I just noticed this. I think it's something new in PP1214?

It looks like it renders like Bryce, in little pixels all over - getting "better and better"

What's the benefits/drawbacks of this? Is it something one should use - or steer clear of?

It is something new just introduced in the latest iteration. However, I haven't gotten to that section in the manual yet. Judging from a previous post though, it might be a continuous render like Reality or Lux. But again, I could be wrong.

Very, very slow and the only way to control it is via number of pixel samples.

Maybe for an overnight render, but I get much better results much faster using the manual settings.

Actually so far I can tell (now that I've found it and have been experimenting a bit) it's faster than regular firefly. But it need the pixel samples cranked al the way to the top or it comes out grainy.

Still, at low pixel samples it's really fast, and it can give a good approximation of what the final render will be. It's a fast(er) way of checking reflections ect. In fact it's apparently like the little Preview Firefly window. So until proven otherwise I'll regard it as a preview render :)

OK I've tried a little more..

Here's first the render (the glass of milk I'm struggeling with in another thread ;)), with "regular" FireFly:

And here it is with Progressive rendering. More grainy (and this was at the max settings) but also almost three times as fast...

What are your "normal" Firefly render settings ?

Do you use an Envirosphere to make renders faster ?

My normal settings can render a nude figure in 9 seconds without SSS and in 17 with SSS at normal screen size.

I only raise the settings to do close ups or really big renders.

I'm asking because most people crank the settings way too high without getting a real benefit from it, so a render that "could" have been done in 5 minutes suddenly takes an hour.

Or they max out their RAM by using higher texture resolutions than necessary. Like multiple 4096x4096 texture maps on a figure that will be only 1500 pixels tall in the finished render.

was hoping the glass of milk would come out to play :biggrin:

BB used to come out with the milk for new poser versions. he hardly hangs out with us any more.

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JoePublic:

I'm using BB's "Soft Light Studio" as my default scene. The one with a "glowing" square. As I mostly render portraits I found it was a good starting point.

If needed, I put "things" inside the Render Room someone created .. some years back. Latexluvr? Not sure. It's in my P8 runtime so it's from the P8 days L It gives the light something to bounce around in.

So this glass is inside the Render Room and also using the Ambient Square ect from BB's Soft Light Studio.

The reason this render is taking so ling is of course all the refraction/reflection stuff that is going in. The renderer works fast until it encounters the glass. Then it slows to a crawl. Regardless of which glass shader I've tried (among the ones that actually LOOKS like glass)

Because I want to test out how good I can get this to look, I render with high settings. And those take time. Render settings are attached :)

I can do faster renders with crappy draft settings but I don't want to waste time on those. A final render will need better settings and most of the time my renders has some "effect", be it shiny stuff, glass or DoF.

I doubt I've made a render in seconds though.. but usually I don't time them L

(what I DO is model in Hexagon, or browse the internet while the thing is rendering ;))

As a comparison, this took 2:30 minutes to render. With the same settings as above. I don't find that long :)

(then again.. I did start out with Bryce, back in the days ;))

the main new feature is the Raytrace Preview window. It renders either on scene changes (auto) or on manual command. It gets its render settings from the main one, but not all of them are user adjustable, Poser implies standard values for those (and does hardly document which). Progressive Mode greys out the ones which are not user adjustable. You cannot switch off raytracing (as its a RAYTRACING preview) and it does not use Irradiance caching, nor motion blur, and so on.

So this PM feature helps you to set the Raytrace Preview. When used for normal rendering, it helps you to get renders which compare well to this Raytrace Preview as Poser will then use those magical "preview values" as well. Whether that's a good idea is entirely up to you. It does render in background, and as a separate process, but seems to follow a "tiny bucket" strategy in an iterative way, which explains why one cannot adjust the Displacement Bounds.

For final renders, you'd better switch it off and regain and get control over the remaining settings, IMHO.

- - - - -

Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

@trekkiegrrrl

if I may comment on your Render settings:

maximize bounces
switch off Irradiance caching
use high values (80+) for IDL quality, for quality results
set pixels samples / min shading rate to 3 / 0.2 for most quality purposes. Only small sized renders for high end prints at a low resolution (100-150 dpi) need 5 / 0.1 for this setting, but usually one just generates a larger render for this kind of output, and print at 200-300 dpi.
your post filter 2 / sync is fine for most purposes
increase bucket size to 64 on a 64-bit system, except for very crowded scenes
leave Displacement Bounds to 0.0000 unless your displacement-mapped objects reveal artifacts at bucket-intersections. Your 0.5 might turn rendering into a nightmare.

