For the last couple of hours, I've been trying to render a very simple picture - two naked Alysons without hair, in an empty scene.

Mostly to see if it would look nice or not, I turned Indirect Lighting on before I started rendering. And now.. Well it seems to be stuck at the eyes. Now, I plopped the Ultimate shader on both of them, and I assume the eyes have some raytraced reflection. And I assume that's why it is stuck there.

Has anyone encountered sometihng similar? I know raytraced effects can take a long time, but this is ridiculous, it's been around two hours now since I started the render and for the last hour (at least) it has been stuck here

I am rendering in a separate process. Windows Vista Home, 4gb ram.

Transparency at the eyelashes and Eye_Surface geometry is why.  Something that may help is to make a morph that just gets the Eye_Surface geometry out of the way inside the head or something, as its value is kind of questionable anyway imo.

 I hadn't noticed that Alyson had any Eye Surface geometry? But since this was made to demonstrate a morph I'd made for her, I might as well look at thatbit and morph it out of the way :)

Alyson might not, I was thinking this was V4.  In any case the eyelashes will slow you down for sure, anything that has transparency going on makes indirect lighting slow down a great deal.

TrekkieGirl - Could you post a screen shot of the Dimension 3D panel from Firefly Render.py? Thanks. I've had eyes be slow, but that seems excessive, even with eyelashes and eye surface reflections.

Whichway

[Ok, I'm going to assume a spurious mantle of knowing what I'm talking about. ]

Hmm, the distribution of red dots looks plausible. Have you checked the Task Manager performance tab? Ideally, you should be getting 100% utilization of all cores if you have render threads matched to number of cores. What might be happening is that running both the UI process and the render process is causing a duplication of data in memory and you're running out of physical memory and paging, which will make things crawl. I've been running the renderer in the same process to avoid this and kept the overall Poser 8 priority at Below Normal. Makes the UI response annoyingly slow at times, but my cores stay hot and I can still check the forums.

Whichway

Just now I set up a scene with the exact same contents, two alysons with the ultimate texture, the studio backlight as well, started the render (separate process on Windows XP64 with 2Gb) & it froze at exactly the same spot with both processor cores maxed out.

Cancelled that & restarted Poser, set up the same scene with 2 Alysons & left the textures as the standard one they load with & it rendered to the end in under a minute.

So I tried a single Alyson with the ultimate texture closeup (so I can see exactly where it stops) & it's freezing as soon as it starts on the Iris, I took out the extra math node in both Iris & it renders to the end this time.

Perhaps someone with intimate knowledge of maths nodes (bagginsbill) can explain why a single node will bring the render to a standstill cause I'm stumped.

I was under the impression that one needed an enclosed space or an environment sphere for indirect lighting to work properly...

It is my understanding that a single item in a scene and you are wasting your time with IDL. Put two items near to each other and there will be IDL bounces between the two items.

That said you can take V4 in the T position and render with IDL with a light from a high position and you will get red dots under her arm pits and for example under her chin. Have a long render running right now or I would post a couple of images.

That's a little aside from the point, that indirect lighting will slow down bigtime when it hits transparency or reflection/refraction.

LuciferTheDark - Very interesting observation. If BagginsBill can't get to it, I might have a look when my current render finishes. (Don't hold your breath. )

Could you post a screen shot of the Dimension 3D panel settings for us as well? Thanks

Whichway

I feel your pain TG. Makes me want to export scene to Carrara Pro.

Dumb question - where/what is the Ultimate shader?

Nevermind, found it.

Whichway

if raytraced materials  with IDL takes hours to render then it would be better to render it out without reflected materials. then in a seperate render we render out only the reflection. then in a software like photoshop we combine the renders together.
if it saves 5 hours .....why not? :) 

the same with lashes. i rather render without lashes and then combine it in photoshop or even paint it in photoshop then to whait 2 hours longe.

I don't think this has anything to do with geometry, reflections or raytracing.

I was working on a scene, with one David one Paperoll from Render Studio for Poser... and just a bunch of lights.  No reflections, nothing odd... and the render was fine until some point, it just decided that it was NOT going to finish precalcing the indirect light.  No matter what I did, once it was done... it was done.  I backed up several steps with render settings and materials, all to no avail.  Eventually I just pulled the thing into Poser Pro and did without the IL.

And I do mean that it just stops.  The display of the precalc stops at the top right corner somewhere, though the status message may eventually suggest that it is done, it never goes on to the rendering stage.  Repeated this behavior multiple times.

I agree. A single figure all alone without even a ground to stand on is not very interesting for IDL, although there will be some inter-reflection by the figure on itself, particularly under arms, neck, and between legs.

Do not render with ground in shadow catch only mode, which is the default in Poser. Even with just the ground, there is a lot of bounced light. You won't get any in shadow-only mode.

This V4 in T Pose is with a single infinite light + IDL and renders in a minute. There are no fancy shaders - just the V4 default color map.

I tried to render out a complex scene last night with modest IDL settings. It took about 1/2 hour to Precalculate 75% of the picture, until it reached the floor. On the floor I had attached a noise node to the displacement channel. The settings were nothing dramatic, but it took about three hours to precalculate. I am guessing that the displacement slowed down the calculations, and will test that tonight. I may want that detail on the floor in a final render, but I can do without it until the scene is otherwise finished.

LMK

For something like the floor, where you won't be able to see the profile of it anyway, it's probably a lot easier on the renderer to just do the same noise trick with the bump channel instead.

pjz99:

You're right. I wasn't thinking. I don't even really want to alter the geometry of the floor. It might make problems with the things I have setting on the floor. Is there much difference between bump and displacement with IDL/Raytracing?

I mentioned this in case some others have displacement on something, didn't think of it, and had slow render times.

LMK

Displacement and Poser's polygon smoothing are done after raytrace effects, so bump map effects won't look the same - possibly better, possibly with different kinds of artifacts.  I'm not in a position to test right now, try it and see.

Maybe Alyson is shy about her body.

I put that noise map onto the Bump channel of the root node, and the Precalculation ( with Raytraced lights) ran over that area very fast. It doesn't look quite the same, but it does what I wanted. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

LMK

very well :)

 Oh.. I forgot about this thread >_<
'
The reason why I put indirect lights on this scene even if it's an "empty" scene was that I wanted the light to bounce off the two women, each of them bouncing light onto the other. I had a feeling it would look nice...

I'll see if I still have the PZ3, I can't remember if I deleted it or kept it. If I still have it I'll try with a more simple material on the cornea as that seems to be what hangs Poser.

In that respect I'd say it's a bug in the texture. The Advanced Texture option ought to be renderable with the "advanced" lighting system in Poser.

Quote - Dumb question - where/what is the Ultimate shader?

Nevermind, found it.

Whichway

I haven't found it, might you have a link?

 It's in the materials included for Alyson. Click the Materials Tab and navigate to Alyson and you'll see it ^_^

Ahhhh so it only works for Alyson then...