Does anyone here have experience with both POV-Ray and Poser? And if so, which on can render better quality images? Secondly, can POV-ray import Poser models easily? Thanks!

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

Attached Link: http://www.povray.org/community/hof/

PoseRay (nruddock's link above) makes the very incredibly easy. The renderer is much better than Poser 4 but it's slower. I can't compare between POVRay and Poser 5/6. PoseRay simplifies some of the aspects of using POVRay and it has a slew of other functionality. Ultimately though, you'll probably need to learn the scripting language to get the maximum power out of the renderer.

Pov-ray, and of course poseray, are awesome. Pov-ray is so much better than the P5/6 Firefly it's not even funny. And it is pretty easy to use. I hope more people take advantage of it.

should be "makes the import very easy." Fls13, I'm gonna run before any Firefly partisans show up :-)

POVRay is very impressive, but considering the relatively low level of detail of Poser models and environments, and judging based upon the images on the PoseRay site, it's not much better than Vue 5 for Poser work, if at all. And I guarantee you that Vue 5 is much easier to use with Poser. They've designed the software to make Poser work easy.

And for me, at least, it's easier to get consistently good results from Vue than it is from Firefly. Renders do take longer, but the result is considerably better and renders can be paused and resumed. I don't know if POVRay can do this, so don't kill me if it does. It's just another nice feature that Poser doesn't have. While I am astounded at the level of detail in that POVRay Hall of Fame, I don't think it's noticably better for use with Poser, and certainly not as easy to use with Poser as Vue 5.

POVRay is definitely vastly superior to the P4 render engine, and those images in the link by dan_whiteside are impressive - I don't think Firefly could do that. But how about P5/P6 procedural materials? Poseray/POVray can handle the simple P4 materials easily, but would I have to set up the material nodes from scratch again if I do some fancy stuff in P5/P6 (think face_off's Realism kits)? That would be a major pain. Though I like the Firefly engine, it can do much more than most users get out of it, I'm also impressed by the possibilities of POVray.

POV-ray's biggest strength over poser is that it lights up 6-sided architectural sets much better. If you just render Poser figs in front of an image map or a simple floor/wall set, Poser rendering is fine. I've also never had a render crash in POV-ray regardless of how many figs I have in the scene. svdl, I have seen sss scripts for skin for POVray. The apps' great masters do toy with Poser figs a bit, Gilles Tran most notably, with very good results.

Just my 10 cents worth.

I had to use Pose-ray and POV-ray when a couple of my P5 scenes refused to be rendered in firefly (too many figures). The results were pretty good BUT there is a bug in P5 material file export (.mtl) [partner file of the wavefront .obj export] that mucks up the texture references for multiple figures. P6 does not have this problem. If you use P5 then you may need to use a python script to do the .mtl file save and you will still probably have to fix some of the material definitions in Pose-ray.

A big plus for some users is that there is a beta multi-threaded version of POV-ray that will shorten the render time on suitable dual processor PCs.

I have not seen any way to get procedural shaders into POV-ray, although I think you can script to get reflection, bump and transparency maps across with a little tweaking.

Pose-ray is an excellent tool (very easy to use) and well worth a look.

Is pov ray not hard to use? Don`t you need to write out the render as a text file?

I'm a big fan on POV-RAY, and spent quite a bit of time with it prior to putting the RealSkinShader together. It's certainly a fantastic renderer, however, statements like "Pov-ray is so much better than the P5/6 Firefly it's not even funny." beg to be argued with.

fls13 - perhaps you could point us to some good examples of human figure renders using POV-RAY. Then we can do a direct comparison with some of the more realistic Poser renders in the galleries.

The best POV-RAY exmaple I could find was http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/images/c02.jpg, which is really a long way behind (no postwork) Poser renders like http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1029948 and http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1026416.

