I have been trying to do a rendering now for a few days. Everything was fine until I added the hair to the figure. Now it is taking 8+ hours to render. I am using Poser 8 and I am also using IDL Studio. I never had renderings take this long before. I was originally using Pookie hair from Daz and it rendered fine but I didn't like the hair. So, I changed it to Rag Doll hair. That is when the trouble started. I am now trying Madde hair and it is doing the same thing. I turned off the hair all together and it was done rendering in a matter of minutes. Any ideas as to what is going on? Thanks for any input at all.

Multiple overlapping layers of transparency -as many hair models have- will slow IDL down badly.  Under the manual render settings, try lowering the number of ray trace bounces.

select hair item(s) and uncheck "visible in raytracing".  FFRender/IDL is gonna calculate trans/refract wrong anyway, hence disable it for now.

Cool, I will try this. Thank you for your help!

Too bad most hair looks horrible without raytracing. I dont have those hair models but another thing to check is in the material room. Some hair models have blinn, glossy, and other nodes that can really slow things down as well.

This is why I use short hair almost exclusively in my renders. Long render times drive me nuts. :-)

Quote - Too bad most hair looks horrible without raytracing. I dont have those hair models but another thing to check is in the material room. Some hair models have blinn, glossy, and other nodes that can really slow things down as well.

This is why I use short hair almost exclusively in my renders. Long render times drive me nuts. :-)

 

Thank you for the tip. I will check that out as well.

Quote - > Quote - Too bad most hair looks horrible without raytracing. I dont have those hair models but another thing to check is in the material room. Some hair models have blinn, glossy, and other nodes that can really slow things down as well.

This is why I use short hair almost exclusively in my renders. Long render times drive me nuts. :-)

 

 

I was just looking around in the material room. Where do I find the nodes that you have mentioned?

Make sure the hair figure or prop is selected then go to the mat room. From there click onto the advanced tab. If they are being used you would see them there.

If there is nothing in the mat room slowing things down then your pretty much stuck with doing what was mentioned. Disable raytracing for the hair or drop the number or raytrace bounces.

What kind of render settings are you using?

Ok, I just checked there and didn't see anything.

I am using these settings:

Raytrace Bounces - 2

Irradiance Chacheing - 50

Indirect Light Quality - 7

Pixel Samples - 5

Min Shading Rate - .20

Max Bucket Size - 32

Smooth Polygons

Use Displacement Maps

Post Filter Size 1

Post Filter Type Box

Tone Mapping None

I was reading that I should turn off texture filtering. Would that help? I got a script for it.

Sometimes the seams for the skin texture is visible and turning off texture filtering usually eliminates that problem, it wont help as far as render times go.

I just looked to see what Madde hair looked like. Thats a lot of hair. :-)

Your render settings are pretty mild So I would try rendering with raytracing disabled for the hair. Maybe it wont look too bad. One trick to do and get shadows underneath the hair is to setup a light on the hair with shadow maps instead of raytraced shadows. Have your other lights use raytraced shadows. That way you have quality shadows on the scene and shadows on the hair without having it visible in raytracing.

Ok, I'm trying what you have suggested here. What type of light would be best to use for the hair?

try with an infinite light. Map size 1024 and shadow amount 1.2. You'll probably have to adjust intensities between your lights to compensate for the added light. If you already have enough lights you might be able to get away with setting one of those to depth map shadows instead of adding another light. Its pretty much a trial and error dependent upon the scene.

Not sure whats going on with her left shoulder.

WOW! That looks pretty good. I am trying what you suggested for the lighting right now.

This is one of the most useful threads I've read this month. I just learned to turn off raytrace for hair in my test renders using IDL, then turn it back on for my final render. Talk about saving time!

Of course, I'm probably the only old fool not to have figured that out, but none the less, I appreciate it! Thanks everyone!

I was just thinking about this because of a poser vs studio thread over at Daz.

