All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the next in a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months, VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to render images in the Render panel.

The previous chapters have pretty much focused on the Preview pane of the Document Window, but another pane exists-the Render panel. Using this panel, you can quickly render the current scene to check its look.

Quality Versus Speed
The Display Style control has a number of different options for rendering the current scene in the Document Window and the order of these options isn't random. The Display Style options are ordered by the quickest rendering method on the left (Silhouette) and the slowest on the right (Texture Shaded).

[Figure 1] Render panel (left). [Figure 2] Quarter sized render (right). 

There is a direct correlation also between the speed of rendered image and its quality. Textures, for example, add a lot of detail to a model, but they come at the cost in rendering speed and memory. You can see the relationship between render quality and speed in the Render Settings dialog box. Using the Auto Settings, you can drag the settings between Draft (fast render and low quality) and Final (slow render and high quality).

Using the Render Panel
You can open the Render panel, shown in Figure 1, by clicking the Render tab at the top of the Document Window. Controls along the top edge of the Render panel let you select the image resolution, select the renderer, initiate a rendering, render an area, open a new render window and pan the current window. The panel also includes a pop-up menu of additional commands. Along the bottom of the Render panel are controls for comparing two images.

Setting the Document Window Image Resolution
The current image resolution of the Render panel is displayed at the top left. You can change these dimensions by dragging on the lower-right corner of the panel to resize it. You can set the drop-down list to the right of the resolution dimensions to render the current panel at Full, Half or Quarter size. Figure 2 shows the current scene at quarter size. Clicking the Maximize Window button in the upper-right corner will increase the size of the Render panel to fill the available space, as shown in Figure 3. Clicking the Maximize button again returns the Render panel to its default size.