I appreciate the OP for starting this discussion - and I appreciate all the contributions in the replies thru the whole thread - as it will save a lot of time understanding where P13 is at. I'd recommend to OP to try to revamp to a dual 3060 GPU on MB that supports dual GPU set up - I did this last summer and it was literally double the performance - and then some. 3060 alone is not enough for pro graphics. My other CPU has a 3090. It's not too costly for dual 3060 and you'll also need a bigger power supply, over 800W - it is comparable to my 3090 solo system... Best wishes.

@ enigma-man, your transparency bounces seem high. Is it that high in 12?

I found out what caused the slow render times. It never dawned on me until I looked at the number of pixels selected. The lower the number the faster it renders but according to the Poser manual quality is not as good at lower pixels to sample. Here are some render times based on pixel sample size.

10 pixels - 9.13 sec             16 pixels -  24.82 sec         24 pixels - 52.54 sec   32 pixels -  90.26       The higher the pixel number the longer it takes. With Poser 12   I was using 128 pixels and .002 and it was fast compared to Poser 13 with the same settings which took six times longer.  Well, that solves the render time dilemma. The texture issue comes as warnings but the scene renders okay so I will ignore the warnings because it's too much work to edit older content. Still not going to buy P13 but that is my choice.

@RedPhantom: As I posted earlier the settings for both Poser 12 and 13 are identical. It's the pixel sample size that affects render times as seen above. 

My Issues with Poser 13 Old Projects New build Library copied I open something I'm working on It can't find textures or other files I Have the Library exactly how I've had since I even point the dialogue box looking for the missing file right at it ok I think it remember it Hit render and it pops up with same missing file I showed where it was at that's My first launch issue Any how that My rant I'm fixing it by coping each file to it's proper location in the Library and other folders and verifying it's there. other than that I to had that slow render issues forums info on that fixed it starting to think this was a 300.00 mistake windows 11 and poser Hmmm 

Render preview is supposed to be resizable, but only the surrounding window is - the actual render preview stays small.

I found out what caused the slow render times. It never dawned on me until I looked at the number of pixels selected. The lower the number the faster it renders but according to the Poser manual quality is not as good at lower pixels to sample. Here are some render times based on pixel sample size.

10 pixels - 9.13 sec             16 pixels -  24.82 sec         24 pixels - 52.54 sec   32 pixels -  90.26       The higher the pixel number the longer it takes. With Poser 12   I was using 128 pixels and .002 and it was fast compared to Poser 13 with the same settings which took six times longer.  Well, that solves the render time dilemma. The texture issue comes as warnings but the scene renders okay so I will ignore the warnings because it's too much work to edit older content. Still not going to buy P13 but that is my choice.

Looking at those parameters, I'm puzzled. My 11.3 often does wide-screen scenes, 64 or 96 pixel-samples, progressive, superfly, usually to suppress low-light fuzziness.

IMHO, you have a lot of 'max' bounces, while the 'vol' bounces seem low. I found that 'vols + buckets' seem to prefer same size, as 2^n, so 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024...

FWIW, in the end, #12's new facilities --Versus removed-- did not impress me enough to buy, and I'm deferring  #13 until eg #.2. (Would be half-price due points stash...)

I'm liking that the renders now move around without scrunching up and distorting when viewing larger sized renders.

If there is no upgrade price from Poser 11, then no sale.

There's no incentive for me to get Poser 13 - even assuming it will run on my Mac!

I can't get mine to install.  The installation just stops at the installation selection box.  Maybe I need to run .exe as administator?  Any and all help greatly appreciated.  I want to play, too.

I played around with security settings and running installer as Administrator on my lap top and finally got Poser 13 to load. My persmissions have been messed up ever since I last upgraded Windows 11.

Just a Helpful Hint - don't use your cap lock when you enter your serial number into the software.  Just use lower case letters.  You do need the - marks.

If there is no upgrade price from Poser 11, then no sale.

A_Sunbeam posted at 11:31 AM Fri, 31 March 2023 - #4460198

If there is no upgrade price from Poser 11, then no sale.

^^^ 100% agree

This release still feels like a second service release for the PP2014 .5 Upgrade aka Poser 11.
Right now everything seems to be about to make the Poser renderer a more complete cycles renderer, which would be nice, if there were other benefits.

Right now, I could just get cycles for free with Blender.
I miss a hair room upgrade. More realistic looking hair, faster calculations.
Same for clothes. 
What has been done, to work against the skating effect in figure animations?

I too am disappointed there isn't a reasonably priced upgrade path from Poser Pro 11.

