hi,

i'm interesting in poser 2014 (or poser 10) because, in the matrice feature comapraison there is "Rendering Speed Optimization"

http://poser.smithmicro.com/poser10-poserpro2014/#compare

what is it ?

does it mean poser2014 can render the EXACT scene in less time than poser 2012 (that i already own) and with the same quality ?

is it possible to have a speed factor ? x2 ? or less ? or more ?

i would to know whenever it is better (mean less expensive) to buy new poser +250$€) or upgrade my hardware (+800$€ to get 6core cpu to replace my 4core without change anything else in material)

is it possible to have a 5days trial version to test the render speed ?

thanks for help and advice.

There are no trial versions of PP2014.
Over all, PP2014 renders between 10 to 20% faster then PP2012 for the same scene at the same settings. (a lot depends on the nodes used and the amount of calculations required)

Poser (any version) renders faster with more cores, and it recognises hypertreading. In General preferences, set the number of treads to the number of cores of your CPU.

A quad core = 4 treads
A hyperquadcore = 8 treads
A 6 core = 6 treads.

What you do is up to you. A 6 core will render faster then a 4 core.

The speed difference will depend on what is in the scene, how it is set up, and how economical your render settings are.

Optimising the material room setup and render settings will bring you more speed then any CPU or Poser upgrade can ever bring.

I think Pro 14 has a 30 day return policy.

some render engines render in real time.if you have the 3D card for it.

somebody might know if there's one for Poser

thanks for all you replies.

does anyone here have both poser 2014/10 and 2012/9  to make a test on a same example scene ?

As i said, the main point for me is money, i don't need other feature of pp2014/10 else the quicker render.

solution 1 : around 800$  if i upgrade my cpu, i will gain in global 33% of speed (by passing from 8 thread 3.33GHz to 12 thread to 3.33Ghz)

solution 2 : around 250$ : i f i upgrade the poser software, you said i might (not sure..) gain between 10 and 20% of speed.

solution 1 : 10% of gain costs 266$

solution 2 : 10% costs 250$ in least case (and 125$ in best case)

i am in an "no way" street because i have an old hardware architecture (core i7 classic), so if i upgrade the whole hardware (mb+cpu+ram) to the last architecture core i7-4xxx then i will gain at least 10% with exact same core/thread and frequency but it will cost more than 800$.

in other way , going to 6cores/12thread at 3.3Ghz costs me 800$ for the only cpu piece whereas in a whole new architecture (Core i7-4960X) would cost 1500$ to change the whole hardware (except storage and video card of course).

i can't render anywhere else Poser because i do render animations, (reality3 doesn't do animation) and i don't really know if Octane does it.  i want to render animation in real format (video codec, and NOT image by image with post work to do with reassembling the video...)

Best regards

Going from an i7 classic (920?) to an i7-4xxx should get you a 100% increase, probably more!

Any 6-core that fits in the old motherboard is going to be expensive and still slow compared to a modern i7 4 core.

Quote - Going from an i7 classic (920?) to an i7-4xxx should get you a 100% increase, probably more!

not really

i am in i7-975x and i can only go to 6core i7-990X  --->33% of gain for less than 800$ the cpu

going from i7-975x old hardware to newer i7-4770 (without extreme cpu) costs  more than 800$ (motherboard+memory+cpu...)  and only to gain 10% of speed

going from i7-975x old hardware to newer 6core cost more than 800$ (maybe 1500$) (motherboard+memory+cpu...) and the 6cores cpu is even more expensive and i'm nt sure there is a 2x factor of performance gain.

you see, i'd better to go to 6core i7-990X (or lower i7-980 6 cores) to gain 25 or 33% of speed for less of 800$.

changing memory to another one won't bring me 10% of speed

changing video card to newer neither

changing ssd to newer not at all (i'm stuck at sata2)

i can change only the CPU or the software to hope gain 10% (software) or 33% (hardware)

in one hand the software costs 250$ for 10% of assured speed, and in the other hand 800$ for 33% gain .

if i render a animation wo take 60min :

• changing software will take 50min for the render

• changing the cpu will take 40min to render at least

so i have to be sure of the gain time of poser 2014 render engine compared to the old poser 2012 render engine

a trial version would be pleased for me to test....

