Have not yet upgraded to P5...is the FireFly render engine much better than the default P4 renderer? I mean in terms of output quality... I realize that FireFly supports additional features (displacement mapping, raytraced shadows, etc.), but do you guys really notice improved output quality? It's hard for me to know which posted images have been rendered with what engine...so I'm just wondering whether the FireFly renderer has distinct characteristics. Any P5 users still using the default P4 engine? If so, why? Any and all opinions appreciated. Sincerely, pdog

I still use the P4 renderer when using P5. Reason is it's a heckuva lot faster than FF and I don't see much difference in quality. Someone posted some comparison pics a while back but I can't find that thread now. That person saw a great increase in render time with little or no difference in quality also. There are people who rave about FF, although I could never see why. Maybe it's my monitor.

FF can be much better depending on settings. One thing it does well is better render curved surfaces over p4 renderer. You also have more features like raytracing, distance blur, fog, distance fade etc. I use P4 when doing shots that don't require elaborate shadows or accurate curve rendering and use FF for the rest. Also some of the material nodes are not supported in p4 renderer like they are in FF. You can't use displacement maps, for example in p4 and the bump map system works differently.

I tend to like FireFly renders a bit better then Poser4 renders...I don't know enough technically to say what but it just seems as if the result looks richer to me and there are some materials available in Poser 5 that simply will not render with anything else other than FireFly within Poser 5. I don't believe you can get actual reflections, for example, with Poser 4. I don't know if I've gotten used to it or the latest patch helped, but it seems as if the renders are not taking as long as they used to. It all depends on what you want. I would not buy Poser 5 because of FireFly renders, but, having Poser 5, I certainly want to take advantage of the benefits that it provides.

Maybe it's my settings, but my pictures are not very good in Firefly compared to P4 rendering and Firefly is soooo freakin' slow! Firefly renders are also a bit blurry - as if I'm using low quality textures. Firefly is also much more prone to crashing.

Hmm. P4->P5. It depends... If you want to be able to use P5's other features, such as the Materials room, the Cloth room, the hair room, then certainly go ahead and get P5. P5 supports both the previous P4 renderer and Firefly, you can decide which you want to use for the current scene. If you ONLY want Firefly's rendering capabilities, then I suppose it really only depends on if you want to pay that much for it. Firefly can be superior sometimes; for other scenes the P4 rendere works better. I know that's probably not too much help, but..I hope it helps:-) Cheers, Diolma

It depends on how you define "quality". Given that the P4 renderer is pretty much total pants, it doesn't take a lot to be higher quality. In general I'd say Firefly is better quality and certainly a whole hell of a lot more versatile. There are still some problems with shadows in small areas but overall Firefly wazzes on the P4 renderer. IMO.

IMHO lights and shadows look better in Firefly, raytraced or not. Also, the P5 material room teamed up with Firefly adds a lot more versatility with reflections and textures. You do come to miss the speed of Poser 4, but Poser 5 has so many more tools and options - I guess it's a trade off. For me, the slow performance and memory hogging of Poser 5 is the biggest headache. I really hope P6 will be faster and less demanding on memory. my two shavings of pressed latnum

I've found that using the P4 renderer in P5 does not produce the same results as rendering in P4. In P5 the shadows look smoother and rendering is slower (the castle render took about 1 min. 50 sec. in P5 and was 30 sec. in P4). (don't have Pro Pack so no idea how that compares) I don't usually get blurry texture with Firefly unless I just use the default draft settings. Chris Cox

Side by side comparison.

Here's a comparison I did a while ago. I wasn't shooting for quality...it was just a time test. All three were the exact same scene, I didn't change anything. Default Poser lighting. The p4 renders had everything turned on. No postwork except to size the image for this board and add the text. Note: since I installed sr4, everything seems slower now, p4 renders take a *lot* longer. Can't say for FF renders cuz I don't use it anymore. No reason to.

