Not that I know the first thing about programming render engines, but FireFly already seems to split up the image into blocks for parallel rendering. I have eight cores going and at any given time eight block of a frame are being rendered at once, one per core.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch to consider further splitting those "blocks" out amongst the network.

But time will tell. I'm sure the programmers have thought about it. After all cloud computing seem to be the way it's going now; cloud rendering seems a logical progression to me.

Interesting, I had to fiddle around with my router settings in order to properly forward VPN traffic and the Firewall Settings had options for NAT Endpoint Filtering.

Currently I have:

• UDP Endpoint Filtering as "Endpoint Independent"
• TCP Endpoint Filtering as "Address Restricted"

To be honest I have no idea what any of that means, but if Poser and QM ord communicating via UDP then I guess I'll have to get into it :)

Thanks for the replies everyone, very helpful.

Thanks for your reply!

And you're right I did a test for a single frame render and it didn't distribute the frame accross the Queue Manager instances.

I too deal mostly in single frame renders, so I suppose this just makes it an academic experiment then.

Still I would be interested to see the difference in render time using a single powerful cloud instance (as in their clustered GPU AMI) vs rendering locally.

Another advantage to rendering to the cloud could be just for the hardware upgrades. My workstation right now is decent enough, but as a hobbyist I'd rather offload the cost of upgrading my rendering power to the Cloud rather than investing in new production rendering hardware myself. 

I'm still gonna see what it takes to get Queue Manager up in the Cloud :)

~ Ryan

Impressive response, I did in fact have my localhost configured wrong. I commented out the "::1" line but still I'm receiving an "FFRender failed to launch" message. I bounced the pc but still RenderQueue fails to launch FFRender.

That said the localhost issue probably still needed addressing. Thanks danborn! I'm sorry I can't report success with this tho.

I'll keep trying :)

Cheers.

Here's another possible question for Poser preview window optimization: Is there a way to create an "instance" of an object rather than a new copy?

In MAX I can create a sphere and the create an instance of it and MAX doesn't have to eat up memory for the copies since they all just refer to the original.

Ah ha. Alt+Click in the hierarchy window. I will try that.

I've got the system chewing away on a render with some indirect lighting, after it's done I'll try playing around with the Hierarchy window.

Thanks for all the input everyone.  

Thanks for the replies everyone!

Sounds like there's no real option for hardware expansion other than a bigger single card.

I guess I'm just asking for the moon if I want to be able to work bigger scenes at full throttle. And maybe poser wasn't really designed for complex scenes in the first place.

The box tracking sometimes gives me issues when objects are inside other objects and the bounding boxes hide details. I'll try ramping down the display mode and hiding objects I'm not using.

The 5770 is fast until I start getting into indoor scenes with 6 or more M4/V4 characters with textures; but as posted above I could simply hide the characters I'm not currently working on.

I suppose even professionals using big time studio work stations still have to use these tricks in their work flow.

I wish there were like a "fast-focus" function where you could select object hierarchies and then just press a button and "hide non-selected" like in 3DS Max. Does such a thing exist in Poser?

Currently I have a Radeon 5770 :) And yes I'm talking about the preview window. The real time working view.

The 5770 is a budget gaming card for sure, and I was planning on exploring the expansion options like cross fire (adding another 5770).

From what I've heard cross fire for gaming requires that the game be programmed for it. In that context I guess a CAD program would also have to be programmed for it.

I'm not opposed to laying down the green for a bigger card, but I'm wondering if I might have the option to expand on it by buying a second one or if I'll be stuck just buying bigger cards? Or even if I buy a second 5770 if it will help any?

Is FirePro more transparent to the application? Would FirePro in CrossFire setup help the preview window?

Cheers.

Works like a charm, I learned something new today.

Thanks a ton for your help both of you,

Cheers,

~ R

Thanks for the reply I really appreciate it.

My problem is that they don't parent themselves to Victoria 4.2. When I pose a body part in the Pose room it does not move the cloth item with it. 

Are you saying that Dynamic Clothing does not react to body part positioning in the pose room?

~ R