I'm considering P8, sidegrading from PPRo, but I'm wondering about 2 things.....

Does P8 have gamma correction as Poser Pro does?

How much have the rendering times actually improved compared to P7/Poser Pro? Does anyone have some figures already, done some comparisment with some scenes, small and large?

GC will remain exclusive to Poser Pro.

Reported rendering speeds with Poser 8 (depending on your box, of course) have been, comparitively,  siginifcantly faster than P7 or Poser Pro.

-- Jeff

insted of GC they have tone mapping . its something similar.

Quote - insted of GC they have tone mapping . its something similar.

Is it as easy to use? Having no GC doesn't sound to good, but if tone mapping is as easy to use and works as well, then I guess it's OK. Can TM be controlled universally and locally as with CG? I mean can you set TM global for the whole scene as with CG and also individually for any texture you select?

Quote - GC will remain exclusive to Poser Pro.

Reported rendering speeds with Poser 8 (depending on your box, of course) have been, comparitively,  siginifcantly faster than P7 or Poser Pro.

-- Jeff

Thanks. As the rendering speeds, significantly faster than P7 or Poser Pro isn't going to do it for me. I'm a numbers man..... for one significant can be 10%, for others 50% and so on. Hopefully someone can give me some real numbers.

The check out the last 10-20 pages of this thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2774766&page=50

Bagginsbill began some timed tests and has numbers (min/sec) under various set-ups.

-- Jeff

FWIW I am still using the GC work around of the Artistic Lens in P8.

I truly am not impressed with the rendering speeds if you use Indirect Lighting.
Without it's faster.
With?
Ferget it. Start the render off and walk away for a couple of hours.

Quote - FWIW I am still using the GC work around of the Artistic Lens in P8.

I truly am not impressed with the rendering speeds if you use Indirect Lighting.
Without it's faster.
With?
Ferget it. Start the render off and walk away for a couple of hours.

Hours? Sorry that doesn't sound to good to me. I've bought a brand new system a few months ago. With my old system renders took hours, with the new system it's minutes, even my largest scenes render with 30 minutes now. I'm not prepared to go back to hours, I've got better things to do then wait for a render to finish. Indirect lightning sounds cool, but for me that price is way too high.

Non IL scenes render faster, are we talking a few % or a lot %?

Quote -
The check out the last 10-20 pages of this thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2774766&page=50

Bagginsbill began some timed tests and has numbers (min/sec) under various set-ups.

-- Jeff

I've seen that thread, but most of them aren't real scenes, no good material for comparisment. Figures with clothes, textures and hair behave a lot different in rendering, then the balls and tanks shown.

Non IL scenes are very fast. It's the pre-calculation of the lighting that does it with the IL renders.
It damn near murders my machine. (AMD Phenom Black Edition w. 5gb RAM)
Either something is seriously off with my install, or IL renders are painfully slow everywhere.

The scene I rendered earlier consisted of:
1x M4
1x Rock Star Hair
1x Denims
1x Shoes
1x Motorbike
1x Wings

No background.

It took nearly 2 hrs with IL, but without IL it only took about 5 mins.
(With using all the Artistic Lens / VSS tricks, and adding Cyclorama)

That's a regular, more or less basic scene. 5 minutes is OK, but I'm surprised it takes that much longer with IL.

How long does the scene take in P7 or Poser Pro (not sure what you've got) using similair render settings?

 Is anyone else having trouble with P8 taking a ridiculously long time to render reflective and/or refractive surfaces? I set up a facial render, and it did the character's forehead in about five minutes or less. I then went to have dinner, and after eating for about an hour, I came back to find that it was still stuck on the first fill square to include an eye (or part of one)! I had a similar problem with the metal parts of V4 JeanZ. I was dealing with the exact same scene I've been toying around with for a while in P7, and although reflection/refraction caused some hesitation, it was never close to being this bad! Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

It may come as a shock, but long render times are to be expected when working with Indirect Lighting/GI and any form of transparency or alpha, in any rendering app.  Things that you take for granted - eyelashes, transmapped hair, EyeSurface geometry in V4/M4, or clothing with mesh-like transparency maps - will just take a long time to render.  There is no magical way to make this stuff render instantly with GI, it's not particularly Poser's fault.

 The render times seem long with or without IL/GI, at least in relatively close shots.  Besides, if P7 could render a close view of raytraced reflective eye surfaces in 10 minutes, why should I accept over an hour of render time in what's s'posed to be an upgrade?  It just seems odd (not to mention discouraging).

