Attached Link: only click here if you can be bothered to read below...

A lot of advice by more seasoned users pointed towards employing an alternative form of rendering. In case it might interest other forum members, I thought I'd talk about some of my experiences...

Consider that many (but not all) of my animations are set in enormous cityscapes using several characters, dramatic camera swoops and all kinds of special effects. I am shooting for absolute realism (I am a long way off, but, hey, I'm a beginner, and as long as I keep getting closer, I'm happy).

I tried a few ways of getting my Poser animation into other apps to try their supposedly superior render machines...

3DS Max: Used PoserFusion, it 'sort of' worked, but I couldn't get any kind of useful render. Tried and tried and gave up.

Lightwave: Used PoserFusion. Worked straight away, even on enormous scenes. Some problems: stand hair don't work, skin textures look strange. Otherwise very cool, excellent lighting, great render machine. I made a simple test scene of an interior. Firefly takes over an hour to get the scene rendered in a quality I would accept. Lightwave takes two minutes (!).

Lightwave doesn't seem to have a native hair or cloth room, there may be plugs for this, I would like to hear if anybody has any experience with this because I need hair and cloth simulations.

If I took time to learn Lightwave's shader system I'm sure I could get the skin problem sorted out - does anybody have any tips?

Cinema 4D: Used Interposer. Big scenes crashed, Simpler stuff worked brilliantly! Being used to Firefly, the default rendering engine is an absolute joy. Depth of Focus adds an hour or more to my Firefly render times. In C4D it might add six seconds (in a complicated scene), and you have far more control.

Skin textures come in looking pretty good. I am having a few problems getting the eyes as good as I'd like them. Strand hair comes in as C4D hair! Other stuff is easy.

Lighting is fabulous. I made a short test animation (you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmtpuSg6-M - the animated scene is between 0:46 and 0:52) using animated volumetric lights (also known as 'smokey god rays') and DoF, render time was under two minutes per frame.

(The scene isn't any good, it was just a test, I set it up in about an hour, rendered all 190 frames in five and a bit hours. Didn't really know what I was doing...)

After more exploration, got my big scenes to load by doing them bit by bit. (Not Bit by Bit, I loaded the city, then the other buildings, the cars, the exploding helicopter and then the people.

For people who are bored by long posts and have scrolled down this far, Lightwave and C4D offer easy and interesting alternatives to Firefly. Can you imagine how it might change your workflow if a test render takes a minute instead of an hour? (For me, it means I get a lot less washing-up done.)

And as for Poser: have you tried animating/posing in any of the above mentioned 'high end' apps? Poser blows them away (the clue is in the name...)

What are your thoughts on Vue ?

If I may chime in? Vue is great at static import of Poser pz3 files...and can be imported in either using the Poser Shader or no. Importing in without the shaders probably gives you more lattitude as far as tweaking textures within Vue.  I'm also not sure if Poser SSS translates across to Vue either...I'm certain it doesn't.

Vue Poser import

This was imported not using the Poser shader tree option, so just image maps and the various Vue translations of Poser spec values etc.

I think you would be pretty hard pushed to find a 3rd party application that can translate Poser data as well as Vue.

Animation wise, I can't comment, because I've never really had the patience to animate anything in Vue :P

Was there a reason you didn't consider OctaneRender for Poser?  It is perfect for animators.

Vue works great for importing poser scenes and when you set it up well, the scenes do look much better then they do in Poser. I'm not doing animations either, only static stuff and that works well. I like how Vue gives you a good number of options when importing, like animations or not, reposing or not, using poser shader tree or not and so on. What I really like is how when you have a scene in Poser and import it into Vue and the you change it in Poser, Vue recognises the changes and gives you the choice to import them or keep the old one.

But.... yes, there always a but and this time there are few. First, you need a decent machine with enough RAM to be able to use poser scenes in Vue. For a small scene you're fine with about any machine, but as soon as you start importing larger scenes, you need cpu power and ram to be able to do so.

Secondly, a lot of the poser modelers are a bit sloppy when it comes to creating scenes for Poser, even people like stonemason. Poser is very forgiving when it comes to importing models with errors, but Vue is not. When importing scenes from poser you may end up with weird articfacts and light/shadow effects. I've even seen normals that just were completely wrong, but never seen that in poser at all. I've been importing some of models into Vue and notice that it is much less forgiving the poser is.

Thirdly and lastly, Vue is a slow rendering engine, unless you have a lot of cpu power. While the quality you gain is awesome, the price you pay in rendering time is far less awesome. Unless you use a standard atmosphere model, then rendering times are ok, but start going volumetric or even spectral and rendering times are long.

Having said that, the price you pay for Vue is of course a lot less then Lightwave or Cinema4D, unless you insist on getting Vue Infinite. For less then a quarter of the price you pay for Cinema4D, you can get a pretty decent rendering engine and lot's of other cool tools to play with.

