Just out of curiosity how many of you NEVER create final renders in poser?

It occurs to me that I never have ever since I started with Fractal design poser2 in 1995 because I had gotten bryce2 at the same time and used to export my poser people ( such as they were) into  Bryce 2 for rendering.

Being somewhat of a render engine junkie
Today I use anything from Cinema4D Advanced Render3, Vray ,MODO 401 or Vue "easel"

Amazingly vue easel, ( for which I paid $60 USD), supports rendering of animated poser scenes and Poser 6 node based shader system

I have Bryce 6 installed just to remind me of my 3D roots but I never use it for rendering anything personal or commercial

Daz  Studio 2.3 "3D Delight engine" Never worked on my system( crashes every single time) although the Open GL renderer works for animation previs
 

I also have Maxwell render
and KRAY for my old seat of LW 9.6
although the latter two rarely see any action.

Cheers

I'm as boring when it comes to renders as I am in everything else: Firefly here. I tried Luxrender, but never did get it working right on my machine. (I need a lot of hand-holding for things like that.)

Just out of curiosity, Wolf... what render engine do YOU recommend for Poser users rendering still scenes and why? Does it require another software, like Vue to host it?

Well, you may or may not know that I've done a few things in Luxrender. I may again :).

Laurie

"Just out of curiosity, Wolf... what render engine do YOU recommend for Poser users rendering still scenes and why? Does it require another software, like Vue to host it?"

Hi based On what I see being rendered by Most poser users it seem firefly is suited best for "skin Dominant" indoor closeup renders.
for those who want to create more complex outdoor  Daylight  true GI

Still renders I would recommend one of the lesser flavors of vue that supports opening PZ3 Files directly and the price of some of the lower vue versions  is still within many hobbiests range.

While I Commend the efforts of the Pose to LUX project I cant recommend LUX for Daily use due to the Long render times
and  apparent grunt work to get textures converted

Unless you truly are doing professional illustration and animation work for a living,
I cant see  most poser users moving to a major app like C4D+Vray or even MODO  for stills when you will need special attention to hand assigning materials  or plugin to get the poser scene into those programs intact.

Just my opinions

Cheers

I just render in Firefly on poser pro 2012.  Most of my work is character focused with background scenery of varying types

"Just out of curiosity, Wolf... what render engine do YOU recommend for Poser users rendering still scenes and why? Does it require another software, like Vue to host it?"

Hi based On what I see being rendered by Most poser users it seem firefly is suited best for "skin Dominant" indoor closeup renders.
for those who want to create more complex outdoor  Daylight  true GI

Still renders I would recommend one of the lesser flavors of vue that supports opening PZ3 Files directly and the price of some of the lower vue versions  is still within many hobbiests range.

While I Commend the efforts of the Pose to LUX project I cant recommend LUX for Daily use due to the Long render times
and  apparent grunt work to get textures converted

Unless you truly are doing professional illustration and animation work for a living,
I cant see  most poser users moving to a major app like C4D+Vray or even MODO  for stills when you will need special attention to hand assigning materials  or plugin to get the poser scene into those programs intact.

Just my opinions

Cheers

I use Poser to render, I think the firefly render is a good render for the most projects you can have.

Quote - Just out of curiosity how many of you NEVER create final renders in poser?

I realize this was about what else we use for rendring, but I never render a final version of anything, ever, because I am never satisfied with anything.  I only do a w/e render in Poser to see the materials, textures, and colors, then sigh and re-tweak everything some more.  I have actually made a few things in the past that looked better to me pre-rendered, so I just go for that kind of thing now and ignore everything not immediately seen in the workroom view.

Render in poser, focus in photoshop

I use Luxrender (with DS4 pro/Reality) most of the time as of late. I have poser 5, 6, 7 and 2012 and carrara 5,6,7 pro. but I just really like unbiased rendering having used vray and maxwell in the past with 3DSMax.

