I like the fact that the Firefly render engine in Poser 5 doesn't pixelate the background images like the Poser 4 engine. But as a newbie I'm having some difficulty with the P5 render engine. (See the attached renders.) Why am I getting the grey sides with P5 when the settings are the same as P4. Also, what's with the ballons on Vickies arms with the P5 engine? Or is it as I have suspected that there are Gremlins in Poser 5? Lance

This is the render of the same scene done by the P4 render engine at the same settings. Lance

Hi, The ballooning is caused by "smooth polygons". Turn this "off" when using the Firefly rendere and it will stop this happening. The grey sides are because your render window is bigger than your background image. When importing a picture, P5 asks if you want to match the window size to the imported image size. Say "yes" and then the grey bits will go and you can resize the window after to a certain degree. Hope this helps!

I might add that you should keep the smoothing turned on in the Render Options because your figure and other objects will benefit from it. You can turn smoothing on/off for each object in your scene on their parameters pallette. Just selct the object that is having problems and uncheck "Smooth Polygons" in the parameters - it looks like your ropes are the problem here. As for the background, in P5 you have a couple of choices: If you use the "Import background picture" then your render needs to have the same height to width proportions (aspect ratio) as the background image. You can crop the image in a paint program to match the adpect ratio of your scene or you can change the aspect ratio of the scene to match your background image. If you don't want to do that, then you should use the background node in your Materials Room to add a picture, and not the Import background picture in the file menu. This will allow you to scale the background picture to fill your scene, or to zoom in on it and move it around to get just the effect you want. The "Auto Fit" option will tile the background to fill your scene rather than leave areas without any image.

Nice Ronstuff, I've learnt something there as well ! Thankx!

I had the "doesn't fill the scene" problem just last night, and had to turn "autofit" OFF on my background image node. Otherwise, I'm not sure what it was fitting to (maybe the material room window?), but it was leaving gray space at the sides. Not leaving the pic's natural aspect ratio, and not tiling it either.

I don't use the auto-fit either because it is unpredictable, and does not really re-sample the image to fit the scene. It is better to set the U and V scale to something between 1.2 and 1.8 (depending on how wide/narrow your image aspect is) and then use the offsets to position the image where you want it. And the preview window in the Material room does not show exactly how it will render unless it has the same aspect ratio as your main document window. If you don't use the same scale factor on both U and V then the image will be "squished" or "stretched", which can work well for clouds and other images that don't need to be equally scaled horizontally and vertically.

Thanks for you help, I've solved the smooth polygon problem. But I have not used the materials room to add a picture before. I selected Object-background and then Material-background and then tried the various connections of the color wire to all the different options color, bump etc. I'm not sure where to connect it. The 2d image for my background shows in the Materials window but not in the pose window. What am I missing? Thanks for your help, I am new at this and don't personally know anyone to walk me through some of this.

You need to locate the Background Node in the Materials Room and then plug the BG Picture Node into the Color channel - there will be adjustments on the Background Picture parameters to scale and offset (position) your picture. Don't use the Diffuse channel unless you want your scene lighting to affect the background image.

Hey Lanceb, There's plenty of help on the forums but I agree with you about help in general. I only got into Poser last year late on and there is no decent book that I can find although I've heard there's one due out at the end of this month (poser for windows in UK). Bye for now!