Is it common for poser to take a lot of time to render . IF so I may have stumbled onto something that might help  please advise

advise what?

what version and what kind of render, and off course what are you rendering...Some renders are quickly, some renders are slow...(and whatPC you have)

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To be honest I don't know what Fire Fly rendering in Poser is for .P4 rendering is enough for a preview.When it comes to final rendering,I  import my scene to C4D.I am quite spoiled by C4D Renderer anyway,because I don't know any app that renders that fast .

-Timberwolf-, the Firefly render engine is for those of us who can't affort a single program costing almost a Grand or more, yet still want more than what the P4 renderer is capable of.

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If you're joking that's just cruel, but if you're being sarcastic, that's even worse.

yes, it is common for poser to take a long time to render. they use various tricks to speed it up, most of which degrade the render quality.

-modus0-  Yes,I know.Reading through the forums shows that a majority seem to use more than one software .Sorry I forgot those who don't.I just wanted to point out that Poser's render engine is no use for me. (Me ! )Rendering an 500 Fr.animation with 35 min per Frame means rendering forever.

Perhaps I don't understqand the first post here, but

Quote - Is it common for poser to take a lot of time to render . IF so I may have stumbled onto something that might help  please advise

 

but there was not a question posed (no pun intended) here.

So what did you find that mayhelp

Well befor i was going to say anything i was going to make sure it was not just a problem for me. If poser on high end renders is rendering slow, puchase a small hard drive 20, 40 gig and move your swapfile to that hard drive and the render times will pick up very noticibley

o.k., we'll give it a try. in Mac OS, that would be known as "page-outs", which is the tendency of the OS to use HD space and reserve RAM for inactive processes.

coyote255 - I think you were just looking for some benchmarks to start?  None of my best images take more than 10 minutes to render a screen sized image.  SOme things, in your render settings to whatch out for are Dissplacement, Raytracing, and Shadows(especially with alot of lights).  If you hav'nt a specifc need for any of these, it would save you much time to turn them off.  I've setup my render setting by starting with as little as possible, and then just adding/testing individual settings.  Honestly when I go back to the Automatic scale I'm really not anywhere near the higher "Quality" level.  I think of it as a huge Conservation!

When I want something huge, for a Poster/Print; then it's time to drop the Bucket Size, and let it run all night.

The rest of this  belongs in the Hardware Technical Forum:

A.) Poser does'nt use it's own swap file, it needs Windows's
B.) Poser can only get 2GB's(Or talk to Stwer for 3GBs,) of combined Physical RAM and Virtual Memory, from Windows.
C.)  If someone were to go out an purchase an external USB, on this advice, he/she would be very sad to know that USB is no where near as fast as a normal hard drive.
D.)  If you're still sharing the same IDE, of the Master drive, you may save tiem from armswing, but the two drive could only run at half speed ea. together.
E.) Even off the primary IDE(1) you still should check your manual for North and SOuth bridge bottlenecks, hte pipe feeding IDE1 may also be used for IDE2.  RAID-0 is term for using two hardrivees, simultaneously, to do the job of one, but I've seen plenty of new Mainboards that advertise RAID-0, but what they do'nt tell you is that would be for much much older IDE Drives.  IDE drives have run at 33MB/s, 66MB/s, ansd most recently 133MB/s.  So they say RAID-0, but do'nt mention that's not for 133MB/s IDE.  ;  (

FYI - SATA drives are 150MB/s, and SATAII is like 200MBs/sec.

? most of the raid stuff I seen was on servers, so mainly I've seen disk mirroring, striping, x/or stuff. Mainly Raids higher than 0. But maybe they've changed things.

btw...define 'long time'...it means different things to Brycers vs Poser users..;) I've never seen more than 15 minutes on Poser, but I've had 14-hour renders on Bryce..;)

I wish I'd said that.. The Staircase Wit

anahl nathrak uth vas betude doth yel dyenvey..;)

RAID-0. which is supported on most modern mainboards, will almost double the transfer rate, but it will not help with access time. Which means that reading/writing large chunks will be significantly faster than on a single drive.

Alas, swap file use is not in large chunks. 4 K per swap. But there's a lot of transactions per second. If you want a fast swapfile, you don't need RAID-0,  you'll need a drive with a very fast access time. For now, the fastest access times on desktop computers are delivered by the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor disks - and those are EXPENSIVE!
But they DO speed up Windows quite a bit. I can tell from personal experience.

Another thing: Poser does not access the drive very much during rendering, only when loading the objects and textures. During the render itself, it's all CPU based plus memory access. I tend to monitor memory size, CPU activity, virtual memory usage and page faults when doing a heavy Poser render, and I found that there are only a couple of swap file/disk accesses per second (if you have enough RAM). 

If you want to speed up Poser renders, install more RAM. More than 2 GB is only useful for Poser 7, which can use up to 3 GB of address space (and thus RAM) on Windows XP Pro, or 4 GB on Windows XP 64 bit.

In short, if you have 1.5 GB of RAM or more, disk speed does not affect render speed.

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SVDL - You've answered a significant portion of my questions, in the Hardware/Technical Forum, so I guess you'd know; but I'm surprised installing WIndows/Poser, onto a RAID-0 array, would'nt be the much help?  Allthough I do see what you mean about just having enough RAM...

Pakled - As far as I know there are only 3 types of RAID.  RAID-1 is the use of two disk, to da all of the same things, so incase one dies, the otehr still has all your memory.  This is only like half as fast, so people developed a way for you to use 4 disks at once, where the second two disks are only for speeding up the process.  That would be RAID 0+1(or 1+0?)  Then the spped emons cam along and threw the RAID-1 part, of the RAID-0+1, out the window.  This leaves you with RAID-0, which would(.../me looks around for where SVDL would have used RAID-0...8 ^ o...) just be faster....Allthough RAID-0 is also known as a Fault Tolerant disk.  Becasue it was originally made to support a very stable RAID-1 array, the is a measure of risk involved with running on only RAID-0, in other words when/if it crashes do'nt be too surprised ;  ).

Attached Link: RAID levels

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V4 
Firefly with very agressive settings
raytrace onf or true eye reflections and AO
IBL
skin shaders
950x850
AMD 3500,  2GRam,
411 seconds

This path is for stills only. I consider an acceptable render time for a full frame of an animation to require duration under 100 seconds.

i am working on the issue of hair. Attempting to render hair on this level of realism, with either dynamic hair or static, is a challenge both from the quality of results, including hair casting shadows properly and extrememly fine resolution of individual strands, and also from the render time issue.

I am exploring the separate render of hair, figure and shadow with separate settings optimal for the item, with composite in Photoshop. The other option is simply to paint the hair in Photoshop, period. With the new synergy between Poser and PS-CS with 3D layers, this will become more feasible.

So far I have not found a way to render such a portrait as above in Poser up to my standards without causing the render time to go to aprox 5000 seconds. This is actually an acceptable time for me for a still. I render final while sleeping.

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I forgot to mention I am on twin 10,000 RPM RAPTOR drives in RAID-0. I always operate as if the array were going to crash forever, at any second. All real work is backed up on an external HD and that is backed up to DVD.

However, in two years of constant running and pushing, I have never had a single problem.