytracing on (I almost always use raytraced shadows and AO).
Irradience caching = maximum (99 or 100).
Bucket size depends on your available memory. I use 150px for the lower render settings, and 75px for final renders.
Pixel samples = 7.
Minimum shading rate = 0 (which just means that the shading rate of each material is used).
Post-filter: your choice, but I use 1 or 2 pixel sinc. (I find that more than 2 pixels often introduces bucket-boundary artifacts on backdrop surfaces: short horizontal lines of missing or semi-transparent pixels).

For light-based AO, I generally use 9 samples. The strength, maximum distance and bias settings depend entirely on the scene content.

One final point. I always turn texture filtering OFF on ALL materials, unless I find a reason to switch it on for a specific texture. Nothing spoils fine textures so much as the default Texture Filtering setting in Poser 7 and Poser Pro, in my opinion. I have a modified SVDL script on one of my Python palette buttons which does this on the whole scene without prompting.

Hope it helps!
Izi

Ooh, I forgot about raytrace bounces.

The correct label for this is:  "Maximum number of raytrace bounces". If the scene requires recursive raytraces to calculate refraction and reflection, this number specifies the maximum number of recursions that will be used. Generally you can leave this set to 1, but it does depend on your scene contents. If you are rendering materials with refraction and reflection, then you will need to increase it.

The Poser manual implies that setting this number to a higher value than the scene requires will waste computation time. Experts say that it will have no effect on render time, because the render will only use as many bounces as it needs for each raytrace. I can't say which is correct because I have not tested it, but I tend to believe the experts - or one of them, at least.

Izi

Sorry, it's only me again... I just noticed that my "5 Final" render settings are not really a compromise at all - they are pretty much full on with everything, higher even than the maximum "Auto" setting. No wonder they take so long for large size renders! I could back those off a bit and still get a perfectly passable render in less time.

Now I'm going to shutup.