There are of course other alternatives, no I'm not talking about DS, Bryce or Carrara, they all have either crappy or outdated rendering engines.  How about luxrender, Octane and so on? I haven't tried those and I'm not going to do so, but they may be a very affordable alternative. Things seem to be moving for Poser to be able to access those and they price is way less then any of the other alternatives mentioned here.

If I'm not using Vue, I'm using modo to render Poser figures.  Some 3rd-party materials for Poser (inside of Vue) are not meant for animation, because the procedural textures are world mapped instead of local mapped.  And Vue doesn't bake textures from Poser figures to help in this.

I'm currently experimenting with Poser's Walk Designer for V3 and exporting animated PZ3s of her to Vue.

 Life has been in the way lately, so I can't comment on how well Vue does Poser animation as of v11 (I've loaded some test scenes, and things were all there, but no time to tweak and check, dammittohell......).

That said, Vue has been a godsend since they released Mover for Vue 4 lo all those years agone. Has it been perfect? No. Do you need a fairly strong machine to wring the best out of the combination? Doesn't hurt; and if you animate, either building your own litte rendergarden or letting friends know you accept donations of old computers and cobbling a few nodes together out of the parts really cuts your rendertimes down, as one mistake in lighting or setting can drive a render from a minute to an hour. You have to dig in and learn the app, as there are enough choices to really make your job easy, or utter misery.

Vue's animation controls are extensive, and fairly straightforward. Trying to animate Poser characters in Vue is possible, but requires said beast with a =lot= of RAM, as you are running an instance of Poser in tandem with Vue. And usually you do better to plan your scene out, and place a primitive proxy into Poser as a guidepost for anything you intend in Vue as an inteaction object, do your keyframing in Poser, and import the whole pz3 and let Vue 'play' it.  

Octane -is- a viable option as an external render, particularly if you don't want to add other programs like Vue or Lightwave to your workflow. I haven't had a chance to test it out (yet. Vacation next week, though...... :D ). The downside to Octane is that it forces you to learn optimizing; you are limited to the texture slots that the GPU is built with, so you have to be real careful about what you load and how many textures, bumpmaps, transmaps, normal maps (basically anything that looks like a texture takes as texture slot). And you have to use a specific family of  NVIDIA GPUs, as Octane is built to exploit the Cuda architecture. But that downside is actually a good thing. Optimizing is one of the sorely needed skills in the Poser-verse. Poser can handle gobs of huge textures, but not a lot of other apps can handle the translation (You can easily crash out Vue with two Vickies and the right texture sets...or at least choke it to the point it runs like molasses).

What I'm hoping is that Octane and Vue can create similar enough lighting conditions that I can use Vue for exteriors and distance work, Octane for closeup Poser work, and match the light enough so they can co-exist without screaming the fact to the heavens.  

being a cheapskate with a limited budget, I have found the beta version of carrara 8.5 is pretty good for rendering poser animated scenes. The lighting needs adjusting and poser dynamics don't work , but on the whole pretty decent rendered results.

I've never been able to get Poserfusion to work well in 3D Studio. I just export OBJ files and import those into 3DS. Render with either MentalRay or Vray.

I've never even tried to get a handle on Poser lights or cameras.

Octane -is- a viable option as an external render, particularly if you don't want to add other programs like Vue or Lightwave to your workflow. I haven't had a chance to test it out (yet. Vacation next week, though...... :D ). The downside to Octane is that it forces you to learn optimizing; you are limited to the texture slots that the GPU is built with, so you have to be real careful about what you load and how many textures, bumpmaps, transmaps, normal maps (basically anything that looks like a texture takes as texture slot). And you have to use a specific family of  NVIDIA GPUs, as Octane is built to exploit the Cuda architecture. But that downside is actually a good thing. Optimizing is one of the sorely needed skills in the Poser-verse. Poser can handle gobs of huge textures, but not a lot of other apps can handle the translation

If you get a 600 series NVidia card (the 650's are around $150) you can load a total of 232 different textures.  Only very large Poser scenes are going to exceed that.

The plugin run INSIDE Poser, so no need to export scenes.  Just animate and render all in the one app.

The DEMO version of the OctaneRender for Poser plugin will not let you save, so you can't render animations with it.  Stills are fine though.

Octane is a unbiased rendered, so going to give a more realistic result that Vue (and all the other renders mentioned).  Worth keeping in mind if you are going to stitch the results together.

Paul

Quote - Octane is a unbiased rendered, so going to give a more realistic result that Vue (and all the other renders mentioned).  Worth keeping in mind if you are going to stitch the results together.