Quote -

While I Commend the efforts of the Pose to LUX project I cant recommend LUX for Daily use due to the Long render times
and  apparent grunt work to get textures converted

Is Vue actually much better?

I do recall trying it once, about three years ago.  Attempted to render some very simple newbie scene at 800 x 800 pixel resolution or thereabouts.  It took most of a day. Unusably slow.

To be sure, my machine was not exactly a workhorse at the time. But still. That's a tiny resolution. And I felt like a needed a microscope to view the preview.

Has it improved? Or have machines just got faster?

I render with Firefly mainly, but I also use Cycles , 3Delight, Luxrender, Kerkythea, and Nox Render with Blender as well.

If I need to do post work, I do it in Paint Shop Pro.

Just started Vray. Postwork and light adjustments always in photoshop.

Well, the truth of the matter is if a large part of everything in the scene is glassy or refective or has dynamic hair, Luxrender is gonna crawl. I do believe it now does gpu rendering, but you'd have to have a pretty decent video card to do it. As for grunt work, writing a shader in Luxrender is pretty easy...worlds easier than trying to figure out what Poser's material room is doing. I guess I'm just one of those people that doesn't mind at all waiting for a good render. That being said, Kerkythea has all sorts of rendering schemes that don't take too long at all and also has a material "room". Like Luxrender, it also is easier than Poser's mess.

Laurie

and brownie energy.  need ghirardelli brownies to be calm through the process

For what little I do lately, mostly Vue 6. Now that I have network rendering set up in Kerkythea I will probably play with that some more. Sometimes Carrara 6. Good old Poser 4 if I'm going to do a lot of playing with postwork filters, film effects etc. I have Poser 6 but haven't used it much. Very rarely POVRay. I got what was then the latest version of 3DeLight months ago but haven't installed it yet.

For me, Vue provides the best results with the least fiddling and the most understandable render settings. The features like the thumbnail real-time render preview, converting objects to area lights, selecting which objects are affected by which lights etc, give a lot of flexibility. I like Kerkythea's rendering but I've never been able to master the scene navigation. Vue's gizmos OTOH are intuitive and a joy to use.

I do recall trying it once, about three years ago.  Attempted to render some very simple newbie scene at 800 x 800 pixel resolution or thereabouts.  It took most of a day. Unusably slow."

Hi I am not sure what your set up was in that instance  but I can only report my experience with an old seat of vue easel I bought in 2005.
Vue with GI  is an order of magnitute faster than LUX as well as Maxwell and Maxwell itself is much faster than Lux on my old 2007 hardware.
The attached image was rendered yesterday in about 13 minutes in vue easel it would have taken a couple of hours for LUX or even Maxwell to resolve to this clarity
I have no idea about poser as I dont even know how to begin set up realistic outdoor lighting within poser itself.
YMMV

Cheers

I used to love Vue ;). Can't afford it anymore. But the free tools I have will do the trick for now. I do have Vue 7 Frontier (I think that's what it is...never used it) that I have on a magazine cd. But you can't import ppl into it (or anything else for that matter) so I figured it wasn't worth the install ;)

Laurie

"I used to love Vue ;). Can't afford it anymore. But the free tools I have will do the trick for now. I do have Vue 7 Frontier (I think that's what it is...never used it)"

You know Laurie, it is a shame that Eon Stopped supporting Direct poser import into ALL versions of vue Several years ago except for their more expensive versions
Hence you see me still running a version Vue 6 "easel"  from 2005 ($60 USD from the now defunct COMPUSA)
 It still imports  PZ3's natively still or animated
I can even load my own HDR files from Dosch.

Cheers

Since starting with Poser 2 I have used the render's of:

Poser 2, 4, Pro, 5, 6, 7, Pro '10, Vue 4, Bryce 4, Infini-D, Ray Dream Studio, C4d demo, 

Maya demo, Lightwave, Shade, Daz Studio 3, Carrara Pro and downloaded but never tried

Lux and DAZ Studio Pro; and probably a couple others I since forgotten about.