You're right, the 975 extreme is fast!

My Cinebench scores tell me the i7-4770k is:

...only 10% faster than the 990x,

...and 40% faster than the 975x.

Doesn't Poser have network rendering?

Have you thought of getting several cheap i5 or i3 machines?

Go with the CPU upgrade.

Although there is a speed gain between PP-2012 and PP-2014, 10 - 20% is quite optimistic and really depends on the scene.

I think I got a drop from ~11 seconds to ~9 seconds for a single nude figure by switching to PP-2014, but I rendered scenes that went from 30 min to 5 min on PP-2012 just by cleaning up completely wrong material settings. (And gaining much more realistic results, too)

So you can get much more by optimizing meshes and materials.

If speed, especially speed for animation is really your only criteria, then investing in a better machine is much wiser than upgrading to PP-2014. (And going from Poser 9 to Poser 10 will even give you less of an performance increase since they are both 32 Bit.)

Poser in general is very underpowered when it comes to animations.

As I wrote and Joe confirmed, the best speed increase can be obtained by cleaning up the  material room nodes setup and optimising the render settings.

my 2cts

 - according to the manual, and to various findings in recent threats, and so on: combining animation and IDL will spoil the fun as single core rendering is recommended for that to avoid flickering.

 - the major speed gain in the rendering process (P2012 vs 2014) is in the advanced / complex areas, with reflections and especially: when dealing with SSS and IDL. But from my point above, you'll either not using IDL and will hardly notice the speed difference, or you're using IDL and should better not do animation.

 - only the SSS, IDL and main render phases are multi-threaded. They benefit from more cores/threads and the 990X upgrade. Other parts of rendering, as well as about everything else in Poser (like Cloth and Hair sims) are single threaded. They benefit from overclocking.

 - network rendering is relevant for animation only, and it requires the frame by frame approach anyway. This way is supported by Luxrender (Reality) and Octane as well.

So, given your purpose, for I would go for a combi of CPU upgrade, overclocking and advanced cooling, while staying away from IDL.

Octane has a demo and a forum for questions.

Any one here know if Octane renders in video codec ?

as said: Octane supports the frame-by-frame way of work. As does Lux, as does Poser network rendering. You've got to assemble the video yourself.

This, by the way, is the standard workflow at profi level / in the industry. Not only because of the post-processing it supports, but it's far more crash prone too, and in case of issues, you only have to rerun a short image sequence instead of the whole lot. And you lose the quality at the latest stage in the process. Compressed avi's should not be input to any part of the flow any more.

Next to that, you need the video-editor anyway to put the sound & music in, to make any scene-fades, and so on.

well...i am stomached! or i dream or i'm dead

i contact the smith technical support and they said i can buy it and have the 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. so i did it.

and i installed pp2014 on the same machine, same SSD than pp2012 and i just finish so little test that let me in a orgasmic state.

first, here my render option :

in poser 2012 i rendered a classic scene (for me), it took 1min52

that one:
http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test1_aikoscence_a_2012.png

i did it more thant twice. and in poser 2014 it took 1m12 (gain 40s, almost 50% of time). My render is in 1920x1080

here the 2014 rended picture, i can see there is little different light and glide in the hair but it doesn't bore me.

http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test1_aikoscence_a_2014.png

then i decided to use a higher scene, so i choose a very close face pose.

this other render took 4min22 in poser 2012

in poser 2014, it took only 2min08 !!!!!!!! less than 50% of the time ! what's the hell ! am i dead ?

here the image of the render in p2014. You can see there is a difference (or bug) in the eye light and somewhere else on the skin. That do not bore me neither.

http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test2_aikoscence_b_2014.png

Then i did a third test : simple animation.

i choose to render a 480p video, 30 images, in opengl render (not firefly like previous test).

in poser 2012, it took 45s to render with avi xvid 64bits codec with 100% quality and motion blur activated.

