hi everyone - can anyone help me with this question? i created my image i wanted, and set up lighting nodes etc etc.. and its a basic image with a model and a plain background. i set up render settings at final (automatic settings) and the size was 1000 pixels by 800 pixels. it was still rendering 30 hours later.......... and only on 3 quaters rendered. is there anything i can do to speed up renders?

my computer is an intel core duo 2 , 2.13 GHz , 2GB ram , radeon x1600 graphics card.

You might want to check out the above settings.... This is what I usually use for quick renders with pretty good quality (IMO)...

Cheers

vxg139

how good is the quality with those settings? can anyone else vouch for these settings?

Since it typically takes about 1-2 mins to render 1000 x 1000 image size, perhaps you could try it out and judge for yourself?..... just a suggestion...

cheers

vxg139

Yea those are how I do quick lighting tests. If you can't render something 1000x800 in less than a couple minutes there, something's wrong.

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I use a very similar setting to vxg139.
The only actual differences are that:

I don't tick the "Displacement Maps" box
Max bucket size is 128
Min shading rate is 0.42

On my Pentium 4, 1200 x 1200 images took a few minutes to render.
I have a quad core now, things are about twice as fast.

What kills you and takes up time is the Raytracing and Shadows.
I personally feel that they make the render look worse anyway.
What I think really improves renders is lighting: that is...make it BRIGHT.
Have the same settings for everything and use dark lighting for the render.
Then render it again with brighter lighting.
Depending on the mood you want to convey, I feel the brighter lighting brings out more detail to the renders. You can get away with removing some of the spiffy Firefly features if you make sure your lighting is good. Since you're probably using Poser as a hobby and not as an industrial tool, not having Raytracing isn't going to affect you too much for most renders, although there will be times that you'll want some shadows.

works well :) thanks!!

Earthjade - 0.42 MIn Shading Rate, that's a pretty uncommon number. Out of curiousity, what is your Max Bucket Size?

As I said, I put my max bucket size at 128.
I don't know if it makes any difference compared to 64, but the renders turn out good in a reasonable amount of time so I've stuck with that.

0.42 is the shading rate because as I move the slider for the min shading rate on the graphic interface, it progresses as 0.00, 0.21 then 0.42 and onwards. So I just chose 0.42 because I wanted higher quality renders and have used that number since.

*What kills you and takes up time is the Raytracing and Shadows.
I personally feel that they make the render look worse anyway.
What I think really improves renders is lighting: that is...make it BRIGHT.
Have the same settings for everything and use dark lighting for the render.
Then render it again with brighter lighting.
Depending on the mood you want to convey, I feel the brighter lighting brings out more detail to the renders. You can get away with removing some of the spiffy Firefly features if you make sure your lighting is good. Since you're probably using Poser as a hobby and not as an industrial tool, not having Raytracing isn't going to affect you too much for most renders, although there will be times that you'll want some shadows.

I wish you had a gallery to back up these statements. * So, I won't bother

To the op,, Setting shading rate to 0.00 (100 micropixel calculations for every pixel.. at least it used to) or, setting RayTrace "bounces" high (more than 3 0r 4) will stop time as we know it.. especially if you have transparent materials loke glass os hair... just an example..
I think you only need 3 bounces to get refraction.. *

Quote - So, I won't bother

Me either. I didn't know where to go with that one. I think you always need shadows, and the best shadows are ray-traced shadows, so I think you always need ray-tracing.

Imaging this scene without either.

As for number of bounces, you need one for every surface you want to go through. That means if you have a water plane like this one but no "other side", you only need 1 bounce.

If you have something like a glass sphere, you need two - one to go in, and one to come out the other side.

If you have a wine glass with inner and outer surfaces, and you want to see all the way through the glass, you need 4.

Here's another myth I'd like to bust but I can't seem to do it. There is a belief, backed by no evidence, that increasing bounces when you have no reflective or refractive surfaces will increase your render time. It does not. The bounce limit doesn't mean that you will bounce, it means you can't bounce more than a specified number of times. If your scene requires no bouncing at all, then the limit is not relevent.

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Here's an interesting one. Observe the glass table. It is 3-D, so there is an upper and lower surface. Observe the table's reflection of the sky, as seen through the window. That requires 4 bounces, to get the double reflection from the inside of the table.

One to go down through the top of the table, one to bounce off the bottom (inside), one to go up through the top of the table, and one more to get through the glass in the window.

If the window was 3-D, we'd need one more to get out of the room. But since the window is a single plane, we only need one to get out.

