Thanks 3doutlaw,

just at this moment I was considering possible options to get finaly started with weight mapping inside Poser - again... while I'm working still with Poser 8.

Though the discount doesn't apply for the sidegrade it's definitly an option to go for :)

Hmm, thanks shvrdavid for that hint. Guess I'll give that a shot soon...

Changing the GPU would be great, but in a laptop it's not an option. I checked already the hacky solution using vidock, but without an expresscard slot it's either no option.

Just curious, does anyone of you used ever this vidock to hook up an external GPU to a notebook? (Links to ViDocks and the Upgrade procedure...)

Thanks fasttam and superboomturbo... :)

Attached Link: LuxRenderer

I guess you can't run it on UN*X-alike systems, like BSD or Linux. So you'll have to get an additional license for Windows.

btw this high-res renderings're for business purpose, are they?

In general I'm thinking since months to built myself a little rendering cluster and once in the long run to establish such rendering service over the internet, you've asked for. So far I checked and working with Lux, 3Delight and to some degree Octane. All of them you can access and run via SSH (with forwarded X), when they don't offer server/client-capabilities. With Firefly I think this won't be possible, though Smith micro writes something about network rendering queues in the features list. I'll check that further, soon.

Bottom line: Hope that helps you a little bit and when you've got some spare time take a look at Lux. With it you can render scenes from Poser via Pose2Lux Script and in this fall also with Reality 3. Then you can outsource these high-res rendering you're doing to spare PCs, running 24/7.

Referring to renting servers I know of one good provider which I used. It's domainfactory, based in Germany and the product is called jiffybox. I don't know of an US-provider, I heard that rackspace is offering on-demand servers.

I have my hands full with Firefly and MentalRay.

btw, when you use MentalRay for what do you need 3Delight?

Attached Link: Octane, GPU-driven Renderer

**
**

don't forget that there is Octane, first renderer which uses the GPU, to some degree Lux is also using it. So get a good CUDA-capable nvidia GPU and you could benefit finaly from this high-end GPUs. To my knowledge no other renderers uses the GPU, do they?

I'm wondering since years why consumer gpus are almost only used for gaming. They could do much more than that. Not that much like nvidias Quadro or Tesla. In my opinion they're wasting potential power and performance.

Quote - How is the rendering in Daz Studio 4 compared to Poser 8 and the firefly renderer. Any improvement in Daz or do you still need a 3rd party render engine.

My only disappointment with previous versions of Daz was precisely the rendering issue, and therefore I abandoned it.

Thats coincidence... :D

I just expirience it the other way round. Stable, fast 3Delight and unstable, slow Firefly.

What 3rd party renderer? Reality/Lux, external 3Delight? I've got never any trouble with 3Delight inside DAZ Studio 3 and 4.

What rendering issues you got with it?

Attached Link: Cnet free download V3, M3, A3, H3

V3, M3, A3 and H3 are still free, not at DAZ but at Cnet. I guess thats legal and DAZ tolerates it. The link is also posted in their forum in a sticky free stuff thread since a long time. DAZ' website is again offline, so no link :-/.

There're only the base figures, no textures and no morphs.

I hope that helps you.

Did you thought to rent servers on demand? Preparing an systems image and run it there? Charged by time spent and after finishing you can freeze the system.

It's not so cheap, but very flexible and I think when your doing such high-resolution render then it's for business.

There's only one issue, you could violate license agreement with outsourcing an image containing Windows + Poser + Firefly. 

Did you use Firefly or other renderer?

Very impressive light setups.

And I'm glad to see one black&white :-)

Addendum: I checked now. There is a new driver for hd 3000@i3.

But after checking the Changelog it's not worth installing, they fixed something for Vista - nothing about OpenGL, stability or something in that direction.

Well... :-(

Thank you all for your replies.

So far as I follow you not only the realtime view in Poser uses the GPU+OpenGL but also other functions inside the application rely to some degree on it. I wasn't certain about the connection between switching rooms, rendering and GPU capabilities. 

I'll checked some weeks ago Intels website for drivers, I'm going to recheck today. I doubt there's one but I hope it is.

@wimvdb: Do those problems always happen - even when you use default Andy (render, material room and unresponsiveness)? And if you turn off OpenGL? Or does it only happen when scenes are getting large?

They are unpredictable, only some of the crashes I can reproduce. With Andy and simple, plain shaders I can switch to the material room. With more advanced shaders and JamesG2, Alyson I get into trouble. I just retried now with SreeD to switch to the material room with a scene with which I got recently trouble - it worked, but know it also works suddenly with OpenGL. 

Usually I make small scenes with at most 200k polygons (1 Model and/or some props), but I'm using a lot of shader capabilities, like fast scattering, fresnel and ambient occlusion (when it works).

@aeilkema: I thought so that an HD3000 GPU will get me into trouble. With other 3D applications I don't have such problems. DAZ Studio 3 and 4, Carrara, Shade 12, Vue are running without trouble.

@vilters: [...] Download , install, and run Advanced system care [...] What anti virus are you running?

I'll try this advanced system care, though I never heared of it. Curious about it. I running russian anti virus application. Kaspersky Anti Virus 2012, no security suite only the scanner. I'll try to run Poser without KAV sitting in the background.

Hell, you ran Poser on a netbook? That leaves me with hope to solve my issues.

Attached Link: Free P3do version

I'll have soon a further look into your content database, so far it sound's great :-)

Btw, the P3do, which I tried recently is in fact an explorer rather than a database.  It offers only exploring and previewing capabilities at the files level, not at the runtime level - no indexing, no keywords, no whatsoever... although still interesting, but not what I've been looking for.

If someone of you is more interested, there is also a free version. I'm attaching the link to it. It hasn't any restrictions, only a few features are not present.

An interesting thread you started here. I'm too new and I don't know if DAZ3D kills itself with Genesis. But I wanted to share nethertheless my thoughts about it - following a trace of DAZ3D mistakes.

I started doing 3D 1/2 year ago. 1 year ago DAZ introduced Genesis together with DAZ Studio 4. When I started I saw not that much content for Genesis, vendors still focused more on V4.

The lack of the SDK for Studio 4 was another issue, a lot of People didn't switch to the new version because of missing plugins. So they didn't use Genesis as far as I read in the old DAZ forums.

So I decided right from the start to avoid Genesis at all. Starting more with legacy V3/M3 and working my way up to V4/M4. Still searching for alternatives, like Miki 3, G2 characters or Alyson (2); and even the free mesh of Antonia at runtimeDNA.

Being a new user with professional background in photography I think that I'm not alone with my decision to avoid Genesis.

Let's see if Genesis turns one day to Exodus... ;-)

Attached Link: P3dO Explorer pro

thanks for your replies. 

I meant this redraw of the screen, wimvdb.

hornet3d: That tracking by month and year inside the database sounds interesting at the moment I track that in a bunch of spreadsheets in Excel.

Furthermore I searched and found at runtimeDNA P3dO Explorer pro 2.4.6. It's comparable to pzDB, introduces a preview of the content in 3D, provides a pattern renamer inside the runtime, supports zipped content and can apply a part of a pose.

P3dO is a Runtime library manager & 3D viewer for Poser, Daz Studio and Carrara.
P3dO is a 3D viewer and browser for above 30 3D and 40 pictures formats.
P3dO for Poser has been around for more than 12 years.

It seems that it uses also Microsoft Access Database Engine relying on the screenshots there.

That's the next application I'll try and compare. Does anybody of you worked with it?