Many thanks. I always seem to accumulate stuff faster that I can use it or install it. As usual, SAMS3D freebies are of exceptionally high quality.

Hi,

PoseRay is at:

http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/Version 3.8.18 is really good but it has a glitch with very large/complex scenes. FlyerX made a fix but this hasn't been relased yet.

POV-Ray is at:

http://www.povray.org/I am using 3.6 (since I only have win32), the beta version for win64 is 3.7.

After installing, don't forget to configure PoseRay so that it knows where the POV-Ray exe is.

Here is how I use the tools:

1. Create scene in Poser 6 (Poser 5 has a bug that makes the .mtl file have the wrong references - so I'd advise against using Poser 5).
2. I don't create lights in Poser since PoseRay has some great lights - although they are a little bit harder to set up).
3. Export scene to wavefront obj file (and material .mtl file) into a new folder. PoseRay can also read .pz3 files BUT I have found it to be problematic with very complex scenes. FlyerX has indicated that he is working on a fix.
4. Load the object and material file into PoseRay.
5. Check all the material references. Occaisionally there will be an untextured material because it used shaders or perhaps a glitch. The POV-Ray material library has some nice effects for reflective metals, water, glass and clouds.
6. View the scene.
7. Set the main camera on the camera tab.
8. Create some lights on the lights tab. A small area light is good for giving softened/more-realistic shadows.
9. Save the scene as a new object (this saves your new material definitions, the camera and lights in new .obj and .mtl files).
10. Set the maximum mat texture size (e.g. 512 for test renders and greater than 2000 for the final render) and let these be copied/resampled to the working folder.
11. Use the POV-Ray tab to set the render settings and export a POV-Ray scene. It is best to do a quick low quality render with shadow to see if the brightness is correct and the shadows are where they need to be AND then do a high res, high quality render using radiosity for the production render.
12. POV-Ray starts automatically when the scene has been saved and it creates a .png file.

Issues:

• Don't think displacements are supported.
• Sometimes see a bit of banding of the shadows under V3 breast that make them look a little cylindrical, might need a bit of fiddling with fill lighting. Radiosity helps to reduce this.
• PZ3 reader in PoseRay doesn't yet do really complex scenes (yet).

Hope this helps.

Hi onimusha,

Another thought worth considering, while you are waiting for Poser 7 (with built in multi-threaded and 64-bit memory support ---- I WISH!), is that Poser 6 can be used to pose a scene that you can then RENDER in something that is possibly faster on the new hardware - as long as you lay off the dynamics and the Poser 6 material shaders. I believe that some of the Vue line can support multiple CPUs (or multiple workstations) doing a render (I think they are called "Render cows"). Svdl would know much more about this as he is very skilled with Vue.

I tend to agree with the feeling that AMD X2s are probably the best performing processors at a reasonably affordable price point. You might want to check out the tech report and their benchmarking of various CPUs.

www.techreport.com
and browse to Articles => CPUs
Although they do not test Poser (alas), they do rendering tests with 3D Studio Max and POV-Ray. This can be really handy considering the huge range of CPU types, frequencies, bus speeds, numbers of cores, core revisions, etc.

For the user needing a cheap (actually FREE) alternate renderer option, there is POV-Ray. The latest (beta) version will run on 64-bit windows and will make use of dual cores to almost half the rendering times. Poser support comes from FlyerX's brilliant POSE-Ray tool. The latest incarnation of POSE-Ray is really quite easy to use and seems to get almost all of the textures and transparencies correct. I found that Poser 6 => POSE-Ray => POV-Ray was the only way I could get a few of my really large/complex scenes rendered, when Poser 6 just choked on the combined geometry and texture load of half a dozen millenium figures and a load of scenery and props.

The results from POV-Ray are not too bad either. Check following link if interested:

Example Pov-Ray render of P6 scene

Attached Link: http://www.morphography.uk.vu/links_page.php

Now the decision has been made, you can start collecting Poser freebies as soon as you like.

The attached link is to morphography's links page which lists loads of the major and minor Poser related sites that have freebies.

A couple of words of warning. 1) Some of the sites can have quite young or nekkid characters - be cautious if nudity offends. 2) Always check out the "requirements" notes for a freebie because some free stuff depends on having other free or purchased items. This is especially true of a lot of the character morphs / textures. 3) Almost everything you might download (or buy - except from DAZ) will be a zip file that you will need to unzip into your "Poser 6" or "Poser 6downloads" folder. Keeping your library of figures, props, poses, lights, materials and hair (etc) so that it is easily navigable is a bit of an art in itself.

Good luck.

Poser is not VERRRRY expensive (unless you consider the time that you spend collecting freebies) since you only really need to buy Poser 6 itself. You get enough stuff with Poser 6 to start making interesting scenes and there are a HUGE number of freebies dotted all around the web (and of course in Rosity's large Free collection).
Also, DAZ3D recently made the Victoria 3 and Michael 3 base figures free (which the majority of Poser users probably use for their male and female adult figures), so the only add-ons that you might need would be the head and body morph packages. I would not recommend buying anything until you have had a play with Jessie and James, and all the other free stuff, and worked out what - if anything - you really want or need.
You will probably need your PSP 9 for a bit of Postwork to the renders (I personally didn't think the upgrade to PSP X was worth it for a slightly faster load-up).
Also, the quality of much of the free stuff is so good that you really do not feel like you are getting second best because it is free.
Using poser is quite easy when you get the hang of it, and there are sections of Poser that you might never need to visit (e.g. if you don't want to put your own photos on figure faces, if you don't want to dynamic hair - since the mesh based textured hair is great, if you don't want dynamic cloth, if you don't want to animate things) and you can grow into these techniques as and when you have the time.

