I saw a post where someone mentioned the "estimated rendering time" as indicated by poser. I don't see that... I've made a bunch of clips to incoporate into a director project I'm working on but the rendering is going real slow. Some of the clips are only 180 frames long and the rendering is still extremely slow, like as in hours. From reading posts in this forum on the subject, I know that although there are many compressors available in Poser, they all take about the same time to render and since I'm doing post Poser work in Premiere and Quicktime, I may as well just render full frame images for import into my Post poser application. I did buy a new computer for this work, it's a p2 1.6 gh processor with 256 mg ram and 20 gigs hard drive. Any hints? If rendering really does take all night, I'll just plant to set one rendering each night before I go to bed. All you really have in life is time. Thanks in advance, Teena Walker-Robin http://home.earthlink.net/~nomeatpla ------------------------------------------------------ "Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle." ~ Abraham Lincoln

A 20GB hard drive won't go far with Poser, especially if you're doing work "for hire," and possibly doing animations. I have a 30GB hard drive which is reserved for the Poser installation, and all my artwork. I currenly have 14GB free, and need to think about backing up some of my art, so I can take it off the hard drive. I will leave the other aspects to the experts.

My longest render for an image was about 3 minutes.The rendertime depends on the imageresolution,and how complex the whole scene is.Transparencies slow the renderengine down. So if you make a animation with about 180 frames you can calculate yourself, how long render will last. But normally the rendering of an image is about 1 minute. And thats fast , take Bryce and rendering will last 10 times longer( Poser is not a real render)

Never compress the video if you're going to do postwork on it. Render it uncompressed, put it all together, then use a codec. Render time is dependent upon many factors: image size antialiasing the geometric complexity of the scene (multiple characters, for instance) the number of lights whether or not the lights cast shadows the size of the shadow maps transparency and transmaps high-res textures CPU speed and memory

I know of a render that has been going for 2 days, it is supposedly going to take 4 days; that render is in bryce5 on an older machine and is an animation of a scene with several objects...transparancies, atmosphere etc. take a long time to render depending on the comlexity of the scene...then you multiply this times the number of frames...could result in long render times

my longest render in bryce.. 10 days 5 minutes.. (animation that I still haven't finished) Longest render in poser (video 2 days) short 7 minute clip Longest still render in poser 3 minutes. Longest still render in bryce.. 3 days transparencies, reflections, highres maps, textures and such will make renders longer (as said above) and the more you have the longer it takes in any program to render.

I know 3DS makes higher quality renders but has anyone here rendered a scene in Poser and then rendered it in 3DS to compare the difference in speed? Also Teena, 256 ram for a 1.6CPU seems pretty low.

Unless you are doing closeups, set the "render options" so that bump maps are not used. Also reduce the number of lights casting shadows. That might speed it up a bit. Scarab <-(rendered in nine months, two days....according to my momma)

I have never done anything too complex with Poser, but from my limited experience, RAM can be one huge factor in your render time. If you don't have enough RAM, the render starts using virtual memory on your hard drive, and that is slow as death.

My first suggestion would be to double the RAM.

Your hard drive is important because you need to have room to save your stuff. That is why I mentioned that a 20GB hard drive is pretty cramped when we're working with 3D graphics.

my longest still rendering with poser was close to 5 hours... large scene with 13 spotlights, which was the vast majority of the time that was on a athalon 450 with 256 meg of ram... Darrin

Longest Poser render I ever did was about 20 minutes, the PZ3 file was 460 Mb, though. I've had many Bryce renders go all night though, some still weren't done then. There is something wrong with Bryce's rendering, it shouldn't take that long, incidently. Pentium 2s don't go that fast, I'm sure you ment a P4, the downside of the P4 is it isn't as fast clock against clock as a AMD or a P3, and the stinking Rambus memory is expensive. I wouldn't buy a system with less than 512 Mb these days, I have 768 in my AMD 1.4 Mhz, it cost something like $130 (the memory, that is!) I have Poser anti-aliasing on as default with this box, as most renders only take 10- 20 seconds or so. Speed kills, but not in computers! ;-)