I did some quick pics on my computer to see how quickly/slowly they'd render. Computer is 1.7Ghz, 512 MB of RAM.

This took 50 seconds to render.

bookmark This is what I want to know :)

This took 1 minute, 20 seconds to render. Hair looks better.

I antialiased this one with firefly. 3 minutes, 35 seconds.

(Yeesh, people are already bookmarking this!) ;-}~

Same, but with the shadow maps at 1024. Took 5 minutes, 48 seconds. (Sorry for the delay, Rendie hiccuped.)

Me too!

^_^

bookmark

How about some renders with the dynamic cloth?

Attached Link: http://www.fallencity.net/reviews/p4-p5-render.php

I give up. I can't tell if Rendie is eating my uploads or actually displaying them. Go to the page above page to see the first set of test renders.

Thanks for your patience. I'll see if I can figure out the dynamic cloth. This was just the initial "how good / how slow" is P5.

I don't want to sound like an idiot, but my eyes sure can't see very much difference in all those images...yes a bit more shadows, etc..but overall they look like Poser renders to me....I really don't see all that much difference in P4/P5--time , yes, results not that much...at least as whether or not the new ones look any better....pretty much the same IMO.

Yeah, me too, I'll take a 30 second render over a 7 minute render anytime. Is it just me, or does Judy look like something out of a Canadian animated film... By that I mean she looks hand drawn, or sketched in pastel. Care to show us a stock Vick or Mike?

Interesting. Bookmark too...

I'd have to say, given render times on such a simple scene, firefly doesn't impress me too much.

The dynamic hair requires firefly to look decent. Maybe the image is a bit small, but the P4 render engine looks awful with the hair. Firefly seems to be a bit better with lots of lights in the scene - it actually beat P4 with the 31 light test timewise. I'll see what happens with P4 and dynamic hair and 31 lights as compared to firefly with dynamic hair and 31 lights. (As I'm cooking dinner. It's going to take a while to render!) I can't figure out dynamic cloth off-hand. My first try resulted in Don's shorts falling off. Literally. I'll do a default Vicki and Mike later to see if there's any major difference in time to render. So far, except for dynamic hair, I don't see a positive difference with firefly. Then again, I'm sticking with simple stuff for the tests. I'll get tricky as I get time to play. Right now, I'm just sobbing in joy with the nested subfolders!

IM very sorry but that "firefly' renderer Looks like the same old poser :-/ So far we MAC users ,who use poserpro4 LW and c4DXL engines dont appear to be missing much :-)

Last time I took part in a time test someone called me a liar. I said I'd never do it again. Well, I must *be* a liar cuz I did another one. Here it is: rendered with default firefly options. Only different was the first had the dynamic hair. That's Mike2 with the medium res map. The seconds probably aren't exact...I didn't use a stopwatch.

And here's a screen shot of what happened after I rendered Mike2 with the P4 renderer (hi-res map, no hair). It locked up but allowed me to click File/New...that's how I got the clean document. But after that, I had to ctrl-alt-del and end the program.

wow...i am so glad that i did not buy this. thanks for sharing, crescent. i was checking, eagerly, the galley...no p5 renders, as yet.

At the rate things are going, I am kinda wishing I would have saved my money. I am worried when i do get it, I am going to have the same problems... =(

Jackson, I rendered Mike 2 fine in my system, a puny PII 400 MHZ. I used the Poser 4 renderer and I tried to reproduce your bug by rendering in all the options available, render to main window, to new window, ignore shader trees checked, unchecked. Its working fine in my end and it renders a lot faster than Poser 4 I think.

Jackson, I have been getting the same type of screen as you did in #19. However, half the time it will NOT let me exit by simply going to File/New... I have to reboot. This is NOT making me very happy or confident. I haven't even tried stuff like the new hair or cloth features yet. Hell, if a scene that P4 zipped through with no problems is causing P5 with firefly to choke, I am almost afraid to try anything else! But, the registration went smoothly. casamerica

Attached Link: http://www.fallencity.net/reviews/p4-p5-render2.php

Here's a few more comparisons. It's not completely fair to P5 - I have to shrink them down a bit a .jpg them, but you can see some differences. On the other hand, it does show that for posting images, such as for Rendie, you'll do about as well rendering larger using the quicker engine then shrinking the image down in a photo editing program and it will be a LOT quicker. I think the P4 render engine is working nicely. I'm having some minor weirdnesses with P5, but so far, no major issues. Firefly seems to be good for the dynamic hair and lots of lights - and if you really need that last bit of softness and don't mind the time. I don't see a reason to use it except for facial close-ups, though. I'm not impressed with the render engine, but there's so many smaller things and a LOT of new content, so I think P5 was a worthwhile purchase, anyway. More later. I'm about to try a 50MB file. I'm sooo glad I can see the TV by my office! I'm not doing anything else with my computer while these pics render.

VIVA LA REGISTRATION !!!!!

