You know, now even V2 is looks like an alien in Poser 5. This is getting more X-Files all the time. I'm hanging on to Poser 4 for awhile longer.

If you want to get excellent renders of Poser models, use Cinema 4D XL. I just use Poser 4 to pose the models, export them into Cinema 4D XL and render them there.

Yeppers, they always look waaaaaaaaay better once I get them into Bryce, too.

To really send you screaming.... note my render times.

Will Bryce and Cinema 4d work with the cloth and hair stuff from P5

Your right strait out of the box p4 models will look that way but victoria and those items were set up to work with the P4 renderer, do some tweeking and use displacement and other effects and it's a whole other story. sure there are still lots of images that don't need Firefly thats why CL was smart enough to include the P4 renderer in P5. you get the best of both worlds.

Attached Link: Cloth

Attached Link: HAIR

Attached Link: Liquid

Attached Link: explosions

Attached Link: JARJAR

Attached Link: SMOKE

Attached Link: BIGMIKE

One thing to keep in mind: In P5, I've discovered that one does not need to set up a bazillion lights just to get subtle effects anymore, unless you're doing firelight or something real complex (even then, you won't nead near as many lights as P4 did IMHO.) Also, notice how the shadows are sharper in your P5 render, and no, they're not odd at all IMVHO. Tell you what - set up three lamps in a room with a bare floor the same way you have 'em set up in Poser, and notice how your shadow falls three ways... each of which have nice, sharp delineations :) /P PS: Forget bumpmapping - go for displacement, using the bumpmap files as a guide.

Let's say you have a scooter. Even a young girl can drive one efficiently in a short learning time. And let's say you have a Montesa Trial 500 HP competition motorbike. Have you ever tried one? I did. And I tell you one thing: not even some experience with big road motorbikes (let alone scooters) will help you first with a Trial competition motorbike. Unless you have some experience with motorbike crossing, and a very careful attitude, you're going to get in SERIOUS trouble in your first drive with a powerful Montesa Trial. What I am trying to say is: if you have to go to the grocery store, your scooter is the way to go. If you use a Trial Motorbike to go urban roads, and don't take care, you're likely to cause some accident along the way. Renderers are the same: there are some that do their best with short, easy drives, like the P4 renderer. Some other renderers require time and dedication to be set up properly. Then, they deliver great images. But if you try to run them without giving them the time and attention they require, you're going to get from them images that are even worse than an OpenGL preview.

I've seen that hair Trans-Texture problem in carrara, i'm a little surpised to find it in P5. Those shadows are way too sharp, they look very bryce-like to me. Is there no "Soft Shadow" option? That would fix all your problems - except the render time (Ouch)

wdupre: You don't find it insane that render times were 31 minutes vs 17 seconds? Penguinisto: The lights in these two example were identical ... take a good look at victoria's P5 left eye that sharpness looks like a surgical scar on her face and her eyeballs? Good lord. Do either of you do animations? It may be ok for still render folks to wait an extra 10 minutes or whatever.... but I need to render 30 frames for 1 second of animation.... Look at that time for crying out loud. Assuming that the render rate would be constant at 1 frame = 31 minutes 1 second (30 frames * 31 Minutes) = 15 1/2 hours a 5 minute animation would be what? 193 days?

Comparing the poser remderer to a top of the range renderer doesn't work - This just ain't Max or Cinema. To imply this is just misleading.

I think that simple renders like 1 character and 3 lights shouldn't take you an a trip somewhere down the crazy render. Customization is one thing but this test is about as simple as it gets.

C4D although I own it and love it doesn't have hair and the rest without plugins. I bought Shave and a haircut for LW and it was a dog. The guy was rude when I asked about a discount for C4D so he lost my business. Poser 5 is not the high-end program that some of these others are, but it does a lot for the price. Hopefully once the bugs get fixed and I learn how to use it I will be able to use it more effectively. I think CL needs to get their act together on customer support, but they and their parent company will hopefully learn from this experience. Marque

I agree Marque!

wolf359 d'you got the names of those plugins? The hair and cloth dynamics. Please please please. :)

I personally think this is a good comparison because it simply shows the extra work that needs to be put into Poser 5 renders to make them look as good as Poser 4 ones. 31 minutes to render that? A person could take the P4 one to Photoshop and have it looking better than anything P5 could come up with in less time than that. :) LOL on your animation render time too...yeesh, 193 days for a 5 minute animation? We could draw an animation by hand faster than that. ;) SnowS Hoping his pictures are worth 1001 words.

Exatomundo SnowSultan!!! A big thanks to TalleyJC for initiating this. I just hope CL can do something about now.

Why does the system always get the blame? TalleyJC do you have any problems running any other programs on your "failing" system?

why does the system always get the blame? when two people get totally different results with the exact same program on different systems? it is something ont your systems that Poser is having problems with is it not? by the way snowsultan those are your lights the light control looks like a pincushion:)

When two people with two systems run the same programs with similar results except for Poser, I don't think it's the system. Thank you.

Spit...it just seems obvious to me!

All right, I can already see the starts of another flame... "Is it the system, or the program that's failing?"

