Hi all am having no problems rendering with the automatic settings, renders are flying out and it is maxed out :-)

However cannot get something to render with manual settings in as quick time. I have 12 gig ram and i7 processor . If I try same scene on manual it takes literally 10 times longer (same quality) I think it has something to do with max bucket size it is set at 32 .... does this need to be way higher considering my ram amount ? If so by how much ?

Or can anyone recommend settings to use on manual, equating to faster rendering.

This is proving unusable atm.

First of all: If you press "Aquire from Auto" it will copy the settings which you had in Auto to Manual. Rendertimes should in both cases be the same.

Rendersettings and bucketsize depends on many things: Which version of Poser you are using, whether you use IDL, IBL, raytraced shadows, blurred shadows, reflection or refraction, etc. Each of these things require a certain minimum to get them rendered. Be sure however to select "separate process" in the general render settings to make better use of memory.

Bucketsize: As a general rule for P7 64 is quickest and for P8 32. But it really depends on the scene. As a rule of thumb: Higher is quicker but less efficient if the scene complexity is not evenly distributed. Lower the bucketsize of the CPU usage goes below 100% at the end of the render.

It depends on the scene that I'm trying to render,

A single figure that I plan on being able to copy/paste to any background would usually be 128.

A complex scene could be 64, 32 or even 8.  If I have to get to 8 to render something, that's when I usually hide things and render bits and pieces and reassemble the scene in Paint Shop Pro using blend mode "Difference" to make sure that I have  the various layers of things lining up properly.

I find my bucket size has increased over the years, as I sit in my chair working on my computer more often. ;)

So keeping that number lower is better for quicker render settings, so pumping it up to 2000 is not going to help! . I am already aquiring from Auto, if I keep settings exactly the same render still takes much longer but it does render. Poser pro had all these same issues, however I never even got to do a manual render (it always crashed before) .

Always remember - choose bucket sizes and shading rates that prevent the renderer from sending information to the next bucket, especially in the case of displacements. For example, if your bucket size is 16 and your shading rate is 1, then your ideal grid size will be 256 (that is bucketSize^2 / shadingRate).

Considering that many people use 32 pixels per bucket and a shading rate of 0.2, each grid contains 5120 micropolys. 5120 is not a power of two number (and each bucket is square), which means that for each following bucket, 1022 micropolys are carried over from previous buckets, compounding. Could this adversely affect render times? Certainly.

Lower is not necessarily quicker. It really depends on the scene. It is a trade-off between less overhead (larger buckets) and evenly distribution of CPU (smaller buckets).
Example: If you have a transparent hair which renders very slowly, you better off with smaller buckets because most of the CPU is spent on that area and with smaller buckets you divide this area up into smaller parts. But you will find that the other areas render slightly slower.

My default setting for a render is:
Shadows On, RT On, RT bounces 1, Shadingrate 0.8, IR caching 50, samples 3
Then if I want IDL, I leave IDL quality at 7.Bucketsize at 32.
When I use refraction I increase RT bounces to 3. And IDL bounces at 1 for IDL.
My default lights are set with blur at 1.0 RT shadows. I also change reflect and refract and fresnel nodes quality setting to 0.1 (this renders much faster as the default without much visible change)
General settings have External process and threads at 8 (i7)

Most renders now finish in a few minutes: A scene with 4 figures,clothing, hair, 20 props and with reflection, RT shadows and IDL  for an image of 900x600 takes about 5 minutes.
If I want better qualtity I decrease shading rate first and after that some of the other values

Thanks very much for the help I will look into this later, been using Vue to render poser scenes usually ....  cannot rember what all these settings do ! I am getting good results from the poser 8 renderer, so wanted to try and optimise on these. Will probably use a mixture of Vue 7 and poser rendering in the future.

I use 64 for bucket size. I also have checked adaptive bucket size , so it changes.

