What is the point of the queue manager? Yes I understand its supposed to cue up jobs and render them however it doesn't do that in any rational way.

1. If I simply render to queue and the job goes to another machine, the other machine renders the job then DELETES the pz3 file. No way for me to reload that file and correct any errors I did not catch in the render preview PLUS no way to pick up working where I left off.
2. If I have the queue render to my local machine it does NOT delete the pz3 but the file is named a date/time stamped file and not the name of the final render. Makes finding the one I want to reload more difficult.
3. The file naming is not helpful.
4. If I save the scene to the appropriate scene file THEN render to queue I have to wait twice as long THEN it takes up double the space in storage.

Why can't I simply open up queue, drag and drop a bunch of files onto it, have them render and send off to other machines to render. The way this thing works now is completely useless. I could live with the weird naming but why do the remote machines delete the pz3? makes no sense. And double saving just slows me way down. Its double the space. Some of these scene files are over half a gig.

I have tried hacking the xml that queue manager uses but I shouldn't have to hack anything. And at this point if I am rendering after saving all my files off I might as well use my own python batch file to render them all in poser.

So what is the point? How is this a useful tool especially when trying to utilize a render farm.

Its been a long while since I used it and have no experience of using other render cows but your description of how it works matches my expectation of how a queue should work. When I print a document to a print queue its rendered to an intermediate format file which is queued on the print server until the document is printed and then deleted. T'he fact the Poser queue manager stores the intermediate file as a scene file is a quirk of design not intent that anyone would use it for other purposes. Maybe my expectation is wrong but I think you're looking to enhance its operation rather than it needs to be fixed.

That's fine. I expect that as well. I thought maybe some compressed format. But then I have to double save at this point which is annoying. Now one thing I could do is write a pythin script to save the file then call render to queue so at least I don't get lost in steps.

I left the cow out in the pasture years ago. I never could get it to work and my computer was never fast enough to handle my usual large scenes that were always over 1 GB.

My current method is to use a pythn script I wrote to render all the pz3 files in a driectory and save the results so I can fire it off over night. Thought maybe I could set up a second machine to do that and thought that's what queue manager would do. Sadly it doesn't help.

Also queue manager does not render exactly the same as in poser. It seems to reset magnet dial settings for example.

I use render queue for animations. It gives me the advantage of being able to pause, stop, start, and fix particular frames that have rendering problems.