I've learned something today. Render times for your images can increase a lot if you have materials with some ambience in it.

Look at the following two renders. Both are done with 3 pixel samples. The only difference is the shader of the Construct (Poser 11's Ground).

After removing the "Ambient" value from the shader of the mostly invisible Construct, a whole more samples seem to be able to find a light, the whole scene takes much less time to render.

I've checked with different scenes as well. Self lit polygons can make removing the grain much harder if they are unreachable from the scene. Especially in dark scenes this can make huge difference. After checking some old props and scenery I bought here, I found a lot of shaders with some ambience in it, even in places where I would not expect this.

With Poser 11 (and as far back as 9) Ambient = light. You create a mesh light with your Ambient settings.

True. But if the mesh light mostly isn't visible, you get much more grainy renders. In addition, there are some "mesh lights" in products where you would not expect it.

I have an office scene in which two pencis, one keyboard and a metal shader do have some ambient in it. Removing that leads to a much less grainy render.

The images above are lit with mesh lights, and they have a pretty high ambient value, and that's ok. It's just that unessesary mesh lights lead to more grain and longer render times.

Curious, would normally associate that problem with high frequency effects like high spec+bump or subsurface scatter, do the materials also have high specular or reflection setting?

The materials are mostly Poser's Physical Surface Root. That's pretty much standard, I guess.

Just try it for yourself. Make a Box with a small opening (use a closed room for example) and render with and without an ambient lit skydome, with an additional meshlight on the inside. Do a render, with Pixel Samples set to 2 or 3. Then remove the ambient from the skydome and try again.

I forgot to add that with most mesh lights in SF you start to get the graininess you see ... higher samples reduce that, there are threads that discuss the balance to get the best quality and render time balance in your settings.

Of course, Boni. But see above, both images are rendered with the same number of samples. When rendered further, both will look about the same. But the first variant will need much more samples to loose its grain, thus needing much more time.

bantha, I think for that example the problem is more to do with attempting to light an interior indirectly from an external skydome as its going to take longer to converge due to the increased effect of indirect light scattering on the samples. That doesn't explain the problem with the keyboard and pencils, not sure what's happening there. BTW I did reproduce the problem but I expect that senerio to cause problems based on previous experience.

Tip: for future use with mirrors. In SF, Poser area and point lights show up in mirrors. You might want to make adjustments when considering those in your scenes. Not dirrected at this thread, but since there is a mirror ... it could avoid future issues.

Didn't BB post that pixel sampling should be much higher; at minimum 10?

The pixel sampling was set to low intentionally, to show the differences clearly. The problem is not that the images above are grainy, both need more pixel samples.

I set the pixel sample so low so it's obvious that one of them will need a whole lot more pixel samples than the other.

Maybe I'm missing something here and although I don't have a Superfly version of Poser, wouldn't avoiding Ambient and mesh lights, (as well as avoiding mirrors) defeat the object of the exercise? I thought the idea of this stuff was to help increase realism in rendering but if you're talking about not using them or not having mirrors, then why bother at all?

As it's a sealed room, why even bother with having the construct in the scene? Just delete it using the hierarchy editor. This example is illuminated only by the ceiling lights with the ambient set to 10, so no need to use what looks like a point light reflected in the mirror to light the scene. You can also use Snarly's SceneFixer to remove ambient from everything in the scene, then you can manually add ambient to just the materials you want.

These were the render settings I used.

raven posted at 9:18AM Sun, 12 March 2017 - #4299078

As it's a sealed room, why even bother with having the construct in the scene? Just delete it using the hierarchy editor. This example is illuminated only by the ceiling lights with the ambient set to 10, so no need to use what looks like a point light reflected in the mirror to light the scene. You can also use Snarly's SceneFixer to remove ambient from everything in the scene, then you can manually add ambient to just the materials you want.

All you say is true. But that is exactly the point, if you render the scene with Firefly it doesn't matter if the Construct has ambient, when it comes to speed. In Superfly it does matter. Unnessesary ambient can lengthen your renders.

In my image, I used meshlights just as you did. That's fine. I just did not expect that, let's say an invisible object behind all walls can significantly influence your renders. But it does, in Superfly. Things like if you have a room with big windows, you better put planes as backgound behind them. If you use a skydome, you will need more samples.

It surprised me, so I wanted to share it.

bantha which product is this? The br looks really nice! D:

It's from the old PoserWorld membership site. https://members.poserworld.com/new-bathroom

I don't know if it's available at the newest PoserWorld site yet. https://poserworld.com/

raven posted at 1:27PM Fri, 31 March 2017 - #4300979

It's from the old PoserWorld membership site. https://members.poserworld.com/new-bathroom

I don't know if it's available at the newest PoserWorld site yet. https://poserworld.com/

Thanks for the link! It's a shame I don't see it on the new site, otherwise I'd buy it right now. :(

I hope they add it.

I think you should ask in their forums. Maybe they can offer you the model, or even better, one of their old dvd sets. Poserworld uset to be the best value for the money when you still could download tons for stuff as a member. Sad that it didn't seem to work for them on the long run.