That wasn't a response to your reflection question, we just posted at nearly the same time.  No opinion about your reflection question.

My experience without IL is that reflections are faster than they used to be.

With IL, they are slower. Remember, the cost of each reflected or refracted ray has gone up, because now it requires that the second intersection be re-evaluated for lighting. Those in turn launch still more rays (a whole fan of them) to evaluate the IL.

 Thanks for your input, BB.  By the way, congrats for being in the credits for P8!  I'm guessing SmithMicro finally wised up about your inverse square method, heh?

I think I'll try rebooting my computer.  I'm also getting black specks in my renders, particularly in the eyes.  Hopefully, the reboot will solve at least one of these problems.  If not, I may wait until I get a new laptop in a few days.  I was going to wait until the debut of W7, but there's a sale going on that allows for free upgrades from Vista if you buy now.  Plus, my current machine is probably pushing two years old anyway.

Black specks? Save the scene! If we can't figure out how to get rid of them with settings, then maybe we file a bug report.

How many ray-trace bounces are you using? IDL uses ray-tracing. Bounce limits can cause the IDL calculation to not go far enough. Try increasing the number of bounces. What happens?

BTW: I'm not in the credits because of inverse square falloff. I wrote parts of the new GUI.

That seems odd, BB.  Since you obviously caught their attention (finally), I figured it'd be for something more functional like your work with GC, conservation of energy, precise fresnel math, the inverse square law, or SSS.  Something as aesthetic as the GUI almost seems a trivial waste of your expertise.

Anyway, the extended render time hasn't gone away.  The top of the head renders in little time at all, but as soon as the engine reaches the eyes, it slows to a crawl.  What are your render settings, BB?

 I entered 30 for ILQ, but it keeps reading back one less than I typed in.

Internally, number of GI bounces is set to 2, so rays hit 1) eyelash polys 2) cornea polys and then stop (that is, they brighten where they are, which is not on the iris).

 I'm not using GI here.  I want to get everything working with my old IBL setup before I replace the IBL with IL.

Well don't feel compelled to actually give the render settings you're using, that would take the fun out of guessing.

 Well, I'm experimenting to see how sharp I can get my renders without crossing the threshold where it takes forever to finish.  Of course, it doesn't help that when it does end up taking too long, I have to Cancel it.  This wouldn't be a problem if the program didn't invariably crash whenever I do that.  I love Poser, and I think I'm going to like the improvements in version 8 once I iron out the kinks in my usage, but I have one word for the developers: STABILITY!

A lot of input, some sidetracking, but no 'hard' numbers yet and contradicting info. Now we have people claiming faster render times (without IL) and longer render times (also without IL). We now for sure IL takes a long time, but are non IL scenes really faster, does someone have the actual numbers?

I hate to blow $129 finding out nothing renders significantly faster.

aeilkema

rendering without IL. so rendering with AO and IBL is 100% faster. IL is GI. its light bouncing around. it takes longer but its more realistic.

100%, so if rendering took let's say 20 minutes, it now takes only 10 minutes? Can anyone confirm that, since that's a lot!

Sometimes something can lock up a render regardless of settings.   I remember trying to render with one particular hair in P7, the entire render would finish execptt the hair which was taking way too long.  

Just to humour myself I replaced the hair with one of Quarker's as I recall and it rendered quickly.   I went back to the original hair and checked the materials - I  can only assume it was a bump map that I disconnected and rendered again much much faster.   In fact, it even looked better without that bump.  

So, some merchants might have needlessly overcomplicated a shader or something which could be causing your render to go so slowly.

Quote - 100%, so if rendering took let's say 20 minutes, it now takes only 10 minutes? Can anyone confirm that, since that's a lot!

sorry i didnt meant that. you asked if we know if its faster. i meant that i am 100% sure that its faster. how fast i dont know.
but its normal that the new version is faster.

OK, thanks for clearing that up!

Quote - FROM ANOTHER THREAD: My own $.02 is that the differences in the way lighting is handled is a quantum leap. I also find the new render engine to be much faster than either the Poser 7 or Pro 64 versions. Amazing. Everything seems to operate more smoothly even with my extremely bloated set of runtimes. And at $129 it's a steal!

DR

How much faster is much faster? Everyone's saying it but no seems to be able to give some more details or numbers. Is it 5% faster? 10% perhaps? 25% maybe? Can we even hope for 50%? When someone says much faster I do expect at least 40-50% shorter rendering time when comparing to the previous version.

