For the manual, use the Help menu.

If that doesn't work then the installation is not complete.

Cheers.

Hello.

You need to install the non-OpenCL version.

Cheers.

Quote - You had mentioned it's faster than other similar render engines, so I was to assume you were referring to physical, unbiased rendering. 

No, I was referring to other renderers in general. Renderers that can render full scenes with 4K textures, multiple figures, environments and so on. Scene that can take multi-gigabytes to render. To note that the 3Delight scene that I posted had one figure with clothing, not so complex and it brought the system to its knees. LuxRender scales up much more easily. 

Scalability is one of the things that is interesting for me with Renderman. If you look at the Pixar movies, for example the recent Monsters University, they have a plethora of characters in them, complex props and with physics-based lights. Obviously Renderman is able to process those scenes and that is quite interesting. 

Of course this is all speculation. I will need to have the software in my hands and have enough time to study before I will be able to conclude if it has a future in the Poserverse. 

Cheers.

Quote - Any idea what Pixar means by non-commercial?  Non-commercial as in you cannot use the free edition because you are a company/corporate entity or non-commercial as in renders made cannot be used for commercial purposes?

The press release talks about personal, non-commercial use. I don't know more than you but I would think that they mean that the rendered image cannot be used for advertising or rendering of movies where people pay for viewing or similar commercial uses. 

Note that Pixar explicitly say that the images will not have any limit in size and will not be watermarked. That statement alone is indicative of the trend, in my opinion. I think that most users of Poser and Studio, who make work for their own amusement, are going to be covered by the non-commercial version. For the ones who do commercial work the $495 license is quite reasonable.

Of course LuxRender is perfectly suitable in any sutuation :)

You have to be careful to compare similar things. Mitsuba is research project which doesn't have the level of completeness of LuxRender. Octane does not have the same features of Lux nor it can process scenes of the same complexity. Corona and Iray I don't know and Thea could be a contender but I never tried it. Maxwell, as much as I know is comparable in speed with Luxrender but it costs $775 per license and doesn't allow you to use rendernode. If a software costing that much was not faster I would be wondering what people pay for. LuxRender, on the other hand, uses all the cores in your machine and it can use any number of rendernodes on any comobiantion of Mac OS, Windows and Linux. 

LuxRender can be considerably faster than Vue and it can be even faster than 3Delight. I know that this last statement will surprise many but I actually have proof. The deal is that very few people try to use 3Delight at a near equivalent point with LuxRender. 

Cirstyn Bech-Yager, a former 3D World editor, who is a skilled modeler and contracts for firms like AMD was trying to render the attached scene with 3Delight. As we can see, after more than 8 and a half hours the render reached only one fifth of the result and the level of realism is nowhere near what you can obtain with LuxRender. Not even comparable.

Cirstyn's machine, for that render, used a quad-core i7-870 at 2.93Mhz. As we know LuxRender provides the whole frame right away, refining it progressively. That way of working helps tremenduosly with productivity and with getting the result out in the shortest time possible. 

When comparing renderers it's important to dig deeply and compare feature by feature. LuxRender has a breath and accuracy that are not easily found in other products.

Cheers.

There have been very interesting updates to Renderman recently. They added unbiased rendering and support for GPU.

Up to a couple of months ago I thought int the same way, maxxxmodelz, but recent disclosures by Pixar made it clear that they have modernized Renderman quite a bit. Neverthless, the price was just too high to "take a peek."

With the new free edition it will be possible to explore the new features and compare the rendering pipelines. I have a feeling that the new Renderman has potential to be intersting for the Poserverse. We will see. Soon.

Cheers.

Quote - Love that mission statement! I don't use Reality much because I'm personally very impatient with slow renders. I need to spend more time working with it. In the long run, it might well save me time.

But I can say one thing, Prêt-à-3D's customer service is excellent. And the product is excellent.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

LuxRender is actually pretty fast, faster than other similar renderers. It is a professional renderer that has everything "turned to 11" :) so it poses more load on the machine. Faster computers, with more cores, can help dramatically. For the past four years I have renderered my images exclusively with LuxRender, via Reality, and never felt the need to go back to something else. 

We have a very active and helpful community online so we will gladly help you address any optimization that you might want to address.

Cheers.

Quote - Paolo, if you do end up creating a bridge for PRMan, I'd definitely buy it!

Thank you, I appreciate it. Time will tell. Right now I have to finish Reality for Studio but I will defintely look into RM when it comes out and see what it can be done with it.

Cheers.

Quote - So, how do you do lip syncing?

I don't.

Quote - If I am doing a video with sound someone is talking. So you nether use nor recomend Mimic?

I don't have to make lip-synching videos so I cannot comment on Mimic.

Quote - But I think you are over thinking it, the OP asked a simple question on how to put music in a video, not how to produce brodcast quility animations with sound.

It's not a matter of overthinking and it's not a matter of broadcast-quality video. Nobody talked about that. If you want to write a poem you don't use a leaf blower. It's a matter of using the tool for the job. Animation is one of the most complex endeavours in computer graphics. People tend always to underestimate it. You prepare the animation in the 3D software but you do all the video editing in the appropriate application. It's hard enough when you use the right tool.

In any regard I don't gain anything from this. I already know how to do this stuff. I'm just trying to help. If the advice is not welcome you can very well ignore it :)

Cheers.

Quote - I take it you've never used carrara?

I does not matter. Video editing is done with a proper tool, which is an NLE like Premiere, Final Cut, or, for small sequences, After Effects. AE is not an NLE but it has solid timeline and compositing tools. 3D software is not the right software for video editing, being that Carrara, Maya, Blender or anything else. 

By the same token you don't ever, ever, render an animation from a 3D software as a movie clip. That feature should be removed from Studio, Poser or any other software. It only leads to pain and wasted time. Rendering of animations is done by using sequences of images. Then you take those images and import them into an NLE for proper assembly.

Anything else is asking for trouble and wasting hours and hours of time that you'll never get back.

There is copious documentation about these techniques on the web but I will gladly elaborate if needed.

Cheers.

Quote - Is this a hint that you're making a bridge to RM?

Prêt-à-3D is named taking inspiration from the Prêt-à-Porter, the "ready to wear" fashion that makes designer clothing affordable for the larger public. The goal of our company is to bring high-end graphic in the hands of everybody. It's "3D ready to wear".

When I saw the announcement of free Renderman I immediately thought at the possibilities. The announcement fits perfectly our company's mission. It's very early at this stage but I definitely have a strong interest in this. 

We have shown that it's possible to create a bridge between Poser or Studio and other high-end renderers while keeping the UI artist-friendly. The technology in Reality is designed to be modular and extensible.

We will keep an eye on Pixar, which I visited a couple of times in the past, and their announcement. If Renderman becomes accessible to the masses we will explore all the ways in which it can be connected to the Poser/Studio world.

Cheers.

Quote - It would be nice if there was something like Reality for Renderman...

Guess why I posted the announcement on our FB page ... ;)

Well, it will take a lot more than that to get anything decent with RM but the announcement is groundbreaking nonetheless :)

Here is the article straight from the horse's mouth: http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25846

Cheers.

Hi.

I assume that you are trying to import the music inside Studio.

Animation are made inside a Non Linear Editor, a video editor, not inside 3D programs. Even if you were using something like Maya or Blender they would be the wrong place for edting animations.

The cycle for animation is:

• Create the sequence in Studio or any other 3D program

• Export the animation as a sequence of single frames

• Import the sequence into something like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere

• Add music, speach and sound effects

• Export the animation as a video file

Any other way will only lead to pain and frustration.

Cheers.