Note that even without the table, I still need two bounces for the scene. That's because I have soft reflections on the leather and the tile floor - one bounce - plus one to go through the window.

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I remember in Poser5 having to bump up bounces to get "missing" elements in a mirror. Half a figure would just not be there... P7 seems to have solved this. Yep on the rest of your statement.

Now this is an "artistic" statement (mho) but I think if you cut your focal length in half,, you'll improve this bath render,, as good as it is. I'm guessing this(render) is close to 100... The back corner of the room seems to be turning upwards (flattening)

Now the other one makes me jealous...lol and that's rare. I like the idea of low grade reflection on leather. Even if it's rough cut surface..At least you pick up the correct light color doing this. You could even force a skin shader to pick up some "scatter" in the right circumstance,,, this room is up there on the renderer charts

"I think you always need shadows, and the best shadows are ray-traced shadows, so I think you always need ray-tracing."

Can you do me a favor?
Can you render an image of a character in a fantasy-esque scene with no ray-tracing and shadows and then do so with ray-tracing and shadows?

I genuinely want to compare the difference. I guess I could do it myself, but it can't hurt to request someone more experienced at Poser take Firefly through its motions.

An example of the basic elements and basic kind of scenario I am talking about would be something like this:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1813661

Thanks for your time.

That would be fun to try - unfortunately I have no set like that. I don't buy much Poser content. (Almost nothing really) In fact, since I'm on the road (work work , sigh) I have practically no neato content stuff.

Is there a dungeon-type freebie you could point me to? I'd be happy to take a crack at showing what proper lighting (candles!) and shaders would do for you, along with how ray-tracing fits into those things. I like projects.

I don't use Poser for anything - I'm not an artist. Poser lighting and shaders is just an interesting puzzle. It's like sudoku for me - relaxing to figure out how to make it work, for no other reason than it is hard.

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In the Renderosity Free Stuff gallery, search for "French Village".
That's a really nice free set.
Doesn't have to be a fantasy scene, just a scene with a character and a set, I suppose. Everything needs some form of lighting and I want to see what ray-tracing and shadows can add to it.

Can you also post up the settings that are used for the render?

Thanks.

Oh - I have the French Village with me.

Here's a test render I did a while back. Nothing fancy - just broad daylight with shadow from the sun, and ray-traced reflections. I suppose you want to see what that looks like without the shadows.

But meanwhile, I thought you wanted dungeon fantasy, so I'm working on one of those for you.

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another

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Here's a free dungeon I'm working with, by shamira.

Go get it and give it your best shot. Then we'll compare notes.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=50713

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Here's another set of free props worth having. I'll use some of these with the dungeon.

Ancient Parts and Pieces by Sparky

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2755257

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Some questions about the two renders:

What were the render settings and size of the image?
What were the light settings and positioning?
How powerful is your computer?
How long did it take to render an image?

I need to be able to balance quality with quantity as I make poser comics rather than singular potraits. Until recently, I only had a Pentium so anything intensive took forever to render. Now I have a Quad Core, it would be worth it to boost up the render features as my processor(s) is faster.

Thanks.

I have a render going, so I'll come back later with stats on the render.

Meanwhile, my computer is not much:

My system on the road is a Dell Laptop D820
Intel Core2 T7600 @ 2.33 GHz
2 GB of RAM

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These are the render settings I typically use for basic rendering, not something for the gallery.

I used these for that village scene.

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OK Here's our starting point. This is that free dungeon set. The author provided a whole scene file with all the props loaded and with lighting already set. I changed nothing other than

Render dimension 1024x768
Moving the camera

This render took 20 seconds - very fast indeed. However, it's ugly.

The first thing is the lighting is "unmotivated". By that I mean that the choices made for the lights are not motivated by the actual scene at all. The author supplied three infinite lights, with one turned off, so two infinites. We are indoors, in a dungeon. There are no torches or whatever, just a window. Why would we then use two infinite lights from behind the camera? Is the room open to the sky behind us? Are we on a distant planet with two suns? I think not.

The color texture maps are ok, especially for a freebie, but they weren't used very well. All the shaders are inadequate. Of course with such terrible lighting you hardly care, right?

So now I'll fix things up.

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Quote - Some questions about the two renders:

What were the render settings and size of the image?

What were the light settings and positioning?

How powerful is your computer?

How long did it take to render an image?

I need to be able to balance quality with quantity as I make poser comics rather than singular potraits. Until recently, I only had a Pentium so anything intensive took forever to render. Now I have a Quad Core, it would be worth it to boost up the render features as my processor(s) is faster.