I do a lot of animation so was interested in upgrading to P12 but the P12 Queue  Manager constantly fails because it can't find some bom file.  So I hoped P13 would give me the faster render times that P12 did while providing a functional Queue Manager.

Unfortunately it appears I cannot test the P13 Queue Manager functionality because it asks for a license number when I send a movie render to the Queue Manager.

I would be far more impressed with P13 and likely to buy it if--

(1) I could verify through the trial version that Queue Manager worked 

(2) I could run my huge collection of P11-compatible Python scripts in P13 (or there was a clear, available methodology for updating the scripts)

(3) there was a reasonably priced upgrade path from P11 Pro

I'm impressed. So far everything has rendered really fast for me. I also like how it renders the whole scene at once instead of the panels. At least that's how I think it works. I can't see the whole render. Some of it is off screen. With older versions, it used to start in the lower in the lower right quadrant and render panels. It would have to render 2 thirds of it, before you could see anything. And when you did see something, you noticed a problem you didn't spot before you started the render. And that was usually a half hour or more after you started the render. Maybe there's a way to preview the whole canvas as you render, but I haven't figured out how if there is.

>>>  Maybe there's a way to preview the whole canvas as you render, but I haven't figured out how if there is.

There is. Choose Render > Render in Background instead of Render > Render. 

The render will take place in the Render window, and you can pan around the scene while it's rendering. 

>>> I also like how it renders the whole scene at once instead of the panels.

That happens when "Progressive Refinement" is enabled in the SuperFly render settings. It will render the whole scene, starting off at lower quality but gradually refining it until the render is complete.

I have to say I am impressed so far, the trick with Superfly appears to be lower the samples, and increase the bucket size and leave Progressive Refinement ticked.  May not work in all cases but using the high GPU preset gives me samples at 25 (in Poser 12 it was 50), Adaptive Sampling threshold at 0.001 (in Poser 12 it was 0.002).  I have then increased the bucket size to 2048, in Poser 12 I had 128.  The renders just flies and appears to between 2 and 4 times fast with the same quality I used to get.  Poser also appears to let the render go a lot faster than Poser 12 did.

I also like the Launcher so you can start in a recent scene, pre prepared scene or empty scene and so on, I think that is a nice touch,

So I take it Poser13 doesn't render faster after all, it just has lower quality presets resulting in shorter render times?

If you set pixel samples to 2 it will be even faster lol.

i.e. if the pixel samples, bucket size and adaptive sampling threshold etc. settings are exactly the same the render time difference is what exactly?

I might have to fire up Poser13 in a virtual machine to see for myself. 

ader posted at 4:35 AM Sun, 2 April 2023 - #4460462

So I take it Poser13 doesn't render faster after all, it just has lower quality presets resulting in shorter render times?

If you set pixel samples to 2 it will be even faster lol.

i.e. if the pixel samples, bucket size and adaptive sampling threshold etc. settings are exactly the same the render time difference is what exactly?

I might have to fire up Poser13 in a virtual machine to see for myself. 

I know there was work done on adaptive sampling because the release notes state that, but I read somewhere that the render engine works differently.  With a multi threaded computer in Poser 12 each thread worked on a separate bucket where as in Poser 13 all the threads work on the same bucket.  I cannot be sure on this as it is something I read but I certainly do not see the multiple blue edged boxes I see in Poser 12. 

What I am sure of is you cannot just use the same render settings in Poser 13 and expect massive changes,  I now render with progressive refinement set and a high bucket count and that seems to be the way to go, for me at least.

i'm not really impressed, hasn't they said something about a new female figure based on a new unimesh that would come with poser 13 ? i mean, updating the renderer is a nice gimmik but the biggest issue is still the lack of good base characters. LaFemme/Homme aren't really competitive, not even against the old V4/M4. why do they still hold on to it, i can't understand it ...

In my environment, when the Pixel Samples value is 100, a threshold value of 0.001 in Poser12 is equivalent to about 0.5 in Poser13, and 0.002 is equivalent to about 0.7. However, that may depend on the Pixel Sample value and scene content.

For that scene I tried, with a threshold value of 0.002, P12 computes about 3000 samples before processing the next bucket. P13 computes all 10000 samples, so it takes a very long time.

* Confirmed by watching the rendering progress bar

I seeked for a threshold value that cuts off the computation at about 3000 samples on P13, and it is about 0.7.

The result is similar quality with slightly faster render times.