When you're interested, I can tell you the why's in detail.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

@TrekkiGrrrl

I agree. a two min render is pretty fast compared to those old bryce renders. I remember one where I used a reflective disk "spaceship" over a landscape that took 8 hours on my old Quadra 660AV. probably would take 30 seconds in Poser to render.

@ aRtBee

my problem with the bucket size is where I've got one small detail in the render like a reflective belt buckle or teeth that are smaller than a bucket that hang an entire 64x64 bucket...i much rather it hang a smaller bucket for a shorter period of time. I do have 16 GB of ram so if there is some magic to this I would love to know.

I thought MSR was per item...you can set the MSR on the render settings as low as you want but the program defaults to the MSR set on the objects properties. So if an object needs finer detail than the rest of the render you can adjust this.

BTW I need to thank you for your excelent Poser manuals...the only time I ever saw anybody explaining why GC did what it did instead of just telling me to to set to 1.0 because that was the way it was done.

So...Yes . I'm interested in the "why" as well!!

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740

Does bucket size affect the render quality?

I thought it was only to control how much RAM was being used per rendered segment

For clarity's sake, I did not make the Render Room. PJZ/Fleshforge made the Render Room prop. I only used it once. Didn't like the white glare it cast all over the place. BB's Enviroment sphere is better.

"A lonely climber walks a tightrope to where dreams are born and never die!" - Billy Thorpe, song: Edge of Madness, album: East of Eden's Gate

Weapons of choice:

Poser Pro 2012, SR2, Paintshop Pro 8

okay then, while the main tutorial on camera, rendering, lighting, atmosphere and backgrounds (say: the Empty Scene) can be expected say end of this month, some notes on the settings presented above. As I'm not The Big Wizard but just finding out things myself, please comment, preferably with the appropriate (documented) arguments.

Max Bounces: tells Poser to kill the light rays which have not lost all their energie yet and still can make it to the final result. Meant for test renders in reflection / refraction intensive scenes, and can cause artifacts. Nature does not put a max to bounces, and reduced values affect IDL lighting levels especially in indoor cases. In my final renders I put it to the max.

Irradiance Caching: a trick on not sampling all relevant spots for AO or IDL, but just the percentage you enter (values are 0..100%). The rest is interpolated, causing inaccuracies, so this is for draft renders with AO or IDL. Note that the various Auto-modes present values from 60 up, Poser seems to disadvice values under 50.
As the sampling / interpolation brings in some overhead, you're better off switching it OFF instead of using values over 90.

IDL Quality: again a percentage 0..100% of something, its about the amount / density of rays used in the IDL calculations. Outdoor scenes seem to do fine with values over 80, indoor scenes might require values over 90, while values over 95 hardly contrbute to a better result but do require far longer render times.

Filter: when you're antialiasing the result, you might want to re-sharpen the textures on the objects. Filter does so, like AA, at the subpixel level which makes a difference from sharpening the final result in post. Value 1 means: no filter, value 4 means: extreme filtered (disadviced). Value 2 means soft filtering, nice for female skin, outdoor clothes and organic textures. Value 3 means hard filtering, nice for male skin, short animal fur, and details on indoor clothing. SYNC then is the best mechanism for the required sharpening.

Bucket size: note that it's a max value, Poser will reduce the bucket size dynamically when resources are at stake. Bucket rendering comes with overhead, because they're rendered with an edge: 32x32 renders as 48x48 while 64x64 renders as 80x80 (8 bit edge all around). So smaller buckets have more overhead, therefore halving bucket size will not reduce memory requirements to 25% but to 35%, while rendertime will go up to say 145%.
On the other hand, when buckets become too large, there will be no new buckets to start at the end of the rendering process, CPU threads will run idle and you'll have to wait till the last bucket is done. No speed gain then.

Whether smaller buckets really solve the "hot render spot" issue depends on whether that spot can be smeared over multiple buckets. If it really is a spot, that won't be the case. In my experience it paid off to investigate on the causes of it: did I switch off Light Emitter for hair? Did I disable real reflections for teeth (specularity is good enough)?

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

Pixel samples is all about anti-aliasing. 3 means that a single pixel in the render is derived from a 3x3 subpixel matrix, which actually quadruples the amount of pixels to be rendered. 1 means: no AA, and personally I don't like the even values as they don't take the main pixel itself into account. 5x5 might be fine for high end printing but in my opinion printing at 300dpi does some AA itself, so I tend to stick with 3x3 and go for larger image dimensions when I'm into fine print.

