He he... sorry Laurie :blushing:

Yeah, good call on the suspend / resume render.

This doesn't seem to actually work in QM either? Even though there are buttons to do it... it seems to start from 0% again when you resume... or am I missing something?

Dang... sorry... there I go again. Just ignore me... :unsure:

The (or a) discussion on improving the transparency channel options is just further up this page by the way...

Hmm...

I don't use Queue Manager. Normally I only have one scene and one render going at a time ;). But if it starts over again from 0, then it's sorta useless, ain't it? LOL.

Laurie

Quote - The (or a) discussion on improving the transparency channel options is just further up this page by the way...

Well, then I agree...lol.

Hehe....no one ever accused me of being the sharpest tool in the shed ;).

Laurie

Laurie, just for my understanding, why do you want pauze/resume render?

• to free CPU resources (can do that now, reduce Priority, reduce Affinity - Windows Taskmanager)

• to free RAM resources (guess Poser will get swapped out when another prog takes the lead)

• to free Poser availablity (can do that now, Render in Background or Render in Queue)

Just wondering.

i would like effects for animations.

like, if a foot/shoe collision detects with a surface, add the sound of a footstep.

if a hand/glove collision detects with a surface, add a whap sound.

add a couple audio layers to the animation palette

more functionality and utilities for collision detection and animations.

With the Kinect craz hitting everywhere I think that Poser needs to tighten its animation and motion capture abilities or be left behind.  Daz Studio is promoting it ability to develp for the game engines.

Quote - Laurie, just for my understanding, why do you want pauze/resume render?

• to free CPU resources (can do that now, reduce Priority, reduce Affinity - Windows Taskmanager)

• to free RAM resources (guess Poser will get swapped out when another prog takes the lead)

• to free Poser availablity (can do that now, Render in Background or Render in Queue)

Just wondering.

It would be a handy feature to have in case you need to turn your computer off after having started a big render for any reason. I know I've had renders that have started out fairly quickly and then decided to go on a go slow! :)

I personally am not a big fan of leaving my machine on overnight for example, so a pause/resume render function, even if it was to disk as Bryce used to do, would be a good thing for me.

Quote - Well I've set the unfiltered image_map textures to be filtered to either "crisp" or "quality"... based on your point about disk access, for texture reference, being a likely source of threading bottlenecking, I've also tried optimising various other textures (e.g. by shrinking the pixel sizes of texture image files for anything not in close up) and that large scene is now rendering much faster, with much higher CPU utilisation.

Shrinking textures is not necessary. One of the main motivations for the texture cache was to be able to handle many large textures while still using modest amounts of memory.

Laurie, Raven,

good point, I support that. But can't one just put the system asleep / hybernation? Never tried that though, while rendering. Just thinking.

aRtBee, I have had power shut down after 4 days of rendering a scene (pre poser pro 2012). Skies were clear when I started the render, but major storm 4 days later, and all was lost. I've lost many a render this way in the past, and being able to save render progress would be fantastic.

What I like about the Vue renderer is its auto resume feature.

EDIT: Can be manually paused and resumed too... seems to work.

There's also the option to tell the external batch renderer (equivalent to Queue Manager kind of, I guess) to save a snapshot image of what it has rendered so far, every however many minutes or hours you wish...

...good for checking nothing has gone pear shaped!

Both these features would definitely be nice-to-haves in Poser...

got the point. What we need is support for the full
... Pauze - Quit - Shutdown // Startup - Restart - Resume ...
cycle. Not sure if Vue supports that, there is no documentation on that Puase button.

The only program I recall that could do that was mojoWorld. I could say; render buckets X to Y, so after a crash at bucket 99 I could continue from 100 on, and assemble the results later. This way I could do network rendering on a single image too: every machine got its own bucket range.
According to the Vue website, Interactive Network Rendering does support single images over multiple CPUs. Bryce can do that too since network rendering kicked in. But then single image / multi-CPU rendering implies that each machine got 1 bucket / thread at a time, so any multi-threading capacity was not used. Perhaps that's changed by now, don't know.

Whenever i need to do this kind of thing, i use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). It has the ability to pause and save the machine state practically anytime and it is very reliable, more reliable at least than every program i know that supports this kind of pause/resume natively. It is free, but when you want to use windows with it, you need an additional windows license.

Quote - > Quote - Well I've set the unfiltered image_map textures to be filtered to either "crisp" or "quality"... based on your point about disk access, for texture reference, being a likely source of threading bottlenecking, I've also tried optimising various other textures (e.g. by shrinking the pixel sizes of texture image files for anything not in close up) and that large scene is now rendering much faster, with much higher CPU utilisation.

Shrinking textures is not necessary. One of the main motivations for the texture cache was to be able to handle many large textures while still using modest amounts of memory.

