Attached Link: Firefly Render problems solved

all at once, several problems which have plagued some Firefly renders since P5 was introduced are likely to be remedied by this simple solution. I discovered this while I was testing the specific problem of artifacts in refractions, reflections and shadows, and discovered that many problems may all be due to the same common source. You can read about it at this link. It is a long post, but if you are in a hurry, you can jump to Post #3 for the summary and then go back and read the full discussion if you are interested.

What a fantastic discovery. Thank you for taking the time to work on a solution.

I have seen you posts about it, glad you discovered the solution to the problem. The only problem is i dont have P5 lol.

Great work! (Does anyone know why Poser uses such a small scale compared to other 3D programs?)

many problems may all be due to the same common source.

What other problems does this solve?

Hurray! Hope CL will fix that with another SR.

Just to bring some of the information here for those who are impatient :) The experimentation has led to a theory that Firefly is having problems dealing with the small scale of Poser scenes, and that this is causing probems. The proposed (and demonstrated) solution is to scale the poser scene by some large factor (1000% or so) and that seems to solve some artifacting issues. While I am not sure that that is exactly the cause of the problem or the only way to solve it, it damn sure seems to work and is clever :)

... for the good detective work and excellent graphic.
(in post #1 above)

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

randym77: Other problems covered by this solution in addition to refraction and reflection artifacts are several related to ray-traced shadows, shadows cast by trans-mapped and unmapped semi-transparent objects, proximity errors and shading of micro-polygon displacements. These are a few off the top of my head, but since I don't know all there is to know about Firefly and haven't even tried to test every function, it is fairly safe to say that there might be others involving computations of small numbers. For example procedural shaders which produce unexpected results on small patterns; artifacts appearing in the detail of bump-mapped surfaces; irregularities in the shape and shading of highlights such as those produced by glossy and anisotropic nodes. And who knows... this MIGHT be the cause of all those shading issues we see when two surfaces are very close together, and we have to use displacement to fix them. It might end up as a long list, but I leave the discovery of the rest to someone else. I'm tired of all this hard work and I want to go PLAY ;-)

I just tested this using your suggestions and it is THE FIX without a doubt. Can't wait to find out what else it fixed. You know how I feel about it...;)

The Poser-scene scaling idea has been used successfully when rendering Poser objects in Carrara. In earlier versions (Carrara 1 and 2), we found that the Poser eyeball structure was so close to the eyewhite in a Carrara scene, that it gave weird transparency artifacts, usually appearing black or grey. The fix was either to delete the eyeball, or to scale up the entire figure 2,000%. I think this was bikermouse's idea, or maybe nomuse, a couple of years ago.

What might be nice would be a python script that would scale everything up at once when you're ready to do a final render on your scene using Firefly.

I second the request for a python script. Ronstuff, YOU ARE A WIZARD!