Hi All,

The internal render engines of Poser (Firefly and Superfly) on my M1 MacBook seems to only use the CPU.  It's ok for simple scenes but it feels slow.  I want to purchase a Mac Studio but I'm concerned that Poser will not suppose anything more than CPU rendering for the Apple Silicon line for quite some time.  Are there any third party render engines that someone can suggest, from personal experience, that will run on the Apple Silicon chips?  

Thanks.

This is exactly why I dumped Apple after 20+ years.

I'm in the same boat.  I've been using Apple for nearly 20 years myself.  I really don't want to chuck my investment.  I've looked at getting:  

* an Nvidia eGPU for my old Mac Pro (it doesn't work with Apple Silicon yet)

* a replacement Nvidia card for my Radeon in my Mac Pro

* finding a new external renderer that is compatible with Poser and Apple Silicon.  

The first two are pretty much throw away solutions since my Mac Pro's life is nearly done.  The last option seemed the cheapest but will slow down my workflow.

Well, I know that Octane is M1 compatible at least in an experimental sense.  I downloaded the free App Store version: Octane X and the examples run quite fast on my MacBook Air.  It hardly heats up in some cases.  But the Octane Poser Plugin isn't Silicon ready yet.  I know that the Metal version of Poser is being worked on and that may help with my old Mac Pro because it has a Metal compatible Radeon card but I was just curious about the Silicon line.  What options exist for that?  Will the Metal compatible Poser work with Apple Silicon for GPU rendering?

You may eventually use Poser's Octane plugin to export your Poser scene, after having setup everything in it, and then use Octane's external renderer from there.
Not the easiest solution I know but...

My experience with Macintosh computers is extensive. We got a Mac Plus back in 1986 and I got my first personal Mac in 1995 (Quadra 660 AV). I worked for a couple Mac only sales and repair shops in the late 90's then for a company that sold and repaired both Macs and PC's after that. At that last company I worked in sales in the Macintosh dept and later I worked in the repair shop.

I had a G5 and needed a new machine. By this point I was ok with running a PC because that's all we had running the store's systems on. The G5 I had bought used as a floor model but it still cost me $1000. I then decided that it was time to switch over to PC because of costs involved and also the horrible customer/repair relations we had with Apple.

Someone would come in with a 3 year old machine that Apple would refuse to work on and tell the customer to come into our shop for the repair. Then Apple would turn around and refuse to send us parts even though we were an Apple authorized repair center. Add to that the cost of something simple like a desktop tower PSU. Apple would charge the customers something like $400 for something I could get off the sales floor for $100 for a nice PSU. I was done with apple by this point.

I bought a cheap assed $300 PC laptop and ran circles around my old G5 in Poser.

Apple refuses to allow people to repair and modify their own computers. You can't get a CUDA video card that works with Poser for a Mac. Also user built PC's that are comparable to Mac desktop machines cost a fraction of the Macs.

ghostship2 posted at 10:05 PM Tue, 30 August 2022 - #4443580

You can't get a CUDA video card that works with Poser for a Mac.

This isn't actually correct for the Mac Pro line.  You can both use Nvidia cards and modify/repair your hardware with the Mac Pro.  Until MacOS High Sierra, the older Nvidia drivers were supported with the operating system.  However, now you need to dual boot into Windows if you are using the most recent version of MacOS due to Apple's falling out with Nvidia.  I think there are some OpenCore mods you might be able to use to get Nvidia cards working in Big Sur but don't quote me on it.  I'm still on Mojave.

Anyway, before this thread turns into an Apple love/hate discussion, purchasing a new PC isn't an option right now.  It is way more money than I have to spend.  That's why I was looking at third party unbiased render engines.  But maybe Poser will come out with support for Metal before I can find something and the point will be moot.

A new PC now is a LOT cheaper than a Mac Studio - those start at 1,999USD.

ssgbryan posted at 4:35 PM Wed, 31 August 2022 - #4443750

A new PC now is a LOT cheaper than a Mac Studio - those start at 1,999USD.

That's true.  And we can most likely debate until we're blue in the face about which is better: a cheap ass PC or an expensive as all hell Mac.  But the main reason that I buy Apple is that I like the product -- not the price tag.  They have been exceedingly reliable for me.  I have purchased 3 Macs in about 20 years.  That's roughly 1 computer every 6.5 years.  Whereas, my past experience with PCs over that same period of time is that they die horrid deaths usually after 3 to 4 years.  So I would have to purchase nearly twice as many PCs to get the same life expectancy as I have the Mac.  Now that's just my experience.  I'm sure others have had better and worse experiences on both sides.  But either way, doesn't matter.  I will stick with what has worked for me until it doesn't.  When it doesn't work, then I will take it out behind the barn and put it down just like I did my last PC 20 years ago. ;)

Right now, I like the Mac Studio and would like to get one at some point.  But if my software is not going to run properly on that platform, then I will have to rethink it.  I don't need an expensive paper weight.  Right now I don't want to purchase either a new PC or a Mac Studio.  I want to find a bandaid measure to last until I see which way the wind is blowing and then decide if I'm forced to return to PC architecture or if Silicon will be fully supported in the future and of course, what it's performance is relative to other options.

In the meantime, I was hoping to know if anyone has used a third party render engine with Poser that might be compatible with Radeon or M1 GPUs.  Octane looks like an option for M1.  Does anyone know of any others?  Does anyone use a render Pipeline that isn't Poser based?

Thanks.

I think Cycles-X is the future (for Poser) and Blender is working on using Metal (on Macs).  Poser will eventually pick up all that goodness.

I'm assuming that to use Superfly (Cycles) they already have to translate the scene into a render-file to feed into Cycles.  How difficult is it to translate it into a file that can be rendered by an external Cycles renderer?  Being able to send a render directly from Poser to a Blender render node/farm would be *huge*.  Reality+Luxrender was great that way.  Non-blocking Poser while a PBR in it's own window did its thing.