This file :

http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test4_animation_with_xvid64bits100quality_2012.mp4

Then in poser 2014 it took....

well first problem, poser 2014 doesn't have the video codec anymore, so i can't render my 64bits xvid video (where i used hardware compression with cuda).

then i decided to use no compression avi and it took 28s !

P2014 did the same job with no codec in less time (not 50% but 10s of gain)

here the video file :
http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test4_animation_no_xvid64_2014.mp4

i gone back to pp2012 to redo the animation without xvid, in uncompressed avi, and it took 46s which is almot the same render time with hardware acceleration xvid64

here the file :

http://www.michael-remy.fr/poser_2012_versus_2014/test4_animation_no_xvid64_2012.mp4

in another test, i decided to unbury the old poser benchmark we can find there :

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2732765&page=3#203580672

in poser 2012, it took  23s and in poser 2014 it tooks 25s. So poser2014 failed here, or it didn't managed to do it better than 2012.

poser 2012

poser 2014 rendered benchmark (quite the same, i did not notice any difference)

This scene have many figures whereas my test1 test2 and animation have only one figure. Maybe it is the problem where p2014 is not improved there. Moreover, there is no idl use.

In my 2nd test (with big girl eyes), i use ray (see the light in the eyes), then p2014 splashed all and gains more 50% on p2012.

so .........what to think anymore......

i guess i will not have a 50% gain by changing my CPU, specially not for only 250€$ !

Well i think i will keep p2014 and do no cancel my 30day period!

I will do other tests, but these are really means for me.

Good Job sir.

AND?
You get the new fitting room, and the new morph brushes, and a TON of other little improvements.

Good JOB. I am sure you will like your PP2014.

Did you upgrade with the latest SR? Build 26066?

Oh, BTW, that old benchmark scene is not representative any more.
The material room setup is WAY too simple to get huge time improvements.

Oh? Vous etes de la France? Je vis dans le nord de la Belgique, la partie Néelandophone.

Attached Link: Aikoscence 2014 (hidden'sister of Gaara)

yep i tried directly the sr3 26066.

and by the way, for the french like me, and the european one, poser pro 2014 is only 225€ on amazon.fr, the full version, not the update at all. what a great price !

i can't believe with less 300€, i have twice my render speed....very impressive!

what will be pp2016.......i'm still waiting and wishing and begging for cuda nvidia or opencl support in firefly render ...

for whom wants to have more information about my hardware and hesitate to poser pro 2014, here my details :

cpu : i7-975X at normal 3.3GHz   4cores and 8 threads
mb : simple asus p6T classic, not even the deluxe one
ram : 12GB corsair trichannel 3x2 modules
ssd : samsung 840 (simple one, not the pro, neither sata 3, juste sata2
os : win 7 x64 pro (corp)
and i just migrate from poser pro 2012 sr3 to poser pro 2014 sr3 and gain mainly 50% in my render process.

What a cheap world in this software...i wonder if people at maya or 3ds community hadsuch speed improvrements from  a older version to a newer. maybe, but certainly not at only 250€ !

Good job smith micro and e-frontier old one....

life is great, isn't it?

And in due time, you can double your render speed again by shifting to the 990X (12 threads) at 4+ GHz. Which works for all your Poser versions! And all other software as well.

well,

i'm considering me already lucky. now, bying a 990x is a little to high because poser was the lone software i need to make quicker. and i did.

Mybe if i find a 980x less expensive, i will found into love but, not a 990x, not now anymore.

i see in your back line, you use Vue2014. in y old day, while i used poser6, people told me to use Vue to render my poser scene because vue render engine was faster than poser one. is it again true ? People also said than importing poser scene into Vue was quite easy because Poser6 and Vue are from the same editor (e-frontier) and require no retouch in vue, just the press render button to push. is it true again with p2014 and vue2014 ?

Putting character in a landscape (instead a photoshop retouch simple image) is another step for my creative activity (and hobbies).

Vue was my first choice, but since, i discovered Lumion v4 and that software seem very very very impresive and easy to use. But i don't know how it can manage using poser scene or figure. But it can importe collada and poser can export too....so... hope.

i'd just saw this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsK7nzlGgW8

and it blowed my mind and make me dream to import Poser figure and animation into lumion...

don't now if Lumion can handle Poser scenes directly, but it's e-onsoftware as well, so ???

