Sorry as I know this is a newb question but my searching skills are suspect. Is there a way to render out an animation created in Poser in something faster than FireFly? If so is there a tutorial somewhere? It just seems incredibly slow and I have a very fast machine. My scenes seem to be of medium complexity but it's taking days for a four second animation.

Thanks.

What are your render settings?  They have a huge impact on render time...

Edit:

Also, if you are using IDL, (presuming you are using Poser 8 or PP2010)  making transmapped objects such as hair and stockings invisible in raytracing speeds up renders enormously.

Another thing to consider is your frame rate.  For some scenerios it's not necessary to have 30 FPS, a lot of productions are done at 8 FPS and then expanded to 24 postprod.

Saves a lot of render time if you're only doing 1/4 the amount

Is there a way to render out an animation created in Poser in something faster than FireFly?

Yes...Vue.

Vue ...thank you sir. I will give that a try. I am messing with render setting and already rendering out at 24 fps

I am now learning Vue and it looks pretty sweet. Not as daunting as some of the other apps I've stumbled around in.

I wish someone could upload a screen capture video that demonstrates the speed Vue does on animations with Poser.

Quote - I wish someone could upload a screen capture video that demonstrates the speed Vue does on animations with Poser.

Hi well that would of course depend on the complexity of your scene
A simple figure walking across an empty scene in vue renders fairly quickly
you start adding plants and perhaps water and other reflective surfaces and you get longer times
but you have to consider how long such scene elements animated would take with firefly

Anywayyou can try to extrapolate from this screen cap I did of the first four minutes of a simple vue animation render
SCREEN RECORD

Cheers

Well in all honesty it seems much faster even though my scenes have become far more complex. I'm actually quite impressed by Vue and easily creating a photorealistic scene but I haven't done much posing in it so that is my next test, still learning the app.

Don't bother with Vue's posing of Poser characters, it's no use...

Most of us [if not all] re-pose inside poser if we have to. When you open your scene up next time inside Vue it knows you've reposed a character and asks if you want to reimport it, you say "yes" and it brings the newly posed figure in and puts it in the same place as the original, no hassles..

Thanks fixer. Question, what is your workflow like then? Let's say you have an animated charactor or several, do you export them to Collada each separately and after each tweak then bring it in or what?

If you want to use poser content and render in another app, take a look at Carrara.

I rarely do animations, mostly stills.

I always import into Vue with the pz3 but it might be easier your way if you do animations more. Someone who does animations could prolly answer you better..

But for stills, if my pose isn't right, I will take the figure back into poser, repose it and then let Vue re-import it, but it is always a pz3 that I work with and always the Poser shader tree inside Vue..

Sorry can't be of more help regarding animations..

Klebnor,

I'm kind of broke with my purchase of Vue and really like it, I hate to jump to another app. I've only done one animation import using Collada and that seemed to work but it would be difficult if I have tweaks to the animation to keep doing that each time.

Are we saying I bought the wrong app and should have purchased Carrara? How does Carrara stack up to Vue?

Hi I use poser to previs my animations and render open GL preveiws from poser to check  them thoroughly BEFORE sending them to C4D ( in my case).

Cheers

Are we saying I bought the wrong app and should have purchased Carrara?

I think you'll find the consensus of opinion has Vue as a much better app than Carrara..

I believe there are some issues with poser imports, just what I heard, I don't know because I've been using Vue since version 4..

Quote - ***

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I think you'll find the consensus of opinion has Vue as a much better app than Carrara..

 

I would Agree with that statement.

Cheers

Well, given what fleshoff wants to do, I simply disagree, but that's somewhat based on other posts as I have no experience with Vue.  I do use Carrara regularly, and can say that it imports most poser and DAZ content (as well as obj and other common format files) with few problems and excels at posing in the app (ie no posing in another app and then opening the file to render).  Everyone has his or her own preferences, but I do find the lights excellent and the rendering blazingly fast. Poses made for poser work, and PZ files open fine.  There are two hassles, which are easily worked around with experience - shaders frequently have to be tweaked (or replaced), and external morphs must be applied in poser then the cr2 has to be resaved so the morphs are internal.  In other words, Carrara cannot read a pmd file.

I have poser and poser pro, but rarely open them.  Carrara also has most things you'd expect like terrain generation and modeling, advanced shader design, physics, hair, fur, etc.  What you might not expect is a full suite of modeling tools (great for modifying models to your needs), and 3d painting.  Also has trees and plants, which can be quickly applied to terrains with rotation and orientation to quickly populate fields and forests.  In Carrara Pro 8, you can modify the mesh of an object (say clothing) on another model (say Victoria).  If you've ever gone back and forth making small changes to a morph and seeing if it fits, you can imagine what a time saver that is!  You can have lights illuminate only selected objects in a scene, or all objects except those selected.  It's multi-processor aware and multi-threaded.  I get twelve threads rendering simultaneously with a hex core i7 and it's pretty quick with multiple lights, all with soft ray traced shadows.  Carrara can use HDRI lighting and has global illumination with sky and indirect light, ambient occlusion.

Vue may have all this too, I just don't know.

If you use dynamic clothes, I don't think any of them work in Carrara.

Attached Link: Mimicat's gallery

I've only used Carrara 6 Pro for some rendering. The Poser import feature and integration with your existing libraries seems solid. I really like the interface, but that is a matter of taste of course. As far as features go, it does have a bit of everything. If I had to pick one application to work with Poser content, Carrara would probably be it.

OTOH, (it must be said, not being familiar with the latest version) I don't see Carrara's landscape features comparing with Vue's ecosystems and the ability to render multi million or billion polygon (ecosystem) scenes. The Vue atmospheres and lighting are IMO superior as well - but I'm talking about what you can get pretty much without any work just using the supplied stock presets. That's not to say that Carrara isn't capable of excellent results.  If you want a best of breed landscape generation and rendering application, I think Vue is it - with the bonus of being able to easily use Poser figures. If you want a more general purpose 3D do it all package,  at a reasonable price then Carrara (though Blender is free) certainly deserves serious consideration.

Check out MimiCat's gallery. She has some incredible Vue rendered images. I'm sure she probably does a lot of post render work to achieve such a painterly look but I think the fact that such a talented artist chooses Vue says something about the app :-)

Here is a frame from my first Poser/Vue animation. Thanks everybody

BTW, I'm really going for the photorealism look and not blown away by what I've seen from Carrara vs. what I've seen from examples of Vue. Now that might just be be the artists themselves but if that is the case Carrara needs to get a better gallery of examples on their site. I understand that exeryone prefers thier own set of tools but I think I've found mine with Vue so far. As far as importing Poser animations I was going about it far too complicated, you just import the Poser file and it seems to import just fine without having to go to Collada, in fact the Collada step introduced more problems. Posing in Vue, while not as easy as Poser, isn't too bad...so I think I can do the tweaking directly in Vue.

Your render quality looks much better than the preview quality renderings posted as examples here.  Reminds me of Xen in Half-Life.