I'm still not convinced by that at all. I've seen Lightwave do incredible realistic renders, so does maya and 3D Studio Max and even Vue creates some very realistic results that will be very hard to surpass. But.... I haven't seen anyone using Poser and the Octance render coming close to what I've seen people doing when the combine Poser with the other rendering engines. I've heard the claim many times now, but haven't seen the proof yet. Yes, the renders look better, but most of them don't even come close to what I've seen users do with Vue, Max and so on. It's the main reason I have not shown a real interest in Octane and LuxRender. As I mentioned before they're a good alternative for the Poser rendering engine, but personally I'm not placing them on the same level as some of the others yet. to be very honest, I've seen a few good examples, but most I've seen so far aren't even better then what you can achieve with FireFly. That's not Octane or LuxRenders fault, that has more to do with the users and understanding getting from Poser to those rendering engines and making the most of them. After all they do need a different aproach the what we're used to if you want to make the best of them.

I understand you do think the Poser & Octane combination is already up there with the other rendering engines, but you are obligated to do so, after all you don't want to hurt your own sales :biggrin:

Would like to know how Shade 13 and compares... 

Also, do any of these programs allow adding soft-body or cloth effects to imported figures?

Maya does, 3D Studio Max does, I'm pretty sure Cinema4D does and I think LightWave may do it as well.

All of those porgrams are out of my price-range.  Even Shade Pro is a bit steep, but I would still buy it if it addressed my needs.  Carrara 9 has been announced for Q4/Q1, but I have been down that road already once before...

I guess I was never clear on which programs import Poser scenes/figures and which ones host them.  I'd assumed hosted content might not allow the full range of modification a program allows for native content, and imported content would not reflect changes made later to the original content within Poser.

(I've never understood why Poser doesn't have some kind of soft-bodys, even a hack would be better than nothing.  I always imagined that they could work like magnets and waves do, as spherical zones with inner and outer falloff, but with an elasticity of movement relative to their parent object.  I was surprised again that PoserPhysics did not attempt to provide this functionality.)

Attached Link: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5

There are Octane plugins for Lightwave, Maya, 3ds, C4D, etc.  People use them because the render quality and speed from Octane is better than the in-built renderer for these apps.  Professionals are rendering animations from these apps using Octane.

but personally I'm not placing them on the same level as some of the others yet.

The OctaneRender for Poser plugin uses EXACTLY the same renderer as the OctaneRender for 3DS plugin, and Maya plugin, and the Octane Standalone app.  What you can do in one, you can do in the others.

If you need "proof" of the sort of quality of renders you can get from Octane - check out the link provided.  There are a few animations in there too.

Thanks for the link, proofs exactly my point, the Poser and Octane combinations just isn't as good when you combine other high end apps with octane. I didn't say you can't do quality with octane, I said the poser-octane combination isn't up there with the others. If you take time go through the thread and compare the poser images to the rest they post, it's easily spotted they're just not as stunning as the others and a lot don't even look better then what people with skills render inside poser.

On the whole octane seems to have a slight problem with realistic characters, no matter what application they come from. A lot of the images I've seen add a certain gloss to the skin that makes it look unrealistic and with a good number of poser-octace images I did see that effect was even worse. It's obvious that it's not just create and click render with octane, one does need to make a considerable effort to get the best out of octane, otherwise you end up with realistic renders with an unrealistic figure and that's what I see a lot in octane. Very realistic looking props, with almost plastic skin figures.

Anyway, we can go back and forth as much as we want, in the end it's choice people make. I do understand octane can render a lot faster and give great quality if you do have the right hardware, but you're going to need to invest into hardware get the best out of octane. I'm sure that within a decade hardware has changed so much that most 3D applications will offer us cpu with gpu supported rendering or gpu with cpu supported rendering. But for now, a lot of people still have gpu's that just won't cut it.

By the way, pro or not, I wouldn't render an animation with poser either, it's just not cut out to do that at all. There are way better alternatives to use on their own or in combination with poser to create animations. If you've paid attention, you will know even the poser team is experimenting with opengl gpu rendering in the lastest poser versions. It's a bit hidden at the moment, but it is there and is already a huge improvement over what it used to be, so who knows what the next versions will bring..... two render engines in on app may be?

What part of the attached image is not realistic enough for you?

Disclaimer: The above image was created and render by Rikk the Gaijin - an incredibly talented artist - but it illustrates the full potential of the Octane rendering engine.

Paul

Quote - What are your thoughts on Vue ?

I tried Vue once but had an error on every attempted import of a Poser scene, so I gave up. This was about a year ago and I believe there was an issue that has since been solved.

I also tried Pose2Lux. This worked very well and made beautiful renders, but as an animator my big priority is speed.

I think Octane sounds very interesting, I think the results look very good, but I don't have a CUDA graphic card. I even thought about making the hardware investment just to try it out, but the limitation on textures put me off, some of my scenes are very big...