Vue and Poser integrate at various levels. In the simplest form, Vue reads the scene file and imports - without the lights. Materials are translated to Vue materials (the translator cannot handle the entire Poser material tree) and objects are imported "just as". Vue does import Poser animation as well, objects and materials do not have to be static. And as usual with all external render engines, there are issues with handling dynamic hair.

In a more complex form, Vue inherits the ability to use all Poser dials to pose and animate each figure from within Vue directly. Second, Vue gets the ability to consult Poser at render time to handle the material tree, in which case no translation of materials takes place at all. Both cases require Poser to be available - in RAM, so your active ram requirements sort of double.

Generally, Vue lighting and its handling at render time is superior over Poser. Point/spotlights have the proper falloff, areas lights are supported, and its atmospheric lighting (indoor as well as outdoor) exceeds Poser IDL in all cases. But still, Vue is a biased non-phisical render: Lux and Octane do produce photorealism at a higher level. But who wants photorealism these days :-) ?

Is it faster? I guess so, at least in the atmospheric lighting section. But honestly, I don't know, simply because when things get faster, my scene complexity, quality requirements and output size go up. Even my final Octane renders do run about 90 mins, despite the dual GFX770 setup. That's me.

Quote - in poser 2012 i rendered a classic scene (for me), it took 1min52 did it more thant twice. and in poser 2014 it took 1m12 (gain 40s, almost 50% of time)

I don't think 35% is even close to 50% In your example P2014 is about 35% faster, that is by not 50%. It also depends on what you're going to render a lot. But you will as your example show a better rendering speed.

I really don't know where you're going to get your stuff, but $800 for a i7-4770 with motherboard and memory is way too much. I bought a complete pc for $700 a little while back.... i7, 16Gb, 500Gb HD, wifi network, dvd/cd burner, case, fan, power supply and so on. Mind you, that is in Europe, where everything is way more expensive then in the States. You should find a different place to buy :)

Not to hijack the thread, but...

Several have stated that dramatic speed gains can be made by "cleaning up" wrong nodes in ther material room. I believe this 100%.

Question: Are there any things someone not familiar with the material room should look at and how should they be changed? Lacking knowlege of the material room, is Scenefixer the best fix out there?

Inquiring minds want to know. (I also want it for the new FAQ!)

Oh, this is a difficult one to answer basicwiz.

Yes, Scenefixer can help. But, and here comes the "but". And there is more then one "but".

Everthing; Ervery cr2, every object, every figure is different.

My workflow, and this is personal; Load a figure or an object.
And goto the advanced material room and DELETE EVERYTHING you see, only leave the Diffuse texture.

No specular map, no bumpmap, no normal map, nothing of the lot. The displacement map can stay if absolutely required.

Then start building the node setup.

I let the Poser nodes build Blinn (I rarely if ever use Specular), displacement, bump if required, all by starting from the Diffuse texture.

Less textures to load, less memory consumption, and the internal nodes calculations are pretty-pretty fast.

Be extremely carefull with transluence, reflections, and other nodes that require lots of resources.

But? It all starts way - way -way- way sooner then this.

First step : again, in my workflow!!!!!!!!! First step is to open the object file in Blender.

REDUCE the number of material zones. Merge as many materail zones as you can.

Do left-right pupil have to be different material zones?
Do left-right iris have to be different material zones?
Do left-right eyeballs have to be different material zones?
Do top-bottom lashes have to be different material zones?

See the point? Clean, and clean, and clean.

Merge as many material zones as you see fit for YOUR use of the object / figure.

Open the cr2 in cr2editor, and delete all material, zones. => Mark the word ALL.

Open the cr2 in Poser and you get a fresh material zone setup coming from the object file you reworked in Blender.
Save cr2 in library.

Now, you can start building a node setup for each zone in the advanced Material room. => Less zones, less work, less prone to errors.

