Durn it… I missed an extra external Poser render (see yesterday’s blog post on these).
Poser works with Refractive Software’s Octane (Nvidia graphics cards only). What makes Octane interesting is that it uses the GPU for render acceleration. The common advice on Poser forums to the… “I wanna new graphics card, which is best for Poser?” query, seems to be that Poser relies mostly on the main processor. But Octane would seem to change that, passing over the heavy-lifting of rendering to the much faster graphics card.
Octane is still in beta, and is reportedly not wholly stable. But then the same could be said of the similarly crash-prone LuxRender. Octane costs E99 Euros (about $130). There’s a Deviant Art group of Poser2Octane users who can give advice, and there are tutorials from the group on how to use it with Poser Pro 2014.
It appears Poser users need to export an OBJ of the target Poser scene — either directly from Poser, or (for more complex scenes?) via loading the Poser scene in DAZ Studio, then saving out as an OBJ, in order to get an OBJ that Octane won’t reject. Sounds a little clunky.
One alternative route that occurred to me might be to get a Collada export from Poser Pro 2014, then use Meshlab to get the OBJ and textures. Another pipeline might be: Collada – Autodesk’s free FBX convertor – OBJ. In fact, I read on the Octane forums that .dae import is supported, so it may now be a straight Poser – Collada – Octane pipeline.
My guess would be that it would probably also be a good idea to use Photoshop’s batch processing to downsample any really huge 4000px or larger materials/texures, down to 2048px, before you load the scene in Octane. Game cards, especially ones that are no longer cutting-edge (like mine), are geared for handling smaller textures.
The Poser2Octane tutorial doesn’t cover re-lighting the scene in Octane, but there’s a very clearly-presented video tutorial on that here…
I do like what I see, I must say. But it doesn’t look as seamless as Vue.