I may be able to snag an edu version of C4D, in which case I am in. The inbuilt render engines are very fast and produce excellent results (which are getting better and better as I gradually come to grips with the material room).

Today I managed to import a Poser scene with dynamic cloth and hair. The cloth came in perfectly, the hair sim looked a bit strange, but it is very easy and unbelievably fast to do the hair sim in C4D, with great results, and the internal hair material system is excellent.

I think C4D is the way to go (for my humble self at least), and the main reason is the rather fab Interposer plugin. I just hope the next update brings WM compatibility.

(SM need to grab this bloke and wave some cash his way before DAZ snag him and he wastes more time on this InterGenesis nonsense.)

Quote - On the whole octane seems to have a slight problem with realistic characters, no matter what application they come from.

What part of the attached image is not realistic enough for you?

Disclaimer: The above image was created and render by Rikk the Gaijin - an incredibly talented artist - but it illustrates the full potential of the Octane rendering engine.

Paul

Yep, so you've just proven my point..... on the whole octance seems to have a slight problem with realistic characters, unless you're an incredible talented artist. Let's be honest, if we were would we still be using poser? No, well perhaps to import out own characters into or sell them, but otherwise no. If that would have been a image from poser rendered in octane you would have blown me (and everyone else) away, now you've just confirmed what you and I know is true..... you're never going to achieve this by using poser & octane, you need a lot more to accomplish that and the majority of octane or even 3D users aren't going to achieve that at all, so on the whole........

Octane renders as good as the materials you provide to it. It has nothing to do with Poser or any other application. If you apply it with a realistic texture and apply material setting which are fitting to the texture and light conditions, it will render it as realistic as it can be - exactly the same as with 3DMax or any other software.

The image Face_Off has shown could have been initiated from Poser (I do not know what the artist uses). I have no idea what point you were trying to make, but I see no proof at all that Poser would not be capable of this kind of render with Octane.

In the end it is the artist who decides what material setups are the best for the image he/she wants to produce. Since that final decision is made in Octane it does not matter what software is used to provide that 3d content to Octane.

Proper material and light setup are key in any render engine.

Quote - but I see no proof at all that Poser would not be capable of this kind of render with Octane.

I see no proof at all that octane is able to do it and in this case, lack of proof that it can do so, means it can't, until you proof it otherwise. I don't have to prove you can't do it, someone needs to prove you can do it. We can discuss this back and forth, but someone has to show proof that the poser-octane is able to do such realistic renders. What I've seen so far, it's not realistic at all. So everyone start posting more realistic renders then we can do in poser..... since that's what's being claimed in this thread. When it comes to rendering, claiming means showing the render to back up the claim. I'm very curious to see if anyone can achieve a higher level of realism with octane!

‘Skin to win,’ as they say at spring break – when they aren’t calling for an appearance by the former President. The Octane render is interesting – very nice indeed. I have to say though to my personal view, it looks just a wee bit like a doll, and I don’t see quite the depth and life that I have seen in some of the best Poser renders. I don’t think that’s necessarily a limitation of Octane. Poser’s users and developers have spent years bringing it to the level it is now in terms of realistic skin. It’s not realistic (no pun intended) to expect the same level of achievement in a relatively new render engine (in conjunction with Poser). Even if the render engine already has a good base solution like Max’s FastSkin, someone has to either learn an entirely different way to do things or hope for a reasonable start via an exporter of some sort and then tweak from there. Much as I love Vue, without SkinVue, it would be a much less attractive option for Poser figures. If realism is your thing, then just about any of the established renderers has a large selection of architectural and other shaders available. Really high quality human skin solutions seem to be more of a roll your own proposition – at least from what I’ve seen.

I’m sure it may be less of an issue for some doing animations, where you have lots of other things going on and may not focus on a character for lengthy shots. I don’t animate but I can see where in many cases, speed would be a powerful factor. Maybe, given that speed seems to be the main reason for considering GPU to begin with, the point is moot. I’m sure that as these hardware rendering solutions mature, and more of the really talented Poser folks like Face_Off work on the connection, we’ll see better and better results. To be fair, I think its already at least 90% of the way there. I should hasten to add that the render shown would be more than good enough for 98% of what I would be interested in doing. It only falls just shy (IMO) of the tippy top, what’s yer index of confabulation level, that late model Poser can be pushed to.

I agree with that.

I'm sure we'll start seeing a lot more interesting Octane renders once users start getting to grips with the materials. (But I can understand Aeilkema's "let's wait and see" position.)

And indeed, C4D comes with lots of excellent materials for inanimate objects. But nothing for skin and hair, and all the presets I've been able to snag here and there in the so called high end forums have been complete and utter rubbish - ha!

