Hi, I'm thinking of buying GlowWorm from the Daz website. Has anyone used this plugin? Is it any good? Is it useful? It is on sale right now for $20. Should I keep my $20 and look at somthing else?
Thanks
bladeeport

GlowWorm is well worth the $20 for it's ability to batch render alone.

Uhm...  I bought it way back in the day.  It kind of got caught out by all the upgrades happening in the main application, and I then got lost over its usage.   Neutral about the product at this point in time.

Is it worth it? Depends on your workflow.

If the idea of setting up several files and leaving Poser to render them in batches, save them, then close itself and shut down the machine (if you tell it to) would be useful to you to render overnight or while you are at work, then definitely it is a good idea. Same if you could do with layered images with separate aspects of the renders, like a render of just shadows, or a render of just AO, or ambient colour. These are VERY useful when postworking images and allow you much finer control of what is going on. Combine with the above, and it can save you a lot of time.

Glowworm also has an option to split big renders into sort of "layers".

In all, I find it very useful, but I know that has a lot to do with the way I work.

Thank you all for the info.
I went ahead and picked up the plug in. I do like the idea of the layers option, I'm sure some tricks can be done with this on its own and that is what I wanted too hear.

Thanks
bladeeport

I was hoping to find that Glowworm made it feasible to render complex (but not that complex) scenes intact;  i.e. using multiple passes, but not needing to render different figures separately.   It didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference in that area.   If Poser 6 couldn't handle the render in one go, Glowworm couldn't, either.   I should say, though, that other Glowworm users seem to have had better luck than I did.

I did detect a very peculiar problem, which seemed to be unique to Glowworm, involving textures.   I had a scene with three V3 figures, all wearing variations of the same material, plus three different hairstyles.   They were in a Stonemason setting, with another Stonemason setting in the background.  In one render, textures for the V3 clothing were applied to Stonemason's buildings.   In another, textures from one of the hairstyles were applied in the same way.   Those Stonemason sets work perfectly every time in native Poser, or in Carrara (the scene was one I had previously rendered in P6 without a hitch, which is why I was using it for the test).

In another thread, from a while back (www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2699875 ), jonthecelt suggested that "Stonemason's prop files (meaning the pp2's) tend to refer to an outside .obj file which is stored in the geometry".   I wonder if Glowworm has a problem with that kind of set-up.   I've never seen any problem like that in Poser itself.

Quote - I was hoping to find that Glowworm made it feasible to render complex (but not that complex) scenes intact;  i.e. using multiple passes, but not needing to render different figures separately.   It didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference in that area.   If Poser 6 couldn't handle the render in one go, Glowworm couldn't, either.   I should say, though, that other Glowworm users seem to have had better luck than I did.

I did detect a very peculiar problem, which seemed to be unique to Glowworm, involving textures.   I had a scene with three V3 figures, all wearing variations of the same material, plus three different hairstyles.   They were in a Stonemason setting, with another Stonemason setting in the background.  In one render, textures for the V3 clothing were applied to Stonemason's buildings.   In another, textures from one of the hairstyles were applied in the same way.   Those Stonemason sets work perfectly every time in native Poser, or in Carrara (the scene was one I had previously rendered in P6 without a hitch, which is why I was using it for the test).

In another thread, from a while back (www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2699875 ), jonthecelt suggested that "Stonemason's prop files (meaning the pp2's) tend to refer to an outside .obj file which is stored in the geometry".   I wonder if Glowworm has a problem with that kind of set-up.   I've never seen any problem like that in Poser itself.

the external geometry file wouldnt be a problem as all Poser props,figures should be made that way..it certainly is peculiar that materials are being applied to the environment..I've used gloworm a bit & never had that occur..perhaps drop a note to Poseworks & see if he can help?
http://www.poseworks.com/

edit,sorry ,looks like you've already tried that:
http://poseworks.com/smf/index.php?topic=142.0

gloworm is very cool at breaking your render down into single elements,..I think P7 has render passes by default now.