Also, "with a threshold value of 0.002, P12 computes up to about 3000 samples" for that scene, so if the Pixel Samples value is 50 or less, P13 renders faster even with a threshold value of 0.002.

stachelzelle posted at 7:32 AM Sun, 2 April 2023 - #4460477

i'm not really impressed, hasn't they said something about a new female figure based on a new unimesh that would come with poser 13 ? i mean, updating the renderer is a nice gimmik but the biggest issue is still the lack of good base characters. LaFemme/Homme aren't really competitive, not even against the old V4/M4. why do they still hold on to it, i can't understand it ...

I don't think it will be unimesh, because they announced that Poser 13 won't have the promised unimesh. I assume they had some technical difficulties.

Unimesh: not yet indeed, but it seems to be only a question of time, as state here.
Excerpt:

> A key goal for this release has been to simplify content creation for Poser by supporting single-mesh figures that remain in memory and are not broken into smaller segments internally by the software (aka unimesh).  We are still working toward that goal  but, with this release, we are proud to announce the delivery of updated tools for content developers that greatly simplify common tasks such as the creation of conforming clothing for Poser figures.  This focus on tools that streamline content creation will be an on-going theme for Poser development going forward.

The old render system gave each bucket to a core.  And if you had a very compute intensive area you would see a core or two working and working while the rest finished and just sat there doing nothing.  The new system puts all the cores to work on the same area so that intensive area will get more processing power to complete faster and you don't have 14 of 16 cores doing nothing.

There is also a time value you can set on the renderer so that after 20 seconds (or 2) it stops that bucket and moves on to the next. Of course that was using the old bucket system and not progressive mode.  I haven't tried the timer since they put the new progressive mode in.  But I did put in a request for a detailed log setting to allow you to see what settings gave what results.  But again this was before the new progressive mode.

i'm not really impressed, hasn't they said something about a new female figure based on a new unimesh that would come with poser 13 ? i mean, updating the renderer is a nice gimmik but the biggest issue is still the lack of good base characters. LaFemme/Homme aren't really competitive, not even against the old V4/M4. why do they still hold on to it, i can't understand it ...

That's for the bit of clarification folks, I still don't see how this new no-buckets thing is different to the old progressive mode, but maybe there was some core wastage in progressive mode they got rid of?

In p12 sometimes I use bucket renders and sometimes I use progressive, and saw no time difference in render time with them previously. I did however a few times see a visual difference in the render when the same exact scene was rendered in progressive mode versus not in progressive mode - this may have been a bug that has been fixed?

I still think it seems disingenuous to try and compare render times of P12 with P13 if the render settings (pixel samples and adaptive sampling thresholds) are different. Comparing apples to oranges basically. Are the render times different with CPU renders or is it just GPU renders that have benefited?

So are you looking at the speed that a certain set of values performs or are you wanting a better end result picture?  If you want the same image quality then P13 can use lower values.  Kind of like I can paint a board in 2 coats but I was told to use 10 coats, the extra time does not result in a better covering just more time spent.

Richard60 posted at 12:45 PM Sun, 2 April 2023 - #4460517

The lower upgrade price from 11 to 13 would be to buy poser 12 then Poser 13 saves you $50.  How much lower do you think it should be since a lot of people bought Poser 12 and paid more then the current price of $99?  Of course I could complain that I bought Poser 5 and they don't give me an reduced price to upgrade.

I think an upgrade price from P11 Pro that was in the range of $140-150 would have been about right, and I would pay that if it meant faster renders than P11 Pro and a functioning Queue Manager

ader posted at 4:20 PM Sun, 2 April 2023 - #4460545

That's for the bit of clarification folks, I still don't see how this new no-buckets thing is different to the old progressive mode, but maybe there was some core wastage in progressive mode they got rid of?

In p12 sometimes I use bucket renders and sometimes I use progressive, and saw no time difference in render time with them previously. I did however a few times see a visual difference in the render when the same exact scene was rendered in progressive mode versus not in progressive mode - this may have been a bug that has been fixed?

I still think it seems disingenuous to try and compare render times of P12 with P13 if the render settings (pixel samples and adaptive sampling thresholds) are different. Comparing apples to oranges basically. Are the render times different with CPU renders or is it just GPU renders that have benefited?

 

Now I am sure someone will be able to take my descriptions and use them to prove something very different but all I know is that the quality does not look massively different between Poser 12 and 13 but the renders do take less time.  If I try and run the the same scene in both versions with the same settings the Poser 13 looks wrong, the lighting generally looks blown out and the render times in Poser 13 seem to be longer.

That said a lot of that is subjective, what I find of good enough quality will be very different to someone else's.  My goal is to generate renders that look good enough in print as I have a photobook created each year, or at least I have done for the last eight years.  Renders for the book have a dimension of 3508 X 2480 at 300dpi which work for a good quality printed A4 page that I can push to A3.  Some of the renders are  7016 X 2480 and 600 dpi as I generally create books that are fold flat so that it will take a double A4 sized landscape render.

