I am still looking into render farms, and the one I'm looking at says that you can "simply transfer your existing license to the iRender server as long as your software provider has a licensing tool (for example, Octane and Redshift)." I don't know what that means. That sounds like something different from simply plugging your serial number in when you start up the program.

are you doing still shots or animation? I think if you are doing still shots you might just want to buy a decent used machine with a lot of cores.

ghostship2 posted at 5:32AM Sun, 25 October 2020 - #4402084

are you doing still shots or animation? I think if you are doing still shots you might just want to buy a decent used machine with a lot of cores.

I'm doing stills. I'm saving up for a new computer, it's just going to take a while, and I feel like buying another, even used, would take a big chunk out of my savings. I just need a way to keep finishing images while that's in progress so I don't lose momentum and get discouraged, I'm already intimidated enough by the changes that Poser 12 is forcing on me. I don't adjust well to big changes, and moving from Win7 to Win10 is...ugly. Can't even upgrade to 11.3 with Win7 so I feel that sword of Damocles dangling overhead, trying to keep my morale up. I don't always find it impossible to render my pictures, just whenever I want to get fancy with DoF or atmosphere or mesh lighting. I managed a fairly high poly scene with tons of props the other day in "only" about six hours, that's somewhat doable. I guess I should ask about what such a used machine might cost, I'm imagining hundreds.

I don’t think poser will use render farms. You can send an image to the queue manager on another machine, but it will only go to one machine, not several.

You can also send it to the queue manager on the same machine you use to set up images, which will free up poser for starting the next scene, but with much of your computing power going to the render, poser will likely be sluggish and if you want a busy scene, You may have problems.

Generally I set up scenes during the day and let them render over night. Sometimes I’ve been 4 or 5 scenes behind in the rendering. Then I get to a scene that takes days to set up and I get caught up again. I’ve also sent several scenes to render with the queue manager at the same time when I think they’ll be done before I get up the next day.

RedPhantom posted at 7:36AM Sun, 25 October 2020 - #4402100

I don’t think poser will use render farms. You can send an image to the queue manager on another machine, but it will only go to one machine, not several.

You can also send it to the queue manager on the same machine you use to set up images, which will free up poser for starting the next scene, but with much of your computing power going to the render, poser will likely be sluggish and if you want a busy scene, You may have problems.

Generally I set up scenes during the day and let them render over night. Sometimes I’ve been 4 or 5 scenes behind in the rendering. Then I get to a scene that takes days to set up and I get caught up again. I’ve also sent several scenes to render with the queue manager at the same time when I think they’ll be done before I get up the next day.

I wasn't sure how render farms worked. If it was just a matter of sending a finished pz3 to another machine with the Poser software on it to render, I'd be good. I can easily put scenes together on my own computer, it's just rendering time that's a big issue. I have to share this computer with my partner, so it needs to be available morning and evening and not locked up doing a render. The ones I manage to get done I start first thing in the morning as soon as it's free and they'll be done by evening by the time it needs to be free again, but that gives me a max window of 11 hours, and some of these renders aren't even a third done in that time. There's one I've been working on recently that I even reluctantly reduced in size--I'm not even working that big, it was 1920x1920 and I cut it to 1080x1080, and it still wants to take a few days to render. SSS + DoF + area lighting (I don't know why that's so noisy) + transmapped, reflective SSS hair...it just creeps, and the computer is pretty much unusable while it's rendering.

If you have a second computer, you could put the queue manager on it and use it to render. It won't even need poser or any of your content on it. Unfortunately, I don't think you can send it to someone else's computer that's not on your local network. There is also the possibility to do area renders. Just telling poser to render half or a quarter of the scene at a time. I had a scene that I rendered in 6 sections. I then put them together in a 2d program.

If you don't mind doing GIMP or Photoshop editing, you can render your scene in several passes and compose later. The advantage of using this render method is you can Queue manage each layer, rendering them one after another and freeing up computer usage. At the same time, you could be rendering your scene much more quickly.

hborre posted at 3:28PM Sun, 25 October 2020 - #4402119

If you don't mind doing GIMP or Photoshop editing, you can render your scene in several passes and compose later. The advantage of using this render method is you can Queue manage each layer, rendering them one after another and freeing up computer usage. At the same time, you could be rendering your scene much more quickly.