Message edited on: 09/08/2005 09:36

"If you just render Poser figs in front of an image map or a simple floor/wall set, Poser rendering is fine." Not surprisingly, the two images you point out are exactly that. You need to read what I wrote more carefully. I hate quoting myself. Here's a link to Gilles' site where he has posted some Poser tests. http://www.oyonale.com/histoire/english/images2003.htm

my impression was that his comment wasn't about scenery, but human figures. i'd say 90% of the poser pics out there focus on the human figure, with scenery being somewhat secondary. and frankly, even the elephant doesn't hold up to the best i've seen of firefly. somehow all the living creatures look like inanimate objects- i figure it has to do with sss or some subtle lighting quality. all i can say is, those human figure tests don't look nearly as realistic to me as the examples face_off provided or just about all of maxxxmodelz incredible gallery. none of the few pov-ray renders with any animals (of those referenced) look as good to me as the best i see in the galleries here. the scenery on the other hand... wow. how much knowledge and expertise does it take to acheive that? how much work? i first played with pov-ray ages ago, when it was all scripting. what was in the galleries was nuts good, but all i could make was really badly lit primitives surrounded by a skydome after much effort. i've touched on it a bit since then, but not much. basically, i'm curious not just how p5/p6 rendering quality compares but what quality per hours of work and level of expertise. does anyone have some renders of identical scenes and time taken to build (assuming no personally pre-built scripts unavailable to the general populace)?

.mtl files only contain basic material settings, not complete shader trees. So I'd have to rebuild the shader trees in POVray using scripts, I guess. Sounds like a major PITA. I have the impression that getting good results with POVRay requires much more than just PoseRay. Just like getting good results in Firefly requires much more than just flat textures and basic lighting. I've looked up those images by Gilles Tran. Good stuff, but when it comes to rendering human figures, a Firefly user who knows what he's doing gets better results.

My experiences of POV-Ray are that it is very stable and reliable. Render times seem to be on a par with Poser 5 but it is hard to determine exactly how much quality to use in POV-ray to be equivalent to (or better than) P5 firefly.

I had some problems with shadows in low light regions (particularly banding under the breasts) that didn't come out nicely in POV-ray and needed quite a lot of post-work to fix, however some of this could have been just my choice of quality settings and more tweaking needed on the lights. I have experienced similar low light problems with firefly raytraced shadows.

I have a couple of images in my Gallery that use Pose-Ray and POV-ray to do renders on a multi-figure scene that could not be rendered in P5 firefly.

WARNING - PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE LINKS ARE TO IMAGES WITH NUDITY

The first is interesting in that the female figures all have exactly the same skin texture (due to the bug in the .mtl file writer) - but the figures still manage to look quite different:

NUDITY WARNING --- The descision

and the second one I managed to get a python script to output (nearly) the correct texture references:

NUDITY WARNING --- I said a hot pose...not incandecent

I think svdl hit the nail on the head - there is a possiblity that Poseray could be capable of more realistic/better quality renders than FF, but because mucher people have been rendering with it - it lags a long way behind FireFly for human figure renders.

I have to agree that from what I've seen, Poser, even Poser 4, can do better looking portraits than you can get 'out of the box' with POVRay. The key is 'out of the box.' Os others have said, I don't think there have been enough experienced POVRay folks using Poser or vice versa to judge the real potential of the renderer with Poser figures. For that matter, the number of POVRay renders focusing on the human figure seems to be in the minority. I've played with BMRT, 3DLight, etc. and without knowing how to really use them, the results don't look appreciably better than Poser. It will be interesting to see what happens as Shade becomes more Poser compatible since that renderer can do some stunning architectural scenes. You'd think that E-Frontier would rather stick with one renderer rather than licensing Firefly. I don't know nearly enough about rendering technology to say but I'd guess that any number of applications out there can do a good job on Poser stuff it's a matter of how hard it is to accomplish. FireFly wasn't designed for Poser either. PoseRay has done a great job of making the Poser to POVRay path much easier and it get's better with every release, not to mention features like HDRI and subdivision. It's also a great tool for loading and converting .3DS and Lightwave models. Currently, the support for tweaking native POVRay features is rather limited but that may change. POVRay at it's heart though is script driven and it would take a hellacious GUI effort to overlay that.

Don't forget that a lot of the great "Poser" renders you see are rendered in Vue. It would certainly be nice if flyerx would add a board or blog where people could contribute tips and tricks on how to better manage the Poser to Povray transfer, but I'll stick to my guns on my main point, Povray is a vastly superior renderer if you want to render fully 3d environments. If you only want to render Poser figs in front of image backgrounds or simple plane floor/wall sets, stick with Poser/firefly.