Quote - Always remember - choose bucket sizes and shading rates that prevent the renderer from sending information to the next bucket, especially in the case of displacements. For example, if your bucket size is 16 and your shading rate is 1, then your ideal grid size will be 256 (that is bucketSize^2 / shadingRate).

Considering that many people use 32 pixels per bucket and a shading rate of 0.2, each grid contains 5120 micropolys. 5120 is not a power of two number (and each bucket is square), which means that for each following bucket, 1022 micropolys are carried over from previous buckets, compounding. Could this adversely affect render times? Certainly.

Thank you for the thorough explanation, Replicand. I didn't realise the interdependent relationship of those settings, though I suppose I should have suspected.

Quote -
Thank you for the thorough explanation, Replicand. I didn't realise the interdependent relationship of those settings, though I suppose I should have suspected.

No worries. When I first read about the relationship of bucketSize and shadingRate, it was like rockets going off.

So what if bucketSize 16 / shadingRate 1 is too crude? Try bucketSize 32 or 64, shadingRate 0.25 which would give you 4096 or 16384 micropolys per bucket respectively. Based on how aggressive your Pixel Samples settings are, you could get some pretty speedy renders (all other things being equal).

 If I'm rendering a scene that is prone to crashing, I'll lower the bucket size, sometimes all the way down to 8.  I don't mind if it takes longer to render, so long as it actually renders.  

replicand is there a mathamatical optimum then for all these settings ?

Lets say my bucket size is 32 or ?  what are the optimum settings for all the other variables to keep the maths side of this equal ?

Lets also assume time isnt a factor here ;) what i mean is what would be the most stable setting mathamatically cos i too suffer from crashing but i think this is from lack of knowlegde rather then my PC !

I get to 2 or 3 days into an animation render and often poser just closes  due to the usual unexpected error, yet sometimes i can render for 5 days straight so it must be something to do with my scene textures and render settings ?

"What is your bucket size ?"

the answer is between me and tailor!

 Leezace,

in reality Stewer is probably the best person to ask. But Firefly, which is descended from Tempest is Renderman compliant. My Renderman "baby experiments" coupled which a lot of reading suggests that you want to set your (bucketSize^2 / shadingRate) such that the result is a power of two number. Buckets are square. Power of two numbers are also square.

If the result number is not power of two, the remainder micropolys advance to the next bucket. What effect would this have?

• assuming raytracing is enabled, no geometry or textures can be discarded because they could potentially be called for a raytrace operation. Memory footprint.

• remainder micropolys are held (unnecessary memory footprint) while the renderer busts the next bucket into micropolys (memory footprint). The "old" remainder polys are added to the bucket along with whatever "current" micropolys will fit, while the "new" remainder micropolys get advanced to the next bucket (unnecessary memory footprint). Lather, rinse, repeat.

• So what happens when your CPU is running at 99%, memory is about to boil over and your hard disk is thrashing because it can't keep up (compared to RAM speed)? You guessed it. An ungraceful exit.

I don't think your self-described "lack of knowledge" is at fault. Poser can be tempermental sometimes. By the way, I hope you're rendering animations as still frames rather than as an AVI file. Much easier to recover from a crash.

Yes doing as still frames, I cannot imagine doing as an AVI! cannot make Manual settings work without significantly increasing render times even when Aquiring from Auto ;-(  and they do look exactly the same as on auto. Rendering it in Vue now and its looking fantastic, however the camera control is no where near as good as poser. I am going to update poser 8 again and see if it makes a difference.... Really liking this new poser lighting.

Useful info, replicand;  thank you for posting. 

I will second that great info it has given me a far greater understanding

Ok, but what is bucket size, and why is it important?

Quote - Ok, but what is bucket size, and why is it important?

This is to the best of my understanding;  I invite and encourage correction as needed.

As a means of budgeting memory usage, Poser renders small pieces of an image and eventually completes a mosaic of these little square pieces.

Bucket size refers to the pixel dimensions of that piece.  It is always square, and it is best if it is an integer power of 2, such as 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, or 64x64.

