tedbragg opened this issue on Dec 17, 2003 ยท 23 posts
soulhuntre posted Mon, 22 December 2003 at 3:05 PM
"A little better, maybe. But a LOT slower for sure."
I don't mean to sound like a snob here, but the only way Firefly is a "little" better is if your only doing the flat basic renders. If you keep thinking in p4 terms then I am sure that's all you'll ever get out of it. However the engine it
"How about it looks like crap compared to transmapped hair and slows rendering to a crawl?"
No matter how slow it is, sometimes having a "helmet" head in an animation simply will not do. Period. Vicky in a temple doesn't care, but in a more dynamic world when your competing with bigger firms it sure as hell does. And it can look extremely good if you spend the time to learn it :)
Besides, it isn't all that slow once you are used to working with renderers that have this kind of feature set.
"Dramatically? Not really...we're still stuck with that old runtime system and the same libraries. Still a pain. A dramatic improvement would have been a normal file handling system that most every other program uses."
It sure sped my life up. it has simplified my ability to make absolutely sure I knwo what assets I have used on a project and how I maintain the runtimes. That is a dramatic improvement for me!
"I only see minor improvements in the addons. The major flaws P4 had are still there in P5...still no fixes since 1999."
There is not one outstanding bug that impacts my work that I know of. All software has bugs, the issue is does it have IMPORTANT bugs :)
P5 doesn't suit you? Fine. Don't use it. But to pretend or imply it was a do nothing upgrade that added no features of import and has seen no maintenance is simply incorrect. Just say "I don't like it".
"Firefly was no where near good enough to replace something like Lightwave, so immediatly the value of Firrely is less to me. Add to this the extremealy buggy nature of the "improved" renderer, and this added feature becomes far less desirable."
Since I use Mental Ray for most final output I agree with you that Firefly is not my "weapon of choice" - but since only an extremely small percentage of Poser users have access to the big guns it is a very good thing to give them a good solid rendering engine upgrade.
Besides, having Firefly to work with has cut down a lot on the number of "round trips" I need to make for animatics, motion tests and pre-production visualization renders. Time is money, saving time means making more money :)
"A quick search of the Poser forum will let you see that you are fairly unique in your stability claims."
Actually no, it doesn't I see a fair number of people who are willing to say P5 is stable and works for them. Either way the reality is that forums will always attract a large number of people who have something to complain about compared to those who do. most of the forums at Discreet complain of bugs in 3DS Max yet clearly the majority of actual users have no problem.
"majority of the people who own the package cannot get the same results in simple getting it running."
The majority of those I know who use it (small production houses who are not active in this "community") have no problems at all. My experience tells me most people run it just fine.
"it WOULD have been a far more popular feature if the overall P5 package had delivered the bare requirement for an upgrade to Poser 4."
That's not it at all. The simple reality is that most merchandise for Poser is from a cottage community of artists. They do great work but they don't really have the time or urge to learn a whole new way of making clothing - especially one that would impact their future market possibilities. Few of them actually understand the importance anyway because they have never used the larger systems.
It is simply easier (because they already know how) to slap together a dress with 3 or 4 morphs. Then you can add more morphs later as an "expansion" and so on. hell, Daz is going to add a whole NEW market with the Steph 3.0 character that would not exist if dynamic cloth was actually well supported.
"In professional render packages strand based hair is used in conjuction with physics tools and special "at render time" shaders to give it the neccesary realism. We go back to Posers poor code base here too. Poser is simply not capable of properly handling enough memory to allow for realistic hair."
I don't buy it :) First off, the special "render time" shaders you speak of are micropolygons to my knowledge (sub polygon, sub pixel rendering calculations to handle something as thin as hair), and Firefly has em :)
Of course the base of Poser has some memory issues, but the core of poser isn't the issue because Firefly is essentially an external system with its own memory management (it's a bolt on renderer so we know something of it's architecture by nature). i doubt the core Poser system actually handles Firefly memory management at all.
Is it the same thing as a full on pro level hair simulation? Nope. Just like Firefly isn't Mental Ray or Brazil. I never claimed any such thing... but to say that it isn't an improvement is ludicrous.
"The service packs were not gifts from CL."
I didn't say they were. But again the implication was that the Poser program has seen no continuing support. It has. it's that simple.
"Of the requested "features" such as use of OpenGL/Hardware accleration, improved work flow, more functional interface, multitherading, none of these were even addressed."
You know that most of the people screaming for OpenGL think it will speed up render times right? I mean, most don't even really understand what it >IS<. I also saw dynamic cloth and hair, better lighting, support for larger textures, support for larger renders, better shadows and volumetric asked for. Maybe you didn't see any of that?
Did we get it all? Nope. Was it perfect? Nope. But again, the concept that it is a non working program with no support that improved NOTHING is simply revisionism born of anger.
"What we got was the same Poser 4 with some new features stuck in that weren't useful to any higher end Poser user."
Right, cause non of us use any of those features for pre-vis, pre-production, prototyping or smaller renders. And then there is the idea that the improvements are dramatic for the core Poser user base :)
Of course, if they had given us high end guys a boost and not added a better renderer for the common user they would be getting blasted for that :)
"Poser 5 actually does not have key functionality that I cam to expect with Poser 4 Pro Pack. It still doesn't."
Buy Body Studio. The "PRo pack" was an add on feature, so is Body Studio. If you can afford Max or Lightwave you can probably spring for it. it supports dynamic hair and cloth and does a great job... it's also much more stable than the Pro pack was.
The feature is there if you want it and you are high end. It certainly would have made NO SENSE to deal with adding price or time to the release of P5 to include that built in.
"It is the high end users in any market who dictate what becomes popular, and Poser 5 was all but a slap in the face to Posers most dedicated users."
You really might not want to speak for all of us :)
"But why would I buy a program that doesn't do what I need?"
Don't. Don't ever buy it if you don't want to. It's no issue for me what you own. But when a poster says that P5 "doesn't work" as a blanket statement and says that it added no features except a minor render improvement I will continue to set that record straight. A lot about P5 was wrong - but a lot of good is there too.