It's hard for me to know which posted images have been rendered with what engine...so I'm just wondering whether the FireFly renderer has distinct characteristics. Of course it hasn't. Given the same scene as input, the renderers should both produce the same output, otherwise one of them is doing something wrong. If you have the same lights in the same room, wouldn't you expect two cameras to take similar pictures?

Besides, if FireFly renders would look different, I'm pretty sure you'd hear a lot of bitching about it ;)

I personally prefer the P4 renderer on Poser 5, just because, to me, is three times or more faster than the regular renderer in Poser 5. Like before, when i was using Firefly, I would start rendering something, then I would go to chill out and read a book in my bed and I would read a bunch of pages before trhe render was complete. Now with the P4 renderer, I just lay down in my bed, start looking at just one page, and then i have to go back to my computer because the render is ready. Quality differences? of course there are, to me the shadows are much sharper and notorious in FF, but it's THAT much of an improvement as to choose it over P4R... now, if I need to do renders with big imported BG images, then I use FF because that's pretty much my only option.

some errata on my post (can't believe it)... it reads "faster than the regular renderer in Poser 5."... it should read "faster than the regular renderer in Poser 4." it reads "but it's THAT much of an improvement as to choose it over P4R" ... it should read "but it's NOT THAT much of an improvement as to choose it over P4R".

Well you can play around with materials settings (displacments,reflections,etc)with FireFly,and do things you couldn't with P4. But for me, in general,the quality differents between the two renders is too small to warrant the looooong render times.

Quality of render is a subjective thing. As an overall statement of the quality of a render produced with one over the other, I'm going to say that it doesn't make one whit of difference. As Noted earlier, it shouldn't. All renderers output the same quality of render, if you define this as overall appearance of an identical scene utilizing identical setups (redundancy intentional). Ultimately, they will both output to the same source -- the only differences are going to be improvements in antialiasing and such. The quality of a render is not the basis for judging it. It is the feature set of the rendering engine, and what those features make possible, that is the basis for judging a rendering engine. By that basis, the Firefly rendering engine exceeds the P4 engine. For speed, it is generally a truism that the more features you use from a render, the slower it will go. Doesn't always apply, but then, the one that it doesn't apply to typically cost more than Poser all by temselves, lol all of that said, I'll say that the use of the Firefly renderer requires you to learn a lot more about lighting, as it is much, much more sensitive to light and shadow and does a better job of handling them. Now if only they'll add in a point light...

Firefly o.k. ... really the most realistic renders come from nice lighting and especially texture/surface work. I've gotten fed up tho with Firefly, altough quite passable, does not have radiosity solutions, cautics, etc. I have worked long hours in a feeble attempt to prove that Firefly stacks up as a renderer, but always feel that well, that Shade program would literally blow that same picture away. I would like to know more about how e-frontier plans to allow poser import to Shade. I hope they don't leave them so seperate that we'll have to go thru hell to get a poser scene in there. If I knew what I knew now, I would look for Shade, because, even tho the Firefly can do much better than the p4 renderer, it still shows a glaring lack of quality because of very important missing algorithms. So p4 makes passable pictures in much less time. Stick with that unless you have zounds of time to get a pic that's somewhat better but prob not worth the extra effort.

Wow...awesome feedback. I'm glad to hear most feel FireFly (at the expense of render time) is detectably capable of more subtle shadows/reflections (whatever the backend antialiasing or sampling rationale). I also am hearing confirmation of: 1) render quality being largely about general lighting skill, and 2) a perhaps cumilative and expected effect of various factors on render quality(use of features like displacement, highest quality models such as V3/M3 rather than V2/M2, higher resolution image maps and the aforementioned attention to lighting, among any number of others). Again, wasn't sure the question had a fair answer, but your many responses have been pretty illuminating (bad pun). P.S. I orininally asked the question because I saw an online ad offering Bryce 5 (full) for like $69. I've been impressed with the realism achieved with the newer Bryce, kinda for how it handles light/shadow, and it got me thinking about whether it made sense to keep aiming toward P5 (I know, I know all very different features/functionality in Bryce). Thanks Again All, pdog