Hi all, I'm very frustrated at the amount of time it takes to render animations on my system (P4 800mgz with 512ram and a voodoo 3d card). Take two clothed DAZ characters with hair in a room with two walls and a ceiling, throw in some furniture, no sound effects and 8 lights and its over 5 minutes to render one frame! At 30 fps we're looking at hundreds or even thousands of hours just to render a 30 minute movie. I called my computer tech guy to get an estimate for the latest P4 1.8 gigahertz and an additional 4 GIGABYTES of RAM. There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the phone line and then he told me he'd have to get back to me. I've read about some people having dual CPU systems but from what I've learned thats definitely out of my price range. My goal is to put a machine together that would render in a few seconds a frame that would otherwise take a minute to a minute and a half. I'm just wondering if this kind of horsepower would be enough to do the job. I'm interested in hearing what the rest of you use for your animations and welcome any and all feedback and suggestions. Thanks Farang

I can't tell you what sort of performance you'll get out of Poser with such a rig (though it'll certainly be better than what you have now). I can, however, talk to you about expenses.

Right now, an Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz processor can be had for a little over $200. The 2GHz version is over $400.

A top-of-the-line AMD Athlon XP 1900, which can hold its own against Intel's finest, is about $250.

As for memory, it depends upon what you want. Pentium 4 motherboards need RDRAM, and although it has plummeted in price recently, 4GB of RDRAM will still set you back about $1600. Athlon systems can use DDR memory, which is much cheaper: 4GB for about $880.

Most motherboards can't support 4GB of memory. Before you buy, check the stats.

These prices were gathered this evening from pricewatch.com, by the way.

looks like we're both in the same boat .... i'm in the process of doing the same hardware investigations lol ... i've done some tech assistance questions and basically get the same answers lol ... wish i had access to the budget the must have had to do "final fantasy" ... maybe now that their done with the equipment they'll let us have it... if ya find any good links to a reasonable hardware config n set up please post ... i'll do the same GOOD LUCK

Attached Link: http://www.aaronix.com

Take a look at Aaronix.com's web site. It's a Yahoo store, and I bought and built my PC from them last year. I've been really pleased, and they're prices are excellent - a P4 1.2 Ghz (less the monitor, though) for under $400 last time I checked. Can't beat 'em. I've bought and built about five of their systems for friends, and all of them are running great! Good luck, if you have any questions, drop me an IM - I'm a tech specializing in the hardware side of things, so I should be able to answer most of your questions... --silver

Attached Link: http://store.yahoo.com/aaronix/computer7078.html

In fact, I just hit their site to check - look at this. Although it could use some beefing up in the RAM and HDD department, it's not a bad deal at all. And no, I'm not an affiliate of theirs - I just swear by their products, cause I use them and order regularly. :) *1.4GHz Athlon CPU * 40GB Hard Drive * 128MB DDR Memory * 16X DVD-ROM Drive * 16X/10X/40X CD-R/RW (CD-Burner) * 32MB Riva-TNT2 Video Card * 3D Sound Card * 56K v.90 AMR Modem * 100 Mbps Network ready * 1.44 Mb Floppy Drive * SiS735 chipset * Premium Plastic Case (double walls, metal Inside) * 300W UL Power Supply * Professional Assembly $599

I spoke with my tech guy today who services and sells my computer stuff and apparently only a few of the top end P4 motherboards allow for more than 1 gig of RAM. Also, according to him the ram cannot be fully utilized unless I get a special hard drive that spins/retrieves data faster. Tell me though as a tech guy would you reccomend going with the new RDRAM or the older SDRAM. There's a big difference in price and I think that the new motherboard that allows for more than 1 gig or RAM might only use the newer more expensive type. For anyone who's interested the m-boards that allow more than 1 gig of ram are limited to 16 gig of ram. A dual CPU system is definitely out of the question at least for the next couple of years, its apparently more complex to put together than I thought. If nothing else thanks for the tip on where to go for good prices Silver. Yours truly, Farang

Poser's render times are totally dependent on the amount of ram, processor speed and hard disk space. Poser also doesn't utilize any kind of hardware accelleration or dual processors. The more complex the scene (the number of props, size of your texture maps, transparency, bump maps, the number of lights all affect render times. Poser has to render a shadow map for each light. Using the Daz figures with their increased poly counts greatly increases the render times as well as the pz3 file size. 5 minutes per frame with a complex scene isn't bad. I have done some animations that averaged 19 minutes per frame at 360x240 on my older machine 800 Athlon, 768Mb ram and a 40Gb hard drive for Poser alone. Hope this helps some. Ed