Min Shading Rate is meant to stop Poser from subdividing object poys into micro-polys, the value tells you how many render-pixels are at least (!) covered by a single micro-poly. So, 4 means; 1 micro-poly covers at least 4 pixels in the final result. As said in the Poser manual.
In my opinion, if I want to do AA in a 3x3 matrix, I'd like to hit at least 1 micro-poly per subpixel because otherwise I cripple the AA process. So, 10 micro-polys per render-pixel would not be too bad, and given the minimum / at least clause in this I even might think 20. This gives the MSR = 0.05 value as Vilters presented (my earlier post was slightly off, sorry for that).

Note that a Pixels Sample = 5 would imply a MSR = 0.01 to make the microplys support the AA process.

Next to that, the micropoly / AA process should be supported by the object texture map as well. Say, I'm portraying a head which takes 50% of a 1000 pixels wide render. So the head is showing 500 pixels texture, and the complete map around it requires 1000 pixels. Accoring to information theory (Nyquist...) I'd better double that resolution, requiring 2000 pixels at least for the texture map. 4000 would be overkill.
But when I take a closeup, the render takes 50% of (one side of) the head. That's 2000 pixels for one side full, 4000 for all around and 8000 for decent quality according to Nyquist. Note; this is already the Poser limit, and for a 1000 pixel wide closeup, not for a 16"wide 300dpi magazine centerfold. This is why photoreal characters in cinema come with Gb's of textures.

Nyquist puts at least 2x2 texture map pixels per render pixel, this is barely enough to support 3x3 antialiasing and actually too coarse to support 20 micropolys per renderpixel. So, in order to balance render resolution, texture map resolution, AA and Shading Rate one might double the texture map resolution once more. Once, not twice.
There are no "best values" for any of these, but in my opinion it's worthwhile to watch the balance between them. Once one of them becomes the weakest link in quality, the others only add rendering time and resource consumption without further benefits.

Last but not least: Min Displacement Bounds. It has to do with buckets. Each bucket considers the objects within the bucket area, but displacement might push objects into such an area while the object itself is not. Poser is quite good in guessing about that (and buckets have overhead edges as well!), but might go wrong in complex material trees. In that case some details of an object with displacement are cut off in a neighboring bucket, as the object is incorrectly not taken into consideration. The risk grows larger at smaller buckets.

The cure is to tell Poser to consider objects with displacement a bit bigger in size, to blow them up a bit just for proper bucket allocation. This blow-up is the displacement bound, and it's measured in Poser Native Units. 1 PNU = 262cm, or: 1mm = 0.00035.
It's up to you to manually override Poser, and small values just put a small time and resource burden on the rendering. But MDB = 0.5 blows up all objects 131 cm in all directions, which means about every object will be considered in every bucket, as a manual override to Poser which does quite a good job by itself. Well, it would not be my choice. The memory consumption that comes with that might force you into smaller buckets, and so on.

Shading Rate as well as Displacement Bounds can be set at the object level as well. Poser takes the largest value of the one set in Render Settings and the objects' one. So depending on the object settings, you might get less (!) micro-polys and/or more blow-up than set in Render Settings.

all the best, comments are very welcome.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

This is awesome content, even for someone who's been using Poser since P3. This stuff doesn't get explained well enough, and I've just always gone by feel with the settings...now I know why a lot of things work why they do. Thanks!

quote:

Whether smaller buckets really solve the "hot render spot" issue depends on whether that spot can be smeared over multiple buckets. If it really is a spot, that won't be the case. In my experience it paid off to investigate on the causes of it: did I switch off Light Emitter for hair? Did I disable real reflections for teeth (specularity is good enough)? end quote

I did a little test on some hair (sylfiad hair) that in the past has taken a very long time to render with IDL. I did a render with light emitter turned on and one with it turned off. The one with it on did infact take longer to render but the one with it off looks flat and cartoonish. too bad, I would have liked to speed up the render of this.

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740

THANK YOU, aRtBee! I've always found these things badly explained in the render settings help (what it shows when you mouse over the setting) and .. manual? There's a manual? ;)

BTW I usually have my min displacement thingie at 0,000. Not sure why I put it at 0,500 in the pictured settings, I think a brainfart or something.

So in short, for a final render you d suggest something like this?

If you like to wait in all eternity, then yes. IDL without irradiance caching is going to be painfully slow and even worse with IDL quality set that high and shading rate that low.

Try it out for yourself, those settings are going to be very slow and the gain in quality will be barely noticeable, if at all.

"What should this render setting be" is a bit like asking "how much salt should I put on my food?". Too little is not going to taste great, too much isn't tasty either. The right amount is where it's at, and there is no amount of salt that's equally right all dishes.

If there were one-size-fits all render settings, there wouldn't be a render settings dialog.

