Okay, surprised no-one called me out on my comment above ;) I thought Poser11 still had a texture size limit of 4096, seems that was just the background-size limit.

I have been doing some more testing on render speeds too.

It seems to me that if one ignores the new Adaptive Sampling options then render times are, as I suggested above, about on par with Poser 11.

However, the new Adaptive Sampling is really, really great! Even with the default automatic setting of 0.00 threshold, I see big reductions in render times, but I'm finding values as high as 5 percent useful. This feature alone would be a good enough reason for me to upgrade if Poser12 didn't have other issues as detailed elsewhere. (Primarily Poser12 seems incompatible with a dual monitor setup).

Oh, I think the Intel DeNoise works really well too for cleaning up quick renders if you don't mind the minor softness it understandably brings!

So I'm not giving up on Poser12 just yet, if the dual monitor issue gets fixed I can see myself setting scenes/figures up in Poser11 and then rendering in Poser12.

I like the sound of that :) thx I will investigate further.

I’ve recently installed the Poser12 free trial version and I don’t see any superfly render speed improvement at all.

I’m struggling to see any reason to upgrade if I’m honest.

I see that:

“ Removed 4096 limit dialog warning on high resolution images.”

Does this mean that the 4096 limit for textures has been removed? If so, what is the new limit? 8192 x 8192? This, if true, might be the only reason to upgrade for me at present.

At this point it looks like Poser11 works fine with the Reality python3 reality scripts - so I suspect that either Poser 11 did have some support for Python3 beyond Python2, or that the specific Python modifications to make these run in Python3 were backward compatible with Python2.

So I decided to install the Poser 12 free trial to test these mods. It appears to me that Snarlygribbly's avfix.pyc may now be the next stumbling block. Because it's compiled I can't try to convert it to Python3. I tried hacking the header version number in a hex editor to no avail :(

I decided to have a look into this. I don't have Poser12 yet, and am a Mac user. It seems to me that the Poser version of Reality relies on the Python2 scripts to bridge the divide between Poser and Reality. So... if the Python scripts were updated to Python3 then it might work.

I emailed Paolo to ask his input but then figured I'd look into it a bit myself. This led me to try converting the Python2 to Python3.

The resultant files are here:

These files replace the existing .pyc files (move them somewhere as a backup) then try putting these files in their place.

As I said I don't have Poser12 so can't test myself with Poser 12, but I did test it with my Poser11 installation which unnervingly seemed to still work. So I suspect I am not understanding something fully.

If you try it and it doesn't work, apologies - just copy the original .pyc files back until we can try again.

ghostship2, with respect to OctaneRender, I think the pricing may have changed since you last looked. There is a $20 a month studio option for 2 GPUs but yeah your point stands.

Before my time (Mac wise).

The first Macs I used were Quadra and LC475 with 0x0 processors in the 90s - which meant a nice natural progression from the Amiga I used at home.

Before that I was a Unix Sys Admin though...

Personally I think it’s a fallacy that Macs have ever been expensive. I do remember a specific time when Mac laptops were more expensive than cheap PCs, but they were in fact at the time cheaper than Sony Vaio windows laptops.

I remember my old boss spending 2 grand on a graphics card alone for his PC for 3DS Max work when a brand new Mac system would cost less.

Basically Macs were more expensive (than some cheap PCs) because they were better quality, Apple has never tried to be in the low quality market.

And yes, for years I used both, but not now.

Can I ask you really nicely to render a specific test scene and let us know the result? Pretty please?

It;s a freebie scene by Jira11, and I created the following thread to compare render times:

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2954858

Thanks in advance!

At home I run Poser 11 on an old MBP 15” Retina late 2013? - i7 2.8ghz? running Mojave, an old iMac 27” Retina 2014 (upgraded middle of the range model that time I think) running Catalina, a recent iMac 27” 2019 (top of the line model maxed out RAM etc., can’t recall details) also running Catalina.

I still mostly use the 2014 iMac and let the missus use the newer one for her heavy photoshop work.

Will be getting a new 15”/16” MBP running Apple Silicon when they get released.

Will upgrade to Poser 12 if they release an Apple Silicon version with Metal support.

Wolf never stops bad mouthing Apple huh

What studio does he work at I wonder...

Apple sold over 5.5 million Macs last quarter... their new Apple Silicon Macs are incredible and look set to disrupt the PC world big-time over the next 2 years.

In the design studio I work at we primarily use Macs as that is what our creatives demand.

We mainly use Lightwave and Maya for the 3D work (not a game studio).

At home I still use a Mac for Unity and personal 3D.

I plan on upgrading to Poser12 if and when it has Apple Silicon support.

Fingers crossed for Poser12 on BigSur as Poser11 seems to work on it fine (rosetta2).

Good call Cobra, I’m thinking about buying a new M1 Mac to play around with.

But I keep hoping they’ll release a larger screen laptop around March with an even faster M1X (hoping for approaching twice the speed for 12 cores compared to 8 cores in the M1 - due to double the performance cores). If I had more free time I’d get me an M1 Mac Mini as a stop-gap. It’s ironic how the GPU is somewhat irrelevant to us Poser Mac users as we have to CPU render.

I think when Apple start bringing out their professional level SOCs a lot of people will be migrating from comparatively slow Windows machines. This new M1 is the slowest Mac Apple Silicon that will ever exist and beats Intel i9

If you get the Mac Mini soon, I’d be interested in the rendering speeds you get.

I went ahead and installed Big Sur on a drive to give it a whirl.

Unfortunately, my 2014 iMac seems to crash after about half an hour on Big Sur even with no applications running.

I did manage to give Poser 11.3.818 a cursory few tests, including scene creation and rendering with no issues except the crashes which I don't think are anything to do with Poser itself.

ah yes, my bad - makes a lot more sense now :)