Thanks.

For comics rendering, based on my own experiences, here's what I recommend:

1. Simple skin shaders is a big one. Simple texture, maybe a simple bump. It's not so much that the more complicated ones necessarily take up significantly more time to render, but if you're doing anything with them, it becomes a pain in the ass when you have to fool around in the material room. As a for-instance, take a gander at my gallery and an image like this one. The skin is a reflective node setup combined, via blend nodes controlled by a mask, with the texture and bump maps. However, even that simple setup means I need five blends: the diffuse, the specular, the reflection_value, bump, and alternate_specular (the reason fro the two specualrs is because the skin uses that, while the reflective surface uses the alternate). I could probably get away with dumping the specular, and for long distances, the bump, but that still uses three.

And, as I said, this was a relatively simple one. Now, imagine what happens when you've got a base skin shader that's attached to the diffuse, the specular, the ambient, transluscence, bump, displacement, alternate_diffuse, and alternate_specular, and you've got to try to wedge your changes in there, plus your changes have multiple node setups of their own? For one-off pictures, that's fine, or even for a single character you'll use repeatedly, but setting up multiple or one-off characters? Blech. When I'm setting up characters, I tend to ruthlessly strip the shaders down to the basics even if I'm not planning something funky.

2. Keep the effects to a minimum in the render. I rarely go more than 4 raytrace bounces for comic renders, regardless of what's in the scene. Displacement? If really necessary. Bump often gets the chopping block as well. If a crude reflection map will make it faster, and I don't need an accurate reflection? Do it. Ambient Occlusion? Skippable. Atmosphere? Oy, avoid that if needed. Depth of field? Faster to fake in Photoshop.

3. Cheat mercilessly with the lights. If there should be 8 lights in the room, and you can get by with 2, or even 1 and an IBL, do it. The shadows might not be perfectly correct, but if the comic is telling a story well enough, people won't notice.

Thing with the lights though, and it's probably the single biggest problem I have with most Poser-based comics, is that they skimp on the shadows and use pretty much the basic lighting setup. It's understandable that they do it, since shadows take time to render, and getting it right takes time, but after a while I find it looks like complete shit.

So - I load a chandelier. Now I have motivation to put lights in a certain place, with certain characteristics.

There are bunch of candles. If I were really to go all out, I'd put a point light in for each flame. But I didn't want an hour-long render, so I used only 3 point lights. They are each 25% intensity, positioned above the candles around the center post. I also used the built-in falloff, so that the intensity decreases with distance. I set distance end = 250 inches.

The linear falloff built into Poser is not accurate, but good enough for this demo. If I was making a really good render, I'd use my inverse-square falloff light shader. They take a while to set up, so I skipped that for now.

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I also loaded a figure, and I fixed all the materials. I used displacement on some, bump on othres. On all, I placed a Blinn node for specular highlights that give a sense of dampness.

This render took 50 seconds.

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Finally, I enabled ray-traced shadows on my 3 lights. Each has a blur setting of 6.

This render has a much more believable sense of drama and isolation. The shadows are key.

Be sure to click for full size on these renders.

Render time here was 10 minutes. Well worth it, IMO.

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Here's the prisoner closeup without shadows.

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And with shadows. Yes it's ten minutes versus 40 seconds. Worth it.

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More fun with ray-tracing. I call this "WTF Do you think is in there?"

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Quote -
I don't use Poser for anything - I'm not an artist. Poser lighting and shaders is just an interesting puzzle. It's like sudoku for me - relaxing to figure out how to make it work, for no other reason than it is hard.

You seem to have a pretty good eye for art. Maybe that is the essence of real art, like trying to solve a puzzle. It seems to be a lot of why I enjoy Poser. I'm no artist, either - but I think I've produced some pretty good artwork with a tool that I,too, find challenging.

I appreciate your thread, here!

Thanks for the mini tutorial, bagginsbill.
I can see the differences and the shadow quality does make a difference.

However, as I mentioned, making Poser comics sometimes requires 100+ images for a 30-odd page story. Taking the initial tweaking you did to the defealt dungeon set, that is the sort of thing I would need: better materials and a sense of dampness.

Once shadows are put in, the scene does look better (especially the staircase) but I don't think it is "9 minutes" better. I suppose where I am coming from is much closer to Keith's philosophy which I could call "partisan rendering" or "guerilla rendering". That is, you want some bang, but you need to be able to deliver it rapidly. This will absolutely require cutbacks and sacrifices. The real issue is what to cut back and what to sacrifice.

