I have been thinking about building a second rig dedicated to rendering.
My question about this is; can I use my copy of Poser Pro 2010 in this second rig for this purpose or; does Smithmicro require that one buy another copy?
Thanks,
Bim

As long as you're not using them both at the same time, you ought to be ok using the one copy. I believe the test is "just like a book." You can't have the same book open in two places. Same for software. 

Why should you want to do that?

I render and develop at the same time, by just sending out renders to the external renderer, and labeling it Low Priority in the Windows Taskmanager. Both processes can have their own 2Gb working mem, or 3Gb with the 3Gb-switch enabled, or more in a 64-bit environment. And on a 4 or even 6 (i980) CPU machine, Poser needs only 1 at design time unless you render out.

okay, I've Poser 8, but P-2010 can't be that different.

Sending renders out to a second machine only works for animations, not single frame renders. I must have misunderstood your question. Sorry. 

"Sending renders out to a second machine only works for animations, not single frame renders."

set the animation length to...1 frame....

basicwiz

My question does pertain to animation.
1 minute of animation is 1800 renders. 
It takes a bit of time... 
My last project took more than 5 days of constant rendering.
I know some people use just a render engine in a second rig, but I have no experience at this.
Any advice would be helpful.
Cheers,
Bim

 hi Bim,

I know where you're coming from, my animations are music based and last about 4 mins each, that's 7000 frames or so. In the early days of 1 CPU per machine (5 years back or so), I managed a stack of 4 controlled by Windows RemoteDesktop. It required a serious network design and systems management, all data had to be on the same drive letter for all machines, and so on.
You can still experience the results on the net, check my site (www.artbeeweb.nl), go 'My Olde Site" from the collection at the bottom, and search the gallery for the Mirror in Mirror short. Full of reflections and refractions, the longest rendering was 20 hours on a single frame and the whole thing took a month continuous rendering (on 4 machines in parallel).

Nowadays, I don't do that anymore. All 4 cores are in one machine (Q6600 based, next one will have six based on i980). I always render out image sequences so I can pick up easily after a crash or power fail or what (auto restarts at night thanks to MS Update, great). But most important, I design my animations in separate shots of 2 to 6 sec. Like TV commercials, which last 30 sec only and contain 5 to 10 shots each, modern takes never ever are long haules anymore. I even advocate that slide shows  should have 2 sec max per shot, instead of the default settings like 5 or more.

Then, I put up a Poser file for each take, or small group of takes. After finishing one in design (a one-thread process mostly, except for test renders) I take it into rendering at the background at Low Prio, while designing the next in front. Ideally, I can design 8 to 12 hours a day while the machine rattles 24 hours a day at full 100% 4 CPU load. 
Practically, I render out stills for the keyframes first, and make a slideshow on the music from them. This helps me to direct the animation as a whole, as some storyboarding. If OK I render out to image sequences, and generate a (lower quality) avi or so from them. This helps me in post processing too.

I consider a second machine some times, but it's not worth the money. You not only buy extra CPU but memory, disk, casing etc too, and you run into various systems management issues constantly. In the meantime, the 'design machine" runs about empty. Seen it, been there, done it. But I do hope that Poser is going to support CUDA-based rendering by the nVidia cards. This enables us to expand on graphix processors only (see www.cubixgpu.com for instance).

I hope this helps a bit.

Hello aRtBee,

Thank you this is helpful and this is great advice.
I've got a quad based machine (i7 930).

The idea I had come up with  was just to enable comunication to another rig and pass Poser scene files through the USB cable made for this purpose ( it's got a capicitor or DC blocking diodes).   I was looking at the AMD 6 CPU 3.2 GHz (goes for $285) and thought that a cheap motherboard and a handful of memory and my computer would never be tied up.

What I am curious about is the Render engines,
there are a couple that I have looked at that are open source or freeware, (Indigo) that are 64 bit renderers.  I have no idea if one can, or if so; how to load Poser scene files for rendering.  If that were no problem, or if I could use my copy of Poser for this purpose, I think I would be ordering parts.  Otherwise I think that I will adopt your work procedure.
Cheers,
Bim 

P.S.
Okay, I just checked out Indigo and it supports;

• Blender

• 3D Studio Max

• Sketchup

• Cinema 4D

• Maya

• Truespace

•  

• Revit

It does not support Poser.  Nor is it freeware any longer but a comercial product.

hi Bim,

Oh My God, No !! Don't !! This is why:

about every renderer on Earth needs it own setup for lighting, camera and materials. Models can be transferred as far as object-geometry is concerned, and animations go well too these days, at least to some extend. But even applications close to Poser, like DAZ Studio or Vue, have to bring in their own lighting and cam setups, and material properties are transferred only partially. 

Poser does support the COLLADA format which helps you out to Photoshop Extended and most other programs, but I have no experience in there. I guess again that lighting, cams and materials form the bottleneck.

Poser is already amazing in its own end by supporting more than one render engine without any settings changes. Note for instance 3DS Max, where you can select V-Ray instead of Mental Ray and other renderers, but you have to make your choice beforehand, and you cannot use V-ray dedicated lights and materials in a MR render, and so on. Plug in the great Octane Renderer (look it up, http://www.refractivesoftware.com), read the features, and find out that it can load any scene. You only have to redo... lights, cams and materials. 

So, instead of rendering 5 days, you end up setting up your scenes anew in 4 days, and render in 2. Hence, before you throw any hardware to this concept, just test it first in small one-machine situations. IMHO, it's the concept which won't work, despite any technology.

Next to all this, please do test transferring Poser scenes to other machines or even directories. You might find missing objects, cloth simulations and textures, as not everything is in the pz3 itself. Test! Try for the PoseRay converter and PovRay renderer (www.povray.org). Free for 15 years now, and still kicking.

This still leaves the question whether you really need a second machine for the second process. I guess not. And why connect them via USB while you have gigabit LAN ports available? But that aside, I doubt rendering Poser scenes in anything else but Poser, and considering it an easy way of living.

BTW: thanks for commenting on my site.
Regards,