hello.

As a keen animator Im allways looking at new software to help me produce better and more realistic animations,I realize of course that pe4rsonal creativity is allways the first consideration but the tools come as a close second.
At present Im  useing Poser 7

So I come back to my question;

Poser 7 or Poser 8 for best animation,?

Peter

Well there doe NOT seem to be any new animation tools
Added to poser 8.
so how can it be any "better" than P7 or P6  for that matter??

Cheers

Hi,

so thats good to know,and render engine ,any supprises there?

Pete

Quote - Hi,

so thats good to know,and render engine ,any supprises there?

Pete

Hi
I dont Have P8 but you should check the many threads
here about the new P8 render engine
in short it is NOT likely you will render your animations any faster in P8.

Cheers

In short: If your processor has more than one core, Poser 8 will render faster than any of the previous versions (if you set Poser's preferences to make use of the cores that is ;-)) 

Now thats good cause I have a quad,

Pete

I did a render yesterday of a scene in teradome with dystopia and a figure. in P7 it took 4 hours and 38 minutes. I saved the pz3 and opened it in P8 and rendered it, it took 1 hour and 5 minutes in P8. I also have a quad core.  Every render i have done in P8 from my old pz3's have been significantly faster. P8 beats the heck out of P7 in render time.

Impressive,Im currently rendering out a 1.5 minute animation to image sequence at 80 frames a time ,80 frames at 760x576 is takeing 10 hours with Poser 7,its so long that i do it overnight as I need the PC next day to creats more scenes,I think im convinced by that

pete

I have not done many animations with Poser just a couple, and the main reason I have not gone in that direction is because of the time involved to render out even a short 500 frame animation. But the new P8 is really so much faster, I am sure because it is using all 4 cores. So even if there are no new tools just the vast improvement in rendering time is a big help in animation.

Poser 7 alo uses all 4 cores as far as I can see in the task manager so some thing must have changed to acheive those render times.

Pete

Yes you're likely right. And it depends on the scene how much faster it is than P7. And if I use the new IDL then it is slow. But for every scene I have tried so far with the same settings from P7 to P8, P8 has been quite a bit faster.

Some people were having problems with P8, i only had a couple in the beginning which were resolved. I am unsure if the sr1 has resolved most of the issues that people were having, so you might check that as well.

Personally though I am happy with P8. I have a q6600 quad core, with 8gig ram, running XP X64 pro. an ATI 4870 something video card. I dont know who makes the motherboard, its a Dell computer though.  I have had almost no problems with the new P8 release, so if you have a similar setup, you may not have any either.

Edit: one more thing that might make a diference.  I dont use any installed anti virus software on my Poser computer, it's never hooked up to the net, so I just scan it from time to time with kaspersky from my other machine. I have always found that anti virus apps cause so many problems that if you can get away without any, it sure keeps the headaches down.

Ah,64 bit,thats accounts for a lot of the speed,but appart from that Iv pretty much the same setup.
Im going to buy a new Pc for this as Im getting more work now and as you said a stand alone machine is by far the safer bet and definitely no internet conection,as for the anti virus and malware I turn them off whilst rendering on my old machine,the malware scans every frame rendered and slows things down.
interested in what type of problems exhist now after thee new patch?

pete.

Quote - Ah,64 bit,thats accounts for a lot of the speed

No, it doesn't. It's got nothing at all to do with speed.

Ok and thanks for your cheery reply

pete

 It has nothing to do with "cheery reply" - 64 bits REALLY does nothing for the speed in Poser 8 as that is still a 32 bit application. How in the world would you prefer that said to you in a "cheery" way? It's like telling time in a cheery/not cheery way. It's stating a fact, not a personal opinion.

What makes the difference is that the renderer has been rewritten so now whenever a bucket is rendered, the free core starts on the next one. In Poser 7, the cores split the buckets evenly so one core could potentially sit idle for a LONG time while the other one was working overtime on some reflexions or transparencies or whatever

Hello,

Nows thats much better :) and thank you  very much for the explanation.

Peter

I don't know why anyone would say that there is no difference in render times between Poser 7 and Poser 8. This is my little contribution to the thread. In comparison, the first image is from an animation of 421 frames and the next was 366 frames. Both zoom, the first inward and the next outward. with motion capture poses from various places and vendors. Before I start talking up Poser 8's speed I will say this, I still set up in Poser 7 and do all of my test renders there. I do this because of simple familiarity, and nothing else.

Poser 7 rendered a single frame of this animation within 3:40 give or take a couple seconds. Poser 8 rendered this same image within 2:20 again, give or take a couple seconds. When you're animating a 300+ frame animation, these times make all the difference. So, you could use Poser 7 to do it and it will look great. however, the guy using Poser 8 will have already finished and be working on the next sequence. For me, I need to get my work done so speed is very important. Poser 8's only problem is that sometimes the finished animation can have artifacts. Simple to fix but even then, I am still ahead of the time Poser 7 would have left me at.

Lastly, If you're not animating for a living then don't worry about it.

Sorry. Here is the second image.

hello.
Thanks for responding,Yes i do this for a living and how ever frugal the rewards are, I wouldt change,
The poser 7 render times are roughly the same as Im getting and the results are really good,the problem is the time it takes.I have to render at night whilst I sleep and about 60 frames is a night render.Its true that more time spent on rendering the less creative time you have.
Right now Im up to 380 frames rendered of a 420 finished animation,so I would save something in the order of 50 mins on the total?
Interestingly you mention camera zooms and pans I feel that these seem to take up a great deal of rescoures? but without them the animation seems to be lifeless.
The artifacte you mention in P 8,are they just a question of the render settings and cosequently can be reset, is it inherant in P8?
Once again thanks for your render info,
The scenes you show look very good and if you ever get around to finishing it would love to see it.
kind regards.

Peter

After working with Smith Micro on this it was just decided that it was a bug that had to be fixed. Now they were to fix it in SR1 but apparently it didn't take. They are looking in to it but so far it seems that this bug is still around. The artifacts show up as unrenderd squares that pop up randomly, if anyone remembers this from Poser 5 & 7, it was a glitch that seemed to superimpose the geometry behind the camera onto the rendered image within the camera's view.

The tech at Smith Micro seems to think that this particular bug is a surface rendering problem and is confident that it can be repaired in the future. I must say that this is not a glitch that really impedes progress because it is so simple to fix. It is very hard to see the difference when a single frame is missing. I simply just delete the aberrant frame and all is well. I surely cannot see any difference save there are no glitched frames :)

Hi,
Ok then thats not so erious then but better when its fixed:)
Thanks again.

Peter