This is roughly how easy it is to make a static scene in Poser:

1. In the "Pose" room, Use the library browser to select a "Character" figure (mesh) to load, e.g. "JamesCasual" from the "James" folder. I think the default is for this character to be loaded as soon as Poser starts.
2. Go to the "Material" room and use the materials browser to find the textures for your figure - this is like wrapping a photo of the surface around the mesh of the figure.
3. Go to the "Pose" room again and use the "Poses" section of the library which will probably have some poses for the figure to set it into a particular posture. Apply a suitable pose, e.g. James sitting at a meeting pose.
4. Go to the "Prop" section and add a prop for the figure to sit on, e.g. a cube primitive will do.
5. Select the charater figure hip using the pull down lists (or clicking on the hip) and move the hip-parameter dials for x, y, z so that the figure is sitting nicely on the cube. You might need to zoom out on the camera so that all of the box and the figure is visible.
6. Go to the "Material" room again and use the simple view to add a background image (e.g. a nice jpeg photo) to the "background" object.
7. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, Save your scene.
8. Go back to the "Pose" room and you can render the scene from the Render tab.
   There are also loads of tutorials available, e.g. from Dr Geep, who regularly posts here.
   Hope this helps.

OK, so I admit it, ... I am a POSERholic.

On a related note - Is there a good Alien "face-hugger" anywhere that is textured and rigged for Poser?

I have experienced this sort of problem often with P5 and firefly raytraced rendering. The rendering of a particular "bucket" can crash and the rendering just terminates with no errors or reasons given. The repeated render buckets just seem to be the way that firefly draws the screen.

I don't have an absolute answer for overcoming the problem but IF you ARE using raytraced firefly, then you could try:

1. Reducing the number of raytrace bounces, if your scene permits - a maximum of 2 bounces should be fine for most purposes.
2. Rotate the christmas tree a little bit to try to overcome whatever is breaking the render (perhaps some complex reflection path from the decorations).
3. Try a smaller bucket size.
4. I have not tried this myself but I have heard that scaling up the sizes of everything in the scene might help the firefly renderer since the renderer was originally made for much bigger scenes.

Most excellent hair. Thankyou!

Some great stuff in those links. Thanks to all.

mrsparky has covered just about everything but there is another thing you can do to make accurate texturing a little easier using a layered painting program. If you make the background of the template layer transparent and then add that layer in-front-of your work-in-progress texture layer, then you will be able to see how the edges and features of your texture match up with the seam and grid guide-lines of the template. If you get this correct then it will look like the mesh grid has been drawn on top of your texture. Keep your texture layer selected when you do your drawing/painting and the template mesh will guide you. Then turn off the visibility of this top template layer (or delete it) before you do your final texture save. You will also notice that many textures overlap the edge of the templates, with a band of skin colour. This is sometimes necessary to prevent the appearance of ugly seams (white/background colour blended with skin tones at the edges of the textured areas) in the rendered texture.

Hi,

Definitely worth looking at dual core. Although P6 is only single threaded, the OS and other tasks could be busy on another core leaving practically a whole CPU core to your rendering. The sweet spot for (dual core) performance per price is probably the AMD 4400+ X2.

Hope you don't mind but I just wanted to chip in and ask svdl a couple of questions.

svdl:

Is the kit that you mention above what you use for your Vue 5 Infinite renders?

I am contemplating getting Vue 5 Esprit as a renderer for my P5 / P6 scenes. Do you actually use all the features of Vue 5 Infinite in your renders or would the lesser Esprit version be capable of the same stuff? What sort of render times are you looking at for your renders? Do you make one scene with all your figures and import to vue or can you make multiple scenes and import separately.

Thankyou very much for any info you can give.

Kind regards,

Jovial.

My experiences of POV-Ray are that it is very stable and reliable. Render times seem to be on a par with Poser 5 but it is hard to determine exactly how much quality to use in POV-ray to be equivalent to (or better than) P5 firefly.

I had some problems with shadows in low light regions (particularly banding under the breasts) that didn't come out nicely in POV-ray and needed quite a lot of post-work to fix, however some of this could have been just my choice of quality settings and more tweaking needed on the lights. I have experienced similar low light problems with firefly raytraced shadows.

I have a couple of images in my Gallery that use Pose-Ray and POV-ray to do renders on a multi-figure scene that could not be rendered in P5 firefly.

WARNING - PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE LINKS ARE TO IMAGES WITH NUDITY

The first is interesting in that the female figures all have exactly the same skin texture (due to the bug in the .mtl file writer) - but the figures still manage to look quite different:

NUDITY WARNING --- The descision

and the second one I managed to get a python script to output (nearly) the correct texture references:

NUDITY WARNING --- I said a hot pose...not incandecent

Just my 10 cents worth.

I had to use Pose-ray and POV-ray when a couple of my P5 scenes refused to be rendered in firefly (too many figures). The results were pretty good BUT there is a bug in P5 material file export (.mtl) [partner file of the wavefront .obj export] that mucks up the texture references for multiple figures. P6 does not have this problem. If you use P5 then you may need to use a python script to do the .mtl file save and you will still probably have to fix some of the material definitions in Pose-ray.

A big plus for some users is that there is a beta multi-threaded version of POV-ray that will shorten the render time on suitable dual processor PCs.

I have not seen any way to get procedural shaders into POV-ray, although I think you can script to get reflection, bump and transparency maps across with a little tweaking.

Pose-ray is an excellent tool (very easy to use) and well worth a look.

[BOOKMARK] - Me too! It was on offer and I thought "looks great", but I have never got into using it.

Thanks for all the help. it seemed to be that the head morphs were needed before the expressions would work (even though the character seemed to have the head morphs loaded). I am still a little confused but at least I have a working solution. Thanks again.