William_the_bloody, have a look in you BIOS with regard to the manufacturer's specs for the hardware.  I gained a huge improvement by just matching the RAM speed and timings.  Also, go ahead and raise the multiplier for the CPU, these Phenoms love to overclock.  I'm running 4.0 GHz on air right now.  Gonna go much higher as soon as I get around to building a water cooling loop with an active heat exchanger.  But I digress.

 As to the Phenoms being older tech, that is definitely true.  I noticed the Phenom doesn't run much faster than my older Athlon II (also optimized and O/C'ed) with day-to-day stuff, but they run fast enough that the CPU isn't the bottleneck, usually it was load times from the drive.  But I stuck with AMD because dollar-for-dollar the brute strength of 6 real cores added with the overclock headroom seemed more beneficial than the Intel tricks to beat benchmarks.  Use the "Render Firefly" script and don't go nuts with settings like pixel samples and light bounces and your render times should go down.  Running the CPU faster than the Athlon and having the extra cores really helped me with multi-threaded activities like rendering.  Also, as far as I know, rendering is the ONLY thing Poser does multi-threaded.  Also, leave your render threads at 6.  Since the Phenoms aren't hyperthreaded, any threads over 6 will have to wait until the first ones are finished.  I found that actually slowed me down a bit.  Good luck! 

No, the constrained part works just fine.  It's when I run the true dynamic simulation that I have problems. 

Quote - It probably depends on several things.  I run cloth simulations with clothing that have over 30k polys and have very little problems with it. A bit slower, but not 20-30 minutes unless it's a very long animation, then it can take quite a while. And I have slower processor than you. 

I think BB already mentioned somewhere that the cloth engine doesn't take advantage of multiple cores?

One thing you can do is to check that your cloth is not set to collide with unecessary things (like feet for a shirt etc), and other objects in the scene, like hair, jewelry etc that are not needed.

Also check how the character goes from start/zero pose to final frame. Make sure the anim graph doesn't have crazy splines between the poses. Also, check that your character is taking the optimum path. Some poses I've seen have the body or hip rotated 355 degrees instead of -5, which is hardly efficient for cloth simulations. :)

You can also pre drape the cloth, if it has a lot of fabric that needs to settle. (Like wide skirts or fluffy clothes in general) Pre-drape it to your zero pose, let the fabric settle, then just export the obj, import it again and run the simulation. You may have to set constrained, decorated groups again.

But... 5k polygons shouldn't have to take very long, so something else may be wrong.  People here love screenshots, so don't hesitate posting them and describing them!

 

Sorry to bail on my own post guys, I've been too busy and actually forgot about it.  I didn't know about dynamics not using multiple cores, but I'm not surprised.  I have it running at 4 ghz anyway.  I have problems fitting the clothes, actually, since I like to stray from the out-of-the-box characters.  What I do is zero the figure at frame one, have it restored at frame 20, and run the simulation to 20 with the entire dynamic mesh constrained.  I spawn a new morph target, then clear the sim and run it again without being constrained to eliminate where the cloth "sticks" to the figure.  I'm thinking maybe using the morph target is somehow complicating the calculations.  Now this isn't the ONLY time I have problems, just brainstorming.  And when I run cloth sims on an actor of a comforming item, like the hip of a skirt, it works perfectly fast, so I don't know what's going on.

Are there any tips or rules of thumb to getting the dynamic calculations to run faster?  I have noticed the more I use dynamic cloth that the simulations can run for 20-30 minutes, even on my 6-core Phenom II.  I leave the cloth settings pretty much stock, except sometimes drop the collision offset and depth to .5 to get better results.  I even went so far as to export a cloth item as an .obj, import it into Max, optimize the mesh from several ten thousands of vertices down to around five thousand, but that didn't have much effect.

 The positioning of the fog worked out rather well, and i'm happy with it, but I just can't seem to get the shadows right. I decreased the atmospheric density to.06 so as not to obscure any shadows, and increased the atmospheric strength on the single overhead light to 2, while giving the volume color a dark gray so as to offset any glow from the increased light strenght, but still nothing.  For now I'm going to revisit the old tutorial for rays through blinds and see if I can get any new insight from a step-by-step walkthrough.

