Well, I just got my copy of Poser 6. And I gotta tell ya, its superior to its predecessor by an order of magnitude. Its faster, its got tons of (useful) presets and the models are way superior to Don and Judy. The new Jessie figure is equal to Vickie 3.0, at least from my renders they were. And I've only touched the surface. Maybe that's why DAZ gave Vickie and Mickey away for free. Now I know Bryce is at 5.5 and not quite at 6 yet. But can we expect the increase in functionality in Bryce 6 that Poser users are getting out of their upgrade? Because so far, from what I've heard of 5.5, it ain't blowin' my skirt up. I just saw the Incredibles. I'm always amazed at the level of imagination that goes into these new CG animations. But from what I saw, its not out of the realm of Bryce to produce those kind of images. I wonder what software they used?

<strong>bandolin</strong><br />
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lol it is out of the realm of bryce to produce those kind of images ;) They used renderman for rendering I think and it's got some pretty spiffy shader options that you simply cannot even begin to fake in bryce. Controlling saturation in ambient occlusion area's, multilayer subsurface scattering. The shading used on the clothing of the characters is not possible in bryce. There's a ton of subtle nuances in the incredibles renders that bryce cannot create.
However a lot of those things can most defenitely be build into bryce and if DAZ do their work well, a bunch of them SHOULD be in bryce 6. It is defenitely a realistic possibility to allow for different shaders to be used in bryce.

Message edited on: 06/28/2005 07:35

"Controlling saturation in ambient occlusion area's" "multilayer subsurface scattering" Huh??? You obviously know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I was talking about the scenes, like in the suburbs and the jungle. And the models of the destructo-robot (which was quite simple) and the various transport vehicles.

<strong>bandolin</strong><br />
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oh yea modelwise you can make the models in bryce or import them into bryce, but how is that different from just about any 3d program with scene creating capabilities? lol Ambient Occlusion is a technique to simulate the effect you see with a lightdome in Bryce. The less light could bounce into the various creases in objects in real life, the darker that part of the object will show on screen. However less light could also affect the brightness of colors in such shadowed area's. If you would want to control this in CG you would want to make sure you can control the saturation dpending on the intensity of the shadows created by the ambient occlusion. Multilayer subsurface scattering is just a subsurface scattering solution that takes multiple layers of the surface into account so you can give those layers their own propperties. You can, for instance, use this for skin textures, so you can create layers to create the effect of different layers of different tissue that make up real life skin.

oh..I thought you needed a flux capacitor to get that to work..;)

Well, I'm not even sure Bryce 6 will come at all. To me it seems that DAZ never generated enough capital from Bryce 5.5 to finance the development of Bryce 6. The sales were going so bad that they needed to add add ons to the Bryce sale continually to even persuade people to buy. Seems to me that Bryce 5.5 wasn't a huge succes at all (and why should it, it wasn't that good at all). Also it took DAZ ages to even bring out a minor update, imagine how long it will take to develop the real thing.....

OTOH, did you notice that their prices are dropping all over the board? Bandolin, the biggest difference in Poser 6 are all those rendering options. Ambient occlusion, Image based lighting, subsurface scattering, Toon render... Jessi has more polygons than Vicki 3, but they still haven't made a really out-of-the-box pretty model. And I noticed a definite slowness when loading up models, unaccounted for by the number of polygons. Work with everything is slower. Some minor bugs are still present. BTW, as far as I know, they modelled and animated The Incredibles in Maya, but rendered everything with Renderman, as Ray says.

And I'm thinking they're probably using a bunch of in-house plugins too ;)

They don't need anything "in-house", cause Renderman is already in-house for Pixar. :-) Finding Nemo was also rendered with Renderman.

yea but does renderman have animation plugins for maya?

or cloth and skin simulation. soft body dynamics, fur simulation, etc. etc. I remember on Monsters Inc they used inhouse tools for the hair and cloth and stuff like that. And the makers of shrek used inhouse animation tools too I think or at least some plugins and such.

Actually, Renderman was a plugin for Maya since Maya 2, AFAI heard. And it's "only" a rendering engine, so I don't see why it would need animation plugins... Or I don't understand what you're saying. For the rest, yeah, quite possible.

With the in-house plug-ins for maya I meant plug-ins for tasks that do not have to do with the renderengine, such as stuff for cloth asn skin simulation, soft body dynamics, fur simulation, and probably some handy tool to be able to create sliders to easily control the various muscles in the faces of characters and such and maybe for swapping different movements between different characters too. Basically, all kinds of tools that are not renderman created but not default maya tools either. Basically I said that just to show that having an in-house render engine like Renderman doesn't mean they don't have (or need) any other in-house tools too.

Attached Link: http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/ambient_occlusion/ambient_occlusion.htm

Funny thing is that ambient occlusion was designed to simulate outdoor lighting but most of the AO stuff I'm seeing from Poser 6 is used in indoors - and it just doesn't look right to me. I'm not that thrilled with either B5.5 or Poser 5/6. And how in the world Poser managed to take a Mac render system and make it 50% slower then the PC is just beyond me!

Thanks for the link Dan. Very informative. Have you got one for multilayer subsurface scattering? I'm wondering, are we expecting too much out of apps like Bryce and Poser or are we out growing them? And when I say we, I'm not including myself since I'm pretty new to this stuff.

<strong>bandolin</strong><br />
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bandolin, there's a couple of good threads by Agent Smith here in the forum about simulating SSS in Bryce. :-) Another good link for ambient occlusion: http://www.techimage.co.uk/index.php?c=ambiocc&m=1 And this is about SSS from Renderman Academy http://www.rendermanacademy.com/docs/SSS_depthmaps.htm Neil Blevins has something about SSS, too. That is, about translucency. http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/translucency/translucency.htm I'll also take a better look at the Poser SSS shader and see what I can glean from it.

Also Ornlu did some threads on SSS which were pretty good.

Attached Link: https://renderman.pixar.com/

Here. Straight from the horse's mouth. =) Considering how much they want for it, I'd guess that Renderman is a stand-alone product and not just a plugin for Maya: RenderMan Pro Server 12.5 (PhotoRealistic RenderMan, Irma, & Alfserver) $ 3,500 But that's just my guess; I couldn't find any mention of Maya anywhere on their site. You'd think that they'd at least give credit to Maya, I mean, sheesh, here they are describing their renderers, and they don't even mention it. =( Of course, Lucas never mentioned Maya either (and that explains that lol)...

Maya has a plugin for Renderman. Akchulli, anything that supports RIB format can export for rendering in Renderman. Rhino, for instance, or even Poser. Theoretically, DAZ Studio, since it uses 3Delight, could be usable in Renderman. That is, 3Delight is a Renderman-compliant renderer. But I'd really have to check the abilities of Studio, since I just use it occasionally. :-)

Hey I just read Neil Blevins' Bio. He's from Pointe-Claire, Quebec! That's where I live. I've never seen him around though. All this stuff is way over my head. What I'd like is a tut on how to simulate this in Bryce and/or Poser. Cause, that's what I got.

Message edited on: 06/29/2005 12:55

<strong>bandolin</strong><br />
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I had an ambient occlusion once.. but the dentist fixed it..;)

Ambient occlusion can be simulated with a light-dome. Render your render in grayscale with a lightdome and composite with your textured render in psp or photoshop or something similar :) You could also render it all at once straight with textures and light-dome in one render. But it's way more flexible to combine the two in post as you can do so much more tweaking that way, and without having to wait hours for each tweak to render.