Fortunately, everything you need to "roll your own" is there in the software. I am now doubly grateful to BB, for he didn't just hand out fab shaders, but explained the way to make them. I find it reasonably easy to get what I want in the C4D material editor, precisely because I've got a decent understanding of the Poser Material Room. I suspect this will be exactly the same for users getting into Max, Lightwave, Octane or whatever.

I'm already getting hair that is much more realistic than anything I ever achieved with Firefly. I have some more work to do with skin (actually, I think EZskin may have harmed me, because I would just bung it on and everything would look good. I stopped thinking about skin shaders and now I have to start! Just goes to show what great work Snarly and BB actually did there...).

That's true. I've seen some awesome C4D skin e.g. the 'Silent Man' tutorial, but most of the shaders I've seen released (at least the free ones) looked to deliver rather unimpressive results. Maybe people keep those to themselves once they've jumped all the hurdles - Poser users are actually rather 'spoiled' in that regard. Those with the requisite interest/talent/patience are always going to be able to get good results with just about any renderer. Frankly though though, wider use is going to require something on the order of EZskin or SkinVue, for those who would prefer to use that energy on other aspects of the process.

I think you are getting confused with the ability of Poser to generate realistic scene geomerty verses the ability of Octane to render scenes realistically.  If I loaded Rikk the Gaijins outstanding render above into Poser and the OctaneRender for Poser plugin, it would render exactly as above - same speed, same quality....since it's using the same render engine. 

Attached is a render I did a while back - this is the screenshot after it had been rendering for under 1 min.Prep time for the materials was nil - I think I used the defaults.  I've been rendering with Firefly for 10 years, and as good as it is, I know that I couldn't get this level of realism from Firefly, and certainly not in under 1 min.

Attached Link: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/30095793

Pauil

I continue slogging along the C4D path...

I'm getting great renders and really fast rendertimes, but...

...I have to redo all important materials by hand. Interposer does a fairly decent job of transfering Poser shaders to C4D, and for background stuff, I can usually leave it. Anything critical means I have to get my head around another material room and get to work. This, unfortunately, is par for the course, and C4D, Max or Maya users have to do the same if they try another renderer like Vray or whatever. It would also be the same for Octane or Lux.

That being said, if you've mastered the Poser Material Room, getting another app sorted out is quite easy. It's all the same stuff: diffuse, specular, reflections and so on.

...hair! Absolutely excellent! What ab fab shader and sim games they have! Anything anywhere near this in Poser and transmapped hair is dead.

...skin(?)! All the tools are there, better than anything we have in my opinion. But no ready made shaders, no examples, nothing like EZskin. I can't find many examples of any decent work by C4D veterans. But, get back to basics, read all of BB's ancient threads over again and try and understand. Fiddle with your SSS, your blinn, and your fresnel reflections and you can get this sorted.

...car paint, stone, wood, glass and all that stuff: lots of goodies in the internal library to get you started. They really are very good. I suppose most users are doing renders where the main objects are comprised of car paint, stone, wood and so on...

...animating a car or a spaceship in C4D is a breeze. Animating a human is a smegging nightmare. I would recommend every C4D user wanting to do anything in this direction to get a copy of Poser immediately

...and finally... I thought the Queue Manager in Poser was a bit quirky, hahaha, the one in C4D is mental, hahahahahahaha! If that is high end, then my end is so high it's interplanetary.

So, still a beginner, still a smegging Poser beginner, but wow, there are great possibilities out there. I know this doesn't interest many people here (most happy with their default lights and depthmapped shadows rendered in 20000x14000), but my adventure continues, perhaps it might help somebody else...

(Anybody got EZskin for C4D?)

Paul,

I applaud your work and I think this Octane business is taking off, I've seen plenty of decent renders.

Unfortunately, no good for me right now. Perhaps with the next generation of graphics cards (I need more texture slots!).

But Paul..... you're still beating around the bush, the thread is about rendering engines that are a good alternative for Firefly and all you do is show us how great octane is, which none of us doubt it is, but the thread is about how well the combination native poser figures and octane is. So fasr you haven't show anything in that department.... stop beating around the bush and start spilling the beans.

First image: FF render of a scene with IDL enabled, EZSkin applied, light setup as provided for the scene. Rendered with medium high quality settings. I would change the light considerably if this was a real image I wanted to do

This image is for reference

Nothing changed except that I  disabled the poser lights and enabled the lights in the room in the mesh (ceiling lights) and I used the Daylight render which takes the poser sun as its settings.

So this is pretty much a straight conversion of the plugin from Poser to Octane

This is the same scene again except that I changed the following:

• I used a preset to add SSS to the figures skin (load the preset and apply to any figure while keeping its original textures - pretty much what EZSkin does)

• I changed the material of the sofa to one Octane provides in its library

• Changed the lights to my personal preference - a bit more intensity and a bit more diffused shadows.

