BB, you know about renderers. 

please fill me in, and correct me where I'm wrong.

Say, I run a render farm, or a multicore environment. The program at hand - say Poser -  contains a scene, in some internal representation. Then I render out an animation, or a sequence of image parts. This is a two-staged proces. In stage one, amongst other things like doing shadow maps, the master engine translates the internal scene representation - which might be optimal for previewing and manipulation - into an intermediate scene description fit for rendering. Objects and surfaces may be clipped, you name it. This is the part where the memory demands usually go up. This stage is not multi-threaded that much.

Then each process - a slave to the master - gets a piece of the cake to work on. Each gets its portion of the intermediate representation and then goes into detail, with the render-internal micro-everything and sliced up subpixels. Some slaves run on separate machines and make an entire frame, some slaves work on threads and can work on portions of a single image, and some programs - like Bryce - can do network rendering on portions of a larger image. This stage is fully multithreaded.

My questions are:

• what is the internal represention in Poser, is it quads, tris, septets, or everything? From the replies and other threads I'm under the impression that Poser runs on any mixture of tris and quads, and threrefore does not have to translate at import/export to the file system.

• what is the intermediate representation after renderphase 1, before the multithreaded pixelmakers kick in? What can the Poser renderer eat for input? Tris only? Quads only? Both? Septets too? Everything? Just by heart I recall that renderers, up till a few years ago, were Tris-only at this stage. Cinema, max scanline, Vue, Bryce, you name it. This breakthrough was ZBrush, which ran quads-only.

Perhaps times are changed, and is Reyes able to eat all, saving Poser the trouble of translation. By then, why is memory going up that rapidly at stage 1 of the rendering process. It's not doing shadow maps only.

You know.

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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