Cas, it didn't let me exit after File/New either. It froze as shown in the screen shot above. Thank the lord for XP Pro; ctrl-alt-del works every time to shut down an errant program. Congrats on your registration. I wasn't so lucky. Mitch, I have a Dual Pentium 4 1.7 ghz Xeons with a gig o' ram & 100gig hd. I'm starting to believe P5 doesn't like my graphics card. Cas, what kind of graphics card do you have? I have a Matrox 450 32meg dual-monitor.

er I hope you don't mind cresent but I was curious. I couldn't tell the difference between the two surfer renders to I save both took them into photoshop and comapred them using "Difference" which will show up the pixel differences between two images. I'm not really sure this was really worth an extra 14 minutes to the render time...= P4 with anti-aliasing compared against the firefly at full production mode.

Oh and some of that "difference" might just be jpg compression artifacts showing up.

Attached Link: http://www.fallencity.net/reviews/p4-p5-render4.php

I'm sure that some of it is from .jpg artifacting. I put up two more pages, the last has 4 larger pictures with much less compression, but it's well over 200kb with those pictures. If anyone wants the original 640 x 640 .tif files to judge these better, drop me a line and I'll be glad to send them. These are just test images; feel free to dissect as you like. :-) Honestly, I can't tell the difference in some pictures between "P4 antialiasing" and the "firefly Production Mode." I was scared to try the 50MB file with all the firefly options turned on. (Firefly Production Mode doesn't use raytracing, that takes additional time. I figured 33 minutes for a test picture was long enough.) There's a lot of new content on P5 and I have yet to touch any of the cool, new toys. I figured I could play today with render times while I get slightly less intimidated by the software. I'm not that impressed with firefly rendering, but I impressed by the content on the disk. I hope all this helps!

I'm not sure I made this clear - both sets of renders are using Poser 5, one set uses the "P4 render engine" while the other uses the "Firefly render engine." I installed P5 over P4 so I couldn't try any of these with P4 - not that the hair would work, anyway. I suspect that the "P4 render engine" is at least as fast or faster than the true Poser 4 render engine. I really like how the dragons come out with the "P4" render engine - just over 11 minutes for 4 fully textured dragons!

I may be missing something, but I don't expect the firefly renderer to do much different until you start using some of the new features (relfections, etc). It shouuld also do better on low-poly figures (using the micro-poly subdivision smoothing) than the P4 renderer. Along the same lines... I hadn't seen anyone try to combine/link material nodes yet... do we know if you have to use the firefly renderer when you do that? (it seems to me that you could add freckles, blemishes and other features in a second material, for example).

Uhm.. thanks for the tests, btw... and yes, for these types of images, it does look like the P4+AA is the way to go.

Attached Link: http://www.fignations.com/jelisa/p5first.html

I've attached a link to a few of my P5 renders, all done using the Firefly renderer. Nudity in some of them.

Wow, I must say I'm disappointed. I've been looking at preview renders and the sort since they've shown up, and while initially I thought it was neat, I think i'm just underwhelmed by the new renderer after seeing these comparisons. I, as a regular person in this as a hobby, don't see much difference in the renders. Sure, a little bit of light or shadow here, and maybe the dynamic hair (which I find to be unattractive and unnatural looking) a little fuller, but I don't think it's worth all of the extra time. If there was a large, visible difference in quality (aside from the apparent render bugs), I may think a little differently, but I'm just thinking that maybe it's not such a bad thing that I don't have the money for it now anyway. I'll keep lurking in the shadows, but with the other bugs and the mediocre new render engine, I think I'll be waiting longer than I intended now.

how anyone can say the new render engine is mediocre when people have only been using it for at most a few hours is beyond me, how long did it take people to learn how to use poser4? this is a new program and will take a while before we get used to using it. Give it a chance before you shoot it down in flames. Rob

i also see that "glowing nostrils"-thingy is still there... :(

Will some P5 owner PLEASE bite the bullet and Do a "Full Blast " Highest setting render with whatever number off lights needed to make it look its best!! this CANT be as Good as the Firefly render gets :-) if it is, i owe a BIG APOLOGY to the bryce community for saying that the firefly engine "looks as good as bryce did six years ago"

this CANT be as Good as the Firefly render gets :-) if it is, i owe a BIG APOLOGY to the bryce community for saying that the firefly engine "looks as good as bryce did six years ago" ::sprays morning coffee on the monitor:: LOL!

I second the motion for a full blown render...I'm not impressed yet either...in fact, I'm quite underwhelmed by what I've seen so far. What's also a bit disturbing to me, the folks doing the renders here have dual P4 machines, fully loaded. What's going to happen to the guys with P3 700mhz 128meg ram systems?

I have to say I'm less than impresseed with the hair - she looks like she suffers from pattern baldness, I've seen the ones with kozaburo's hair too and they still look "thinning"

what bothers me most are those triangular artifacts in firefly renderings. i guess one has to go for the maximum quality (and rendering time) to get decent results...

I have to agree with LadySilberMage. They all look like they need a vat of conditioner and some Rogaine.

Hair...from what I've read, you can increase the amount of strands---but the rendering time also increases dramatically....maybe its the default, but most of the images that have commented on hair use 5000 strands...someone mentioned in another thread that humans have around 100,000 hairs---thus---you have thin looking hair.... It would be nice to see maybe one with 20-50,000...that, I think would be sufficient...maybe that many is is unnecessary as well---- so what's the ideal strand count for full, healthy looking hair ???