I spent about 5-10 minutes making the changes - mostly checking out in the render how it looks

Is this a perfect realistic render? No, but the result has improved a lot with only minimal changes.

So yes, Octane is a valid alternative to the firefly render engine in poser.

There are limitations to what it can do - as other people have said - but for many users these limitations do not really apply. I can render a scene with 6 or 7 people in it with plenty of props, so it is not limited to small scenes with a single figure.

Firefly can do things which Octane cannot do and vice versa. So if you have access to both of the engines you can see which fits the image better

For some reason, my browser will only load 1/2 of the Poser image, even though its smaller 993x942 @ 179kb vs 1024x942 @ 254kb & 261kb for the Octane renders - had to use FlashGet to get the whole thing. Would be interesting to see the FF image with similar attention to the lighting as per Octane version. As presented, Octane looks better.

Quote - For some reason, my browser will only load 1/2 of the Poser image, even though its smaller 993x942 @ 179kb vs 1024x942 @ 254kb & 261kb for the Octane renders - had to use FlashGet to get the whole thing. Would be interesting to see the FF image with similar attention to the lighting as per Octane version. As presented, Octane looks better.

That is what I said in the first image - I would improve that too. Most likely textures too.

I would improve the 3rd image as well - lots of things I would improve. But then it is not a true conversion anymore. In both cases you would modify the light and materials to fit the render. I wanted to show a "ready made lightset" wich belongs to the scenery compared to whatever Octane made of it. The infinite light converts directly into sunlight. The point lights convert to spheres and the spotlights to one directional planes. That works, but takes long to render (sphere distributes light in all directions. That is why I disabled them) so I made the ceiling lights into area lights which you can see in the second image. No changes in Poser, just changing the light material into an emitter.

If you would do work in both cases you will get good images, but totally different.

Thanks for the images, they're looking good. How long does it take to render such images with octane?

It depends on what quality you want. I always switch on an option where it saves the image every 500 samples. If I don't see a difference anymore, I stop. In the last image I was satisfied after 2000 samples. This was about 12 minutes on my machine with a GTX 680 graphics card. The GTX580 is faster. But if you add an additional card you cut the render time in half. If you use a cloud render engine, the transfer of the final image back to your machine probably would take longer.

The rendertime is defined for a large amoung by the number of glossy and specular materials. In this case almost all materials in the scene had a glossy material (specular in Posers language). So if you want to have a speedier render you would turn it off for those materials which do not need to be glossy

One more question..... does the quality of the image depend on the gpu or is the power of the gpu just used for rendering the image without influencing the quality?

On second thought..... I've just went over to check out the octane render engine and requirements and I suddenly lost interest. €279 for the rendering engine and at least €400 for the graphics card (preferably 2 of them) is just a little too much for me. With that kind of money I can do all kinds of lovely things, I'll stick to good old Poser and Vue and may check out luxrender, that one has a much more attractive price.

Let's not even talk about how bad such graphics cards are for the enviroment, they're a complete waste of energy.... such a card uses more power in idle then my whole computer.

I think the price is quite reasonable for the reduction in rendertime.

I just see the texture limit giving me all kinds of headaches.

It's not that bad.

Attached image is nowhere to my liking yet, but that has nothing to do with octane
This image has 5 gen4 figures plus clothing, 2 genesis figures and another 3rd party figure plus a set of props

Quote - I think the price is quite reasonable for the reduction in rendertime.

I just see the texture limit giving me all kinds of headaches.

The image took about 12 minutes to render in octane, but looking at it, I'd say with good light settings on a good machine it would take about the same time in Poser to do so, after all the image is only 1.024px × 947px. I'm not sure if I ever want to pay well over €1000 to get a little reduction in rendering time. For that kind of money, even the €679 that's needed for only one good graphics card and the octane license, I can buy a really fast i7 or even go Xeon and I do have my doubts that octane will really be that much faster then poser. But of course, I may be totally wrong.

Next thing is the limited amount of memory a graphic card has, the €400 gtx 580 only has 1536 MB, you will run into problems with this one pretty soon running out of memory. The gtx 680 has more memory, 4GB, but is more expensive as well, well over €550. Sooner or later, if you want to render multi-figure scenes on a high resolution, you're going to run out of memory. How about rendering images on printable resolution, like 4000x3000 or even much higher? I'm not doing renders for screens, I'm doing them for printing, books, comics, posters and such, I doubt octane will work for that, I'll be running out of memory soon.

Then there's power consumption, most people happily forget that. Run this thing on full power and it uses  370-380w and idle 100-140w depending on the brand. The gtx 680 does better, full power 317w and idle 96w. But.... pitch that against the i7 3770 with the HD4000..... 31w idle and 105w full load. Depending on how fast octane really is, it will be either cheaper or more expensive to run.