Quote - What they said.
However, if all you're doing is combining morphs and maybe using the morph brush, and you're doing it all inside poser- when exporting just uncheck all of the export options except for the bottom one (Include existing groups) and save the obj.

Load the full body morph into your V4.2 base figure, and all should be good.

Every time I do that Poser crashes :( 

Quote - mr. you-know-who apparently fixed up FFrender so it works better in poser 9.

Ah, that explains it.  Now I have something to look forward to!

Oh wait, sorry PhilC.  that's pretty much what you just said.  Nevermind then.

I had the same thing happen recently.  First time though.  Wouldn't connect to the network at the time, either. I THINK what happened is my ferret pulled the plug out of my router because I wasn't giving her enough attention (not exaderating, she actually does that).  I open the browser and it defaults to offline mode.  Since Windows is a big, veiny intertwined machine something wondrous and magical happens and other things get all screwy because it is working offline.  I open Poser and the library doesn't work because  of aforementioned magic.  I plug the router back in, deselect "work offline", and now everything works fine.

I don't know whether or not this is accurate, but worth a shot. Makes sense to me though because of the above posts on internal TCP connections, but I try not to figure out how Windows does that stuff because when I do it usually leads to a lot of swearing and a total system reinstall.

Oops, sorry.  Let me clarify.  I just happened to be searching for atmospheric stuff when I stumbled across the tutorials, there is no atmospheric way to do it that I know of.  HOWEVER, an ambient surface WILL cast light onto other surfaces when rendering with IDL.  With no other surfaces in the scene it will not show any light except for what directly hits the "lense".  There was a good thread on that not long ago.

That second, larger ball for the halo sounds familiar, I think that was the gist of what I had seen before.  As far as I know, that is the only way to get a halo effect.

By the way, for those working with pre-Poser 8 versions you can still have one object illuminate another by putting a gather node on the reflective property of the target object.  There was a really good thread about that, too, just a bit longer ago.  FYI it is a complete beast to render like that, though.

Miss Nancy, I'm curious to know what "in pre-poser 9" means :)

Quote - This is called diffraction, the direct application of Huygens principle and wave nature of the light.

Yeah, I know, lol.  Couldn't think of the word.  Felt like I was spelling with wooden blocks and making choochoo sounds while I was writing "bending".  You're right about diffraction, maybe ambient occlusion is what I was going for.  And not the fake stuff like older versions used.  Even a quick render with default scanline settings in Max seems to have smoother light distribution.  I think if that were sorted out in Firefly it would become a lower end competitor for the other mainstream, non-bajillion dollar renderers out there, like Mental-Ray, C4D, etc.  Or maybe not, but I think it would make it a heck of a lot easier for those with less experience/Poser knowledge to produce better renders and avoid some frustration.

Good thread.  I used to get all upset because I couldn't get a render to ever come out right.  didn't know as much then, though.  However, now that we have a way to get a scene to Luxrender, I actually kinda like Firefly.  I can usually have a decent quality render in less than two minutes, IDL included (cheating a little bit though, I got a six-core Phenom just for this purpose).  While the renders are nowhere near unbiased quality, they actually turn out really well considering that, and I love not having to wait fifteen minutes before I even have a clue what it is going to look like.  I can use it for a preview then let Lux churn out the final.

Now that Firefly has IDL support, plus D3D's Render Firefly script, I think the only thing missing is a little more physics in it.  I would like to see the light do some bending around objects (like real light), I think that would really add to the realism.  I expect that would be a pretty big change to the renderer and don't think it will be implemented because of cost factor for SM's target customer base, but just thought I would mention it.

What version of Max?  I have 2010, and I know it has a Poser preset for the GW obj exporter.  Or maybe the preset is in the exporter. I don't know, come to think of it.  The exporter is a free download if you search for it.  Anyway, it automatically corrects alignment, grouping, (mostly) sizing, and has options to bake textures as well as export the textures as well.  It isn't perfect, but may fix your problem.

try Googling for "Poser atmosphere" or "Poser volumetric light".  I remember seeing some tutorials for doing effects like that scattered aroung a while ago, just don't remember where or what they said.