Mr. Jeremy Birn gives as a "rule oft humb" that at shadow map sizes of >= 1024 you should seriously consider ray traced shadows instead - and I think Mr. Birn has more experience than all of us together. * Technically, the resolution required in shadow mapping is directly proportional to the output resolution. Likewise for a scene of any given complexity the number of ray tracing intersection calculations is also directly proportional to output resolution. The only point where a switch should be considered is where one implementation begins to fail technically, specifically, in this case, if the shadow mapping size on disc or in memory forces a resource crisis, which typically manifests itself in the intervention of OS resource management services. However, this apparently isn't the case for Poser shadow-mapping, as all of the reports have been consistent with memory leak problems, i.e. performance is acceptable at the outset, but begins to deteriorate with progress. Now I'm not sure of Mr Birn's qualifactions, or the amount of experience he's had with Poser and Firefly's implentations (I'd guess none), but I expect he was referring to specific implementations, and if he was generalising, frankly he talking crap. And I'm sure some people at Pixar, who almost exclusively use shadow mapping techniques, and for whom render times equate directly to production costs would disagree with that as a general assertion. But I digress, as this has nothing to do with the subject. Poser 4 users had no choice but to use shadow mapping. It was all that was provided. Likewise Poser 5 users have little choice but to use ray tracing, not because its the only alternative, but because the shadow mapping is broken and apparently nobody at CL has managed to find 5 minutes to verify that the myriad complaints and problem reports were in fact based on observation, rather than being of mischevious purpose. Hence cue dissatisfied customers and poor company reputation. If the best defense, after the fact, that can be made is that "Some bloke who never used Poser but wrote a book said that you shouldn't be doing it that way anyway", then frankly nobody should be surprised that users like Tim sometimes get a bit hot under the collar. Bill

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Fantasy Poser Computer!