Quote - About 30 different props all together, and about 6 lights. 

Prop count is not important - it's polygon count. I can render 1000 Poser boxes, but not 1000 Minicoopers. (I have 25 pieces of paper in my pocket - who has more money, me or you?)

Quote - I have turned up the settings on light mapping to 1024, and I upped all my render settings to just about the fullest possible 4 for Raytraces, almost full on IDL calculating, etc.  Can that take over 12 hours for a render? 

If you ran out of physical memory and are now swapping to disk (thrashing), it could take 12 weeks.

The phrase fullest possible is not consistent with 4 raytrace bounces. The fullest would be 20. I consider 4 to be the minimum for IDL, although for a draft and for specific situations, 2 can be enough. I usually want 6 for a quality render. Be aware that there are actually two different "bounces" settings in Poser. One for reflect+refract, and one for IDL. We often only need 1 or 2 for reflect+refract, but need more for IDL. Setting up more than you need for reflect+refract does not cost anything, unless you happen to have two bi-reflective surfaces interacting with each other. Then you'd want to deal with the two settings separately. They can be found in the D3D render firefly settings dialog found in the scripts menu.

You mention "light mapping to 1024" - I assume you mean shadow mapping, therefore you're using depth-mapped shadows. These are faster than raytraced and 1024 is also rather small. A "fullest" setting would be 2048 or perhaps even 4096, but can't remember if Poser will even let you do that. To get over 1024 you have to modify that parameter's maximum allowed value, and then there is an internal maximum you can't go past.

Quote - I really like my lighting effects I finally figured out -- I now have individual lights lighting up the headlights of the car and parking lights using "Point" lighting, have it adjusted so it doesn't bleed on other aspects of the environment.  I even have the lighting for the environment to look "night" colored,  but the render times are driving me nuts!

Sounds like you enabled inverse square falloff, which is a good thing for small light sources. But note that it doesn't add to render time at all. It just changes the equation used for lighting.

Quote - I guess everything worth waiting for is worth the trade off. 

Almost. And you must mean everything worth having - it's a source of endless argument in this forum as to what is worth waiting for, or what is worth putting effort into. Gamma correction is free. Inverse square falloff is free. These are things worth having, and you don't have to wait when you use them. As you talk to various people, some will be insulted, injured, or threatened by views that they fail to use features they should be using. As you read stuff regarding what's worth doing, keep in mind that realism is hard, and if you want it, great. If you don't, great. Some people don't feel that way, and they are utterly unable to let a discussion of difficult realism techniques go unanswered. When they try to tell you it's not worth it, tell them to shove it. I hate ugly fake looking pictures.

You, of couse, don't have GC with Poser 8, so you'd have to put more effort into using it. Sounds like you already put considerable effort into lighting and ran into some difficulty getting realism at night. That comes for free with GC.

Quote - My question is this -- does anyone else experience the long render times for the best results on their images? 

I often render over night. I never find it unfinished in the morning. In the past, I did quite often, but I have learned what render settings and other things will cause that. For example, if you use a very low min shading rate and lots of small feature displacement on a large polygon viewed from very close, you force the number of micropolygons into the millions. That sounds unusual but it isn't. A single large ground square with a pebbly texture using displacement and the camera close to the ground will use all your memory.

Once that happens, 12 hours isn't even a start. Could be weeks.

Quote - My system specs if helpful:  Dell Inspiron 531 2.88ghz Dual Core AMD processor 3 gigs of RAM, and 1gb GTS 250 by MSI Factory Over Clocked.  Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit.  I plan on upgrading to 7 64 Bit after my business gets going. 

3 GB RAM is weak. You need that much for Poser alone, and with the OS using probably 1 GB, you don't have enough.

Your processor is unspecified, but I'm guessing it's 20 times less powerful than my I7 860, so your 12 hours is my 36 minutes, even if you're not thrashing to disk.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)