What part of rendering takes the longest time. I've just tried to do a quite complex render with 7 figures including the Millenium dragon and the Daz ruins and a background image placed on a flat square to size it properly. Anyway after 7 hours of rendering, it still said "adding objects" and although my CPU monitor said the programme was still running I wasn't so sure. I'm using P5 with firefly render engine, nothing else really over the top. 72 d.p.i etc. Is 7 hours + excessive or should I have left it even longer. My usual renders take less than an hour normally. This one has more in it than normal though. Let me know your thoughts please.

Dense P5 Hair Dense displacement maps Large texture maps Deep procedural shaders Large shadow maps Shadow casting lights Ray traced reflections Any more ? :)

Poser seems to take way too long in preparing a scene for render. Things like adding the objects/textures and calculating shadow maps larger than 256 is far slower than I experience in most other 3D programs. I wonder why. If it wasn't for the incredibly slow prep time, rendering in Poser really wouldn't be so bad.

Firefly has a REALLY hard time with some of the existing light sets out there. One of the things you can try is to change any of the "old style" shadow mapped lights and change them to raytraced lights. (This would only be necessary on lights that cast shadows).

Thanks for the replies guys but is a 7 hour + time normal? I have read here of people doing "overnight" renders which suggests it is the norm. Incidentally I can do the same render using the P4 engine in about 30 minutes, why the difference? Help!

I expect any render to get to the actual rendering stage - i.e. past "adding objects" and "calculating shadow maps" - within an hour. If it hasn't opened a render window by then, it's probably not going to. Can you post your render settings and system specs, might be able to suggest something to help?

Look at your Task Manager, the processes tab. If no memory transfers are being done for about five minutes in the Adding Objects stage, the engine has gone in an infinite loop and will never come out of it. Only solution is killing the process. (So ALWAYS save before render!) The things that really slow down Firefly are very large shadow maps (4096x4096 took 8 hours on my - fast! - machine), volumetric lights (normal render time x10) and DOF (normal render time x5). If a P4 render runs in 30 minutes, the Firefly render (provided you don't use volumetrics or DOF) should also take about 30 minutes. If you use raytraced shadows instead of depth mapped shadows, Firefly should be faster.

Hi Steven, thanks for the info, that's really helpful. This has happened on another render before and was ok using the P4 engine. Karen, my PC spec is a 1.8GHz P4 with 512 RAM and a 128 MHz Nvidia 5200 graphics card, more than enough I would say. I'll do a screen grab of my Firefly settings as soon as I can. I'll be posting the image in a minute or two that was done with the P4 engine, I switched shadows off because it was crap on the background. Thanks for the help everyone, much appreciated.

Your memory may be a little low - I'd recommend 1gb - but your processor should be fine... the graphics card won't make any difference as Poser doesn't take advantage of hardware accelaration. By the way have you applied SR4.1? I find it significantly improves firefly rendering time.

Yes I've put in SR4.1 and I thought 512RAM would be enough, but a message did come up saying my "virtual memory" was low and the system was modifying it so maybe that's where it screwed up.

Adjusting virtual memory during render is a sure way to crash the render. Karen is right, upgrading to 1 Gb physical memory is a very good idea, and changing the virtual memory settings to 3Gb minimum /3 Gb maximum will make sure you'll never run into that "virtual memory adjustment" thingy again. THe processor is fine, as is your video card.

Thanks Steven, thanks karen, much appreciated.