FireFly can render some nice effects. At first, just goofing around with it, I was very happy with it. Sure, with all the effects turned on and what not, it renders slower than the P4 renderer, but the results are amazing. Now that I'm actually trying to get images out of it thought, it's just one disapointment after another. I'm trying to render my images big so that I can resize them after post and what not - I'm trying to render at 1300x1300, which isn't even that large when you take everything into consideration. I'm rendering big scenes with six or seven characters in it (not V3's. I have one V3 in there with other scene figures and creatures.) The scene renders fine in P4, but I want the raytraced shadows. So I render it in FireFly....Alright, half of it renders with the other half black....So I figured I ran out of ram. I reduce the bucket size, as this says it takes less resources. Alright, it rendered all the way...But now Kozaburo's hair looks noisy. I've heard of this before, no problem....I'll go find the fix. It turns out the fix is just turning on texture filtering. So I do it....Now when I render, it goes through all the steps, and renders me a nice big black screen. Grand. And since the engine takes longer to render than P4, this has all taken place over several days while I wait for my renders. I have 512 megs of ram. I'm sure a gig would work much better, but this is ridiculous. I've seen much more detailed renders with more bells and whistles render just fine in other packages.

I've done hundreds of complex scenes with as many as 17 Mil-figures or equivalent rendered to sizes 1500x1500 and have had this happen only once. Strangely, when it happened, the scene was not one of my most complex, so I don't think it is scene complexity alone that causes it. What did distinguish my problem scene from my other renders was number of textures and their sizes, along with almost everything in the scene having some transparent element.

I reduced texture sizes and tried another render - it still forze, but completed more of the picture before doing so. I turned off shadows (in options panel) and the scene rendered fine, but I wanted the shadows rendered, so I then deleted one of the foreground figures, turned shadows back on, and the scene rendered OK. In the end I had to render that single figure without the other scene elements, and composite the two images in a paint program.

Bottom line is that it might be RAM related, but I am also suspecting lighting and shadow-casting as being involved in these mysterious "freezes" where Poser 5 really isn't frozen, it is just in some kind of endless loop perhaps trying to calculate shadows for one transparent object casting a shadow on another transparent object, etc.

It would be interesting to hear from others about what circumstances were when they have encountered this problem. It doesn't happen very often since SR 4.1, but it DOES still happen.
P.S. - I still wouldn't go back to P4 for a zillion dollars ;-)

Message edited on: 05/30/2004 14:35

Since P5 is a memory hog and you are on a smaller machine , you might look at the size of your texture maps. Try reducing and still keep the quality you want. If any part of the body is covered with clothing, hide it. Finally, before rendering, save the file then run Dial Cleaner, you should have it if you bought M3 or get it at Daz, free archive. That will help cut down the size of the file by removing unused V3 or other inj figures channels.

temp solution: increase page file size. (saved my butt numerous times)

I think your machine could be causing the problem. i had similar troubles that were fixed when i upgraded to a newer machine.

Mofolicious: I'm pretty sure it's not my machine. I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, so I keep it up to date. Right now I'm running a 2.4c Pentium 4, 512 megs of matched dual channel PC3200 corsair RAM, a Radeon 9700 Pro and all drivers up to date. Sure, there's newer stuff on the market, but I don't need to upgrade quite yet.

Increase the page file? How does one go about doing that? I wish P5 used dual procs...I could turn on hyper threading. Come to think of it, I wish D|S used dual procs.

nickedshield: I do have a lot of large maps. V3 is using her high res textures, which are 3000x4000, 512x512 and 4000x2720. Then there's her catsuit's texture, which is 2000x2000. The creature uses a procedural texture made in P5. Then there's the three eggs, the gun in the background, the two different cryo tubes, and the building itself plus the two transmaped square planes to make the goo. I'd say that's a lot, but still.....I feel it should be able to handle that. I have a feeling if I were to use another program, such as Vue or C4D or something, it would be able to render easily, even with my current system specs which aren't shabby. I have a realitively up to date system.

And I forgot to mention that everything that doesn't need to be rendered is indeed hidden. Even the body parts below the catsuit.

Message edited on: 05/30/2004 23:09

And while I'm at this, why does my P4 render not show shadows? I have them all set to use shadow maps, not the raytrace shadows.....But when I render in P4 mode, I get no shadows....

The shadow problem is possibly due to a corrupt light file. Poser enjoys creating these so you'll have to trick it into not doing so by adding as many new lights to your scene as the light file you're applying has (ie: say your light file has 10 lights, you need to have 13 lights in the scene BEFORE you double-click the library thumbnail). As for the texturemap complexity, I agree with what was said above: you should create lower-resolution versions when possible. Unless you're doing close-ups, you'll see no (positive) difference in renders. Too bad Poser doesn't do LOD...

"But now Kozaburo's hair looks noisy. I've heard of this before, no problem....I'll go find the fix. It turns out the fix is just turning on texture filtering." Who told you that? Texture filtering kills render times if not killing the render outright The best way to smooth out blocky hair is to link the displacement channel to the texture map and set it to 0.00001

Attached Link: http://digitalbabes2.com/dload/texturefiltering.html

FireFly is alright for rendering... true, it does use a lot more memory than other renderers but the reality is that with a lot of textures loaded into your scene you may well be bumping into a memory issue even with 512mb. I was having a bit of trouble with my other system at 512mb, but with my new box and 1gb of RAM the black renders have disappeared. Should you need 1gb of RAM to render in FireFly? No. Will it require that much sometimes? Yes. It's lame, but the alternative is to export all of your scene objects to something else and take your chances... The extra RAM will probably be a lot cheaper than your time trying to get around FireFly's memory appetite.

Instead of using texture filtering (which increases resource consumption across the entire scene), simply modify the shading rate for the hair itself.

Two identical conforming hair figures. The only difference is that the hair on the left has a shading rate of 0.5, and the hair on the right has a shading rate of 0.05.

It takes a bit longer to render the hair with a lower shading rate, but the results are clearly worth it.

Hey, thanks for the tip Little Dragon! I'll try that as soon as I get home. Looks like it will work wonders.

Thanks LD, that should help with the problems I've had with some of Jim Burtons & Dark Whipers hair, Firefly seems to have a problem with the transmapping on them

no. Firefly doesn't have a problem with them, they have a problem with firefly, lol. None of these products were designed, made, or originally intended for use in Poser 5 or Firefly. The creators were specifically taking advantage of the capabilities of the previous rendering engine. This doesn't make it better or worse. IT makes it different. As adoption speeds up, folks will begin to develop stuff to take advantage of firefly's abilities (transmapped and displaced hair, anyone? Ca you say finenesss of granularity with me? I knew you could :)) and then we'll see another new rendering engine come down the pike that will do it again. The key is learn, adapt, grow, compensate. understand your tool, and it will become of value.

"The key is learn, adapt, grow, compensate.
understand your tool, and it will become of value. "

Very well stated, ynsaen. I couldn't agree more.
Thanks to everyone for the tips as I am a die hard fan of Firefly and am determined how to learn how to use it to its fullest potential.

This isn't mean as a slight towards those favoring P4's engine. Maybe it's because I never had P4 since I had to wait for a version compatable with MacOSX. After seeing the huge difference between the two (from posted screen caps showing Poser 4's interface), I see why P5 is so baffling to some P4 users.

I'm sure my time will come too when Poser 6 or Bryce 6 comes out.
Hopefully, there'll be a lot of kitty valium on hand to help get me through. ;-)

Arry