"max, can't you kill the flicker by scaling up, not increasing shadow map, etc. and there is no slow down with that solution."

I tried scaling a scene up once just recently. It seemed to cut down on much of the shadow problems, but doesn't do much for pixel roping and texture crawling, which can only be solved by setting higher render quality settings. The same problems occur in 3dsMax's default scanline renderer, but since rendering is much faster over there, it's not a problem to increase parameters or supersample materials until it goes away.

In Poser, such problems are not so "easy" to tackle. For example, a checker pattern (or some similar detailed pattern) on a ground plane gets "mottled" as it extends into the distance from the camera. One way to solve this problem in Firefly is to turn on texture filtering, but doing so causes problems with other textures unless your shading rate parameter is set extremely low, which of course causes a dramatic overall hit to rendertime. I've also come across "pixel jitter", or texture crawling, when shading rate was not low enough. Sometimes you can get away with inconsistancies in an animation because things aren't so noticable as in a still, but when you're rendering for HDTV or DVD (where picture quality is very crisp), the small things become more noticable.

Another problem I have is that there's no targa output for rendering image sequences. Yes, TIFF also retains an alpha channel, but targa is more widely used in video editors, and it also has extra channels that can seperate the alpha for you, which is very convenient for compositing. Which brings me back around again to G-Buffer output. I do a lot of compositing, and always run a seperate shadow pass. Poser doesn't let you do that obviously, so it's pretty useless for compositing. You can create a "matte shadow" from the shaders, but it doesn't work good on multiple objects under different lighting situations.
Message edited on: 01/13/2005 09:05

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.