@trekkiegrrl: yeah. Except that I would use sync instead of box for Post Filter Type, and I don't use Tone mapping / Exposure adjustment in most cases - certainly not on top of Gamma Correction. You don't do Depth of Field (focal blur)?

Suggestion: my site containt some tuts on Render Passes (e.g. Depth of Field in post) and on Gamma / Exposure Correction which might have some info / ideas as well: http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?book=poser-rendering

@ghostship2: hair, especially in this volume, presents a complete "area of interest" indeed which smears well over multiple threads; one does not want to concentrate all that in one or two buckets. As usual, getting quality takes time and resources, and IDL / Hair is not a fine combination. Perhaps we can make a new thread for that, and see what the (other) gurus think about it. Maybe some additional AO for more depth when we exclude it from IDL.

My main tut on rendering, lighting, camera, atmosphere and background will be published on my site by say the end of this month. I'll do some research on the hair-thing before that myself :-)

Edit @stewer

I was discussing final rendering, ideal settings, no quality loss. These are not my favorites during drafts and test runs.
feel free to trade quality for time and resources in all cases. But when one wants to increase quality somewhat, it helps to know which slider does what instead of pushing them at sort of random, hoping for the best, and turning Render Settings into a casino. Advice generally is something to be ignored, but it'd better be for a reason :) IMO that is.

- - - - -

Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

that would make an all night or 2 day render on my little i5! I tried turning off the IC on the render posted above but it took like 3 or 4 hours and still wasnt done. it's a little frustrating. I suppose that having an i7 or like processor that runs more threads than 4 would be faster than my i5....would 8 threads double the speed?

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740

@ aRtBee

the AO idea sounds reasonable. ...I think posts were made while I was writing..

yes another thread on hair would be a good idea. thanks for the input!

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740

about MSR...I thought that there was a tool for this in Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer but I can't find the control for it in the interface. is there another tool that will change the MSR on all items at once? I looked at the free stuff section for a script but could not find one.

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740

okay,

frankly I never bothered that much about rendertimes as i've got a fat machine (i7 990X, 12 threads @4GHz so yeah, that runs 4 times faster than 4 threads @ 3 GHz), but mainly as my final runs either run in queue at the bacjground or overnight.

So I did some additional investigation to find things out. Lower settings result in lower quality, but what does that mean in real life? I tried settings for Irradiance Caching (IC) and IDL Quality (Q), and I found noticeable quality reduction when either of those fell below 80. Noticeable quality loss means:

- splotchyness, clearly visible in even, smooth walls and skin

- clearly visible differences when flipping render results, when it was not clear where to look for beforehand

- those differences were especially present in AO-sensitive areas, like hair, hat-edges near the head, skirt-edges near the legs, etc. Lower settings seem to arp less light into those areas resulting in darker (self)shadowing.

- measured differences between render results, RGB values differed 4 or more (that is: a wall with RGB=(196,196,196) gave 200+ in at least one of the RGB channels in at least some spots in the result. Apparently, the eye does notice that.

When both values exceeded 90 the quality loss was gone, not noticeable. Flipping render results revealed no differences even when I kenw where to look, and measured differences were 1 at most: the wall with RGB=196,196,196 deviated to 197 in some of the channels in some spots in the result. The eye does not notice that.

The IC=80 Q=80 setting clocked 25 mins on my machine, including 22 mins for the IDL pre-pass. Raising Q => 90 extended the IDL pre-pass with 2 mins, raising Q is the best way to lose the splotches, which I consider the main quality-losers as these are the most visible. Raising IC => 90 had a far larger impact on rendertime, the IDL pre-pass took another 10 mins more, and another 8 mins when I raised the bar to 95. Higher IC values especially warp more light into the AO-sensitive areas, which I consider the least visible improvement.

Since leaving IC off is mainly a potential saver for very high IC values (say >95) my suggestions for a good result in a decent timeframe are:

- IDL Quality to 90. Higher values hardly pay off, and the extra rendertime from 80 to 90 is small compared to the extra quality gain. Don't go below 80 for final results.

- IC on, don't go below 80 for final results, don't go over 90 either because higher values don't pay off. Raising the bar from 80 to 90 might double render time or so, while not having the largest impact on the quality of the result: it mainly brightens some (self)shadowing areas, although raising to 85 does some extra cleaning on the splotches too. Hence IC/85 to IC/90 it is.

On top of all this, I managed to crash firefly in various situations that combined large image, large bucket size, extreme render settings and IC turned off. With IC on and a high value (say 95 or 98) in there, the crashes did not occur. So, for whatever reason, the IC/90 setting recommended above embeds some hidden life-saver as well :)

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Progressive mode rendering?