Seriously, though, I think it's more of a combination of both. Sure, everything else runs great on the system except for poser 5. If you keep track of the resource usage, Poser 5 tends to take up far more than other apps. That may even include 3ds Max, due to the fact that max takes advantage of hardware acceleration. That's where I feel Poser 5 falls over. Try turning off the acceleration in Max sometime and try rendering (just as an example). Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Poser 5 is using an openGL function for rendering, using software rendering. Good for system compatibility, bad for render times... For better or worse, that's how it seems to have been done.

Either way, at this point I don't care... All I'm seeing is kindle being thrown on to a flame, and I'd rather not see another flame war. Rather than arguing about what's at fault, how about figuring out solutions? Nerd's already posted a great tip topic on decreasing render times. Anybody else have some good ideas on how to drop the render time?

~DM

PS: Here's the link to Nerd's post: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=899746

"Sure, everything else runs great on the system" I'm glad you realize this!

TallyJC. I think the shadows are legit on the p5 render. That's probablyraytracing you used, right. That will also explain your poor render times. Now I have seen some oddities with p5 myself like polygons not shaded right across surfaces etc. But the materials etc. will make a big difference.

turning raytrace on & using displacement mapped shadows slows Poser5 down a lot, if you want shadows with raytracing change the shadows over, plus you really only need to have one light with a shadow switched on, just use the light camera to position the shadow where you want it

When Cinema XL 7 first came out, about 2 months went by as people tried to figure out how to use it's new renderer settings and features compared to what people were used to in Cinema XL 6. People were aghast at how much longer their renders took, but eventually they learned how to get great results and shorter render times. Some things take more time to figure out than we would like. That's not to say P5 is without problems, but even if it worked perfectly, there's still that darn learning curve, especially with 3D apps.

wdupre, TallyJC One intersting thing I've noticed is that render times with Firefly can vary massively with the same scene and only small changes in camera position (even on the same machine). By massively I mean by a factor of 100 or so, on one scene, render time (with raytracing) varied between 2 minutes 30 seconds and 4 1/2 hours when the camera was pushed a small bit towards the scene centre. No more or different features were visible in the scene in either case. The slowdown in the worst case was so radical that it may explain some of the 'render freeze' reports that a few people seem to be encountering. When I get home I'm going to test a few theories regarding possible bugs with the hither/epsilon plane and CL's implemention of the primitive/micropoly splitting for objects close to or spanning the camera plane. TallyJC - try pulling the camera back and see if this changes the render time. Bill

Ok... My system is no pig. I primarily am a musician and I run tons of digial audio and video through it (I score and edit independant films on the side) as well as my Software development tools: Sonar XL, all the cakewalk plugins, Waves processing bundle, Photoshop, Flash, Visual Studio which contains VB6, VC++,Visual Interdev, Source Safe, Enterprise tools, and SQL Server 7 (on an identical separate hard drive). Are these light weight apps? I conducted other tests and though despite what everyone thinks, raytraced shadows seem to be way faster. If the lights are allowed to calculate the shadow maps the render time is way longer. wdupre: You can tell me that you are happy with that render on your system using a Pentium 4 2.5 ghz machine? My System is a 1GHZ P3 and my Poser 4 test was 17 seconds - on your system that should be about 5 seconds. Yet you are happy with a render time near 1 minute? And the hair still looks like combed clay and the skin has a really high degree of black and you used more lights? Picture is kind of dark don't you think? Yes you can tweak a model in p5 until it looks decent or until the cows come home. The point here was with no work at all p4 had superior results in 1/10th the time. If you're satisfied, more power to you - I guess being a software developer since 1986 I have higher standards when it comes to software performance and end user's responsibilities.

Being satisfied has little to do with standards and almost everything to do with expectations. I resent seeing you imply that someone is satisfied only because they are stupid. It's rude and ridiculous.

Interesting Bill.... I will try that. In the case above the camera was not moved at all. I simply loaded the model in both versions and switched to face cam. Still kind of bad to make your user's have to plan camera angles and distances for performance reasons. Yet another hinder to the creative process. Again, I have to stress that many limitations can be "worked around" for the still renderer.... animators have much more to deal with.... but in either case we shouldn't have to.

Kiera , This is the problem with printed media. You can't see my facial expressions hear my tone. I implied nothing, but you inferred a meaning that was not intentional. Expectations would have been a better word.

I haven't tested this theory yet, but it is reminiscent of the problems that myself and a few others encountered with the P4 'Depth Cue' functionality, and it would explain a lot of odd behaviour that I've witnessed, as well as explaining why a lot of people simply haven't seen this problem (yet). Bill

I was never happy with the depth queue in P4, outside of using it as a strange affect. (like ghosts in a cemetary or something) So I haven't used it much... Was it a problem in p4 as well and carried over to p5? I did notice in other experiments that the focal length seemed to vary when switching back and forth between cameras but I can't quantify it. Ist it possible that ther is camera cross-talk?