Because Firefly also looks at pixels bordering the bucket at hand, Poser will render at its quickest if the bucket size is large enough to make full use of available capacity, but if you use too large a bucket size and exceed the computer's capacity, the render engine will crash.

So, the the trick is to use the largest bucket size which doesn't exceed your computer's capacity.  This will be different for the same scene, if rendered on two computers with greatly different amounts of RAM.  It will differ between two scenes of different complexity.  It will change for the same scene if you crank up the render quality settings.

I am lost !!! my bucket size window only allows me to select one set of numbers
i.e. 32 not 32x32 ?

I dont get it doh lol lol even if i select a bucket size or 32 or 64 what should the other factors be ? like shading rate ? sample rate etc.

There are just too many variables for me to get to grips with.

Is there a noobs guide to basic render set ups rather then needing a degree in maths ;p

Quote - Is there a noobs guide to basic render set ups rather then needing a degree in maths ;p

Yeah, it's called "hit CTRL+R and go", lol

Why don't you post an image and circle the areas you are unsure.  You should roughly understand the basics first; everyone has their own render settings according to their machine specs.  Your may also be unique and only experimentation will define which settings are usable.  But take into consideration that each scene you create will have different specifications.  If you find that render times are unbearably long, you will need to evaluate the contents and make changes to materials in the Material Room.

Thanks hborre for the constructive input ;) i will do just that, i am rendering as we speak so i will wait for it to finish and then post a pic of my settings with a brief system spec

Thanks ;)

 Yes, you can only put one number, which Poser will automatically square. I think the key to remember is to use a number like 32 rather than a number like 17.

Quote -
Is there a noobs guide to basic render set ups rather then needing a degree in maths ;p

Replicand's feeble attempt to create a noobs guide to basic renders. Here goes....

As you know, most humans have ten fingers and ten toes. As such, it is very easy for humans to count in groups of tens. This is probably the primary reason why the metric system is used world wide. Number systems that use ten as the basis of counting are called "base 10" number systems. Easy enough, no? In base 10, one would count 10, 20, 30, 40, so forth and so on.

(I'm an American by the way and I think we should've switched in the 70s when we had the chance but that is a story for a different day.)

Now, I want to step outside the discussion for a moment to state an opinion: a secretary who could not embrace a word processor would be hard pressed to survive today's environment because typewriters occupy a small, niche market. By a large leap in reasoning, I think it would be difficult for a 3D artist to balance quality and performance from their machines without a little understanding of math. I'm not trying to offend, that's just my opinion and here's why:

So with your permission I will continue.

In terms of 3d rendering, you have good image quality, fast rendering time and cheap on systems resources. In Poser 4 Pro and earlier, you had fast and cheap nailed. With the introduction of Firefly, you now have the "quality triangle". So how does this relate to buckets?

*Egad, more math: *

Computers, basically,  contain a large number of switches. For the sake of this argument, we will say that switches have only two positions - on and off.

So, since a switch can only be in one of two states - on or off - then you can't count in base 10. You must count in a number system which can only represent two states. I will call this number system "base 2".

Counting in base 2 (binary) would proceed as such: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, on and on.

I've highlighted the two numbers because they were previously mentioned in post #11 in my response to RobynsVeil. I will refer to these numbers later.

As mentioned earlier, Firefly is a Renderman compliant rendering engine.  Who cares?

Pixar's Renderman specification was written to "not care what happens in the modeler" but to provide instructions to the "back end" render engine to create photorealistic images. PRman runs CG images in Hollywood (could be good or bad depending on your perspective). 

Now, there are a superset of features that Firefly does not cover, but the basic design of Firefly is the same as the render engine that runs Hollywood. And for a "hobbyist" program that's saying alot, especially with BagginsBill's contribution to the community. 

BTW, did you ever wonder what why there's File / Export / RIB? Renderman Interface Bytestream? Oh the possibilities.

So perhaps understanding Renderman better helps speed up Firefly renders?