For me, I am in a fortunate position that now I have upgraded my computer, I can look to be improving the render features rather than cutting back, but I also can't go crazy with the features and make a shadowy scene that will take 10 minutes to render out. The question is: what do I improve? what do I not add?

So I would like to ask you:
With what you have shown, what would be the best settings and features you can think of to make a good quality render in 4 minutes or less (and most preferably less)?
Keith has given a few suggestions I am going to experiment with when I get to my rendering computer later on, but I'd like to know what you think. For example, would you sacrifice shadows completely? If not, what's the best balance? Needs to be a good compromise between fast and pretty.
That's a mathematical puzzle if ever I saw one...

Thanks for your time.
I'm going to print out this thread later on for future reference.

Well, first of all, your quad core will do that render in 2 minutes flat - maybe less. My laptop is crap, remember.

Even on my laptop, if I render with only one point light, the shadows and highlights are not quite so soft, but pretty close to the same thing, and the render is 4 minutes 35 seconds. On your machine it would be 30 seconds.

Plus, my figure had AO on the skin shader. You mostly won't need that for comics. You'd be down to 20 seconds I bet.

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Also I imagine that you don't need a 1024x768 render for just one panel of a comic page. You'd probably come in even faster.

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Problem (for a lot of Poser comics) is that a lot of them are a single panel per page.

*100+ images for a 30-odd page story.

a lot of them are a single panel per page.

= ? huh ?

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Really, guys, I'm not trying to force you to use shadows and raytracing.

I was responding to this:

"What kills you and takes up time is the Raytracing and Shadows.
I personally feel that they make the render look worse anyway."

All I'm saying is, that's just not true. Raytracing and shadows do not make the render look worse. And, on a decent desktop, you get a full-page render in 2 minutes with raytracing and shadows.

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Just for giggles, here are some tests of my own.

Mind you, I'm running a quad-core Vista-64 machine with 8 GB. The scene is the same as BB's (I have Sparky's as well, so even the extra light source). I used Michael 4 as the figure, his standard res maps. The fourth wall was not loaded.

To start, I'm using my default setup: no texture filtering, 1 infinite shadow-casting light, white 80%, 1 IBL at 20%, using a simple two-tone node setup medium gray and dark gray (I think the node setup is yours, BB). 1400x875 render window, 2 raytrace bounces, irradiance caching at 100. I moved the infinite around to get reasonable shadows inside, and downsized the resulting PSDs in Photoshop to produce the examples.

I did one initial untimed render to get all the textures loaded.

Run 1, no shadows: 12 seconds. This is pretty much "Webcomic standard" in terms of quality that I've seen.
Run 2, shadows (blur radius 1, min bias .2): 31 seconds. Not what I'd call great. but for a webcomic pretty fair. The shadows are a bix pixelly but not intolerably.

*? huh ?

*Depends on the style you choose.
Some people do one image a page so it's more like a graphic story.
Some go for a more traditional layout with multiple renders in multiple panels to a page.

Next test: 1 point light, 100%. Only light in scene, parked over the chandalier. 12 seconds. Shadows on: 35 seconds with Blur radius 1, 13 seconds with it set to 0. Nice, sharp shadows as you'd expect from a point source.

Interestingly, even without shadows getting away from the damn infinite lights makes it better (due, as you pointed out BB, even without shadows the light is actually coming from somewhere).

Next 1: point light turned down to 80% because I turned the IBL back on.

Without shadows: 12 seconds
Without shadows: 13 seconds (IBL makes no difference in time, as expected)

Looks even better.

Now with 3 point lights. I turned them down to 15% each, and turned off the IBL.

No shadows: 13 seconds
Shadows: 20 seconds

Looks pretty darn good, if I do say so. Better than quite a lot of webcomics I've seen. It's even better at the full render size.

Since I have the shadows working nicely with no real impact on time, I added back in the IBL at 20%. It's hard to see at the reduced size, but you get to see the stairs on the right (so they look like stairs rather than a door) Render time 16 seconds.

Wow thanks, Keith. So there ya go - shadows are damn cheap on a nice computer.

I forgot to tell you I disabled shadow casting on the chandelier. Since the real fixture has so many lights, real life would produce hardly any shadow from the fixture.

I envy you. 3 point lights with RT shadows in 16 seconds. Wow.

So I'm sure we're crossposting, but how about with nice blur?

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If you turn on the light falloff on those point lights, you can bring them back to 25% like I had.

