I used Transposer to import a poser character with dynamic hair. I removed all the poser lights and added a Carrera lightbulb. I enabled soft shadows. I then set the anti-aliasing to be the best possible and proceeded to render. The hair took for ever to render (120 hrs!) but came out beautifully. The rest of the character rendered relatively quickly (as I had expected) and came out beautifully shaded but with jagged edges. I have attached a cut from the render and a screen-capture of my render-settings.

Can anyone here tell me what is going wrong?

Try Carrara (with an a).  Just guessing. I never touch the aa settings-just leave at default. I think your knee is over bent? I think that an hour for a 1500 by 1200 image , with dynamic hair, is getting a bit long when I do something. Try leaving the aa at default and lets know your time.

Hi Graybeard, Nice to see you around. It looks like a geometry issue rather than an aliasing issue. The outside of the joint is bent far enough that the geometry smoothing is not "hiding" the stretched polygons. On the interior of the bend, it looks like the geometry is simply distorting because of the extreme angle of the bend. If you can ease the bend a little, the issues should go away. Poser characters do not have real high poly counts at apendage joints. Their faces have the highest counts. If you weren't needing to bring in the Poser hair, I'd suggest subdividing the joint area in the modeling room to remedty the issue but if you break the connection to Poser, you'll loose the hair. 120 hours, in my opinion, is too long for a render - regardless of your computer equipment. Some of the settings in Carrara can be set too high for the task with no real increase in quality - just an increas in time. Try anti aliasing on "Good" but change the pixel settings to 2 and see how that looks. I rarely use Best because it just kills the render time. The usually use Best when the poly count of the objects is low but the texture map detail is high. Hope this helps a little. Good luck! Mark

The same figure - and yes it is bent a lot (works nicely for the picture once it is done, believe me!) - renders with no problems on the Poser firefly engine.

I'll try your advice about subdividing the joint area (I can always connect to the hair in postwork).

The Poly issue explains the top of the picture (It is a buttock) - but does it explain the jagged edge of the inside of the leg ?

I actually did not post on the speed issue for the moment, but since you have taken it up there is a few things that makes me wonder. My machine is relatively fast: Intel NT 3,2 Mhz with 2 Gig memory. The processor went 99% all the way during the render, but the memory never got over 300 Mb. Is itnormal for Carrara to use resources like this? IAnd does anyone have any experience with rendering high intensity dynamic hairs from Poser. I do think 120 hrs is a bit over the top. Is there any brilliant way to make the hair in Carrara?.

Questions, questions... ;-)

The Firefly engine is truely optimized for some of the issues that Poser throws at it. What you're seeing may be one of those issues. Carrara "sees" the polys a little differently than Firefly. For the hair, you might actually try reducing the hair count in Poser a bit and then change the thickness etc. in Carrara after import. Unless I'm animating with dynamic hair, I'll actually use poseable hair instead of dyamic hair if the render is to be done in Carrara - just for the speed reasons On the interior of the bend, this may be a Soft Shadow/normals issue that can be fixed by simply moving the light source slightly to the left or reducing the size of the shadow light source (the numeric value in the size portion of the soft shadows pane) Carrara will use almost all of the processors when rendering.

I tried breaking the link to Poser and subdivide - and it brought me the problem of loosing the texture and shader as well. I also tried changing the size of the shadow light source and it did not really work. So I took the image through PSP and posted it to the Carrara galleries: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1230806

I'll have to try and try again to see if I can find a workaround for the problem.

Thanks for the help!