Some basics :
Cornea usually requires no map and is completely node driven.
Transparancy => this map has to be loaded at GC 1.000 and connected to Displacement at 0.1.
Diffuse texture => Has to be loaded at render gamma settings or manually at GC 2.2

Displacement => Driven by the diffuse map throught a Math_Function node, and combined with a Turbulence node. 
=> Result => Dark area's like brows get more displacement light area's get no to littlle displacement.

Blinn => Driven by Diffuse texture so that dark area's like brows get less Specular and light areas get more specular.

REMARK :
You can build all this up inside the Advanced Material room. No need to load all those extra memory consuming textures vendors provide.
Usually they are nothing more then black and white versions of the diffuse map anyway.

This alone, reduces render calculation time by a WHAW %.

Ach, I absolutely need more time.
When are 36 hr days in promotion?

Doug, => Check Rox.

Slight error in previous post.

Transparancy => this map has to be loaded at GC 1.000 and connected to Displacement at 0.1.

Here I am talking about the Lashes Transparency.

Transparency at 1.000 with the lashes transmap loaded at GC 1.000 and connected
Transparency_Edge 0.000
Transparency_Falloff at 0.000

And the lashes transmap also connected into Displacement at value 0.1

Not sure. Of course a very complex material tree takes more time than a simple one, and the latter is to be preferred when it presents similar results.

In the current process of MatRoom FAQ I'm handling and testing about all relevant nodes in the same scene setup, and there are just a few render killers up till now. On the average the scene renders within 5 min with any mat tree setup, so I don't clock them.

 - Dynamic Hair, since it generates an extreme amount of vertices. 6 million in my test scene (Vicky does about 60.000 so the hair thing is 100x as resource consuming). This combines not to well with IDL (switch off the Light Emitter option!) and not with a high bounce setting anyway. Render took over 50 mins.

 - somewhat reflective walls and floor with reflective as well as transparent / refractive objects under IDL and a high-end render setting. Render still under way, after 7 hours it's say 55% of the Calculate IDL prepass.

And I'm running Pro2014 with all the hardware that Michael-Remy was looking for, see my signature.

In your dynamic hair test render?
Are U using a Raytraced shadow on a light? ?

Prediction;
The render will finish, (sooner or later) but PP2014 will "hang" at the end of the render, and some buckets will not render to screen.

It will not crash (hopefully) but it will "hang" requiring a forced close down.

I'm afraid none of this is useful to a noob. I guess scenefixer is the best answer if you are not material room savy.

But it IS extremely interesting to see how the folks in the know do it! THANK YOU!

@Vilters: I know what the causes are :). Just cross 1 direct light with raytraced shadows with 300.000 hairs with 20 verts/hair and all those 6 million elements are considered in the reaytraced shadowing. No, it did not crash but required 6Gb ram and 45 min patience.

@noobs:

 - be aware of the size of a Dynamic Hair object / result, and its consequences for raytracing (shadowing, reflection, IDL, ...)

 - render blocks are issued when the first one is available. So when 1234 are processed and nr 2 takes a lot of time, you won't see 3 and 4 on the screen. In the meantime, the renderer is working on 567 etc. The moment block 2 is ready, all 234567 will be issued to the screen. So, to know whether the renderer is busy or crashed, consult the CPU load via Taskmanager or so.

yes, in europ, computer pieces are more expensive (add more than 20% to US prices)

maybe the material room of pp2014 is better auto-setupped  than in poser2012 and it is not a bad thing.
As i am also, a python developer, i do believe the compiling of Poser in python 2.7 is a hight point too for the quick render. Maybe in poser 2014 we will have a python 2.8 compiler .exe or even a python 3 !! let's dream....
Maybe the developer team has even recode some hard part of the render engine...

but, the most importing thing is i just get at least a 35-50% gain time in my render  for just 225€ (about 200$). i don't know whyt, but amazon.fr sell full version of Poser 2014 at the price of the update (even less expensive than the update from pp2012). Thanks amazon!

One thing is sure, we DO need a real and serious benchmark for Poser.
If someone have the time tio build a scen with many thing and free object and figure, it will be pleased.

thanks for posting test results, michael!