Early on I was obsessed with getting reflections, but was it P5 that first made reflections possible directly in Poser?

I'm pretty happy with the renders I get in Poser Pro '10, especially considering the little time that goes into setting up the render versus exporting and converting for other renderers.

"Has it improved? Or have machines just got faster?"

Your results seem a bit odd, unless perhaps you just cranked it up to Ultra. It's not the fastest thing going, but you can improve performance quite a bit by creating your own render settings Peggy Walters has a good tutorial: 

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Of course lighting and atmosphere settings are important as well. Environmental lighting (HDRI) seems to render faster. Smaller terrains help as well. Like any renderer, there are always optimizations, but Vue is reasonably English to me, while everything I read about FireFly looks like G(r)eek i.e. more checkboxes and Faster vs. Better sliders and fewer 'set this to oh point 73' etc - but that's just my impression. OTOH, it may be easier to get good interiors with Poser than Vue, just from what I've read.

I have found that HDRI does render faster in vue for me at least.
No one can argue against the power of a Node based  material systems, but I will never use one that forces me to endure the vicissitudes of those tedious wiring diagrams for shaders or lighting when All of the
So called high end apps/ renders that I use have drag and drop shader presets and lighting presets as as well.

Cheers

Quote - "I used to love Vue ;). Can't afford it anymore. But the free tools I have will do the trick for now. I do have Vue 7 Frontier (I think that's what it is...never used it)"

You know Laurie, it is a shame that Eon Stopped supporting Direct poser import into ALL versions of vue Several years ago except for their more expensive versions
Hence you see me still running a version Vue 6 "easel"  from 2005 ($60 USD from the now defunct COMPUSA)
 It still imports  PZ3's natively still or animated
I can even load my own HDR files from Dosch.

Cheers

Come to think..I have never tried my Vue 4 disks to see if they work in Windows 7. I could at least give it a shot ;). Even tho it doesn't have all the features it had later on it's still better than anything poser can still do ;). And it imported Poser scenes :P Of course, I'd probably still have to import as objects since things have changed so much. No biggie.

Laurie

Since Pro2012 and BB and others made the SSS more appealing-I use it mostly. I used LW 9.6 and my own variations on the SSS skin shaders prior to Pro2012. I've used Vue as well-not yet figured out how to make the skin look right with Vue SSS though.

Quote - "Has it improved? Or have machines just got faster?"

Your results seem a bit odd, unless perhaps you just cranked it up to Ultra. It's not the fastest thing going, but you can improve performance quite a bit by creating your own render settings Peggy Walters has a good tutorial: 

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Oh, god knows what I was doing.  I was just trying it out so I told it to render with fairly high quality settings.  Maybe they really were outrageous. Thanks for the link.  I might give it another try.  I think Poser's 2-6 hour 5000x5000 pixel renders at decent quality settings have spoiled me.

"...but I will never use one that forces me to endure the vicissitudes of those tedious wiring diagrams..."

LOL. I was continually befuddled by Max 3's material setup but I rather grok it than spaghetti. Different strokes. I've managed to avoid Vue's advanced node section for the most part.

"I have never tried my Vue 4 disks to see if they work in Windows 7"

Vue's worth a dual boot IMO, if only to play with landscapes. Either that or putting it on an older machine with XP if you have one. You may luck out though. I'd bet that the .pz3 import wouldn't be a problem. It'll probably just ignore anything it doesn't understand - that's just a guess though.

"I've used Vue as well-not yet figured out how to make the skin look right with Vue SSS"

There are probably some tutorials out there but generally, I think SkinVue is the way to go, SSS in a few clicks. I think they started including it with Vue 8 - not sure which editions. I only know that SSS (in any renderer AFAIK) is very sensitive to the size of the object.

