Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=899432

Link to another thread of current interest. I'm still using a default bucket size of 32x32 (lower values had no discernable effect), and my memory usage is maxing under 300MB during the rendering (oddly much more during the shadow mapping), with no disk thrashing on a 512MB system. Bucket size for a REYES renderer (supposedly like Firefly) is a compromise to allow z-buffereing to represent (numerous) multiple layers of transparency (and support a few other things that Poser cannot do). Unless you are rendering scenes with lots of transparency levels (eg. someone-or-other's fog prop ;)), there is no reason why a 32x32 bucket size should consume more than a few megabytes of memory. The architecture is intended to be extremely resource friendly. Firefly seems, however, to be at quite the opposite extreme and, with the presence of non-localised (non-REYES) effects and the persistence of unnecessary (in a REYES architecture) polygon shading and smoothing options, really makes me wonder if any at CL really had a clue what they were trying to do. Just for general information, REYES renderers stand head and shoulder over other rendering methods in terms of quality and (speed/resource) performance, so CL definitely made a good call in going for this technology. Its just seems to me that (by my own expections as well as all comparable standards and competitive products) they have really managed to screw the implementation, even if it promises some advantages over the P4 engine. Maybe they should have stuck to the P5 formula and gone for a bolt on third party engine instead. Bill