I am greedy. I admit it. Animating two Vickies, both with full texture and hair with texture. Decided to see what full greed rendering would be like. P4 2.4 GHZ 500 MB RAM Video card has 64MB memory (does this matter, even?) Poser 4 with ProPak 2 instances of Vickie 3.0 in scened, both with hi-res texture applied Koz pony tail on one, messy hair on the other Animating to 320 x 240 30 frames per second 100% quality on compression, Full resolution 72 dpi Anti-alias on Shadows yes Only 1 light No clothing yet, or other props The resulting frames are beautiful. I'm rendering a brief 10-second movie and will post here, but it will be over 3 hours from now! This animation render is requring 38 seconds per frame. I am not necessarily unhappy about that, since, as I say, I am being greedy about the quality. Questions: 1) Does this rate seem normal to Poser people, or am I doing something wrong possibly. 2) I have two other applications on the way to me, Motion Builder and trueSpace 5.2 and wonder if these programs can render faster than the Poser 4 engine? I like animating in Poser, but will be looking into these other two programs for speed and animation features. 3) If I were to buy a rig just to render, what are the specs to go for? (DualProcessor?, MHZ, RAM, type of RAM, graphics card, etc.) Any insight welcome. ::::: Opera :::::

Video card has 64MB memory (does this matter, even?)

Not for Poser 4. Or Pro Pack. Or P5. Maybe (maybe) Poser 6, but that remains to be seen. DAZ|Studio will have 3D hardware support, but this will only help during the composition process. True renders are software-driven, and dependent entirely upon your processor speed and amount of system RAM.

1) Does this rate seem normal to Poser people, or am I doing something wrong possibly.

Sounds about right to me, given your hardware, render settings, and the elements loaded in the scene.

Enjoy the speed while it lasts. Eventually, you'll be building increasingly complicated scenes at DVD resolution, where each frame takes minutes to render, and will find yourself taking up productive hobbies like needlepoint to pass the time while waiting for "that next animation" to finish.

2) I have two other applications on the way to me, Motion Builder and trueSpace 5.2 and wonder if these programs can render faster than the Poser 4 engine?

Not likely. The P4 renderer is one of the fastest around, mainly because it's so limited. You start adding features like motion blur, raytraced reflections, depth-of-field, etc. and it really slows down the renderer.

From my days with earlier versions of trueSpace, I can say with some confidence that it'll be slower than P4. I can't speak from experience with Motion Builder, but I know that it's primarily an animation tool with an advanced real-time preview display, although it does have some sort of render engine, also.

3) If I were to buy a rig just to render, what are the specs to go for?

Ultimately, it'll depend upon which software package you choose as your renderer. Some of them can make use of dual processors; others, like Poser 4, can't. As a general recommendation, build a rig with the fastest processor available and as much memory as you can afford. The graphics card won't be of much use during the render itself, but can help during the scene-building process if your software has 3D hardware support.

[i]100% quality on compression, [/i] I stronly recommend rendering as a series of still images and not as a AVI or MOV file and converting it to the desired format afterwards. That way you can try different codecs/compresions without having to render the whole thing again.

little dragon: "...increasingly complicated scenes at DVD resolution" what would the settings be for DVD? What pixelCount/aspectRatio? Codex? Quality? Little Dragon, thank you for your detailed and thorough response to my post. It's a perfect example of contributing to the community, and it helped me significantly. Thank you for giving your time. ::::: Opera :::::

stewer, thanks for responding. That is incredibly important advice. Same time to render, but total freedom to use the frames independantly. Besides the points you made, I can take a set of frames and make an animated gif or flash mini from separate images (I use Canvas for this) ::::: Opera :::::

what would the settings be for DVD?

Depends upon your television standard (NTSC/PAL), and whether you're trying to achieve fullscreen or widescreen (anamorphic or otherwise). It's even more complicated because television pixels are rectangular, unlike computer-monitor pixels, which are square.

Here's a webpage that should leave you nice and confused on the issue:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/

You'll want to use no compression (or at most, lossless compression) while creating the animation, because as the final step you'll have to convert the video to MPEG-2 format, which is the standard for DVDs.