Hi there.

I am rendering concept art for the video game I am making out of my own Poser models.

Now lately, Poser Pro 2008 has been misbehaving when it comes to renders.

I am trying to render a female ninja and the render has taken over 5 hours and it's not even a centimeter away from the beginning!

Here are some of the settings being used for the render.

^ The lights I am using for the render is one of the HDRFX Lights and it's the Room 404AO light set.

It's been just fine until I lowered the transparency in her hair. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Please help me! What could be causing the problem?

Thank you for your time.

reduce your raytrace bounces to 2, increase the shading rate to 0.2. reduce bucket size to 16/32. reduce IR to 30.

I'm no expert but what is typically suggested is lower the ray trace bounces to 2, and reduce your irradiance cache to about 50  and the pixel samples to about 3. This is what I've seen frequently but the experts will probablly correct me. They usually do.

in addition to reducing the raytrace bounces its very important to actually go into your material editor and tweak the settings of all your reflect/refract materials.

if you have large reflective objects and theyre set to something like 1.0 quality with softness, it will take exponentially longer to render than if they were set to 0.1 quality. ive been able to set reflection quality as low as 0.01 and still pull off decent effects.

i would not lower pixel samples too low. yes its a rendertime hit, but nothing looks worse than horrible aliasing in a scene.  what you set it to depends on your scene and background, but ideally you should bump it up until the jaggies go away.

as suggested, .2 shading rate is good.  i used to render everything at 0.00 but the difference is very minor but the rendertime hit is quite large. i crank the hell out of it to 4.0-8.0 for preview renders since it makes them render lightning fast and you dont need shader detail for quick lighting tests.

And there is no such a beast as Poser Pro 2008.  The correct, official name is Poser Pro for the Poser 7 derivative, Poser Pro 2010 for the Poser 8 derivative, and Poser Pro 2012 for the Poser 9 derivative.

Theoretically, a shading rate of 0.00 means infinite (literally forever) render time. FYI

Shading rate is the average area of a micropolygon. The lower this is, the more micropolygons. With an area of 0, you need an infinite number of micropolygons. The render will never actually begin, as each bucket will have to be filled with an infinite number of micropolygons first.

The min shading rate is in two places, the render setting and in the material itself. The default in the material is 0.2, I do not think setting the render setting less than that works.  

How big a render is it  ? number of pixels width and height.

Quote - Theoretically, a shading rate of 0.00 means infinite (literally forever) render time. FYI
Shading rate is the average area of a micropolygon. The lower this is, the more micropolygons. With an area of 0, you need an infinite number of micropolygons. The render will never actually begin, as each bucket will have to be filled with an infinite number of micropolygons first.

poser may have some internal 'minimum' in the code?  if you set min shading rate to 0.00 (in both the render settings and obj properties) it renders, albeit slowly.  this would make sense, since if setting it to 0.00 caused it to never render SM would be flooded with bug reports.

a while back - way back when firefly shipped with a ridiculously high min shading rate and all renders looked like crap - i recommended people render with a shading rate of 0.  at the time i didnt know that it took the higher of the two numbers (render or obj properties - and the latter defaulted to .2), so i guess i was recommending they render at 0.2 shading rate.  thanks for the clarification.

Quote - reduce your raytrace bounces to 2, increase the shading rate to 0.2. reduce bucket size to 16/32. reduce IR to 30.

This suggestion worked the best for me!

Thank you all for your replies anyways. Help is always appreciated!

Now my renders render anywhere between 2 minutes to an hour, depending on how much I want to render. But no more than that!

Thanks again! :D