I was messing around tonight with Poser 5 and I noticed one of those temporary files that P5 makes, like "spotLight 1_shadow_0003.tmp" so I decided to look at it with a hex editor. It contained this copyright notice "Tempest Raster Image Format.(C) 2000 - 2002 Pixels.Version 1 1 0". That got me curious, so I started searching on the web, and found out somthing interesting. Poser 5's Firefly render engine is actually the render engine from a piece of software called Pixels3D. It's a Mac only program which looks pretty nice. The neat thing is they have some very detailed documentation you can DL from their site, www.pixels3d.com It goes into detail about the shader nodes, and displacement, and a lot of things that CL kinda skimmed over. Thought ya might want to know.

The Pixels 3D community has produced all manner of free downloadable shaders. I wish there were an easy way to make them work in P5.

...oh boy first this explains the render speeds on PC.. but more importantly... this is real fuel for the 'CL lied' arguement about poser 5's problems.. I'll be in my bunker with the door closed..

For those of us that have joined this movie halfway though, could someone explain why this proves 'CL lied' about Poser 5's problems.

In case you didn't notice, the bottom of your Poser 5 box clearly says "The following companies also provided technology used in Poser 5: Pixels Digital, Inc., ...", Poser's about screen says "portions of the FireFly renderer and associated shading technologies are coypright (c) 2002 Pixels Digital, Inc." and Pixels is mentioned in both the printed and PDF manual too.

Attached Link: http://www.pixels.net/pixelstv/reptile_skin/

Thanks volfin and stewer for the links. The material nodes are one of the best things in P5 - so much still to explore. Now if I could have a Mac version running on a new G5 by fall... :-)

yeah.. and the face room is from the software "3d me now" from biovirtual... poser5 is just slapped together from several stand alone aplications...

No, it's not. The face room was developed by Egisys especially for Poser 5.

Actually, it appears as though CL and Biovirtual both licensed the face generating modules from Singular Inversions (www.facegen.com), who also makes standalone software.

"CL lied" probably refers to the fact that in some of the discussion between the release of Poser 4 and Poser 5 (significant time) representatives of Curious Labs said (are thought to have said) the program was being rewritten from the ground up. You can explore the perspectives on this by searching through the archives here and at the other Poser forums. Please note: I am not taking a position, only trying to relate relevant information.

yeah.. p5 seems to me like poser 4 with some 3rd party aplications embedet that are not realy run stable with poser5..

smiller1, stewer please note I said 'this is real fuel for the 'CL lied' arguement about poser 5's problems..' meaning that there will be ppl that will use this. to my mind this explains why Firefly is slow. the system has been ported from the Mac to the PC (Pixels3d is Mac only), not written for the PC specifically. hence instead of running native code, we're running ported/translated code. hence unstable and slow.

'to my mind this explains why Firefly is slow. the system has been ported from the Mac to the PC (Pixels3d is Mac only), not written for the PC specifically' If that IS the case, then presumably poser 5 for the mac will go like bomb when rendering. Somehow I doubt it. mac

A lot of modeling applications have 3rd party renders. Max has Mental Ray etc. The information about the Firefly render engine is listed in the manual, look at the copyrights, really wasn't hidden. The Firefly render is slower in some cases cause it can do a lot more calculate a lot more, hence takes a bit longer in some cases. Since the updates it's gotten better and better. Pixels3d licences the rendering code to other companies, not really a 'lie' as I see it, plus poser 5 has the original renderer of poser4 so it's best of both worlds. Daz3d is licencing a 3rd party rendering engine for DazStudio, I forget who's it is. The Poser5 documentation is lacking when discussing all the features of Poser5 firefly engine, I wish they had covered more. the Pixels3d docs while similar didn't really explain much to me that translated over to poser5, someone point out pages to me, I'd love more information. I dunno about unstable and slow code. Pixels3d handled the coding on that end with a lot of their programers and knowlege. Lots of software is ported PC/Mac and it's fine. Like Poser 4 for instance. I think it's a bit of a over generalization to say that CL lied and becuase it's ported it's unstable and slow. I'm with Little Dragon, I wish we could convert the free shaders out there. And yes, I'm one of those people that don't have problems with Poser5, not tryin to bash people that are having problems, I can understand some of the frustration. my 2 cents.

MachineClaw When you register for the Pixels3d demo download, you can also download the PDF manuals for Pixels. They have a (IMO) good explanation of what most shader nodes do. hence instead of running native code, we're running ported/translated code. hence unstable and slow. What would make FireFly not native code? Renderers in general do not make any platform dependant function calls at all, they're just plain C or C++ floating point calculations. The reason why the Poser 4 renderer is faster is because it's incredibly primitive compared to FireFly. Also, the default settings for FireFly even in Draft mode. You can make it faster by reducing the number of pixel samples and increasing the values for min shading rate and bucket size. E.g. try pixel samples 1, and 128 for min shading rate and bucket size. With such settings, it's even faster than the Poser 4 renderer on my computer.

To clairify, I wasn't trying to say that CL was hiding the fact that they used Pixels3D's Renderer, I was just pointing out that they could have documented it a lot better. As stewer pointed out, there are a lot of tutorials and documentation for Pixels3D that will work with P5, CL could have adapted some of this for use in the documentation. Doesn't really matter, just have fun with all of the new info!