Silver thanks!!!! right now i got a dual cpu system that i built a couple years ago (so now its a dinosaur) lol but i'm gonna go with another dual system ... thanks for the info im gonna check out that site in the am ... i gotta do it soon cause i'm gonnna lose my mind if i dont... right now while rendering stuff i might as well go out n have a birthday lol ....if i could get to 5 min/frame with some of the stuff i've put together i'd be doin cartwheels thanks to all for the info help n leads

"we're looking at hundreds or even thousands of hours just to render a 30 minute movie. "

You should not set up an animation that will run 30 minutes
straight when rendered.
not even the "big" animation houses run sequences that long.
Look at any movie of your choice and "time" the shots
for example see how long the camera is actually on an actor before
it cuts to a different shot and you will see its a very short time.
and all those short "takes" are edited together in post production
to tell the story the way the filmaker intended.

Of course more powerful hardware is always better
but you should consider investing in a Good NONlinear video editing
program and start thinking in terms of short scenes/takes to be edited together later.
posers animation render engine is very , VERY!! Slow by todays standards. but quality 3d character animation is a patient mans game.

I render my poser animations in cinema via the propack plugin
and cinema has the fastest high quality raytracer in its price range
and it still takes me 3 -6 hours for 4 seconds a quality animation with
textures ,volumetric lights, and reflections.

Not preaching here, I am glad to see another Character animator
in this forum besides me,

but the more rendering power you have the more you will want to add to you scenes and your render times will still tend to be long
remember that Pixar with their custom sun enterprise32 GIG of ram render boxes still takes 3 hours to render one frame.

Well remember Celron and equivlant, a low chache will kill your rendering from what I understand. Consider your mother board as well. As for the Dual CPU. Test show have shown that a dual CPU system can ofter out perfom a one cpu of triple MHZ. Thus 2 233 probably would do better than 1 800mhz cpu. The problem isn't so much the price as that Poser doesn't take advantage of a dual CPU system any ways from what I understand. Maybe a cheaper way is to look for lower poly count products. Mike and Vicky are pretty high from what I undstand put some hair and cloths wow vary high oply count already. It may be worth to make your own characters replacing bodyparts with clothing parts. 8 Lights is a lot as well. The props for the furniture to may be high poly. Taking the normals out might help make it render quicker. If you don't have a celron or equivlant I think your options are limited. Have a rendering computer and a work computer. Or rely on 3D and animation skills to lower the file size of your projects. I hope this helps.

Y'know- I did a christmas animation with Poser 4 and was getting 12 sec/frame 720x480 on a P4/2Ghz 512Mb RAM. It was going to take forever. I blew the money, downloaded the Poser Pro Pack then rendered in 3D Studio MAX and got 2 to 4 sec/frame render times. - and got better output to boot. Batch rendering worked just fine with Windows XP home edition and I'm still using MAX 3.1... I just set it to batch render, went to bed and everything was ready for After Effects when I woke up :)

as a result of other 3d progs that i have that either stand alone or compliment poser i'm gonna go with 2 1.7 p4's --- 2 60 gig hard drives --- a 64 meg oxygen vid card --- raid controllers --- and at least a gig of ram --- etc and make this a seperate workstation to connect to the one i got ... if anyone knows of additional hardware that will enhance the out put let me know ... again i appriciate the excellent info i get from here

Dude, with complex scenes, Poser chokes. Put the same complex scene in Max, no problemo. 2X faster or better. Especially with big texture maps. In Poser, those will kill ya. For testing, & many high rez images, turn Antialiasing off for a big speed increase-up to 5X. If you have Max, for viewport quad view, if you have a geforce3 & DX8, your get superb realtime quality. great when building /testing scenes. Thats where you spend most of your time. The high quality viewport is a godsend in Max. A technique pro use, is to layer your animated elements separately. The composite them or paste to the backdrop. If you're serious about animation, you need a better renderer. Also, tweaking choreography in Poser- you'' spend 80% of your time fixing quirks that shouldn't have happened. Wayward extrapolations, twirling wrist or mysterious jumps in a linb. I decided to spend $450 on Lifeforms cause I was never getting anything finished. Good luck

I'm not sure what those $2000 do for the extra money.? Anyone care to explain? For me look at the Quadro DCC by Elsa ($670 street), if you want something you can serious viewport quality. Any gf3 card tho I've heard works beautifully with Max 4 viewports tho. http://www.xbitlabs.com/video/quadrodcc-3dmax/