Quote - As mentioned earlier, Firefly is a Renderman compliant rendering engine.  Who cares?

Me!  As a developer wanting to learn shader-writing, it would be brilliant to leverage what I've learnt into writing for a much large market, to include DS but also those "peripheral" 3D artists, who use those obscure programmes like Maya and 3DSMax and stuff like that.

Quote - BTW, did you ever wonder what why there's File / Export / RIB? Renderman Interface Bytestream? Oh the possibilities.

Oh, indeed! I can easily imagine moving in that direction in the near future, as Poser has come into a more serious market with Poser Pro... so who knows? Things may be developing in that direction even as we... er... type?

When PRman was first created, (excluding mainframes) computers were...quite a bit more feeble than they are now. One of the primary design goals of PRman was the ability to render one full 2048 x 1584 frame per minute in order to produce a 90 minute film within one year. 

Now if you have a 1mHz processor with 16KB of RAM, how on Earth would you accomplish such a thing? Why not break the render up into small chucks. We can call these chucks "buckets". Granted, at the time, raytracing was an opulent effect, SSS / IDL weren't even twinkles in Ed Catmull's eye. Those types of effects were "faked" using reflection maps, bounced lights and a now defunct ray tracer called "Blue Moon".

Pick up any pre-2006 Renderman manual. You will find two things:  (1) most of my inebriated rant will be verified and (2) there will be a striking number of similarities between Firefly material nodes and Renderman functions.

I cannot tell you "why" because I need more math training but I can tell you "what": when (bucketSize^2 / shadingRate) = some power of two number (such as 4096 or 16384), all things being equal, your render will be relatively fast and will not crash.

Disclaimer: does not take into account the exorbitant poly weight of most Poser characters (which would normally be handled with ultra low poly models with "rendertime subdivision smoothing"), the extra weight of clothing (which would normally be modeled on the character and / or created with displacements), or "real" hair / fur (modeled from NURBS curves, which Poser does not support)

Quote -
Me!  As a developer wanting to learn shader-writing, it would be brilliant to leverage what I've learnt into writing for a much large market, to include DS but also those "peripheral" 3D artists, who use those obscure programmes like Maya and 3DSMax and stuff like that.

Actually, all of this information is directly applicable to DAZ Studio Advanced (last time I looked). I was rather disappointed though, that you can't import / export complied shaders or code. That would really open the floodgates, so to speak.

Nowadays there's virtually no 3DSMax / Renderman translators so that might be a waste of time and mental ray would be a better choice of study - and that's a wholly different set of math.

Maya has a robust mental ray implementation as well but most "serious" Maya / Renderman artists either code with a text editor or use Renderman-centric tools.

Quote - BTW, did you ever wonder what why there's File / Export / RIB? Renderman Interface Bytestream? Oh the possibilities.

Oh, indeed! I can easily imagine moving in that direction in the near future, as Poser has come into a more serious market with Poser Pro... so who knows? Things may be developing in that direction even as we... er... type?

RIB export has been an option at least since Poser 3, possibly earlier. Any Poser 1 or 2 users can confirm this?

I never understood why is was included or what their "then" future plans were.

Replicand thanks for the explanation of bucket size. I found most of this by experience and trial and error.  Here is my question does your render dimension size have an effect on the quality or time to render. Of course I know that a very large render 4000x4 000 takes longer. But what I mean is would it make a difference if I used render dim. of 2048x2048 instead of 2000x2000. I used to render at dims such as 512x512 or 2048x2048 but started using 2000x2000 or 1500x1500 or whatever I wanted. What I do now if I want very high quality is render at the max size I can without a crash message and later reduce the image in Photshop to improve the quality. Example such as rendering at 2000x2000 and reducing to 1000x1000  in PS. The final image reduced image does appear less pixelated and smoother. Do you have any thoughts on this or if I am not doing this the best way or so. Thanks

Well my last animation was all rendered at 1200 x I think 900 and then shrunk down to 720 x ??? default sony vegas render size. This was very noticeable going from 1000 x (sorry cannot remember these numbers) which looked far less quality.  I am now rendering all my frames at 2000 x ???? and they are a hell of a lot clearer than 1200 x which I was rendering before.  I have big problems with Vue and currently I am limited to only being able to use broadcast render settings, this changes daily some days it will let me render with default, ultra etc but most of the time will not so thats why I stick to broadcast (it always seems to render). Increasing the resolution and then shrinking it appears to give me more detail. Also using photoshop and applying guassion blurs or indeed various filter affects can make the image appear more detailed.

