The biggest helps were unchecking the "Separate Process" box in preferences, and switching to a less complicated (albeit less realistic) hairstyle.

Thanks again for everyone's suggestions!

I still don't fully understand what irradiance caching does, but I did try that after your suggestion. It rendered slightly faster, but the problem is those darn teeth...lowering it any more than 60 makes bright white spots start to appear where the AO detail breaks down, so I kept it as is.

However, I finally got the SSS eye whites figured out! Above is the finished render. As you can see, the eyes are brighter, the teeth don't stand out, and overall I think it has a nice look...especially for rendering in under a minute. Hopefully my superiors will think so as well.

/jumping for joy

Aha! Excellent suggestions - thank you so much! I had to uncheck the "separate processes" box and bump the number of threads up to 4, which was stated. That cut the time down by about half...at least on this particular render. Out of curiosity; on a PC running XP, is there a similar issue, or can it take full advantage of the multi-threading?

I also switched out the hair and replaced it with Gwenith Hair from RDNA, which cut it down by another couple of minutes. So now my render time is less than one minute per frame.

So thank you! This was a big help. :-D

So for clarification; Poser 7 doesn't take advantage of the multiple processors on a Mac? Darn, that's really disappointing. That was one of the reasons why I thought a Mac Pro would be ok for this.  :-/

What kind of hair would you recommend I look for? Something that's not strand-based? I don't have many of those. :-/

Replicand, I tried lowering the bucket size to 64, but it added time to my render with the same settings...and it seems to function fine at 128, so I'm going to leave it there for now. The reference manual actually states that higher bucket sizes will speed up rendering, but at the cost of processing power, iirc.

svdl, I tried your texture filtering script (thank you!), but it added a few minutes worth of render time...and it didn't look so good either. I also tried it on the "fast" setting, but it either takes much longer, or it's freezing up at some point. So that doesn't work either.

I also tried your morphs script, but I guess it doesn't support V4? I got an error...one that for some reason, I can't copy and paste.

Now how would I add SSS to the eyewhites? What material actually applies to the eyewhites, as a matter of fact? Would I have to change all of the colors, or just the scatter color?

Quote - uncheck "smooth polygons", "remove backfaces" and "displacement maps" if possible.
if stuck with FFRender, reduce all textures to minimum size, delete all unused morphs,
do whatever the others said, but skip the part about virtual memory, as apple has
thoughtfully taken away control of that from typical users.

According to the Poser 7 manual, "Enabling [the remove backfacing polys] option can greatly speed up render times but can affect realism, especially when using ray tracing." So shouldn't I turn it on to speed up rendering?

As for texture size, I can't find the option in Poser 7 anymore. Someone in another thread said that textures are handled differently now, so there's no need to lower max texture size...unless there's another place besides the render options that you can do it?

And out of curiosity, how does deleting unused morphs help? Does it load all the morphs in a model, even if they're not being used?

Here is the result of the settings I posted above. I might be able to skimp on AO, but the problem is the teeth...without it, the characters look like "vampires" from the feedback I've gotten, because they're too bright in the back of the models' mouths. AO is the only way I've found to counter that, unless someone has another solution that will make the front of the teeth look bright, but the canines look dark.

While we're on the subject, does anyone know a trick to make the eye whites brighter? The teeth I want darker, but the eyes look strange and plastic-y because there's so much shadow on them. Is there a way to fix that without post-work?

Attached are my latest settings, and while they're much faster than before, I think they could still do with some trimming...at least it doesn't take 10 minutes.  :-P
For lighting I'm using the default "Lagoon Desaturated" IBL, plus a skintone HDRI from AerySoul described here (NWS).

Quote - about three minutes a frame

Make that about twenty minutes...three minutes is how long it used to take before I added AO.

Ditto for me too. :(

Any idea what "roughness" translates to in Poser 7? I can't find it in the material room, nor in the manual... :(

I had no problems, with either the mac or pc file.

Quote - I am seeing Poser-generated scenes being used more and more often for purposes like this.  Dare we call them.........professional applications of Poser?  cough cough cough

As everyone knows: the words "professional" and "Poser" when placed in juxtaposition to one another form an oxymoron.  Except, of course -- for those many professionals who regularly use Poser in secret but who will never admit to the fact publicly.  It's just too embarassing.

It's interesting - you're talking about two very different applications for Poser as a creative program. For creating art, within an artists community (whether it's the Poser community or 3D in general), yes - there is a certain stigma about Poser being a guilty pleasure...or as someone else put it to me today: a "low end consumer 'toy'."

But when you're talking about commercial applications for Poser, I doubt you'll find many people who are scared to admit to their boss that they saved the company hundreds to thousands of dollars by using Poser over some other 3D program. If it gets the job done, and it's tons cheaper, it's instantly a better solution.

It's the difference between artistic integrity, and career integrity. Two totally different areas.

But as far as the commercial uses for Poser, surely you've seen it more often than in just magazines! What about those "artistic renderings" of architectural spaces, wherein they have a bunch of stock figures walking and playing around? I noticed that most of those are from...or made for...Poser. I saw a billboard the other day with James G1 and G2, and Jessi G2 to boot. There's probably a lot more than we think.

Wow, thanks! That was an awesome tip! I wouldn't have wanted to miss that.

By the way, whatever happened to DAZ's freebie section? I went back to try and find those great Drakkorian weapon freebies, but I can't find it now for the life of me.