Here is something I did recently. It is a good example of "reflection overload".

{4 spotlights, all with shadows. raytrace node for floor, wall, bedrails, chair legs; and out of view is a television set prop with image map attached to diffuse color, specular color, and ambient color.}

Poser took about 45 minutes to calulate shadows and such; the total rendering time was approximately 3 hours.

{Hi my name is Whazizname & I have an addiction...}

  

              

   While the image is fine that long render time seems absurd.
As an experiment I'd like for you to make a simular scene save the .p3
and send me to .p3   to time how long it takes to render.

Something with reflections  and matts  still, I'd guesstomate  I could render
this in Poser 5, firefly engine ray-trace shadows
and we're taking ten minuites to render....

Another creepy thing about Poser
Say you're in th Material room, but want to render to see that material change...

Okay, in there  left to it's own devices, Poser can actually hang and stop.
the blue progress line grinds to a halt.  Okay, in that case  -FOR SURE
you can restart the progress by clinking the mouse on the white BORDER
of the rendering Progress  window...  in the POSE room you can often visibally
SPEED UP THE RENDER  by clicking on that border, but know that once the
MAC Color "spinning -wheel" appears, you won't do any good clicking
until that stupid wheel disapears.

I don't know how it works on PCs but on a Mac you want to render
with ONLY Poser running, and mouse clinking that think white border
makes Poser speed up  -a lot.

My Mac is ten years old.  My Daughter's   -runs three times faster.
On hers I've rendered  1024 x 768  full screen   Monitor Background images
and was amazed by how faster it rendered.

No "white border" (nor barbed wires ) on the PC, you can only sit down and wait, however I don't think that MAC is faster than a PC while rendering a picture made with Poser, not because a PC is a crap incomparison with a Mac (Yes, leahman gave me a large bribe and the Z3 of his daughter that now rides a half used Vespa instead ) but because the architecture of the program is jurassic and i think it works the same on every platform (and the last Macs have INTEL cpus too). In this scene there are a lot of lights and reflections intersecting each other, it would be interesting to know how much Whazizname raised up the "raytrace bounces" and "pixel sample" value

Somehow, I missed the responses in this thread...

I'll reload the pz3 (sometime later tonight US CST) and see if i actually modified the ray bounces, or pixel count.

Leahman: I can send the pz3 to you; but you will need to have all of the figures & props in it...



Looking back at this, I agree that it is an abnormally long calculation & render time... Hmmm...

I reloaded the pz3, and looked at the render settings; there is nothing there that I would consider extreme. (See image)

I also re- rendered the scene using the saved settings, and got the same results... approx. 45 min. to calculkate shadows, approx. 3 hours total render time.

I have a few opinions about what may be the cause of these long times:

1.) Poser's internal design is indeed "jurassic".
2.) My 1.6 GHz G5 iMac only has 768MB of RAM.
3.) The plants in the scene require more processor power than I imagine.
4.) The "wall" is a 180 degree half tube.
5.) The bedposts are reflecting not only the room around them, but also the spaces between them.
6.) The lights have modified "blur radiuses". Light 1=7, Light 2 & 3=11, Light 4=12. all have "shadow bias" of .800.
7.) The lights are all different colors.


Keep in mind that this image was done by me almost two years ago; and I now tend to use higher quality render settings. I think that I will try using my current preferred settings to see what difference they make in the look, and time of the rendered scene.

You've 4 raytraces bounces, I don't know if you will see any difference if you set it at 2 because you've only reflecting objects and not transparent objects there, try with 1, 2 and 3 and look if you see any differences. To "export" the scene you could save the lights, the render parameters and place some basic objects that come deault with Poser, like the high polys square instead of the background reflecting panel , a cube instead of the bed and a Posette and a Dork ( ), the render time will be lower but because of the lower number of polygons involved.