Hello, I have never been able to get a render using IDL to work (other than a naked figure in an empty room or the mannequin study that bagginsbill did way back with a glowing box in a hallway). That being said, I want to see what is frying my ability to render basic scenes. They always stop computing IDL about 1/8th to 1/3rd of the way down and then only render that small area. If that.

My current settings are IDL quality 7 but I can set it lower and it still chokes. Any pointers would be appreciated since it is frustrating that I can never use it.

Step one for any Indirect Lighting/Global Illumination render is to enclose the scene and all your lighting in a polygonal environment.  If you don't want to do this, most of the light will just vanish off into space.

Reason for your renders stalling is probably transmapped hair.  The more complex the hair model, the worse this will be.  It isn't limited to just hair, but hair models tend to provoke this problem in the worst way.  A workaround is to hide the hair from raytracing - this isn't ideal, but it's better than waiting a month for your render to finish.  This is a problem that occurs in pretty much all GI render applications, when dealing with complex geometry that is partially transparent or partially hidden by alpha.

I have found that dropping my irradiance cache to 10 and number of bounces to 2-3 makes by renders go quicker than trying to max out the settings.  I would suggest using D3D's render firefly found under Scripts rather than Poser's legacy render engine.  You have more control over your final settings.

The problem is that enclosing it normally makes the scene not render. And this is in simple scenes with no hair (except eyelashes) or no human figures even. It just dies.

I will try dropping the irradiance cache down to 10 and see if that helps. The D3D script doesn't work for me. I did try that once before.

Quote - The problem is that enclosing it normally makes the scene not render. And this is in simple scenes with no hair (except eyelashes) or no human figures even. It just dies.

If it's behaving like this, you don't have a settings problem, you have a bug.  Contact SM for support.

http://www.smithmicro.com/support/contact.aspx

What does irradiance cache do? I am not sure but I have ran a few tests and it works fine with a low setting but it dies whenever I have it at my usual render setting. It also works at a mid range but I am not really seeing a difference in the simple test I did.

Whether it's set to zero or 100, it should NEVER cause the app to hang, especially on an empty scene.  There should be no combination of settings you can apply within the interface that ever causes the app to hang.  You have a bug.

Well the application doesn't die. The render does. Partial renders, it is computing and it only goes so far before stopping. Here are two renders that show what I mean, normally in Poser it has a couple of render buckets missing but they just dropped the whole row when saving it.

they'll need more info on yer render settings and in what manner d3d ffrender script doesn't work.  they may also wanna know which version of OS X and what machine, RAM, graphics card, poser prefs et al.  not seeing transmapped hair in there, but find all transparent surfaces and uncheck "visible in raytracing".  IC (AO and IDL) allows interpolation error into the lite calcs.  AOIC=100 or IDLIC=100 means interpolation error = 0.  this setting means render will be very slow.  it will likely cause PPC or low-ram intel macs to quit.

I reckon the render progress bar actually disappears and the render stops, rather than the render appearing to stop while the progress bar continues to move (may be a feature, not a bug), then you hit "cancel".

I can reproduce the same problem if settings are too high or I'm trying to render too large of a resolution. I'm only running 2gb of ram and I'm sure thats where the problem is.

 

The render bar disppears and the render stops, it thinks it is finished but it isn't. I wasn't seeing much difference in the lower IC so I think I will just try to lower it and see if that works from now on.

What is you ram amount? Also are you on 32-bit win or 64?