Andrewbell thanks for reply. I agree , I now render as large as my processor will allow with the settings I use and the total number of figures ,props ect in my scene. Than shrink it down in Photoshop works well I also add blur sometimes and I also use magnet loop to select eyes and teeth ect and use brightness and contrast tool to brighten then up. Eyes and teeth look too dark in poser sometimes. Thanks

Yes, render dimensions affect the time that it takes to complete a render. I doubt you'll see much of a difference between 2000^2 and 2048^2, but you can expect a eight-fold increase from 512^2 to 2048^2.

Redereing larger and reducing a common way to avoid rendering with Anti-aliasing, which woul theory would be faster but I've never tried it.

No probs Flyboy I had the same questions when I started using this method. If all my render settings worked all the time, I would probably render at 1200 x 900 but at higher render settings.

Currently  I am able to use default settings... however  tomorrow this probably will not be the case, so I am leaving computer on until it is finished! Does anyone else have the problem where they cannot animate above broadcast levels?  This appears to be random, one day it works, another it doesn't ! Normal atomsphere works, then it doesn't etc etc animated atmosphere with GI settings applied works, then never worked again! Uninstalled, reinstalled, patched.
Keeping user preferences to default helps,  (when these settings are changed it sometimes doesn't render even on broadcast). Thinking about buying Vue 8 but if it has these same issues I may as well stick with this. Some scenes I have created are totally unrenderable even if I remove everything from them and leave the basic ground and sky it will not even render on preview!

Does anyone else have these issues .... 7.5 extreme windows 7 ?

I'm not sure that I understand the nature of the problem you are describing. If you are talking about Poser. I am able to render animations in any combo of sizes. ALTHOUGH I have a lot of trouble trying to render ANYTHING   close to 4000x4000. Most of my animations are no bigger than1000x1000 and single renders not more than 3000x3000 only because large  rendering with high quality settings exceed my RAM and VIDEO card. I have a good computer but I am using a single 512 3DDR EVGA  card. If I try to render over my limit.I get the message to REDUCE BUCKET SIZE OR TURN OFF ANTI- ALAZING ect. This usually solves the problem. But I have once or twice had a scene that was impossible to render.  I had to take some props and characters out of the scene or  render two scenes with different content and merged them in Photshop.

Render dont use video card ...

lol sorry wrong forum, spend most of my time in the Vue one! But what I said previously about making larger images, then reducing them still stands for poser.

**Anthanasius I was not aware that the rendering software did not use my video card. I was allways told that the video card controlled the render. Can you tell me how rendering works. And does it matter what size video card I have. And if video card is not used what causes my computer to be unable to render certain  scenes where I get the message to reduce texturesize or bucket size. I have a computer with intel 2.6 chip max RAM memory. I have 2 computers very similar and one performes a bit better with Poser than the other . But they do have same size video cards but different manufactures. What hardware could I buy to greatly improve renders speed and quality  ? I have Poser 6 does Poser 7 and 8 use multthreading, is this how to add speed to rendering ?
**

Video Card helps massivly when setting up a scene, have noticed huge differences as I have upgraded through various cards. .... but no help when rendering

i7 processor all the way, poser 8 takes advantage of multithreading,there are 8 threads to use in an i7 compared to 4 in a standard quad processor . Renders are way quicker than any of the previous incarnations of poser you will need 4-6 gig of ram - only seen poser 8 use about  5 gig max (uses much less in previous versions)

