Did a search in the Poser Python manual for Bucketsize & Bucket, but found nothing, so I guess not- but I thought I'd try here. Am I scraping the bottom of the pail? :O)

I was thinking of putting a feature in my render program to try and adjust the bucket size between each frame render to try and get to the most efficient size. Opening the PZ3 file and rewriting the line that contains the bucket size parameter would, I think, add too much time to be worthwhile.

Some Firefly options were added in P5 SR3. You have to look in the POSER5-SR3-README.TXT that came with the release to find those extra functions, but the bucket isn't there.

:0( Thanks for the reply Ockham.

How do you work out what the bucket size should be anyway? Is it a scientific mathematical calculation based on you computers memory or is it a trial and error process.

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Is it a scientific mathematical calculation based on you computers memory No. If there were a way of determining an optimum bucket size before rendering through a calculation, the renderer would do that automatically for you.

I was thinking of starting with a low bucket size, maybe even 1, for the first render and increasing by 16 for each frame rendered until the time taken to render a frame was longer than the previous frame. Then I would halve value of 16 (to 8!) and subtract that from the bucket size and then use the 'binary chop' technique to hone in on the best bucket size. Once down to 1 I would keep increasing / decreasing by 1 as appropriate as an animation could get more or less complicated as it progresses- although it wouldn't normally 'suddenly' get more complcated, so a 1 fluctuation should be sufficient to keep up with the changes.

You'd render one frame 20 times just to figure out what bucket size is the max for that frame? What would that be good for?

No! As you render each frame of the animation, you adjust the bucketsize to try and improve the render speed. Being an animation, each frame would be similar to the previous frame, so the optimum bucket size would be roughly the same. Over time, the picture would be very different, so when you get to the optimum bucket size you still adjust by 1 to allow for this. So you might get something like this.... Frame : BucketSize: Comment 1: 1 : First render, take a time 2: 16 : Compare this time to frame 1's render time, it's faster, so add another 16 to the bucket size. 3: 32 : Render was slower than Frame 2, so we deduct 8 from the bucket size. 4: 24 : Render was faster than Frame 3, so we try another reduction, this time by 4 5: 20 : This render was slower than frame 4, so we increase by 2 6: 22 : This render was faster than frame 5, so we increase by 1 7: 21: This render was slower than 6, so we decrease by 1 8: 20: This render was faster than 7, so we increase by 1 So by using the binary chop, we've discovered that the best bucket for this animation in the early frames is 20. However we keep fluctuating by 1 to test if the bucket size can be improved as the animation progresses. If so, the bucket size will gravitate towards the new bucket size.

I'm still not sure if that will really be that great. If there was the necessity to determine a "perfect" bucketsize (assuming that such a thing even exists), something like this would be out already. There are dozens of renderers that render in buckets, and they're out for years now.

Ok Stewer, how how do you decide what your bucket size would be? I have tried timing the renders per frame using a stop watch, I have tried looking at PC memory usage during renders, and basically it still comes down to total guesswork, which is not the ideal situation to have. I have to render a 5 minute animated video at television broadcast quality by the 20th of November. My initial calculation of render times for my scenes gave me 2250 hours of rendering time. By experimenting with different settings I have brought that down to 1200 hours, which was still not acceptable, so now I am actually going out and buying a new motherboard, processor and another gig of RAM. If someone can find a way to tell me what my bucket size should be, rather than me taking wild guesses, I would appreciate it. If this script can do it, then I think it would be very useful.

Well, I have never seen any discussions about "optimum bucket size" at all, and PRMan exist for over 10 years now. My advice would be taking the "densest" frame (where lots of geometry comes together in a small place) and turn the bucket size up just as high as that your computer doesn't start swapping. Then just render the whole thing using that bucket size. If you want to tune your scene for fast rendering, don't be too obsessed with the bucket size. You can get a significant speed gains from increasing the shading rate on less detailed objects, removing shadows where not necessary (also uncheck the "casts shadows" option on objects that are not required to cast shadows, e.g. the floor) and avoiding ray tracing whereever possible.

BTW, the way I do it is simple guesswork. A change of 1 or 2 in the bucket size makes hardly any difference, so I would not waste any time scratching my head about that. Adjust the bucket size in multiples of 16 (and skip the bucket size of 1, it's just too low), don't bother with a finer division.