Attached Link: http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/

I upgraded PoseRay to v3.8.0. This is a large update with many new features and bug fixes.

For those that do not know PoseRay is a utility with the following main features:

• Can render Wavefront OBJ (including from Poser and DAZ Studio), 3D studio (3DS), LightWave (LWO), AutoCAD (DXF), Moray (UDO) and raw triangle (RAW) 3D models using POV-Ray.
• Also converts to Moray UDO files or Wavefront models (OBJ & MTL). So it allows LWO and better 3DS import into Poser and DAZ Studio.
• 3D Preview of the model with support for materials and setup of lights and camera
• Simulation of HDRI lighting from high dynamic range images
• Smooth and flat subdivision
• Material property editor
• General geometry transformations
• Simulation of cartoon rendering
• Support for Poser scenes including geometry, materials, lights and camera
• Support for DAZ Studio scenes including geometry and materials.
• Provides an alternative rendering method for Poser, DAZ Studio or any other modeler that can create compatible models.

Enjoy,

FlyerX

PS:
If someone is getting problems running PoseRay please let me know. I have received reports of people having problems with PoseRay and the German version of Windows 2000.

Your render looks really fantastic. Did it take a long time ??

Likely not -- POVRay is a fairly quick renderer, and that doesn't appear to have used a great deal of transpaency and reflection or refraction settings. This is wonderful news. I hope GilaMonster knows -- all of her work is rendered in POV Ray. This upgraded Pose-Ray is a welcome addition! Now if only they could make them darn light settings more interface driven....

Render took about 8 minutes without radiosity and about 50 min with radiosity. That is on a 6 year old Pentium II 400 Mhz The difference between the two images was very little with most of it around the legs close to the ground. You can usually get nice results without radiosity with a shadowless light from below at 30% intensity. ynsaen: You can set POV-Ray lights and camera in PoseRay also. FlyerX

PoseRay has to be one of the best free additions for Poser and it's grown to become much more. It also becomes easier to use for rendering Poser scenes with each release. My only problem is needing a faster machine! I'm afraid on my old 1GHz Athlon, POVRay is indeed frustratingly slow, especially using radiosity - which is one of the neatest rendering features. I've just started experimenting with the HDRI feature which looks promising as well and perhaps not quite so slow.

lmckenzie: for HDRI simulation use a larger step than 5 degrees for the scan and use shadowless lights exept for the main source of illumination. That should keep render times low. FlyerX

Thanks, I'll try that. Are you referring to unchecking the "Lights create shadows" on the HDRI tab or other lights in the scene? The few times I've tried HDRI, I deleted all the other lights in the scene. Are there some general guidelines regarding using HDRI and other lights (ie.) Poser scene lights together? What type of lighting did you use in the sample image? An odd thought - since you're extracting lights from the HDR/PFM files, would it be possible to save those setups in a standard Poser .LT2 file? I think Poser 5 may already be able to utilize HDR data but some of us poor folks still use Poser 4. Even if the quality of the Poser render wasn't as good as POVRay, it might be a good way to set up the scene before going into PoseRay. Just a thought. I'll have to keep playing with settings. I think the scene I did, 1 clothed figure, PoseRay viewport size, took a little over an hour. Of course, that's with only 320MB of RAM. I'm sure it's no magic bullet but I'd really like a (free) renderer that allowed you to specify lighting by inputting the location, time of day, sky condition for outdoor scenes and things like type of lights for indoors. I've seen the former in one of the free landscape programs (Genesis?), and the latter in some high end applications. I think there's even an industry standard for defining artificial lighting source profiles that some applications can use.

I tried downloading the install from your site flyerx, but the .zip file is corrupt!

I have a strange problem with it also- just yesterday I tried to install it- What i got was---nothing--- I double click on the icon- it runs for a minute- then ---nothing. No program comes up- no icons appear- just----nothing I do the alt-ctrl-del bit- and is shows nothing is in memory. When I close down windows it say, please wait- closeing poseray. 633 celeron 256 ram (ok damn it-- stop laughting) :) lol

flyerx: You've got some broken links on your site's gallery page. Xdyne's link is to a .inc domain (no such TLD) and the DAZ link needs an http:// before it (because it's trying to append the URL to yours).

The image above was done using radiosity and a single parallel light.

I just checked the file and it is downloading properly so if someone is having problems getting it please try again. You can check the MD5 checksum with the one listed on the downloads page.

Flyerx I'm using windows 2000 and i keep getting access violation at address 0DBFB450. write of address 00000000.warnings when i try to preview anything. cheers Kev.

