I finally installed Poser5, figured out how to direct it to my P4 stuff, and played with it for awhile. After a few test renders (draft mode), I tried a Production quality Firefly render of Stephanie, with some new P5 hair, on the beach. Unfortunately, because of all the lights, the shadow renders took forever (almost 2 hours!) and I ended up with this nightmare. I have over 1GB Ram and a 800MHz processor. Is rendering taking everyone else this long?

Wow. It looks like it rendered the shadows form each light, one on top of the other. I don't have P5 yet but it looks like you'd want to turn off the shadows on all but one, maybe two lights, and then bring the shadow intensities waaaaay down. If you had a light under the breasts facing upwards I could see how you might have the shadows above the breasts but what the heck caused the shadows on her chest???????? As I said a while back, I don't mind being a Mac guy and having to wait. It looks like it'll take some time for some of this to get figured out. I encourage you to hang in there. We may very well have to work differently but I've seen enough pictures to believe it can be figured out. Bobasaur (I am 7 of 12)

Hi Black Cat, It's no consolation, but you're not alone. Yesterday I tried several times to render a very simple scene: Michael w/hair, no clothing (was using one of sturk's hero MATs), standing in a small room, default lighting. In production mode, even with most options dialed down, it was incredibly slow. I never did get my render because after 40 minutes I lost patience and canceled out. My system is a P4 2.4ghz, 1GB RDRAM, etc. I was thinking that it was just me, and that I was obviously doing something wrong. But from your post I'm thinking maybe the firefly renderer is just very, very slow. I'm not going to cast judgement and slam the program, its way too premature for that and wouldn't be fair. But... I do know that I will be using the P4 renderer for a little while longer until I figure out what I'm doing. Matt

Bobasaur, What is causing the shadow on the upper part of the chest? Her hair is. Look carefully at the positions of things and where the lights are coming from. If it's not the hair, then it's a HUGE glitch. Try moving the light that is directly above her and see what happens. Matt, I have a 1.3ghz Athlon, 256 mB DDR memory and I can render Michael (nude) in less than 10 minutes with the FireFly render in Production Mode. That's with the flat top. If I add the JeanZ it takes a bit longer, say 15 minutes because of the texture and bump maps for the JeanZ. How many lights are you using? What are their shadowmap settings? I increased the map of just one light in a scene from 256 to 512 and the time to render the shadowmap tripled (at least)! Not that I haven't had my share of problems with P5, but I haven't had these. I just thought I'd let people know that it isn't all bad . . . Shawn

Er...what operating system are you guys running? I did a quicky test render at production quality of default Don in his default clothes with dynamic hair and it took under 10 minutes. It was a close-up of his face though. I don't know if that would quicken things up that much though. I'm running Windows 98SE on a speedy little Celeron 850MHz with 512MB RAM. Lammoth

"Unfortunately, because of all the lights, the shadow renders took forever (almost 2 hours!) " Go to the materials editor and turn displacement off. The black area is being caused by two separate effects. First, the shadows are making it hard to see, second, I have seen problems with imported PZ3's creating a displacement setting. The displacement basically pushes polys out of the way, but depending on the quality of the mesh in certain areas, it can actually "push" them into another dimension it would seem. ;) I had a similar problem in beta, and I found it was fixed by creating a diplacement node, linking it, and turning the value to 0 with no map. Paul P.S.: This is not a sure-fire fix... try it, render with the firefly without displacement, and see if it works. If not, we'll figure something else out. Many of the problems I've been seeing people post on in this forum are due to not understanding the depth of the program yet. The blurry clothes all happen with Poser 4 clothes in firefly, because firefly renders shader nodes, and old clothes only have the three standard P4 maps, which must be adjusted in the materials room to be handled properly by firefly. Take time to get used to the Materials Editor. It's not difficult, but will take patience.

Also ... for better looking shadows, make sure your lights DO NOT use shadow maps, but raytraced shadows instead. -Tim

Thanks for all the input. I know it sounded like I was griping at P5, but it was just frustration peeking out. I'm sure after time and learning all the finer points of this new software I'll get it figured out. Thanks again!

Hey, why is everybody quoting their CPU/RAM specs? These, especially the RAM, will aid in rendering, but you should know where all the work is being done: your graphics card! What graphics card are you using and are you using OpenGL or Direct3D? How much memory does it have and what kind of 3D support (NVidia, 3Dfx, etc)? This is a 3D graphics application and is therefore heavily dependent upon the 3D graphics acceleration of your system. I've seen major differences in quality and speed (Poser 4) between my ATI Radeon 7500 and GeForce 4 cards. If and when you decide that these are 'bugs' and need to be enumerated to CL, this is a very important variable to mention to them. Kuroyume

Ummm.... poser 4 and 5 are NOT hardware accelerated programs and take NO advantage of your highend graphics cards for that you need a 3D progame written for graphics hardware acceleration like Cinema4DXl Lightwave3D MAYA or MAX sorry :-/

Here's a good experiment: Export your scene and bring it into Vue or Lightwave. Then, change all the render settings to "maximum" or "realistic" or "high-quality". Render the scene. My guess is that it will take far LESS time to render with far BETTER results, in either program, than in this "Firefly" render. (And of course, the "draft" mode in either Vue or Lightwave will show "flipped polygons"... but you won't have to wait 15 minutes to see it. But, one has to wonder why ANY P5 figure has "reversed" polygons! Wasn't this checked before they shipped?) --John

wolf359: I realized that after reading the system requirements. It just seems unusual for a 3D application not to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration (although mine doesn't because it is Java and avoiding Java3D). No need to be sorry, it was ignorance on my part. Borahyumeh - wrenching foot from mouth ;)

Wow, that's pretty powerful shadows to come from hair. If it's any consolation to anyone, Lightwave and other high end problems come with a learning curve, too.

As I've stated in other posts, the lack of 3D accelleration FOR THE INTERFACE is unfathomable to me ... almost as unbelieveable as not having a REAL UNDO, let alone multiple levels of UNDO. JH, you're absolutely right ... no need to bet.

Shawn, Thanks for replying. Actually I was just using the default lighting. I have no idea why it was taking forever to render, but I suspect that it's just my inexperience. So... back to experimenting! :-) Matt