Hello all,

I bought the Poser update from PPro to P8 after SR1 was available. Two sentences from the SM website:

• "Render PHOTOREALISTIC or stylized art and animations for print, web or video projects"

• "Poser 8 has been PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZED so you can pose your characters and RENDER them FASTER on today's multiple processor systems"

Well the render took more than 4 hours on a workstation with a Xeon 5520 CPU, 12 GB of ram, an ATI 8700 Firepro GPU and a Western Digital VelociRaptor harddisk.

Frankly speaking: All the time trying to understand PoserPro, I thought it's my fault that I don't get renders that are at least a little bit realistic. Now I have Poser8. After all the hype about the it's speed it's superior render quality and so on I thougt it will be better. But the result is still not what I expected. Or more harsh, It's completely useless (remember it's already SR1 of the 8th version of the software and it still can't render a simple room with "Indirect Light").

Is it still me who uses wrong settings all the time? Do you get better results with a reasonable render time?

Those ones of you that use other software (e.g. DAZ studio or Carrera, Lightwave, Max, Cinema etc.): does that software also need more than 4 hours to render something like I got? (and yes I used high settings, yes I know it's CPU intensive stuff, but 4 hours for that result?)

It's a serious question. E.g. Lightwave is available for under 900$ (still a lot of money). Might it be the better software even for a hobbyist? Or should I wait again for SR2? Should I wait for PPro 2010. Will it be better with that one?
I am not sure anymore.

Thanks a lot for your opinions.