Heads up - Poser on sale now also at Rendo

[Miss B]

Yes, I've been playing with her Lemon Hair, and she suggests SubD of 1, which makes the hair take even longer to render.

That's a nice render, BTW. I use EZSkin3 with SuperFly renders, but I don't always get such good results, though sometimes I think I just pick the wrong lighting. I have Ghostship's set or Portrait Lights, and they're usually my go-to SuperFly lights, but even then, sometimes just not bright enough. I like the way yours came out. Skin looks very natural.

 

[Willowisp]

Thanks, Miss B It's one of Maddelirium's skins, they usually come out very nice regardless

 

[Miss B]

Hmmmm, I think I have at least one of Maddelirium's sets. I'll have to check to make sure.

 

[Hornet3d]

Well bit by bit. Here is the latest state of play, lit by a pair of area lights.

 

[Nod]

All wishlist items are also 50% off. I'll bag a couple of photo textures, as they work out at about £10.

 

[Nod]

To be sure, it's very good but annoyingly slow. I'm experiencing 2.5 hours to render scenes in Superfly that render in like 4 minutes in Octane. Plus the fact that I can use HDRI lighting in Octane without having to jump through hoops.

Not just me then?
Octane is amazing for animations tests. (And obviously proper animations.)
I treated myself to the Carrara version as well.

 

[Miss B]

Thanks, Miss B It's one of Maddelirium's skins, they usually come out very nice regardless

Well, I checked, and I do have one of Maddelirium's characters installed in my old DS 3 Advanced Runtime, and I've never used her in Poser before, sooooo, I loaded her into PP11 and rendered her in both FireFly and SuperFly, and except for adjusting her lip color, because I'm never happy with those included on any character, the only thing I needed to fix was a slight haze on her eyes, which I've seen when I first rendered Dawn in SuperFly. Luckily I only had to disconnect an Alternate Diffuse map on all the eye matzones, and they rendered just fine.

This is Vivienne rendered in SuperFly. Unfortunately, the Chocolate Hair comes with baked in spec/reflection, so I probably should've used a darker texture, as there was no way for me to get some of that shine off.

 

[Willowisp]

Looking good Yea, old hairs will need new maps for modern times

 

[kobaltkween]

Poser defaults SF to using Branched Path tracing. Not only have I found that literally about 10xs as slow to the point of crashing, but I watched a video of the November Blender conference where a Cycles developer offhand mentioned that Branched Path is much slower for being a little less noisy in some situations. Most of my renders in SF have taken minutes, where my standard settings in Firefly takes hours. Basically anything with IDL, SSS, and transparency is slow as hell for me in FF. Which is pretty much anything with a figure and hair. And mind, I turn off IDL on all the transparent items I can.

FF actually cripples how you model and create props and figures. If you don't make glass or gems their own separate objects that you can set shadow casting and other properties, you have to totally fake how its shader works. Having real caustics is absolutely invaluable.

 

[phdubrov]

If you don't make glass or gems their own separate objects that you can set shadow casting and other properties, you have to totally fake how its shader works. Having real caustics is absolutely invaluable.

Facetted gems still are better as separate actors because of smoothing angle that is an actor-level setting. Or you need pure Cycles shader with Input: Geometry: True Normal.

 

[Hornet3d]

Poser defaults SF to using Branched Path tracing. Not only have I found that literally about 10xs as slow to the point of crashing, but I watched a video of the November Blender conference where a Cycles developer offhand mentioned that Branched Path is much slower for being a little less noisy in some situations. Most of my renders in SF have taken minutes, where my standard settings in Firefly takes hours. Basically anything with IDL, SSS, and transparency is slow as hell for me in FF. Which is pretty much anything with a figure and hair. And mind, I turn off IDL on all the transparent items I can.

FF actually cripples how you model and create props and figures. If you don't make glass or gems their own separate objects that you can set shadow casting and other properties, you have to totally fake how its shader works. Having real caustics is absolutely invaluable.

Well my first render in Superfly took literally hours and that was just as 8 samples and so I had really come to the conclusion that I would not be using Superfly on a regular basis. I just unticked the Branched Path tracing and the speed was stunning but the result looked noisy so I am now rerunning the render at 30 samples and it is still a great deal faster. Looks like I might even be able to drop the samples, clearly I need to do a lot more testing before I make a decision.

