EClark1894 posted at 11:44AM Fri, 30 August 2019 - #4360846

Here's a wish, I haven't heard in this thread. Blender just revamped Cycles and updated it so that now you get real-time updates in preview. I'd like to see that in Poser, or at the very least enlarge and speed up Raytrace Preview.

Yes and no. Let me explain: For comparison, let's just say that if you have a sufficiently beefy GPU, you can do a very decent iRay preview in realtime, in the viewport(s), in a certain other app.

Now - this is awesome if you're not taxing the shiz out of your GPU while you do it. I can do it right now with a gaggle of NearMe figurines in some simple 'toon-like scene, and quite frankly it's pretty awesome to watch it in action. However, one fairly recent mega-poly-count mesh in a fairly complex scene can bog down my latest-Gen i7 CPU w/ 32GB system RAM, on a GTX 1060 w/ 6GB of vRAM, to the point of hampering the UI and lagging the hell out of everything.

It's a balancing act, though - they have to make the render (pre-render?) quality high enough so you can see precise lighting and be precise with your compositions, but it still has to be crappy enough to not turn your GPU into butter, or require you to buy a $4000 video card every year (because let's face it, we're not all pros who can afford to do that.)

The point is, it's a neat-o feature, but (speaking from experience here) it is not very useful unless your scenes are very light on polys, or your computer/GPU combo is an absolute badass. In those cases, it is hella useful to gauge lighting and layout in realtime. Every other use case, however, is a total fail, I promise.