Thanks for the info 4140HT. I've seen some amazing POVRay output - It's definitely capable of some high quality results. It all depends on how much time and energy (as always) you want to invest. Frankly, though I'm a programmer, I really don't want to have to learn what is in effect a programming language to do a render. I'm afraid I've become addicted to the visual IDE approach. There's always going to be a learning curve to mastering the power of something like POVRay but... I should (chuckle) be able to light an interior scene by specifying that the lamp on the table has a 100 watt GE SoftWhite bulb, the paint on the walls is semi-gloss latex, etc. and have the software pull up the relevant data on color temperature, surface reflectivity, etc. withoug having to enter everything manually. Of course, I want it to cost no more than $29.95 and render in less than 30 seconds too :-)

Well I've successfully downloaded PoseRay now and run it with POV-Ray. All I can say is....outstanding. Took a while to find the PoserMaterials button :-) Will post some renders once I get it humming. I'll be interested to see how the render quality compares to Firefly.

Attached Link: http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/

I think I found the problem that some people were having while trying to run PoseRay. It was the OpenGL extension check that was going into an infinite loop. I also fixed a few material and cartoon rendering bugs. The updated version (v3.8.1) is available at my site.

So if you downloaded PoseRay and it crashed give it a try now and see if it works this time.

The image attached is a Hellboy LWO model in cartoon mode. The model had to be subdivided twice to get a decent result.

I wish I could upload in PNG instead of this dreadful JPG format.

FlyerX

I forgot...

For best results always use the latest official drivers for your video card

FlyerX

Message edited on: 09/09/2004 01:58

Attached Link: http://www.planit3d.com/source/album_page.php?pic_id=2612

I always set up textures & lighting (and do most of the modelling) in povray. Poser is great for manipulating models of people, but I've never really cared for it's lighting, textures or renderer. Povray can be pretty daunting to learn, but once you get used to the scripting language, it's really nice to be able to set up macros and loops to build libraries and do the more tedious modelling.

Penguinisto, have you gotten poser to run under linux with either crossover office or wine? I've done a couple of scenes where windows just couldn't handle the memory needs, but ran fine in linux - it would make things much easier if I didn't have to reboot to swap between linux & windows so often.

DAZ|Studio runs very well under Linux and cxoffice (see the D|S forum for details, my system specs and the screenshots) It runs just as fast as the Windows version does most times.I've run the benchmark thread @ DAZ and canget the default EgyptScene.daz to render in 3 min. 47 seconds @ full quality, which is typical for similar hardware. Poser will install in cxoffice, but it'll choke and die if you try to launch it. It will however run perfectly in Linux with Win4Lin (from www.netraverse.com), but you're limited to 128MB of effective RAM for both the 'doze environment and Poser to run in. It'll bog down hard if you get V3 and more than two other items in a scene... I'm using SuSE 9.1 Pro and cxoffice 3.0 :) /P

I wish I could make Linux and Mac native versions of PoseRay but I have never used any of those operating systems and starting now would be too much. I am glad that PoseRay runs in Linux (thanks Penguinisto for the test) with emulators and someone else just confirmed that it also works with MacOS X 10.3.5 using Virtual PC 6.1.1 or Blue Label. FlyerX

Damn, that is a nice piece of work. It took me only a few minutes to get a pre-existing Poser scene up and rendering. Considering I've done a grand total of one render, I have to say I'm pretty impressed so far. This sure beats the pants off the Poser 4 engine.

Usually I waste a developer's time asking if they're using any PC-specific libraries in their code; your website is kind enough to acknowledge external libraries. I don't know whether the libraries you're using are precompiled or platform specific; you do. As far as porting Windows apps to OS X is concerned, the trend seems to be that since OS X = UNIX it's less of a jump than OS 9 was. Not being a professional programmer I'm not qualified to make that statement as fact.

No worries on the porting, Flyer - as long as I can get a .pov file out of it that I can then transfer to the native renderer, s'cool with me :) Duane - dunno about the libs either. cxoffice does carry most of the 'doze-specific libs, as does Mac's Virtual PC, so it may just be a Windows thang (pre-compiled usually == bloat, and this one looks to be quite small and fast.) /P

Apparently this application is developed with Delphi, and I can't tell whether that's a combined language/RAD or what.

Delphi is (used to be) Borland's Pascal based visual development language. Best comparison would be Visual Basic - though the Delphi folks would snarl at that comparison :-). They have a Linux version called Kylix. I have no idea if the components/libraries for Delphi are in any way compatible with Kylix though. Delphi's a very nice language. I switched to VB because at the time the Delphi database access was painfully slow. Haven't looked at it since Version 3 though.