Ah, okay, thanks Stewer... cool. In that case having the texture filtering set to "none" on just two figures was what was apparently causing the major bottleneck for the IDL and Render passes. Good to know!

Cheers

Quote - Whenever i need to do this kind of thing, i use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). It has the ability to pause and save the machine state practically anytime and it is very reliable, more reliable at least than every program i know that supports this kind of pause/resume natively. It is free, but when you want to use windows with it, you need an additional windows license.

That's a good idea... 

...the only issue I'd see with using a hypervisor / virtualiser set up is the added memory / processor implications of running an OS within an OS... and there's some degree of added disk latency too usually... unless you can give your guest pass-thru disk access.

But if you can counter for that with a beefy enough system, etc... then virtualisation is definitely a great approach to take... for lots of stuff 

Another thing I'd like to see is some improvements to the groups editor.  It took me ages to discover that box selection selects everything in wireframe, but only selects the visible front-facing polys in the shaded modes.  Still, I have a hard time selecting small occluded polys such as inside the nostrils, especially when zooming in puts you too close to actually select them, and zooming out makes it hard to see if you really have selected the right ones.  It's especially annoying having to look up inside the nostrils to select the ones facing away from you.  It's usually easier to select the whole nose in wireframe, and then swith to shaded to un-select the polys outside of the nostrils.  (I usually give nostrils their own mat group with no specular and reduced diffuse to try and combat nose-glow) 

What the grouping tool needs is +/- selection such as in Wings.  Then selecting, for example, the nostrils' polygons would be as simple as selecting one of the polygons making up the "cap" and tapping "+" two or three times.

Might mean less "no bone" warnings, too. 

moogal, I agree that tool could be a bit easier to use, for the reasons you mentioned. I often use the grouping tool to create new material zones that are lacking in some figures and props, and going across different areas, like lower and upper jaws, to create one material would be handy instead of having two materials to cover inside of mouth or gums.

"According to the Vue website, Interactive Network Rendering does support single images over multiple CPUs"

It does indeed as does Kerkythea, though with the latter, it only works with one of the unbiased rendering modes and you have to manually copy the scene to each render machine.  

Quote - You can parent a light to a prop or figure. Just drag it onto the actor in the hierarchy editor

 

Well that dosn't seem to work for me?

I'm using Poser Pro 2012.

Quote - > Quote - You can parent a light to a prop or figure. Just drag it onto the actor in the hierarchy editor

 

Well that dosn't seem to work for me?

I'm using Poser Pro 2012.

Has to be point or directional, worked last time I tried it...

a 'text material node' and a python script or something to type in the text 

why poser looks so old against the new iclone program and are in the same price range?

"pro tools" for the pro version of poser pro and price range around $700

leave the word "pro" away from this software if it's for hobby users only.

more & more pro users would like to work with poser and need more features.

it's not only for hobby users anymore.

pro's would use all the available content in projects to animate biped figures, quick pre-vizualization of dummy's.

i hate to read everywhere, that people don't like to see evolution to this software.

some people just don't like to spent money, that's fine nothing wrong please use the basic version for the hobby market and this kind of people.

and have the pro users their toys, "poser pro" should have a price more like zbrush and better pose, animation and rendering tools.

my 5th cent, to poser: HIRE MORE AND BETTER DEVELOPERS.

Quote - why poser looks so old against the new iclone program and are in the same price range?

"pro tools" for the pro version of poser pro and price range around $700

leave the word "pro" away from this software if it's for hobby users only.

more & more pro users would like to work with poser and need more features.

it's not only for hobby users anymore.

pro's would use all the available content in projects to animate biped figures, quick pre-vizualization of dummy's.

i hate to read everywhere, that people don't like to see evolution to this software.

some people just don't like to spent money, that's fine nothing wrong please use the basic version for the hobby market and this kind of people.

and have the pro users their toys, "poser pro" should have a price more like zbrush and better pose, animation and rendering tools.

 

my 5th cent, to poser: HIRE MORE AND BETTER DEVELOPERS.

I am not against the software progressing but I don't like the idea of there being a massive hike in price because Pro features have been added in an attempt to compete with other Pro peices of software.  If real Porfessionals want those features they can use them now buying using Pro software.  Poser is a great program aimed at the hobbist, more features but all means, but lets not completely forget the customers who have supported the program so far.

I think pricing is something best left to Smith Micro.  A higher price doesn't guarantee profit if it puts people off buying the program.  Hoping that future versions have the features that people want, getting the highest number of sales at the current pricing would be fine by me.

Just a quick wish drop.

I wished I had an infinate plane like landscape programs have. I also wish for instancing for hair and other things. Poser's engineers are smart so it's sure to happen but I just wanted to say that because I've always wished I had those things in Poser.

All the best.