Hi,

PoseRay is at:

http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/Version 3.8.18 is really good but it has a glitch with very large/complex scenes. FlyerX made a fix but this hasn't been relased yet.

POV-Ray is at:

http://www.povray.org/I am using 3.6 (since I only have win32), the beta version for win64 is 3.7.

After installing, don't forget to configure PoseRay so that it knows where the POV-Ray exe is.

Here is how I use the tools:

1. Create scene in Poser 6 (Poser 5 has a bug that makes the .mtl file have the wrong references - so I'd advise against using Poser 5).
2. I don't create lights in Poser since PoseRay has some great lights - although they are a little bit harder to set up).
3. Export scene to wavefront obj file (and material .mtl file) into a new folder. PoseRay can also read .pz3 files BUT I have found it to be problematic with very complex scenes. FlyerX has indicated that he is working on a fix.
4. Load the object and material file into PoseRay.
5. Check all the material references. Occaisionally there will be an untextured material because it used shaders or perhaps a glitch. The POV-Ray material library has some nice effects for reflective metals, water, glass and clouds.
6. View the scene.
7. Set the main camera on the camera tab.
8. Create some lights on the lights tab. A small area light is good for giving softened/more-realistic shadows.
9. Save the scene as a new object (this saves your new material definitions, the camera and lights in new .obj and .mtl files).
10. Set the maximum mat texture size (e.g. 512 for test renders and greater than 2000 for the final render) and let these be copied/resampled to the working folder.
11. Use the POV-Ray tab to set the render settings and export a POV-Ray scene. It is best to do a quick low quality render with shadow to see if the brightness is correct and the shadows are where they need to be AND then do a high res, high quality render using radiosity for the production render.
12. POV-Ray starts automatically when the scene has been saved and it creates a .png file.

Issues:

• Don't think displacements are supported.
• Sometimes see a bit of banding of the shadows under V3 breast that make them look a little cylindrical, might need a bit of fiddling with fill lighting. Radiosity helps to reduce this.
• PZ3 reader in PoseRay doesn't yet do really complex scenes (yet).

Hope this helps.