... of waiting for renders to finish. My own fault, mostly, because I go for high quality and crowded scenes. Anyway, I'm springing for a new computer this week and I was wondering if it is worth it to jump from Poser Pro 2012 to Pro 2014. It claims faster render times. Is that proving to be true?

My own experence is, it's about 15-20% faster, but others have other experiences.

Faster for me for sure. pp2014.

It's faster in some areas, especially IDL lit scenes.

I'm on Octane now, with mighty video GPU's. That's fast.

Thanks, everyone. aRtBee, Octane is not somethin I have considered. Are you setting the scene in Poser and then rendering in Octane. The computer I intend to purchase is heavy on cores. With Octane, should I go another direction computerwise? 

Octane is a Nvidia GPU based render engine. There are some things you should look up on the video cards based on the complexity of the scenes you plan on rendering in Octane.

Texture units, ram on the card, number of CUDA cores and GPU type, all come into play depending on how much you want to render at once.

I would still get a decent cpu in your next machine even if you go the Octane route.

I got both.

First I got the heavy CPU (6 core i7-990X @ 4GHz) with a rather simple graphics card.

After a year or so I upgraded the graphics card to the heavy duty kind (2x nvidea GTX770-OC).

and yeah, set up in Poser, and the card keeps on rendering while I alter the Poser scene, it's real time, very handy for positioning reflective stuff, and adjustment of complex materials and lighting.

Some disadvantages:

 - Octane doesn't deal with dynamic hair too well

 - it doesn't deal with complex material room setups and procedural textures, but you can add Octane-mats instead

I still do use the heavy duty CPU too, for Vue (which does not do GPU rendering), for Firefly renders, and for the Reality / LuxRender combo.

To me, Octane is the high end ($$$) solution for getting high quality pretty fast. When loading your machine with high end video cards, do mind

 - your wallet
 - your power availability
 - your air flow / cooling capacity

in my case, my two cards are a bit stacked to each other in the box and temp goes up to 95C, while noise levels are going up accordingly. My next ones will be liquid cooled.

Thanks!!!

I have Poser Pro 2014 running on an i7 quad core with 16 GB of RAM. Yesterday, I started a render with two characters and DOF. 14 hours later, it's about halfway through precalculating subsurface scattering . . .

I hate long renders, too. But in this case, I really wanted DOF 'cause it makes the scene look better. I'll be leaving for work soon, so my computer will be rendering all day long.

for comparison http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2474029

at 1200x1200 (@ 3200 Samples/pixes) took 60 mins in Octane on my HW. Tomorrow and day after I'll issue two other ones. All IDL DOF included.

Quote - I have Poser Pro 2014 running on an i7 quad core with 16 GB of RAM. Yesterday, I started a render with two characters and DOF. 14 hours later, it's about halfway through precalculating subsurface scattering . . .

I hate long renders, too. But in this case, I really wanted DOF 'cause it makes the scene look better. I'll be leaving for work soon, so my computer will be rendering all day long.

If you have Photoshop, you can do Depth-of-field in postwork if you output a z-map. The only trick is you want to turn off the post-filtering (or minimize it), otherwise there will be "haloing" around the figures since the z-map (or depth-map) isn't filtered.

Sometimes I do precisely what you've recommended. Lately, Poser has been REALLY slow at rendering indoor scenes. I've been trying to render for three days, and I can't get past subsurface scattering. So, I'm back to rendering just the characters, then the background, and compositing everything. It's a bit of a pain, but it's notably faster.

Sigh . . . .

Quote - If you have Photoshop, you can do Depth-of-field in postwork if you output a z-map. The only trick is you want to turn off the post-filtering (or minimize it), otherwise there will be "haloing" around the figures since the z-map (or depth-map) isn't filtered.

The only problem is that it doesn't handle transparencies (especially hair). But you can also blur your depth map in Photoshop (or any other program, really), which makes transitions softer and helps minimize or eliminate halos.

Ugh! I dumped my render and sent it to the Queue Manager 13 hours ago. I just got back from work and it's only 18.7% done.

This is RIDICULOUS!

Quote - Ugh! I dumped my render and sent it to the Queue Manager 13 hours ago. I just got back from work and it's only 18.7% done.

This is RIDICULOUS!

Ugh.  I hear ya.  I have a scene that is taking FOREVER to render for some reason too, and it doesn't make sense.  It rendered with normal times, then add 1 object, which I've used before and it is going slowwwww.  It's also not using much RAM despite having plenty available.

And after re-installing PP2014, my Queue Manager isn't working.  Emailed support, and re-installed in the recommended order.  That didn't work and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.

If you can afford a second computer (or if what you have is good enough to be your secondary, spring for new) you can offload jobs to the second/third what ever computer(s).

Check out this good thread on render settings, especially the posts from vilters.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=4109021&ebot_calc_page#message_4109021