Does anyone know of a really good Firefly setting? I've always used the Poser 4 rendering because it looks better than the default Firefly settings in Poser 6. Thanks in advance. Adrian

Once face_off gave me these FF settings (copy/paste):

"Texture Filtering OFF
Shadows ON
Raytracing OFF (unless I've got Ambient Occlusion, R/Trace Shadows or Eye Reflects). If so, use 2 bounces.
Min Shading Rate 0.5 (lower if hair is rendering grainy)
Pixel Samples 3
Max Texture Size 4096
Max Bucket Size 64
Smooth Polys ON
Use Disp Maps ON
DOF usually OFF
3D Motion Blur OFF
Remove Backfacing Polys OFF

These setting produce crystal clear renders (check my gallery - they are all no postwork).

Based on these settings (r/trace off), with 1 or 2 lights with shadows ON, at 900x900 I wouldn't expect a render to take much more than 10mins - and that's with really BIG texturemaps. Once I add AO and r/trace eye reflects I'm looking at 30mins. And DOF will (depending on the fStop) blow that out to a couple of hours"

Hope it helps you. It helped me a lot :)

Message edited on: 12/21/2005 06:30

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html

Stefan's Firefly FAQ explains what the various settings do.

Note that if you use Minimum Shading Rate to fix noisy hair textures, you have to change the properties setting for the hair (or anything else you want to be affected) as well as the render settings.

And in some situations, you might get better results by using a lower max. texture size. (Rendering a small image with large textures, say.)

I use a little bit of Gaussian to soften dynamic hair.

If your computer chokes with these settings, lower the Max Bucket Size to 32 (or, in extreme cases, 16). This will not affect render quality, it only controls how big a chunk of data Poser processes at a time. Lower setting = less memory consumed but longer rendering time, higher settings means exactly the opposite.

I think im finally about to bust out of PPP and do more exploration of P5's features. This thread should be a big help! bookmarkski

Casettes How much RAM on your machine? That affects whether the pc will struggle with bucket size of 64

I have 768 MB RAM. And I work faster with a bucket of 64 than 32 or less

Thanks everyone for your help. I had no idea how involved Firefly settings are but they do look better than Poser 4. Thanks again! Adrian

While we're on the subject -- is there an explanation somewhere about the various Firefly blur settings (box, gausian, etc.), what they do, their uses, suggested settings etc. Thanks!

Short note: Its most a good idea to set Max Bucket Size 34 only, as some computers can get problems with higher bucket sizes and doesnt render till the end.

I've found Poser 6 will handle a bucket size of 64 most of the time. For Poser 5, I'd use 32 or even 16, but for Poser 6, 64 is usually okay.

One thing I'd like to know is what render size are we talking about (600 X 600 or bigger) and approximately how many objects of what complexity. I have trouble with two people (V3S3, etc) and almost any settings. At best only a few (three or so) lights. Any ideas for how many complex object can be handled?

The less complex the pic, the biger the bucket size you can try - with P6, I'm currently using a bucket size of 256, with 1.5 gig of RAM.

yeah but why turn off ray traceing? cant you get reflections and cool effects with it on>?

If you're using ray-tracing, then by all means, leave it on. But if you're not using ray-tracing, turn it off. To use ray-tracing, you have to have at least one light set to ray-traced shadows. If none of your lights are set to ray-trace, then there's no point in having it on.

It's the same with displacement. If you're using displacement, make sure you have "use displacement" checked. But if nothing in your scene is using the displacement node, uncheck it.

This is what I meant when I said "it depends on the image." Sometimes you'll be using ray-tracing, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you'll be using displacement, sometimes you won't. Some objects/textures require a higher shading rate than others. Etc. It depends on the effect you want.