 

[kobaltkween]

My test runs are now about 32 samples. And really, you can just put it as high as you like and run it on progressive. It's _much_ faster for iterative test rendering (you can see errors pretty immediately), and you can stop it before it's finished if you're satisfied with the render.

Cycles doesn't have smoothing as Poser knows it. This is really important to know in testing. I when I was doing some beta testing a bit ago, I didn't spot some poke through problems because I used Superfly and FF with smoothing off. That said, it does have smoothing in terms of whether polygons are smooth or flat shaded. I don't think Poser has a way to understand that. Just speaking personally, I already had to figure out ways that didn't involve smoothing angle to have faceted gems work in Poser, because turning off smoothing _does not_ turn off smooth shading. Poser pretty much doesn't support flat shading, period. The only way I've ever found to get around that problem without changing the mesh itself involved a very specific and rather expensive UV mapping tool.

You know how some simple meshes look bad and have terrible shading in Poser? Even with smoothing off? I've seen that problem since P4/PPP, even before Firefly.

 

[Hornet3d]

SM recently put the upgrade price to PP11 to a whopping $49.95, and I was tempted to finally upgrade - until I realized that the price for Europeans was actually 55 euros, which equates to $65, which changed the price from 'affordable xmas present for myself' to 'too much for a hobby'.

But now they are offering the same price at Renderosity, which means I pay exactly what is advertized, and with the added bonus of render rewards!

Too good to pass! So now I can finally try Superfly

(oh and just move the thread if it's in the wrong section)

Thank you so much for this heads up, I purchased from the SM site for personal reasons but I still picked up Poser 11 pro for just short of £46 and included was a 14 part video tutorial which although basic, I still learnt a lot from so all in all I am a very happy bunny. I would almost certainly have missed this without your heads up so thank you once again for the heads up.

 

[Hornet3d]

My test runs are now about 32 samples. And really, you can just put it as high as you like and run it on progressive. It's _much_ faster for iterative test rendering (you can see errors pretty immediately), and you can stop it before it's finished if you're satisfied with the render.

Cycles doesn't have smoothing as Poser knows it. This is really important to know in testing. I when I was doing some beta testing a bit ago, I didn't spot some poke through problems because I used Superfly and FF with smoothing off. That said, it does have smoothing in terms of whether polygons are smooth or flat shaded. I don't think Poser has a way to understand that. Just speaking personally, I already had to figure out ways that didn't involve smoothing angle to have faceted gems work in Poser, because turning off smoothing _does not_ turn off smooth shading. Poser pretty much doesn't support flat shading, period. The only way I've ever found to get around that problem without changing the mesh itself involved a very specific and rather expensive UV mapping tool.

You know how some simple meshes look bad and have terrible shading in Poser? Even with smoothing off? I've seen that problem since P4/PPP, even before Firefly.

Thank you for your suggestions on this they have been a revelation. I avoided upgrading to Poser 11 for a number of reasons but mainly because I could not see myself using Superfly and the fact I would lose some of the scripts I have been using for years thus, for me, the cost of the upgrade was not really justified.

Thanks to this heads up I have managed to pick up the upgrade at a fraction of the launch price and thanks to the help here it is clear that my reasons for not upgrading were wrong. My first renders using Superfly only supported my belief I would not use it very much but thanks to your suggestions I can see it becoming my default render engine. With Branch Path tracing unclicked and with progressive selected the render looks much like Luxrender but faster. My GPU is not supported being rather old but with 8 threads from the CPU the renders look to be around the 1-2 hour mark with with a render of 2000 pixels on the longest side. That seems reasonable to me and with progressive, as you suggest, you can see any major problems very early on. I thought I would miss the Luxrender ability to suspend and restart a render, which I would still like, but with render times in this time frame it is a nice to have rather than essential.

I do miss some of the scripts I was using but thankfully the Netherworks Studio ones I use still work and with other changes I know I can get used to working with Poser 11 fairly easily. The addition of the area lights and the suggestions made here are going to prove a very big plus for Poser 11 as well.

Rather strange that my 3D world has taken such a change in the latter part of 2017 and it has really boosted my enthusiasm for 3D art as we race to 2018 (racing a lot faster for some of us than others).

 

[Bonnie2001]

Not just me then?
Octane is amazing for animations tests. (And obviously proper animations.)
I treated myself to the Carrara version as well.

I'm going to get the Octane DAZ plugin out of my Christmas money.