Help!

I'm having the worst time getting transmapped hair to look good when using the firefly render engine. What's the secret; can someone please share it with me?

:)

Ken

Three approaches:

A) Reduce the resolution of the hair textures and transmaps. This may seem counterintuitive, but it often counteracts the grainy effect that Firefly tends to produce. You can either resize the maps in a paint program (keep copies of the originals), or change the Max Texture Size in your render settings (which affects all maps in the scene).

B) Lower the Minimum Shading Rate in your render settings. I've found that a value of 0.2 or 0.25 usually works well with most transmapped hair. The downside is that it'll increase your render time. But that's generally the tradeoff for improved quality.

C) Enable Texture Filtering in your render settings. This works great for transmapped hair, but it may have a negative effect on other textures in your scene (seams, particularly); it's also a resource hog.

Can you explain what exactly is happening with texture filtering? When I first got Poser 6 and read what it had to say in the manual I remember feeling less than enlightened. I have had it turned off ever since. I remember feeling like it was washing out textures in certain areas. But I was also improving the shading rate and other aspects at the same time. So, now I just don't go near it. Superstitous, huh? : )

I get the impression that it's some sort of softening filter, and its main purpose is to eliminate or reduce moirpatterns.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2356407

try adding just a tiny bit of displacement; that often does the trick.

The Normals_Forward option in the Material Room can fix some problems, also.

Thanks for all the repsonses. Some of these I've tried other I havent. It is unfortunate about texture filtering, it corrects the transmapped hair but causes other texture map seams to show and look very unsightly. What were the thinking!? :( Ken

The ideal, of course, would be to move the texture-filtering option to the Material Room, so it can be enabled for specific materials, rather than everything in the scene. Perhaps for P7 ....