i just keep thinking it is math. rounding, or something. But i had not thought of UPPING the frame rate. I just got done with two runs at 24 FPS and 20 FPS, no improvement. I am just about to execute a radical run. I threw away two lights. I put the shadow map from 512 to 3000 on the last light. I checked every morph on the light in the graph for ANY keyframes...found none....straight lines all the way across. I am still attacking with everything I can think of. I will try your 60 fps idea also. I would start removing textures, etc., except that I remember this problem other times in the past, even on Poser4PP. ::::: Opera :::::

ynsaen, "scale up..." I kinda see the logic of where you are going, and it comes back to my idea that there is a 'rounding' problem in the math somewhere..the rendering this high density complex situation at 30 fps is somehow exposing too-truncated math when the shadows are deep or something. I guess. Maybe "bigger numbers" after scale-up would relieve the pressure of something. Okay, I am going to keep experimenting. I might try a test at 20 or 24 fps, try the scale up, and also try some of the settings moochie suggests. I have to keep plugging, if there is no solution, I can't use Poser for this project, at least at this level of photorealism and high-pack animation. ::::: Opera :::::

It's not the hair.

Hi-res clip here. 5MB Quicktime

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THANKS! I've been nosing around on http://upgradesource.com/ today, which was my 'guru site' when I built my first PC a year and a half ago, but that site is not as great as it once was. Thanks richardson. That's a great link. ::::: Opera :::::

LOL Sam!
What tune is that to?

BRITNEY...if the breast morph's aren't enough....
USE MAGNETS

Don't let us "down."

We love you Britney!

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P.S how about this one:

"Oops I did it again,
I played with my dials, got lost in the game,
Oh baby, baby
Oops!...You think they're so real
That they're sent from above
I'm not that innocent

those are two great leads. There IS a non-visible texture associate with the hair, an "outer transmapped sphere of hair around the scalp" that I had to dial WAY down to get this simple hairstyle. The FIRST THING i am going to do is take a safety copy of the file, toss out the hair and render, leaving everything else exactly the same. If that does not work, I will start making the adjustments you both suggested. Thanks greatly. ::::: Opera :::::

here's a wild one: Hash's Animation:Master spline-generated render of either static shot OR animation, with Arctic Pig's browser driven fly around in real time. www.hash.com ::::: Opera :::::

That model looks not yet a woman. I bet there is a morph WeddingRingOff ::::: Opera ::::

Yes, putting the runtime on RAM disk would be "daunting." Would have to be a purpose-built stripped out Runtime. Will kick. ::::: Opera :::::

ok, so you ARE saying the HDAccess impact on render times is resource-fetching, not with writing the actual output file.

Given that....i wonder if Poser is smart enough to load more into RAM if it sees a lot of RAM, or does it make assumptions, and above a certain point starts swapping to virtual REGARDLESS and causing HD access. [SIDE NOTE: the new G5s can map out up to 8GIG of RAM! Many PC motherboards can go to 4GB. In an extreme situation, would Poser, I wonder, even see that RAM and use it to load full textures, etc.]

So, if one has a lot of RAM, I guess the first approach to avoid disk access is strategy/settings to force Poser to load as much as possible into memory. Are there any?

Next...what about putting Poser.exe and the runtime folder (with the textures, obviously) on a RAM disk?

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Message edited on: 12/22/2004 11:57

I have been inquiring over in the Vue forum... There is the possibility of procedural materials in Vue down the line. Probably will not be in the forthcoming release of VuePro5. Face_off, I hope you read this and comment, even if it is to tell us "no hope at this time." ::::: Opera :::::

I too am disturbed by my attachment to this new tool and the fact it is Poser-only, phantast.

I have Vue4Pro and plan to render in it, a large animation. I have some sadness...like a love affair that is sweet but about to hit a big big bump in the road.

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Message edited on: 12/22/2004 10:44

PC: I have increased my bucket size from 32 to 128 last few days and am getting a full 20% gain on render time. What an idiot i did not try that before.

Mac: I have a super clean G5 Dual 1.8GHz with 2.5G RAM but just the standard 80 gig drive plus one 250G SATA. Will be installing Poser next few days to gain new rendering station and do time trials.

For serious animation workstations...we should all remember that SCSI is still in the picture for either OSX or Win...you just need to throw down the bucks and you can acquire controler cards and a dual drive SCSI subsystem, external, and you can RAID 0 on that. This is very common in the audio world, where high-end PCs and Macs are used for direct-to-HD digital recording of the human voice (AKA singers!).

One interesting way to keep the price down would be to not go for large drives, because you are focused on fast access during render, mostly. Once rendered, final files can be pushed off to a large storage drive. However, the smaller SCSI drives may not have the hardware/buffers/access/drivers as the larger; you might need to buy big drives anyway to get top performance.

I must say I am a little suprised that HD access seems to be so big an issue. Is it really?

And if so, is it access to Poser and OS resources not loaded into RAM that are critical, or the is it the actual write to the file.

Here's why I bring that up. Last night while sleeping I rendered a 10-second animation. I rendered out to separate image files, 300 frames. The individual frames are large .tif files of 1.4MB apiece, 720x405 at 144DPI. This render required about 5.5 hours. The folder at the end was 350MB in size [ended up with beautiful 17MB Quicktime, Sorenson compression]. Now, during 5 hours, really, how much intensity was focused on writing a 'mere' 350MB to disk, and how much on pure processing between the CPU and RAM. At 128K per write, it is only twelve or so burst writes to disk per frame.

I float this not because I have the answer...I am hoping people with more technical knowlege will respond so I/we can gain perspective on the impact of disk access time on such renders. I tend to think it is much more a question of CPU/RAM power and sympatico.

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Message edited on: 12/22/2004 10:27

Message edited on: 12/22/2004 10:30

EJ is so great you might consider purchasing your upgrade to Poser5 just to pull out the judy.obj! I am not being sarcastic. You will eventually also fall in love with Poser5. ::::: Opera :::::

Thanks face-off. Much more to come. I'm working on getting him up to about age 28-34. So far I've succeeded in moving him from about 17 to perhaps 22. More mod of texture coming..wrinkles..etc. plus more spinning of the incredible articulation morphs provided by 3Dream on this outstanding model. ::::: Opera :::::