I don't remember having done a render with Poser 8 that took longer than 2 hours. Ever. Usually I run out of memory right around the 80 minute mark... and kaboom!

I'm jealous. I want my machine to be able to render for 8 hours. ;)

Yeah, I tried all the settings that were given me but unfortunately the hair kept coming out terribly. So, I just have to rough it out and let it do its thing to get the good renders. I guess it is better to take time and have quality work than to rush it and have something that you really aren't happy with.

Quote - Yeah, I tried all the settings that were given me but unfortunately the hair kept coming out terribly. So, I just have to rough it out and let it do its thing to get the good renders. I guess it is better to take time and have quality work than to rush it and have something that you really aren't happy with.

Totally agree.

I've had to resort to rendering in layers... background, background with untextured figure(s), textured figures with no hair, textured figures with hair with no raytracing, raytraced hair all by itself... then composite all the layers in photoshop.

Or conversely, render the half of the scene that poser will render before stopping, rotate cameras 180 degrees and adjust the z/x settings and render upside down to get the bottom half. Rotate in photoshop and splice the two renders.

It's silly. But I'd rather do that than render on lower settings or at too small a resolution.

Some might say it's time to move to a render engine that's more suited to production work...

it's possible that some beta-tester may start dropping hints about poser render engine improvements, hence let's not give up yet.  it's an evolutionary process in which they can't add all the features at once - they enjoy springing surprises like everybody else.

Area render seems like a better option than rendering in layers. Although most animations are done in layers and then composited in video editing software.

@onnetz: Unfortunately, if the renderer quits on me before completion once, it will quit in exactly the same place when I use area render, too.  Hence my need to render upside down to get the bottom half.

@Miss Nancy: Poser's render engine is great if you keep to low resolutions. But as soon as I get into the 4k x 4k range, all kinds of problems crop up. I don't want more features. I want stability.

Perhaps it's just that I do not know how to optimize materials and shaders for high resolution renders. Venders seem to enjoy complicated nodes, and the results are lovely at low resolutions. But, alas, my 32bit Poser 8 does not seem to be able to reliably handle such complexity.

However, judging from these forums, 2010 also seems on occasion to quit rendering part of the way through for no apparent reason as well, and I'm thinking that's it's just because it's not really designed for high resolution renders with high quality settings AND overly complicated materials/shaders.

So one should adjust the materials and shaders to optimize render stability. But it's a lot of work. I do wish products came with low, med, and hi res options, but I suppose that's asking a bit too much of venders.

Quote - @onnetz: Unfortunately, if the renderer quits on me before completion once, it will quit in exactly the same place when I use area render, too.  Hence my need to render upside down to get the bottom half.

Somthing doesnt make sense. If you use area render to cut the scene into 8 renders for a 4k x 4k image thats 500x500 for each one. Your saying it wont render those? Maybe save and restart before each one.

 Unless somthing specific in the scene is choking Poser. Then it woud be more of a settings problem than resolution.  

How much memory do you have?

Speaking of other rendering engines. Even vray will crash with a complex scene. And it will crash before anything gets rendered. I wasnt very happy when I found that out the hard way. Again you have to cut the scene into pieces.

Yes, onnetz, I expect something specific is choking Poser.

I've got 12 GB of memory. Poser.exe's memory issues aren't a problem. Poser.exe rarely even approaches a gig of memory usage on the performance monitor. FFrender.exe, on the other hand, routinely gets to 4gb, at which point, predictably, it quits.

So, yes. Settings. But what exactly? I don't, for a moment, think it has anything to do with render or undo cache or bucket size or number of threads, since these things really don't change the final outcome.

I think it's a combination of render resolution, render quality settings, and materials. Sure, I can render small, lower quality renders, but I want bigger, high quality renders. And poser can give me this. But not consistently. However, figuring out exactly which materials are causing the problem -- and how to fix it --  is giving me major headaches.

