Bug report sent, for now I will use the FireFly z-Depth map.

I had 2 infinite lights and an IBL light, no spot or point lights.

So I decided to delete all the lights and create one single light.

I tried all the different light types with SuperFly and got the same result = no z-depth map (or rather it was always like a mask with no depth information).

I then tried all the same light types using FireFly and got a z-depth map every single time.

I'm on Mac using Poser 12.0.757 so maybe it's a Mac bug... 

hmm... the plot thickens, as when I render in FireFly the depth map is fine, it's just not working in SuperFly.

VedaDalsette, I think you'll find that the Adaptive Sampling made most of the difference there. It does the same on my MacBook Pro too, setting it to 0.002 for me reduces the render time by over 30%. Obviously higher values mean more noise and lower quality - but I find it a good tool to use for quick renders before final.

I started this thread as I wanted to see what people thought were acceptable render times so your comment about getting impatient certainly adds the that body of results, thanks. 

Personally I've always left my computers rendering while I sleep so final render times don't tend to bother me too much - but obviously faster preview render times while working are better.

I chose this scene for this thread as it was moderately complex with high default render settings, was free and would provide a good compare across a variety of machine specs. It's been real interesting so thanks to everyone who took the time :) 

Just ran this again on my new 16” MBP - M1 Max with 10 cpu cores (so same as M1 Pro) = 3060 seconds or 51 minutes.

Poser 12, Monterey. 

Let’s hope one day we get the Mac/Metal cycles upgrades that Blender has been getting.

As noted above Reality is now open-source so someone more conversant with the languages - C++ or C# and Python - could in theory update it.

Nice tip Y-Phil!

Rhia474 posted at 10:20AM Tue, 01 June 2021 - #4419532

Heck, perhaps it should be crowdsourced.

I think that's a great idea, if that's what Snarly needs, then I'd support it.

That said, the recently released SkinEdit product might solve a fair bunch of the Poser12 SuperFly issues? (not tried it yet).

Going forward, I want to stick as pure as I can to only using PBR via the Physical Node as that's clearly the future and best for content creators imho.

Thanks CobraBlade, makes me look even more forward to getting a new iMac or Mini after WWDC. I didn't get an M1 machine as I thought the even faster chips would be out before now - so am chomping at the bit a little - but brushing up on my ZBrush for now.

I did a bit of testing on my old intel iMac and yes it was good in some ways, and not so good in other ways - multiple monitor support was particularly bad for me - I submitted a bug report but don't think there's been a new version released yet.

One of the main bad things was the side-effects of Python3, like not being able to use EZSkin for older content, but it looks like the new SkinEdit product might have solved that one (I have yet to buy and test it but intend to). I thought the de-noiser was great.

Personally I won't be interested in gpu rendering until Poser supports it via Metal on Macs. I would like it if we could get distributed bucket rendering in Poser though like Cinema4D has - so I could have multiple Macs rendering a single image.

I won't go back to windows of any flavour, ever. Life is too short for that lol.

That’s odd, must be something specific in the scene, perhaps a material configuration it doesn’t like. If it was me I’d make multiple copies of the scene and try deleting things one at a time to isolate and identify - but I get that not everyone wants to bother with that kind of thing.

Then again it could be something in Big Sur as I haven’t had any crashes in Catalina at all. I’ve not got a Big Sur installation I can test on as of yet as I’m trying to hold out for newer Apple Silicon Mac (M1X or M2 as the M1 is about on par with an iMac we have).

The adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will be your friend to reduce render times and it also has a good de-noise to get rid of the sparklies too.

I think Poser12 is definitely incompatible seeing as it is unusable for dual-monitor setups (unless it's just my iMac and Apple Thunderbolt monitor setup of course).

I can't change a texture in the material room, for example - the popup dialog is invisible and unfixable no matter what I do so I have to force-quit the application or unplug the second monitor.

Personally, I have no issues with Poser 11.

Poser 12 is a whole new world of pain for dual monitors.

Well, I've been looking at this some more. I was able to decompile and modify Snarllygribbly's AVFix so it still does it's thing.

I think the new stumbling block is loading a SharedObject (Reality.so) from the GeometryExporter I'm getting the error:

startup error occurred importing addon Reality : ERROR: module 'Reality' has no attribute 'Scene'

Lol yeah, meant Python.

Whenever installing any software you should make sure you have a backup of your system - Time Machine on Mac for example makes this super easy. And installing a new version over an old version is always asking for trouble. Even for increment releases you should not overwrite - I have several Poser 11 versions on my machine.

Poser decompiling is something I hadn’t thought was possible - it never occured to me, I must investigate.