*"I was just trying it out so I told it to render with fairly high quality settings." *

Yeah*,* the presets are all or nothing. You have to select Custom to enable/disable/adjust individual settings as needed. I'm embarassed to list the 'specs' of the system I mainly use, but I usually don't have the patience for anything more than a few hours - of course I seldom go over 2K - 5K would be a masochistic endeavor with any settings :-)

Well I used to render in Vue and C4D essentially for the lighting, but with the advances in Poser (IDL&SSS) I have really no cause to use their renderers anymore.

Poser is mainly used for portraiture (at least close-ups of human figures) where skin reality is paramount, but the conversion of skin shaders has never worked effectively IMO in external renderers, so the advantages in great lighting of say Lux or Vue, is outweighed by the loss of skin reality, something that Poser is set up to do, and does briliantly.

Not that other render engines are not superiour to Firefly, but just that they are not fully suited to the type of work that Poser users usually produce.

Certainly I made sure and got a version of Vue 10 that included the Importer Module as well as RenderUp.

This combination allows me to repose Poser scenes within Vue. It also let's me render the data from Poser's native shader tree, in a way, as well as output spherical panoramas to use within BB's envsphere.

That said, aside from the latter option there, I've mostly found myself playing around with rendering using Firefly. So far.

The interoperability between Vue and Poser certainly does make for a pretty powerful, out the box, prosumer workflow combination I reckon.

Each renderer seems to come with respective quirks and limitations. But there will always be this reality I suspect, in some form... the physical universe with its restrictive forces of time, gravity and the resultant economics, dictates this. The limits just shift relative to expectation, I expect, as one progresses up the tree to more advanced, more expensive solutions?

But I guess part of the fun, certainly for me, is in trying to make things work the way I imagine them, in spite of these limits...

Cheers ;-)

I do have Bryce, DS3/4, Vue and Carrara, but I don't like the way any of them renders. Bryce and Carrara are outdated, DS3/4 are OK, but not as good as FireFly. Vue is a resource hog and slow if you want quality. in other words I stick to FireFly, easy to use, pretty fast and decent quality renders.

I render backgrounds in Blender (Internal) and foregrounds with figures in PoserPro 2012 with Firefly. I am flirting with Cycles, haven't tried Lux yet.

Nanette: I've found Cycles to be pretty awesome. What I really need to do is now learn all those node based materials, which on the surface seem to be simpler to figure out than Posers but there are so many of them that I fear I may never figure them all out. I've toyed with the idea of exporting a scene out of Poser to render in Cycles, but I haven't tried it yet ;).

Laurie

Forgot to mention that I did try Luxrender, but it left me completely unimpressed. To this day I still haven't found an image made with luxrender that impressed me, they seem to lack life and sparkle somehow.


That is why I recommended Firefly to Basicwiz for most poser users.
however when you do this for money for clients ( as I Do) you will need to be able to render much more scenic variety than close up portraits of single figures sitting still in a largely empty universe.

And then there is the matter of NPR ( Toon rendering effects) for comics/Cartoons which firefly has never done well enough to my personal satisfaction.

Just for fun I Did this Fake "poster" yesterday for the Starwars Clone wars TV series  the figure is a fully functional IK rig of  "tan'wei"from "Attack of the clones imported to C4d from Lightwave 9.6 the background building are from Stonemason and the text is adobe illustrator added in post.

All rendered in Maxon Cinema4D sketch& toon module
This is the kind of versatility I need which sort of forces me to use many render engines in my workflow



Cheers


I would really LOVE to try Freestyle just because I've never tried anything like it, tho I'm not entirely sure I'll like the sketched or comic book look. But ya never know ;)

Laurie

It would be nice to have the ability to take a scene and designate parts of it to be rendered by a specific engine. Vue can have Poser render Poser materials and Vue Infinite can render Vue stuff in Max, C4D etc. Those require you to have the full packages though. Something that allowed you to buy just the render cores and plug them in would be great. Unfortunately, the lack of a 'universal' shader system or a good conversion engine would still make it impractical.