@onnetz -- Thinking about cutting a scene into 8 parts. Now I get what you're saying, and, no, I haven't tried to do that exactly.

What I have tried is to render, and then when it quits in the middle, to area render the rest.

I haven't tried to render small pieces right at the start. It might well be a solution. I'll give it a shot. :)

Quote - @onnetz -- Thinking about cutting a scene into 8 parts. Now I get what you're saying, and, no, I haven't tried to do that exactly.

What I have tried is to render, and then when it quits in the middle, to area render the rest.

I haven't tried to render small pieces right at the start. It might well be a solution. I'll give it a shot. :)

With a little luck it might just work. Looking at your benchmark post you should have a system that can do it. Another option I was thinking about that may or may not help is to run poser at a lower priority within windows.

I fear another meme of falsehood is starting.

Please do not take offense, but there is no evidence I'm aware of that having a lot of nodes consumes significant memory. CPU, sometimes, but not memory. The amount of memory a node takes is not proportional to how big your render is, or how many polygons it is being applied to. 

I'm referring to:

Quote - Venders seem to enjoy complicated nodes, and the results are lovely at low resolutions. But, alas, my 32bit Poser 8 does not seem to be able to reliably handle such complexity.

I think you may be conflating factors and making an incorrect conclusion. I believe that large textures will cause you trouble, but not large shaders. 

As an example, I did an experiment with a ray-marching 3D clouds shader I wrote a while back to produce procedural clouds in Poser. The shader was 1440 nodes. That's right, one thousand four hundred forty. I loaded this shader onto over 50 cloud props. So that's a total of 72 THOUSAND nodes. All of them were visible simultaneously. It rendered fine in 32-bit Poser 8. I'm sure you've never come close to that many nodes in one scene.

Ah, bagginsbill, please don't permit me to become responsible for the perpetuation of a nascent falsehood!

Thank you for the information. What you say makes sense. People have been promoting procedural shaders as a way to reduce the load on the renderer, after all.

But when it comes to textures, I have some products that have multiple image maps (as many as 10+) for each material zone for figures that have themselves multiple zones. It's a lot of image maps. These products will render at smaller resolutions, but trying to render them at a larger resolution is impossible for me.

So when I say "materials" as being part of the equation, I'm including these image map heavy set-ups. I used the word "materials" because, well, they're accessible through the material room. But perhaps my terminology is incorrect? Should image maps all be referred to as "textures"? If so, I'll be happy to correct my usage.

On the other hand, if a single figure has 30 image maps of varying resolutions associated with it, (and I have a fully clothed human wearing 12 such figures) and this should not affect rendering, then I need to figure out what else is going on with the scene.

Now, I have also been told that AO can cause a significant slow down. If that's incorrect, please tell me. AO is type of shader, isn't it? If not, again, don't hesitate to correct me. If I'm using the terminology incorrectly, we'll never communicate properly. Reflections, too, can be a problem?

When I say that fixing materials is a headache, I am partly referring to resizing all of those image maps to the appropriate size for each render (and obviously the bigger the render, the bigger some of those maps need to be) depending on the figures' locations in the scene. Or I'm thinking that there ought to be a way to recreate the effect without using all those image maps, but for me this is no small  matter.

That being said, there are also some scenes, which for whatever reason, I just cannot render at decent resolutions. I want to know why. When I look at the scenes that are problems, it doesn't seem to be polygons that are causing the trouble. But what I do see is a material room that's complex enough to my eyes to look like an Italian pasta buffet.

If anything I've said is clearly false, I do beg you to please correct me.

Quote - Another option I was thinking about that may or may not help is to run poser at a lower priority within windows.

Interesting. Could you explain how? Thank you!

Quote - I'm referring to:

Quote - Venders seem to enjoy complicated nodes, and the results are lovely at low resolutions. But, alas, my 32bit Poser 8 does not seem to be able to reliably handle such complexity.