Thanks for the info Andrewbell.  I was wondering if the multithreading feature was really that good. I have vista and 4 Gigs. I have been reluctant to upgrade to Poser 7 or 8 only because I was concerned that many of the scenes and much of the content I have might not work. Have you had any problems using content or opening scenes that were made with earlier versions of Poser. If not I will get Poser 8 soon. Are there any problems  with Poser 8 ? Thanks

Yes it uses 100 % of all cpus available (like any good renderer should!) I think the most Poser pro used was about 50 %. Rendering is much, much faster there are mixed opinions but mine is that it is about 3 times as fast (depending on settings but this is a good guideline) and with better lighting. Only problems I am having is when I import into Vue 7 the animations I create in poser seem to render as single still frames ... the scenery animates but figure remains motionless (really doing my head in but I am sure there is a solution). I wouldn't even consider using poser pro for rendering anything and used Vue for it all... now that poser 8 has got half decent render times I am begining to favour it more I don't feel the quality is as good as can be produced in Vue but until I can get Vue to animate my figures this will certainly do.! It has not crashed on me yet...  What I find strange is poser pro is still £350, I got this for about £150 and is better in every way, Poser Pro was like a beta for this. Content management is massivly improved.

I must add I bought a 3d Connexion device http://www.3dconnexion.com/ and it makes the poser experience absolutly awsome!

Ok.  So can anyone help?  What would be the ideal bucket size if I use a shading rate of .1?

Hello I was very grateful for the help with making morphs for V4. I got that down now. I was hoping that you could help me with another Poser problem if you have time. Here is my problem. I often work in Poser by creating a scene with all my scene elements in frame number 1 in the animation pallet, then using the animation pallet I copy frame 1 to frame 3, change pose and camera angles ect., then copy frame 3 to frame 5 and change poses again. As you can see I often have a Poser scene file that gets very large sometimes 20MB-40MB I am using DAZ V4 characters. I have Poser 6 My computer processor and memory are MAX as of 2 years ago. My video card is a single EVGA 512 3DDR. Here is what happens . I may work with this kin dof scene  for several hours and it seems to be saving and rendering test shots OK. I close the scene and try to reopen it and it "STALLS" and then wont open. The blue poser circle stops spinning and there is no scene. Sometimes the animation pallet will show all my frames and scene characters and elements but there is no pose window just blank screen were the pose window with my scene should be. I have a feeling that this could be that my video-card does not have enough memory to open the scene. Or that when I last saved the scene before closing it my memory was low and the scene did not save correctly.  In any event as you can see this is very frustrating to have worked on a scene for hours and lose it for some reason. This does not always happen I have scenes of 40 MB that will open OK. BUT they have less characters usually in then.  Here are some more hints. I transfered the scene file in question with a thumb drive to another conputer with Poser 6  that is almost exactly the same as far as processor and video card. And it wont open there either. Here is something else to consider, in the python script/utility function/collect scene inventory window, all my scene elements are there in the list but a blank space where the pose window should be. If I get a larger Video card will this solve the problem ?, and HOW LARGE DO I NEED.and will my lost scenes open OK. Or is this something else causing this, is there a way to recover my lost scenes uning the python script tools. I know this is a lot of questions to ask you . But most users  do not have your experience or knowledge to help me, I have ask a few they didn't have a clue whtas going on here. Thanks

When using raytrace bounces, I reduce bucket size to 4. (for those overnight renders)

When I'm composing the scene without shadows or raytracing, bucket size 32.

If you uncheck 'render in separate process', setting the threads to 3, you can see 3 separate sections with buckets zipping across the screen.  It's fun.  Like watching the dryer tumble your laundry.  pacman has nothing on buckets.

Quote - Ok.  So can anyone help?  What would be the ideal bucket size if I use a shading rate of .1?

Well, did you change the min shading rate of all objects in the scene to .1, too or did you leave it at .2? If it's the later, using .1 is pointless :-)