Let me start with my system specs.

Frankenstein build with the biggest tower I could find.

AMD 8350 8 core at 4.01 Ghz

32 Gig of Ram

64 Bit Windows 7

2 NVidia Geforce GTX 660 running 4@ Samsung 27" Monitors

4 Plextor 256 Gig Solid State Hard Drives

1 1.5 TB 7200 spinner

and my baby a pocket Seagate 2 TB Drive for daily back up.

Never leave home with out it.

The one thing to keep in mind is as Ted has told me about a thousand times,

There is no one size fits all render setting, so these setting are for this image only

Bucket size is default 32 so anything from now on that is not listed is Poser Default settings

Number of threads 7 as I have 8 cores and want one so I can run other programs. Use Own Process is checked.

Quality is set to 12 so the renderer takes a lot more samples. A more refined image for the little details.

Shaderate default is 0.95 which is good for test renders but the default shade rate for most objects is 0.2

so my choice of 0.25 is pretty good for helping with all the small details.

Also keep in mind that it takes all these setting to get a decent image and one feed off of another.

That is why they are divided up into sections such as Quality.

Next is Features and they are my defaults

Then we have enable ray tracing check and that is my default always other wise,

you would not see reflections in the windows like you see in the first image.

Bounces is set to 1 which is good enough for all my city block sets.

Ted explains Bounces this way.

1 if you want to see your face in the mirror.

2 if you want to see the back of your head in the mirror behind you.

3 if you want to to the reflection of a reflection of a reflections such as there mirror balls setting near each other

4 if you want your render to take a few weeks.

you get the idea.

1920 x 180 is the size of mu final render.

This render took almost 18 hours to render as the picket fence you see in the yard is a transparency mapped item.

Also the SSS adds time to the render as well and the many many displacement maps on the siding snow roofing etc.

So all these things get a pretty good looking image with out resorting to Enable Indirect Light which is a whole other subject.

I had a Skydome in the image so I used a spot light with shadows set to the setting you will see next, in the post.

Tom