Hi folks

Still frustrated with Poser6. It's like a boss; you MUST work with him, but you aren't HAPPY to see his ugly face day by day. Poser5 was more friendly and over all with stable rendering result. Poser6 is a lottery: you never know the result, but usually is badder than P5

I explain. First, my intelligence centre: PC, 1800 MHZ processor, 80 GB HD (70% free space), runtime in external 250 GB HD, 768 MB RAM. Windows2000. Poser6 SR 2 (yes, finally I reinstalled the s.o.b. patch)

I try to render a theorically easy scene. A tree in the background, a nude Vicky in front. The tree comes with Danie & Marforno's PATIO, a nice model full of leafs (this obviously is the problem, a lot of polys). I want (ridiculous, I know it) REALISM. So I'm using RDNA's Poor Man HDRI, a set of over 30 infinites (crazy, nah?). Well. The render started tonight and I left the computer rendering (typical with Firefly). This morning I crossed my fingers (I have deformed my fingers with all the times I used Firefly - a lottery, I said) and went to my PC: The nice screen of the memory bug: WHEN YOU USE FIREFLY YOU NEED TO DISABLE BLAHBLAHBLAH. Render stopped at 30%. Nice

This is the setting I was using:

An this is the result I was getting, until the f***** crash (forget the lashes)

Perfect for me, this light and shadow between the leafs. But obviously too much for Poser6. Well, I tried to follow Poser6 gurus readed here and deleted all Poor Man's lights (poor man ME), and I put a IBL AO. In render settings I used the same settings but enabling Raytracing, raytracing bounces 1, and disabling Smooth polygons. And render again. I've stopped the render, because the result was looking like a poo, the leafs hadn't the previous nice lights and shadows but looked like fluorescent. So I can't use IBL AO. And I'm dead at this point, because I'm now at work with a lost rendering night. Frustrated

Any suggestion different to screams, blasphemies and voodoo to e-Frontier?

(added violence tag because my violent language, grunt)

I'm using RDNA's Poor Man HDRI, a set of over 30 infinites (crazy, nah?). Shadow maps, I assume? At what size?

Default

I dunno; I think Poser 6 is not that bad but (like a woman) you have to know how to treat it. I've seen your work before and it's good. I would start by rendering the background separately and compositing foreground and background elements. For an "expensive" item, such as a tree, I would render the tree as a tiff and "alpha channel" it to a billboard / square prop. Twice the work but I think you'll be able to add more bells and whistles for your main subject. Haven't used sp2, so no advice there (sp1 runs like a dream on my system), but I would definitely recommend more RAM and faster processor if your resources allow it. I run a P4 3gHz, 2GB RAM running XP Pro. Firefly runs great and there are no complaints here. Fast!

Couldn`t you render the tree just and use that as a background when rendering the vicky character?

Shading rate 0.01? Come back in 3 years, it might be done rendering. For every pixel it has to render 100. Try a MUCH higher setting like 0.5 a sane minimum is about 0.2 (For fast previews set it to 8!) You could try IBL again, without AO. Set the IBL light(s) so they DO cast shadows (Yes, that will really work.) Put the light sort of in line with the light source in your light probe. That setup can even work if AO is turned on. Don't forget to add a light set for highlights only when you do an IBL scene. If you don't use a highlight light every thing will look flat.

Shading rate 0.01 D'oh, I overlooked that! That's your memory eating monster right there! This setting will dice every polygon into 100 micropolygons per pixel.

Okay, don't kill meh, I will try a higher setting ;) And I will try your IBL settings, nerd Thanks to all :)

I'd also try a smaller bucket size. I frequently have to turn mine all down to 16 when doing pictures with more than one character in them (and that's with a shading rate at 0,1)

30 infinite lights? That's a killer indeed. Since P6 has IBL you don't NEED so many lights. By the way, that very low mininmum shading rate setting does not affect the render. Most objects have their own minimum shading rate set at 0.2 by default, and Firefly will use the largest of the render dialog setting and the object setting. One object you might want to lower the minimum shading rate on is the hair. Bad looking transmapped hair in Firefly is almost always due to a shading rate that's too high. 0.2 is a good starting value for hair, though you might want to lower it to 0.05 (and set the minimum shading rate to 0.05 too).

The other thing to remember on IBL is to keep the intensity low. YMMV, but I've found that unless I keep the IBL intensity down in the 10-25% range, you end up with a very flat image w/ almost no shadow definition, but having that little IBL helps tremendously. Note, I do use AO on all my IBL lights and have had very little problems with it. Check Refuge to see a complex scene w/ IBL/AO enabled. I should say, however, that I'm running a 3.2GHz w/ 4GB RAM, and I'm willing to wait a day for a high-res render.

(Note, the 10-25% intensity if for a pure-white IBL. With a darker image, you can raise the intensity. Before I understood this, I generated this where the colors are thoroughly killed by IBL at 100% pure-white intensity.)

BkMrrrrq

Looks like allproblems mentioned If you like the leaves and cannot get IBL right,,,use your big 30lightset and render it without figure(post 4). Save iy as leaves.tiff... Blurrrrr them a bit in paint.. (Fake focal And/or File>import>background picture.. Move/rotate tree prop over new bg pic.. rerender,,,save as ,,, blurrr in paint a bit less,,, Import new 2 level Blurred leaves.tiff and unhide figure....delete/hide tree prop, render,,,yada yada Many ways to make this bearable and not go crazy

"Since P6 has IBL you don't NEED so many lights." Exactly, and since the pre-P6 RDNA "poor man's HDRI" sets use multiple lights to simulate HDRI effects based on accompanying photographic backgrounds, you can just use the exact same photograph with on IBL light to get pretty much the same effect.

Realistic=Oclusion.

I love Poser 6, but I also use texturefiltering and texturesize I always vote 2005.Bucket size 34. The problem with the lighting you can forget if you use hmanns Magix Lights (here on Marketplace). It always renders with best result.

#14 is dead on. Incidentally -- P6 cannot handle more than a certain number of infinite lights in a scene, and will generally fail to render after that. This is noted in the P6 manual, as well.