TallyJC, My point was that not everyone is having 31 minute renders. and yes I did my test in the default face camera settings even on my old computer which is slower then yours. and even though there are tons more lights in that snowsultan set most are not very bright. the skin texture I used is rather dark and in my opinion far more accurate in coloration then the one you used. I never claimed that the new renderer wasn't slower it is even for me but on my systems I am seeing a factor of maybe 2to5 times slower not the 20 times you are reporting I never said you werent getting those times but it's only fair to let people know that not everyone is getting those horribly slow results. I will again reitereate my first point which is you don't need the more heavy duty renderer for all renders and certainly this is one case where it would not be nessasary that is why P5 included the P4 renderer(which incedently seems faster to me then the version in P4)

wdupre, just to let you know, if there are tons of lights in the light set you are using, I didn't make it. :) It's probably a global set, while almost all of mine are simple 3 or 4 light setups designed for a painted or illustrative look. Thanks for giving me credit though. ;) SnowS

Agreed... People will get different results. I know that I am in a very small percentage of those that use(d) Poser for animation. As an animator, other animators need to be made aware of this serious render slowness. Even with your render time differential, an animator using your system would have a serious issue. Additionally, the point I am trying to make is that CL can not claim to be ignorant of Victoria. I don't know of many of us that use posette in p4 as a standard model. V2 or any model that used the .PZ3 structure should have been able to be imported and rendored correctly without having to rework all the bump maps and materials. If displacement maping or the Jpg versions of bumpmaps are the preference p5 should do the converions and set up the material nodes. The new user that buys p5 and victoria will have no idea what to do. They won't know that the .bum files are only supported by the p5p4 renderer and not firefly. With experience and skill we can find all kinds of work arounds for the still render. Animation is much tougher and if we get into processes like: Only use 1 light with shadows, turn off raytracing and reflections... shut off this and shout off that.... What then are we left with? What benefit then is the Firefly renderer?

heyas; just one question... if you want p4-style (and speed) renders, why are you using the firefly engine in the first place? i mean, that is like comparing a bryce scene render time with a poser scene render time. everybody knows the p4 quickie shadow-map render is a heck of a lot faster than the full-blown, ray-traced bryce (or vue or anything else) render. of course the ray-tracing is going to take longer. i don't understand why everybody is so suprised about that. why do you want to use the firefly renderer for animations? it's designed to do all that detail stuff, and if you want ray-traced reflections in your animations, you'll have to sacrifice some speed. how fast do you think frames get rendered out in like toy story or shrek? i don't think they take just a few minutes, even with their render farms pumping them out. oh, by the way, those 'black flakes' on your eyes? looks to me as if those are the shadows from the eyelashes.

sorry snows thatone must have gotten into your folder by mistake :) Sorry TallyJC I don't expect complete backward compatability especially with a renderer which uses a vastly different material setup to mean that for best results use it just as you used P4. you gotta work a little to get better results. yes I think that the material room setting falloff at .6 is a glitch which should be fixed. the new user that installs most victoria textures that I am aware of won't be dealing with .bum files as most come with .jpg files which need to be converted in P4 to .bum format. Yes I am guessing that for many people the firefly renderer will be too slow for animating untill vastly faster systems are available but as you say you can get good results with the P4 renderer for that. and for the new features only the hair doesn't render well in that renderer.

Strange, I seem to remember Bryce4 being faster than Bryce5 (less features?), how many animators here use Bryce?, how many animators who use bryce are complaining about the speed of Poser5?

It is a simple reality that more complex and capable renderers have more uneven performance that varies widely based on scene and lighting. While Firefly is far from a high end render engine, it is grown up enough for this to be true for it as well. The simple reality is that you are NEVER going to be able to ray trace very fast. You are ALWAYS going to have to make compromises in your scene if youw ant to animate it and keep render times low. That is a simple reality of the math. This is not limited to Firefly. Small adjustments ins cene and ligting can make a factor of 50 difference in render times for higher end renderers - and if you add radiosity and GI into the mix it gets more complex. FF is a different beast than the P4 engine. If you want the extra features you will have to work with it, like all the bigger engines - shader adjustments, light placement, bucket size, bounces and all the rest of it. If you DON'T want them, then don;t use them and the render times will be predictable and fairly fast. But you don't get blame CL because you can't render ray traced shadows from 15-20 lights with a incorrect bucket size in inder a fairly long number of minutes on consumer hardware.

Bloodsong and others do make good points about render times, and it's true that we cannot expect raytracing render times to be comparable to P4 render times. I suppose my complaints are directed more at the fact that many people expected the Firefly renderer to be a significant improvement over the P4 one even in fairly simple scenes. Maybe they were hoping for the "professional" 3D look that we've only been able to simulate using global lighting up until now, but without the lengthy render time. I would expect to wait an hour for floor reflections and volumetric light (well not really, I'd try to make them in Photoshop first ^_^) but I'll admit that I'm surprised that there appears to be so little difference in quality between the P4 renderer and Firefly in your everyday "normal" Poser render. Guess we should think of Firefly as a renderer to use ONLY when we need those sorts of effects, and to just keep using the P4 one otherwise. wdupre, I have my own folder of stuff on your system? I'm flattered. ;) SnowS

Sure Snow I even have a folder on my hard drive called Snowsultans_specatcular_seamguides;)