As for octane being faster then a good cpu rendering, I'm sure it is, but how much? I've seen the 10-15 times faster quoted, but compared to what? I've been looking for benchmarks and comparisons, but I can't find them anywhere, so how much faster is it in reality? Once? Twice? Ten times? Who knows? Until there are benchmarks, no one really knows.

Well, I've seen plenty of reports from users finding a dramatic increase in render speed, and discussions on the Lightwave forums regarding the improved speed and quality in comparison to the (very good and very fast) Lightwave render engine.

As I said before, Octane's texture limit disqualifies itself from the point of view of my personal requirements. Nevertheless, I can see it being viable for many Poser users, especially those who already happen to have a suitable graphic card.

However, I do agree it would be good to have some benchmarks. Perhaps some kind of standard scene like they use at http://www.3drender.com/challenges/index.htm could be compared with different render engines?

I suppose a "Standard Poser Scene" would be some kind of V4/slutwear/temple/sword/default lights kind of thing...

Quote - > Quote - I think the price is quite reasonable for the reduction in rendertime.

I just see the texture limit giving me all kinds of headaches.

 

The image took about 12 minutes to render in octane, but looking at it, I'd say with good light settings on a good machine it would take about the same time in Poser to do so, after all the image is only 1.024px × 947px. I'm not sure if I ever want to pay well over €1000 to get a little reduction in rendering time. For that kind of money, even the €679 that's needed for only one good graphics card and the octane license, I can buy a really fast i7 or even go Xeon and I do have my doubts that octane will really be that much faster then poser. But of course, I may be totally wrong.

Next thing is the limited amount of memory a graphic card has, the €400 gtx 580 only has 1536 MB, you will run into problems with this one pretty soon running out of memory. The gtx 680 has more memory, 4GB, but is more expensive as well, well over €550. Sooner or later, if you want to render multi-figure scenes on a high resolution, you're going to run out of memory. How about rendering images on printable resolution, like 4000x3000 or even much higher? I'm not doing renders for screens, I'm doing them for printing, books, comics, posters and such, I doubt octane will work for that, I'll be running out of memory soon.

Then there's power consumption, most people happily forget that. Run this thing on full power and it uses  370-380w and idle 100-140w depending on the brand. The gtx 680 does better, full power 317w and idle 96w. But.... pitch that against the i7 3770 with the HD4000..... 31w idle and 105w full load. Depending on how fast octane really is, it will be either cheaper or more expensive to run.

As for octane being faster then a good cpu rendering, I'm sure it is, but how much? I've seen the 10-15 times faster quoted, but compared to what? I've been looking for benchmarks and comparisons, but I can't find them anywhere, so how much faster is it in reality? Once? Twice? Ten times? Who knows? Until there are benchmarks, no one really knows.

It would depend on the quality of your graphics card vs. CPU.  How can you benchmark?

Anyway, there's no comparison between quality.  Octane is a phyically accurate unbiased render engine.  Firefly is not.  In the amount of time FF renders a biased, incorrectly lit scene, you can get full GI, with HDRI, caustics, and all kinds of realistic results with Octane.  You're paying for quality and speed.  Let's be real.

Try rendering in FF with one light.  Just one emitter light.  Then do it in Octane with Pathtracing or PMD kernel.  Realism will be unbelievably better in Octane.

If you want to see the quality of what Octane is capable of with Poser stuff, just look around at what pple are doing with Reality/Luxrender.

Octane uses the same unbiased rendering algorithms (pathtracing) to render it's scenes as Luxrender.  So whatever Lux is capable of it terms of lighting, Octane can do, but about 10x faster, depending on your graphics card.  It also has other render engine kernels, which are optimized for the GPU.  So if you want very good scenes rendered similar to say Vray, you just use the diffuse kernel, which is like Brute Force Occlusion.  That is very very fast.  Faster than even Vray on my machines, and I only use a mid range Nvidia card.

The octane material tree is deep and totally functional.  Paul will tell you it's about as good or better in some ways to the Poser materials.  Plus you can get real caustics, and SSS.

I'll be posting some Octane/Poser renders soon to my gallery.  I just cleaned house, and I don't have any of my older images up right now, because Octane changed the way I work so much, even my old Vray renders look like crap to me these days. ;)

Quote - It would depend on the quality of your graphics card vs. CPU.  How can you benchmark?  

Anyway, there's no comparison between quality.  Octane is a phyically accurate unbiased render engine.  Firefly is not.  In the amount of time FF renders a biased, incorrectly lit scene, you can get full GI, with HDRI, caustics, and all kinds of realistic results with Octane.  You're paying for quality and speed.  Let's be real.

Try rendering in FF with one light.  Just one emitter light.  Then do it in Octane with Pathtracing or PMD kernel.  Realism will be unbelievably better in Octane.