Whoa, I didn't know about layering passes!! I have been doing area renders for some, over the course of days, but it's dangerous because if something happens to disrupt the rendr, my cache dumps the old render and I have no idea where I was. Since Poser area render has no grid overlay to use to divide renders up I have to use the ongoing render in cache to know where the next chunk is. Are you saying I could do this with sample passes somehow on the entire image?

Check out page 540 in your Poser manual on Rendering layered PSD files and this Youtube link on layers and render queues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5mwnG0m6S0. Since you are using Firefly as your render engine, the information is relevant.

hborre posted at 5:02PM Sun, 25 October 2020 - #4402128

Check out page 540 in your Poser manual on Rendering layered PSD files and this Youtube link on layers and render queues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5mwnG0m6S0. Since you are using Firefly as your render engine, the information is relevant.

I'm not, I'm using Superfly, that's why it's taking so long. I don't have GPU rendering available because my vidcard is too old. Thanks for the link, I will check it out!

I can sympathize. I ran a render for almost 2 days before pulling the plug and accepting the results. Depending on what you are including in your scene, you may need to re-evaluate each prop and character for mesh density and texture resolution. Using a 4000 x 4000-pixel resolution on a mid- to far-scene object is a waste of computer resources. Great if you are rendering a closeup but needless if you are rendering a landscape. Reduce texture resolution, deconstruct high poly mesh objects, don't use SSS unless it's necessary, use bump or normal mapping instead of displacement, minimize the number of total pixels to achieve what you want, etc. There are many things that can be done pre-render but you will need to spend quite a bit of time tweaking and retexturing. Forget about using Queue Manager between machines for Superfly, it doesn't work and atm it is not supported except on the same computer as your Poser install.

hborre posted at 6:21PM Sun, 25 October 2020 - #4402131

I can sympathize. I ran a render for almost 2 days before pulling the plug and accepting the results. Depending on what you are including in your scene, you may need to re-evaluate each prop and character for mesh density and texture resolution. Using a 4000 x 4000-pixel resolution on a mid- to far-scene object is a waste of computer resources. Great if you are rendering a closeup but needless if you are rendering a landscape. Reduce texture resolution, deconstruct high poly mesh objects, don't use SSS unless it's necessary, use bump or normal mapping instead of displacement, minimize the number of total pixels to achieve what you want, etc. There are many things that can be done pre-render but you will need to spend quite a bit of time tweaking and retexturing. Forget about using Queue Manager between machines for Superfly, it doesn't work and atm it is not supported except on the same computer as your Poser install.

I have adjusted my shaders as you suggested for a while now--unfortunately displacement is going to have to wait until Poser integrates the better sort that does not rely on mesh--but I did not think to reduce my texture resolution on the props that are farther away, so there are 4k textures on EVERYTHING in my scenes and I never reduce polys either. So I will try those things! Lately I've been abandoning the figure or prop textures right away and using 4k PBR texture sets on everything, and they look bomb, but that's also been contributing to my issue with rendering. I've already converted them all to jpegs since they usually come as pngs, and for some reason Poser utterly freaks out at pngs these days and changes their colors (maybe a memory issue). I didn't think of making them smaller! Thank you very much for the suggestion.

A surfeit of textures ? Uh-huh. Either your render comes out in shades of grey, or your prior renders vanish from side-bar, or Poser simply 'falls over' as the 'garbage collector' crashes...

At least if you're converting 4k PNGs or TGAs to JPGs with ~1/10 file size, you're also set to down-size pixels to 2k, 1k, ½k for lesser levels of detail...

I'm most familiar with {free} Irfan View for graphics wrangling. Digging around in the batch tools, I've just found additional down-sizing options to match the single tools. But, without scripting tools to auto-pour each down-size into appropriate sub-folder, only one ratio at a time. You'd need to be so wary of what went where...

-- I port a lot of freebies from eg XPS via FBX, or MMD's PMD/PMX via OBJ/MTL. Remembering to mirror latter's meshes left/right before export, of course, of course. Too many come with a vast zoo of huge PNGs or TGAs. And then there's the misery of having to extract the 'Alpha channel' from each 'diffuse' or 'metallic' to use as Poser's transparency map....

That's all way over my head! I only ever grab OBJ or 3ds freebies, and if they come with textures at all ( so many just don't) they are usually jpg or bitmaps or the occasional tif. Since Poser and Blender are the only rendering progs I have, and Silo and PoseRay the only mesh programs, I only ever end up importing/exporting those two formats. I see a variety of others available in the import menu but have never tried them...I briefly tried using Bryce but could never get a handle on the way it exports textures so I gave up. xD