Ok ya'll I am half exhilirated and half bummed out.  My 30 frame animation took almost 7 hours to render under the all out firefly settings the quality is OUTSTANDING and I can't stop watching a half punch but at this rate I'll be 90 before my movoe is finished.  I am running a sony vaio with 1 gig ram 256 int video geforce card and a 2.4 gig processor do you guys have these long renders on such short animations or am I doing something wrong?  I rendered at half quality firely, example 3 buckets, 80 % compression quality but it just doesn't look as good and the p4 rening is just out of the question, about what kind o machine do I need to have much faster render times?  share with me your system specs and render times at full quality please.

Render time will vary with scene complexity, image resolution, etc.  Stuff involving raytracing, dynamic hair, or lots of transparency can slow things down considerably, also.  So until we know exactly what you're trying to render, we have no way of telling whether seven hours for thirty frames is bad or not.

Your graphics card will not affect the speed of Firefly renders.  The Firefly engine is software-only, and its speed is determined by your system's CPU and memory.  Your graphics card will only affect the speed of renders done with Poser's OpenGL preview engine.

Codecs and compression settings will have almost no impact on render time.  It usually takes only a fraction of a second to compress a frame.

A bucket size of three is fairly low.  Unless you specifically need it that low to manage your resources and successfully complete the render, I'd recommend a larger bucket of 16 or 32 for performance purposes.

I'm sorry I meant bounce rate of 6 all I am rendering is m3 in his costume punching 130 g2 animation but it looks so much better if I put it at final quality than anything else, how do these guys post screen shots of settings? what program do I have to buy to do that

Quote - I'm sorry I meant bounce rate of 6

Bounce won't matter unless you've enabled raytracing.

Quote - all I am rendering is m3 in his costume punching 130 g2 animation but it looks so much better if I put it at final quality than anything else

I recommend switching to manual settings, and learning what each option does.  It'll give you a lot more control over the process than simply setting everything to maximum and hoping for the best.

stewer has some helpful information on his website.  Some of it was written for Poser 5, but much is still applicable.

http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/index.html

Quote - how do these guys post screen shots of settings? what program do I have to buy to do that

If nothing else, assuming that you're on Windows, you can use the PrintScreen key on your keyboard to copy the screen to clipboard, then paste it into Microsoft Paint.

Most decent paint programs (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP, etc.) have built-in screen-capture functions.

to do a commercial animation in a reasonable amount of time (4 minutes per frame) it's necessary to have dedicated rendering software and a render farm. the poser renderer is far too slow even for a render farm IMVHO. e.g. I tried to do a caustics render overnite with p7, and it was half-done in the morning. same render took about 5 minutes in carrara. well, not the same - vastly superior, as poser doesn't appear to do caustics without jumping thru hoops first. p.s. each individual frame might take 400 minutes to render, but with 100 machines in parallel, that's a net rate of 4 minutes per frame.

7 hours for 30 pictures is not that bad - especially if you use ray-tracing. About 15 minutes per picture. If that is too long, you probably will need to reduce the quality a bit.

First of all - switch of the visibility for both normal and ray tracing for every body part which is not visible. Which hair do you use? If you use dynamic hair, concider switching to a conforming one - this helps a lot too.

Then tips for the render settings - fewer pixel samples, higher shading rate. Switch of "Smooth Polygons" if it is on. Changing the render settings will change the quality too - so see what you can live with.

Hope that helps.

Quote - p.s. each individual frame might take 400 minutes to render, but with 100 machines in parallel, that's a net rate of 4 minutes per frame.

i haven't even been ABLE to pass 400 minutes/frame, with full scenes, which i can easily see pixar having the render farm to do it with ;p but with carrara i've never got that high hehe

i keep my scenes to about 60 seconds time per frame on a P4 3.0ghz (then network render to cut the time), and using carrara5 for the renderer

post a frame so we can see what elements you are contending with.

Is ray trace on? Is it strand hair? Is the hair visible to raytrace? Does the hair cast shadows.

Those would be my first lines of attack.

To show us your settings:
Do you have a 2D graphics program like Photoshop? Do "Print Screen" which puts the bitmap of your screen on 'the clipboard' then paste it into Photoshop, crop it to manageable size but still showing your settings, save out to .jpg and post it here.

::::: Opera :::::

Keep in mind the resolution you're going to display the animation at - television is about 320x200, which might look terrible on a computer screen, but fine on a television.