Seems like you've got a lot of experience with comparing poser renders with their octane counterpart renders. So it should be easy for you to show us some of that amazing work and how long it took you too render in octane and how long it would take in poser.

I'm still dying to see those unbelievable better realism octane rendered poser images, so fari haven't seen them. I did see some good images in this thread (be it completely out of focus) and other threads (some of them quite grainy), but they weren't better what poser can do and I sure haven't encountered unbelievable realistic octance rendered poser scenes.

It wouldn't be a problem to compare benchmarks at all... get the same image.... let render engine x render it with a number of settings and then let render engine y render with similar settings. All we've done so far is talk theory, let's put some meat to it, I'm assuming people are not making up stuff as we go along, so it should be easy to show some results. So, let's move away from theory and hype and show some reality.

EDIT: I'm in the process of buying a new computer and if this is something worth pursuing, then I'd like to invest in it. I'll check out the luxrender images, but luxrender is much cheaper and is said to be going gpu as well as cpu..... here it comes, cpu for quality and gpu for speed. As for 10 times faster..... here we go again.... ten times faster compared to what? An i7? i5? i3? Core2Duo? Problem is that if you do some searching around the web the 10-15 times faster is diminished by quite a few people, claiming it's not and that's why benchmarks are lacking.

Quote -  
Seems like you've got a lot of experience with comparing poser renders with their octane counterpart renders. So it should be easy for you to show us some of that amazing work and how long it took you too render in octane and how long it would take in poser.

Well,  I have a lot of experience rendering Poser scenes in a lot of different engines.  MentalRay, Vray, Luxrender, and Octane, and also Firefly.  Firefly has a lot of problems attainting realistic lighting without a lot of help, and even then requires some postwork to correct issues with artifacting (especially with DOF), and GI.  A lot of the great renders you see people post from Firefly have a lot of postwork done to them to correct the artifacts and incorrect results.

Quote -   I'm still dying to see those unbelievable better realism octane rendered poser images, so fari haven't seen them. I did see some good images in this thread (be it completely out of focus) and other threads (some of them quite grainy), but they weren't better what poser can do and I sure haven't encountered unbelievable realistic octance rendered poser scenes.

Why do you think POSER scenes, specifically, will not render with excellent photorealism in Octane?  You must concede that the render engine is capable of producing photorealistic results, correct?  I mean, you SEE photoreal renders created with Octane of many types of scenes on the Octane website, so why do you feel that isn't possible using a POSER mesh?  What is inherantly different in your eyes regarding Poser OBJ vs. any other OBJ from any other application?  I do not understand your skepticism or reluctance to believe it's capable of more realism than Firefly.  It makes no sense.

This guy does most of his work in Octane, and I'd say his results are better than Firefly (I'm talking about results from the engine, not artistic talent):

http://thepapertiger.deviantart.com/

Perhaps you should contact him and ask about render times, etc.  I will be uploading some of my Octane renders to my gallery, but I don't have time to do it immediately, because I'm not at home today. 

I mean, these images look very much like so many of the Reality/Luxrender renders I've seen in terms of accurate lighting, and realistic materials, but were rendered in Octane.  (warning for nudity)...

http://thepapertiger.deviantart.com/art/Vanity-346226082

http://thepapertiger.deviantart.com/art/Biopunk-360407697

So I'm not sure what the argument is about it's capability to render Poser scenes just like any other scene.  Seems silly.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/the-metropolitan-collection---london-v4-2/97977/

Just as much as it doesn't make sense to believe that poser 2012 wouldn't be able to create realistic images. I hardly doubt most people are even aware of what Poser 2012 can do these days. I've looked at the images and while they are good, they still aren't more realistic then what poser 2012 can do, see link provided. On the contrary, if you look at the octane images, you will quickly notice the famous barbie doll shine on the bodies and as with lot's of octane images certain parts of the body are out of focus, while they should not be at all. So far, I haven't seen anything that Poser can't do as well or as realistic, you're completely underestimating poser as many people do.

We're not comparing poser 6 anymore, com'on give poser a little more credit.... it's 2012.... SSS, IDL (Yes, one lightsource only renders!!!) and lot's of other excellent light and render improvements. If you compare octance to poser 6 or maybe even 7, ok, octane is way better in realism, but not when pitched against the newest versions. Faster yes, sure, but it comes at a cost if you take time to study the images.

Attached Link: Poser 2012 render

For animation, as an example, you won't get GI flicker or inconsistent IDL in Octane from frame to frame.  It's unbiased, so everyting gets calculated accurately, and evenly in every frame.

I can tell you right now that the DOF in that render was most likely post processed in some way, because have you tried to get that kind of creamy DOF from Firefly? Good luck.  You'll be waiting a week for the render.

I know what PP2012 can do.  See attached link.

I doubt that.  I've done extensive rendering with Firefly in 2012.  Under many conditions.  I know what I'm talking about.