I think you may be conflating factors and making an incorrect conclusion. I believe that large textures will cause you trouble, but not large shaders.

Oh, yep. I see. I'm likely misusing the word "nodes" here. I think the confusion stems from the fact that images (hence some textures) are plugged into nodes (aren't they?) At least, that's how I remember them being referred to in discussions in these forums.

It may be that I lack the vocabulary to adequately describe my problem. But that does not make it any less annoying.

Quote - > Quote - Another option I was thinking about that may or may not help is to run poser at a lower priority within windows.

Interesting. Could you explain how? Thank you!

Here's a thread on how to do it.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3753806&ebot_calc_page#message_3753806

Speaking of texture maps I have a Java app that I wrote a while back to resize all images in a folder and write them to a new folder. I wrote it for my daughter so its about as simple as it gets. 3 clicks and your done.  Choose a percentage and click onto ResizeImg. You'll be prompted to choose a directory to open. Then you choose a directory to write images to. Done. I'll upload it to my file locker in a bit. If you have the jdk installed all you need to do is click onto the jar file to run it.

Caution: It will overwrite files with the same name without hesitation. :-)

@onnetz: Sweet! Thank you.

Physically resizing the images is only half the problem -- you have to either create new mat poses or add the material collections, or resize for each render. If you're really obsessive, you might want to resize different textures for each "product" at differernt resolutions, depending what you're focusing on in the scene.

However, just resizing all the textures in some background props might well be all it takes to fix things in a great many cases. And if your app renames the textures to the same names, then the mat poses and/or mat files don't need to be recreated. I just need to make sure I don't overwrite the originals. Also, I could happily use it create thumbnails and/or med res preview images. Sounds great! Thank you.

Ijust don't believe that the size of your images can be the problem as everything was working fine initially in your scene and your scenes don't normally take that long.

Did you do anything else eg add a morph with the morphing tool?

Love esther

make sure you camera isn't partially in a wall or something.

possible new features in poser 9 may include speedier renders, e.g. one of the new features in poser 8 was that GI renders were 100X faster than those in poser 7 (unsupported feature) and produced much less noticeable errors.  we'll hafta wait and see if they drop any hints.

@esterau, thanks... I read with interest about your troubles recently. The camera in wall thing is intriguing... but in my case, no. No front wall for it to be stuck in.  But it's something to check for, indeed. Thanks for the reminder.

I managed to find a couple of scenes that were giving me trouble which I had not deleted. Both included AO on every prop surface. Removing the AO solved the problem. It also made the render look like crap.

Tweak the lights, try with IDL. Render still looks like crap, but took five times as long to do it.

Bah. Reducing texture size and/or slicing and splicing may be my only options as long as I'm operating under a 4GB per process limit. I'm assuming that a 64 bit poser would solve the problem too.

well having had similar problems I am sure it is not texture size.  my renders are always quick - i have a powerful computer, and all the times my renders stuck it was some other factor.  most recently I had used the morphing tool and had a funny spike stretching to infinity.  deleting the morph fixed the rendering problem.

If your renders are normally quick and suddenly hanging why would it suddenly be the textures?

Love esther

Quote - well having had similar problems I am sure it is not texture size.  my renders are always quick - i have a powerful computer, and all the times my renders stuck it was some other factor.  most recently I had used the morphing tool and had a funny spike stretching to infinity.  deleting the morph fixed the rendering problem.

If your renders are normally quick and suddenly hanging why would it suddenly be the textures?

Love esther

That's a very good point!

Quote - select hair item(s) and uncheck "visible in raytracing".  FFRender/IDL is gonna calculate trans/refract wrong anyway, hence disable it for now.

Been fighting a test render for hours using Danae's Rio, Zachrael's Maroon Hair & Corvas' Soft Lights.  Either the render stopped or the hair looked awful.  Switching off 'Visible in Raytracing' did the trick.  Thanks so much Miss Nancy.

Best Wishes, All,
Rªnce