When I bought Poser 5, I thought my dream of doing animation was now ready to take flight. I created a simple animation One figure starting around the corner off camera. He walks around the corner and walks into the camera, 280 frames. There are 10 lights, 5 with shadows on. I have used displacement mapping in place of bump mapping on the figure and dungeon walls (I really love this feature, I tried to go back to Poser 4 but It just doesnt look the same). There are five torches with animated flames and a sad attempt at a moving mist on the ground using displacement mapping again (I will get this right eventually). Im rendering the animation at 640x596. The first attempt was taking approximately 45 minutes a frame. I played around with the settings and reduced my shadow maps to 256 etc. and got 18.5 minutes per frame. I played around some more turned off casting shadows 8( and adjusted my bucket size, maximum texture size to 640 and changed other settings as per Nerds posting here sometime ago and got the speed to 4.5 minutes per frame. Is this good should I be expecting a better frame rate than this? I dont have the experience to know if this is an acceptable frame rate or not.

My system is PIII 850, 512 meg of ram, Geforce GTS 64 meg video card. All drives IDE 7200 rpm. Windows 2000 all service release installed. Poser 5 beta release 3.

The picture is larger than the animation frames, just trying to illustrate what is in the animation.

By the way, what should be happening the characters lats when his are swings back? Right now the arm just goes in the lat.

Thanks for listening,

Thorgrim.

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Your processor is on the low-end of the scale these days. RAM is adeqaute, but more is always better, naturally. The P5 renderer has improved its speed greatly since the initial release, but it still is a tad slow compared to other renderers out there. However, there are still a lot of unknown variables. If you want, you could send me the PZ3 with all the render specs and I'll see how long it takes to render on my machine. I have a P4 1.8GHZ (rapidly becoming obsolete)with a GIG O' RAM. Are you using Firefly, I assume. If so, are you using raytraced shadows, or shadow maps. I know you said you decreased the shadow maps, so you are probably using maps. But that does not definitely mean you are using shadow maps. Also, have you tried it without the displacement maps? This actually has to physically alter the geometry, unlike bump maps, so this COULD add to the time. Someone else with more experience with displacement mapping could probably comment more authoritatively. Well, that's all I can think of right now. A processor upgrade to a modern Pentium4 (ala 2+ GHZ) and more RAM would make a tremendous difference alone. Probably cut render times in half. -Tim [Founding Member of "The 12 Animators"]

Try to reduce the number of lights, that should reduce render time noticeably.

Try moving his arms out and twist them in a bit, really big men move more like gorillas, they use more shoulder to swng with and the arms move less. Your guy's almost mincing...! Excellent effort though. As to your speed, I really wouldn't worry too much about using production mode, personally I think that's more suitable for the still renderers. Your eye really won't pick up on that level of quality, draft's adequate - actually it'll have to be because you won't finish your animation this side of Christmas otherwise...

4.5 frames per minute isn't bad, given your system, the scene elements, and a resolution of 640x596. In my tests, displacement mapping didn't seem to appreciably slow down the render, and I was doing some extreme displacement (mountain ranges). The big slowdowns in Poser 5 are raytraced reflection and refraction, transparency, and dynamic hair.

By CROM! that looks kewl. :) Yeah displacement mapping is pretty easy on the system. (a pleasent suprise.) Your render speed sounds about right if you are raytracing it. a few more patches and it'll be faster than Truespace 4.3 :)

Thanks for the Info. The animation I have planned is approx 10 minutes in total length but of course this will be many cut sequences put together. (I have wanted to do something like this for a long time.) Im not using ray traced shadows or ray tracing at all for the matter. In fact currently, I have cast shadows turned off. (Not the way I want to leave it but I will have to decided on that based on appearance / render time.) I have two lights for each torch one to light up the torch on the wall the other to make it look like the torch is casting light into the scene. (I will play around with making these flicker in time with the flames as soon as Im happy with the flames animation.) The other lights Im using for fill, as the lights from the torches dont light up the scene very well. I had more but turned them off some where between 45 minutes per frame and 18.5 minutes per frame. I will give the change in the arm swing a shot to see what that looks like. Unfortunately a faster computer is a little way off yet with my current budget constraints but who knows I may win a lottery J. Thanks again, Thorgrim

You won't miss the shadows it looks great. If ya need a shadow for dramatic effect just use one shadow casting light... that shouldn't add too much time to a render. I'm not sure whether Raytraced or Shadow mapped shaows are faster in Firefly, I always use one (or at max 2) Ray-shadow casting lights, and they don't slow me down much then again I got a P4 1.9 Ghz machine. Ever read any of Marvel's Conan Comics? That character is a perfect dead ringer for some artists renditions of Conan. I absolutely love it, and was actually planning on doing something in the same vein one of these days.

I really liked the large Savage Sword comics when I was a kid, but my favorite images of Conan still have to be Frank Frazetta's paintings. When I read the books this is the Conan I saw in my head. I think my attempt here is still available in Freestuff if you want it. Now that I feel that I maybe able to actually make this animation, I'm going to do a little bit more work on this character, textures, and bigger and better scaled hands. Displacement mapping has added a whole new level of detailing that was unavailable to me before. I may even try to make strand based hair but I don't think it would be practical for me as it would take way to long to render a frame. So many dreams so little time :)

You do that... don't give up! I assume the veins are displacement mapped. they look sweet.