This is a Poser 12 render but shows the idea.

Not surprisingly my renders can take a while but if I go back to when I first started having books printed most of the renders were overnight jobs, by Poser 12 they were down to a couple of hours and Poser 13 appears to be on track to complete most in under an hour.   The end result is I am more than happy with Poser 13 for the work I use it for but, not only that, I am finding it fun as well.

Thanks, DCArt! I didn't know about the Render to background. Tried it today and I like it!

Thx hornet3d& Richard60, I guess I'll have to give it a whirl and see what I think for myself when they release a native Mac version. 

Thanks, DCArt! I didn't know about the Render to background. Tried it today and I like it!

Are there any realistic renders of people using 13 floating around that someone could point me to? Thanks

There are some at the P13 render thread over on the P13 forums. Some, mind you. Not everyone in Poserdom does photoreal.

Has anyone tried rendering through the Face camera? I ended up with a black render, but it may have been because I was using an infinite light and only the Main camera seems to  "see" the older Infinite lights. I also tried rendering through the other support cameras and they picked up my Area Light but not the Infinite.

I want to add that I really liked how Firefly works in P13, it goes so fast and looks great. But P13 Superfly to my eye will need new skin shaders, as it seems to render them with a graininess that I don't care for.

I've rendered through all cameras without any problem.  Double-check that there isn't any obstruction in the way that blocks the camera's view when rendering.  You may need to reposition the camera.  

And yes, old skin shaders need to be modified for them to work correctly in Superfly.

When was FBX import introduced (I'm way behind the times still running PP2014) and do such files retain their rigging when brought into Poser?

I've rendered through all cameras without any problem.  Double-check that there isn't any obstruction in the way that blocks the camera's view when rendering.  You may need to reposition the camera.  

And yes, old skin shaders need to be modified for them to work correctly in Superfly.

Interesting. I hadn't realized there had been improvements to Firefly as well as Superfly.

You know how calculating the subsurface scattering was always sloooow? It's not slow now and the images just look ..nice! Firefly has always been a capable renderer and it can look super if you don't mind a softer look. Superfly to me has always been about the shiny, glittering hard surface and while I am all about that, I love how Firefly makes people look good.

@redfern, I think (could be wrong) it was introduced in poser 11,  as far as retaining rigging.. hit and miss unless it's been improved in 13.  Some things import in fine, others not so much, both in 11 & 12.  Not tried in 13 yet.

@redfern, I think (could be wrong) it was introduced in poser 11,  as far as retaining rigging.. hit and miss unless it's been improved in 13.  Some things import in fine, others not so much, both in 11 & 12.  Not tried in 13 yet.

MeInOhio posted at 7:07 PM Sun, 2 April 2023 - #4460562

Thanks, DCArt! I didn't know about the Render to background. Tried it today and I like it!

You can render to Queue Manager on a local machine also.

For those comparing Superfly parameters between P12 and 13, please note that CyclesX is a completely redesigned rendering engine. It is said to be completely rewritten from scratch to free Cycles from the old architecture that imposed hardware and software limitations. This is why the new engine is so much faster than the old Cycles, BUT... the parameters have changed. For those expecting to simply reuse parameter values from P12 to 13, it's not that simple. 

We have new parameters, and the values used before won't work the same in P13. I am still getting used to the engine, getting to know what values work better with it. This is all rather new, and I will need more time to figure things out. I see some people claiming SF is slower in P13, but it might be just because they are simply comparing based on reusing P12 parameter values in P13, which makes no sense considering the parameters and values have changed. We will need to spend more time figuring out what values would be comparable - but frankly, I can already see P13 being so much faster that I just don't care for P12 anymore - I am not going back. 

The Physical Surface PBR root node in P13 has been expanded, presenting a new SSS calculation method that resolves many of the artifacts we previously had in P12 SSS, and it has become the new default setting in P13. This means we can no longer compare SSS rendering between P12 and 13 because we now have a new way to render SSS that P12 doesn't have. I can also confirm that Firefly renders have become faster in P13, and I was surprised because I wasn't expecting it. 

BTW, people have been asking me a lot if my P12 scripts will work in P13, and the answer is yes, they will. The "MAT Edit" general materials editor had to be patched to support the changes on the shader nodes, so the current version is now fully compatible with P13. My other P12 scripts should work fine as they are. ^____^

randym77 posted at 1:21 PM Tue, 4 April 2023 - #4460759

Interesting. I hadn't realized there had been improvements to Firefly as well as Superfly.

That's enough for me to actually upgrade.