1-10% isn't mentionable, imo. 10-25% is a bit faster, 25-40% is faster and over 40% is much faster.

Who will take this challenge and give me some real numbers...... I've got to get as many reasons as possible to justify buying P8. If I don't have facts, but only vague terms like faster and much faster and improved, I'm not going to convince anyone that spending $129 is justified. For some it may be peanuts to spent, for me it's a considerable amount and it needs some hard facts to back up to the purchase. I'm not trying to be a pain, but I do need some numbers to see if this purchase is justified.

If rendering speed is really improved and someone can show some numbers, that will help me a lot in getting closer to buying P8 and getting the money needed.

Quote - So, some merchants might have needlessly overcomplicated a shader or something which could be causing your render to go so slowly.

There are a couple of vendors out there that save their hair figures/props with min shading rate set to 0.01, that's most of it that I've seen.

Since I am not a tech head I can wrap my head around the fact Poser 8 would render faster than Poser 7 given the way Poser 8 handles mutli core CPU's more efficiently than poser 7 does. So yes one would see an increase however, Poser 8 is still a 32-bit app right? So what is gained in CPU usage is lost to that blasted RAM limit usage a 32-bit OS?

When it is stated that Poser 8 renders faster than Poser Pro I am assuming, which is something I don't like to to, that they are reffering to  the 32-bit and not the 64-bit firefly render engine correct? I can't see a 32-bit app being faster than a 64-bit.

Tech head here.

Consider two programs that differ ONLY in whether compiled for 32-bit or 64-bit. All algorithms and data structures are the same. Now we run these two apps on a 64-bit system. The 64-bit app will be slower than the 32-bit app. The reason is that all memory pointers are now 64-bit, and most integers are now 64-bit. That means that most of the data structures will grow in size, often doubling in size. In other words, to do the exact same job, everything will occupy nearly twice as much RAM. Many calculations will require more bits be moved around.

Now if on top of that, you actually improve the 32-bit version, using better algorithms and data structures, then the potential exists for the 32-bit version to run MUCH faster than the older 64-bit version.

Now if on top of that, you improve how processors are utilized, so that all 4 cores in a quad core are always busy in the 32-bit version, while sometimes they're idle and not helping in the older 64-bit version, the difference widens even more.

Given that 32-bit Poser 8 needs less memory than 64-bit Poser Pro, that its algorithms and data structures are improved and optimized more, and that it always uses all cores at 100%, I'd say your conclusion is about as wrong as can possibly be.

Um. You're doing nothing wrong. I can't say yet what the problem is but I know what the problem is. I've contacted SM management. Hang on. I have to get permission to tell you the problem and the solution. I know, cryptic, right? Just hang in there.

 Thanks, BB!  Just in case it helps to know this, the specks occur only in the eyes when I use IBL and all over the figure when I use IL.

Meanwhile, set the Tone Mapping to HSV Exponential, set the Exposure to 2.0 or 2.2 and render again with IDL. WOOT! It's like GC only simpler. No incoming anti-gamma to deal with.

 Actually, the only reason I haven't done that already is because I have GC built into the shader.

Yeah, well GC in the shader will create falsehood on the indirect lighting. The IDL will be using values as if they are linear, but they are in sRGB space. We can't use shader-based GC with IDL and still get accurate results. Maybe good enough in most cases, but technically wrong.

Regarding the artifacts, there is a HotFix in the works that probably will fix it. If not, the first Service Release will.

Look for the HotFix soon, by the end of this week. It will be a small download.

Quote - Yeah, well GC in the shader will create falsehood on the indirect lighting. The IDL will be using values as if they are linear, but they are in sRGB space. We can't use shader-based GC with IDL and still get accurate results. Maybe good enough in most cases, but technically wrong.

so if they use GI its better to use tone mapping then you GC materials?  

Quote - > Quote - Yeah, well GC in the shader will create falsehood on the indirect lighting. The IDL will be using values as if they are linear, but they are in sRGB space. We can't use shader-based GC with IDL and still get accurate results. Maybe good enough in most cases, but technically wrong.

so if they use GI its better to use tone mapping then you GC materials?  

I'm not really certain. Maybe the differences in numerical value are not that important. Maybe one less bounce amounts to the same thing, know what I mean?

We'll have to experiment. I have no time today sadly. Another all day meeting for me.

The hotfix BB mentioned is already available, and links are in other threads about it here.