Hello World! I am another Poser vet peeking in here. I spent an hour searching and reading threads first, but I admit I might be asking things covered elsewhere, for that I beg forgiveness. Respectfully I ask, no modelling arguments. This is about rendering. Thank you. The specs for moving Poser assets into Carrara5Pro look highly appetizing, but it's only worth it to me if I get a real boost in render speed and solid render farm implementation. This would be for animated scenes where skin realism, convincing hair and cloth dynamics, and global illumination/soft shadows are the emphasis. (Not landscapes, vegitation, architecture, flyovers, etc.) Please cut and paste for animation. 5MB Quicktime. http://jrdonohue.com/blurr.mov Both Poser and Carrara have these tools. I am making great progress in Poser6, but to get realism with two characters, dynamic hair and clothes and GI, I am at approximately 600 seconds per frame at 720x540. I have been gradually whittling that down from 12-15 mintues per frame through texture simplification and lighting optimization and shaders. 1) everyone says the Carrara render engine is faster. Is it, REALLY? I am trying to discover: If I work my way up the CarraraPro learning curve, especially with skin realism including SSS, GI and cloth/hair dynamics, will I realize a twice-as-fast gain in render time in Carrara? Or just a fraction? 2) the render farm: seems it sends one frame at a time to the nodes, with different CPUs rendering different tiles on it, then all cpus wait until slowest one gets done. Can it instead be instructed to send separate FRAMES to separate cpus and no waiting? 3) how many nodes of render farm do you get with one license of Carrara Pro 5? 4) does Carrara have procedural shaders like Poser6? If I can penetrate the Carrara world a little more by reading, viewing gallery images and posting, I'll download the Pro demo. Thank you, ::::: Opera :::::

I use Carrara for rendering some Poser scenes, and I think it's definitely worth it. I don't do much network rendering, but the speed difference between Poser and Carrara is dramatic, especially if you're looking for rendering large scenes with complex lighting. I'd be willing to say it's twice as fast on comparable quality scenes, but I don't have actual benchmarks to prove it. Carrara's raytrace engine is one of the fastest I've used, with the exception of a few higher-end renderers that I've experimented with. If you have ANY raytraced reflections or refractive materials in your scenes, then Carrara is going to outperform Poser by much more than 2x the speed, and with better final quality to be sure. Carrara 5's AO is definitely faster than Poser's, and you're also getting true SSS with Carrara. The only downfall so far with Carrara's SSS is that you can't define it with maps. For instance, if you wanted more SSS on certain areas of the figure, but less on other parts, you have no real way to control this with greyscale maps like in Poser and some other apps I've worked with. The SSS is homogeneous, defined by the model's structure itself. This isn't really a show-stopper, since the SSS still works nicely, but it doesn't allow the level of manual control I really wanted. Carrara does have procedural shaders, but I still think Poser's node-based material room can possibly do more if you're a math guru who can figure out complex node trees.

The C5Pro app comes with a license for 5 render nodes. You can purchase a license for more if you need to. The render speed increase from Poser to Carrara is as significant as Bryce to Vue. Adding render nodes increases it further still. But it's never fast enough... ;-)

Personally, I get a kind of 3D Claustrophobia in Poser if I try setting up and rendering a scene in Poser5/6 -- is like setting up a scene in a closet. Moving the Poser objects to Carrara5 Pro for assembly/rendering is like setting up a scene in a big room or the outdoors -- a lot of virtual elbow room.

C5Pro has arguably the best render engine available for a 3D application -- certainly when considering its cost.

C5Pro has arguably the best render engine available for a 3D application Ohhhh... yeah, I'd say that's a bit beyond arguable, considering 3 of the top 4 high-end 3d packages (Maya, 3dsmax, Softimage|XSI) all come with MentalRay as a default render engine. I think Carrara's engine is great, but I've used MentalRay before, and it's depth and versitility are far superior to Carrara. For the price, however, I agree with you.

Which was my point " -- certainly when considering its cost."

Well, the basic Softimage package costs less than Carrara pro, but I am not looking for complexity, just realism, poser-friendliness and at least twice as fast rendering as Poser, everything else equal. Thanks for the specific answers above. My scenes are not big and complex with a lot of characters, clothes, props, walls, chrome, etc., so the raytrace/reflection is not critical. However, excellent, fast AO/HDRI and SSS IS. To find out for sure I will have to download the demo and do time trials, certainly. ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://renderfred.free.fr

that's a terrific service RenderFred! I think there are a lot of Poser people like me who would love an apples to apples benchmark of a poser pz3. Could be really good for Evoia sales. ::::: Opera :::::