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Now for the improvements: bump mapping and displacement mapping on the floor, and I pulled everything from Mikey's material setup except the basic texture and bump maps. Turned all the lights down to 10%, turned off the IBL. It's dark, it's dreary, it took 22 seconds.

(Problem, which I hadn't noticed before rendering, was he's glowing because his ambient is on. That's why he's glowy still.)

Final one from inside the cell: with the glowy skin taken care of, I thew back in the IBL at 10% (note: that means total light intensity is only 40% for those still paying attention).

Looks pretty good to me.

> Quote - Wow thanks, Keith. So there ya go - shadows are damn cheap on a nice computer. > > I forgot to tell you I disabled shadow casting on the chandelier. Since the real fixture has so many lights, real life would produce hardly any shadow from the fixture. > > I envy you. 3 point lights with RT shadows in 16 seconds. Wow. > > So I'm sure we're crossposting, but how about with nice blur?

Yeah, I should have picked up the chandelier shadow myself.

Okay, it's shadow is off. Camera back to roughly same position. Shadow blur at 6, bias 0.2.

Time: 2:35

Without light fallout, obvious problem: the 3 lights are spaced far enough relative to the bars that, with the shadow more realistically blurring, they're canceling each other out since it's no longer effectively a point source. I don't find it nearly as dramatic, storywise, even though it's more realistic.

That's one of the things I meant earlier about cheating with the lights. In graphic storytelling, the image has to advance the story as well as the words, and sometimes realism has to be sacrificed to that end.

I'll try one more with the blur dropped to 2.

Okay, the 2 made no real difference. I redid the render with no blur (and no chadelier shadow, mostly), and turned the IBL back off, so you could see the difference. I find the play of light and shadow more interesting than the more "realistic" render, and it only took 15 seconds or so.

Now here's where it gets interesting: exact same scene as last time with two exceptions: a skyball with a simple gray and white cloud pattern (so where I took away the wall for the camera it just wouldn't look black), and our jailer, one of the Chrome Covered Cyber Sirens From Beyond Space. or something. Render time: 2:10

Raytracing by itself isn't a big deal: what you're raytracing, on the other hand...

If i was doing a webcomic, I'd be tempted to really cheat with that one and use a fake mirror finish, especially if there were a few of them in the scene (and I've rendered a few in a scene and man, that takes forever.)

On the issue of doing comics, there's one other critical issue that can't be overlooked: while two minutes or five minutes or ten minutes might not be long for a nice-looking render (and remember, my machine is on the upper end, so I don't represent the majority of users) , that's not the major thing. Say it takes 10 minutes to make a really nice render, and you have a 10 to do for a few pages of artwork. Sure, that's under two hours of rendering time, BUT...

and this is a really, really big but...

That's not all you have to do.

On the front end, you have to assemble the scene and the characters. Then you have to pose them. Then work out your render angles, and so on. Render. And then , if the scene changes, you have to do all that again. And then when that's all done, head to the graphics program to add all the other things a comic needs. And that's not counting re-renders, and god save you if you can't use pre-made items and textures as they are; that's why I brought up the bit earlier about simplifying the texture setup, mainly because that's less time I have to spend later futzing around in the Material room.

And for a lot of people, rendering is all they can do at one time, so they have to sit back and wait for it to be done.

So, back to where I started with this: can people make better rendering with not much additional overhead in terms of time for comics? Damn straight, as shown. I think a lot of comic artists (and not just 3D) tend to get a bit lazy. Which you can understand, most have lives they have outside the comic, so anything to save time is good.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that there's a limit on how far you can go to make it pretty and at still do all the other stuff needed.

Cool stuff. Thanks.

I was figuring that somebody who's cranking out tons of comics would be using a render queue. While the last scene is rendering, you're setting up the next one. I gotta figure it takes more than 10 minutes to pose and whatnot, so a few minutes to render the previous is overlap time. And I'd probably also set up all the scenes, and do test renders at low quality without shadows and so on during the day, then save these scenes in a folder and do a batch render of them all while I sleep. (If there's no tool for that, I can write one in python pretty easily)

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

In fact, if I wasn't sure about settings (lighting and such) I'd even think about doing the photographer's "bracketing" trick. (You know - not sure of exposure - so you take 3 or more photos at various exposures.) Meaning, I'd have my scripts set up to vary the lighting so even if I don't know exactly what the perfect values are, I'd render all conceivable values and pick the one I like best in the morning.

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: rendering times with poser 7