If so, is it worth installing? Is it better than Firefly in P6/SR2?

Attached Link: http://www.yafray.org/index.php?s=10

I think it's needs POVray install also dosn't it? It does render pretty from what I've seen. Not that I ever figured it out. I hate command line apps. Here's another one I found just yesterday. Also a command line app.

Hi,
PoseRay and POV-Ray are worth installing if you are intent on making complex scenes (with loads of Millenium figures - e.g. 4+ V3s, huge props/many props and/or very large textures) and rendering them in a single pass. Complex scenes all-too-often break the Poser firefly renderer.

Although POV-Ray is a command line tool there is almost no need to learn any commands because Poseray provides the configuration interface for the POV-Ray renderer and actually fires off POV-Ray when it is needed.

The are a few issues, e.g. P5/P6 material shaders are not supported, P5 has an export bug that makes it somewhat harder to get the material maps sorted and material area seams need to be welded to get shadows correct.

On the plus side, the Pose- and POV- ray have some nice lights (including area and radiosity) and there are some good procedural materials available. Rendering is also quite fast.

Personally I like using Poser 6, but when it cannot manage a particular scene (even at reduced texture and quality settings) then I export to Poseray/POV-Ray.

I have a number of Poseray / POV-Ray renders in my Gallery.

Regards, Jovial.

Yeah, Poseray is merely the conversion tool and Povray
http://www.povray.org/
is the actual renderer. I've been using the combination a bit more than a year and really like it a lot. Light behaves the way it's supposed to in Pov-ray, especially "in the box" (a six sided, 4 walls-ceiling-floor, architectural set.) Any questions, feel free to ask.
There are also pov-ray extension apps that allow the use of renderman shaders, which are great, and macros like lightsys, which do a great job quickly and easily matching light types-sunlight, flourescent etc.
There are plenty of sample files available on the net and with the command line aspect it's pretty easy to cut and paste lights from one file to another.

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 16:31

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 16:32

POVray is a pretty good renderer. If you want to see what can be done with it, visit www.irtc.org - most pictures there are done with POV. But if you use POV you will have a different set of material option and a different set of lighting options. PoseRay is great as a bridge to POV. But it cannot do everything perfect. Some handwork is required, if you want to get the best out of POV.

From what I've seen, if you already have P6 then it's probably better to stick with it, unless, as Jovial says, your scenes are outstripping P6's rendering ability on your system. With Poser, you have access to all the tweaks like realism shaders and such that(again, from what I've seen) can do a better job on rendering human figures, especially closeups. I'm sure POVRay may well be capable of it but I don't know if there are many folks who know how to simulate SSS and do all the other tricks in POVRay who are also rendering Poser figures. Having said that, PoseRay is a fantastic tool. You can achieve some very nice results and the Poser scene import is quite easy. You can use HDRI lighting in a couple of steps and you can mix POVRay materials with your bitmap textures, etc. Overall, it's may be the best integration of Poser with a 3rd party renderer you'll get without paying for it (or the renderer). As Bantha says, if you want more advanced capabilities, you'll have to dig into POVRay. OTOH, if you go the RIB route, I haven't seen anything that will make using one of the RenderMan compliant apps as easy as PoseRay makes using POVRay. Even if you don't use it to setup rendering though, it's still worthwhile. You get a great way to import Lightwave (and other format) models and save them for import into Poser. You can weld, crease, subdivide and otherwise manipulate .obj files as well so it's really quite a versatile program. Personally, I use it for the other things more often than I do to render. It only took a couple of minutes to import the 17 Lightwave sub assemblies of the Honda Prelude and export an .obj for Poser with materials intact. I wanted a snow terrain, so I found an image and used PoseRay to displace a plane object and create one. If you have P6 or DS of course you can use a displacement map but in P4, it's very handy.

POVRay with an HDRI probe. POVRay materials for the glass, and wheels.

Attached Link: http://www.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~jpanta/Graphics/Kerkythea/

If you want a non-command line renderer, you might check out Kerkythea. It's pretty fast and has pretty extensive options. Even though it has a GUI though, you're still have to know about index of refraction, self luminance, translucence, transmitted color index, etc. etc. to get the most out of it so it's really no different than POVRay in that respect. It does a good job of importing .obj or .3ds scenes though and I like the GI lighting. I have a long way to go in understanding how to set up all those materials options--I can't even make glass look right yet. Still, it's fast enough to experiment with. On my creaking system, POVRay is just too slow for my level of patience. Of course, none of my examples should be considered representative of the capabilities of anything, even P4 obviously :-)

Thanks everyone As I use poseworks python scripts, the Unimesh realism kit and several shaders, looks liek I'll stick with Poser6 for now.

Stupid question here! How do you make a Poser scene ready for use in PoseRay please? I have no clue what I am doing. I was quite able to figure out 3ds and obj conversions. thanks!

Go to file/export/wavefront .obj then hit OK check what you want in the export, name the file and away you go

Thanks very much!! That sounds so simple! lol

jt1161, the first step is to export your scene as an .obj file as fls13 says. In the Poser export dialog, uncheck items like the ground plane that you may not to export. According to the PoseRay docs, the other options like group names don't matter so I just use the defaults. It's unlikely that just the .obj file will be enough for most Poser scenes though. For one thing, the .mtl file Poser will create has the texture map file names but no paths so you'd have to hassle with telling PoseRay where to find them. The easiest option is to also export/save your scene as a Poser .pz3 file. Now, PoseRay will be able to use the .pz3 to find the texture maps more easily. In addition, loading the .pz3 from the Poser scene tab of PoseRay will give you the option to import Poser's camera and lights. If you're just starting, you'll probably want to use those options since it's pretty much select the .pz3 and .obj and you're ready to save and render in POVRay. When you've got the hang of things a bit, you can play with using HDRI lighting, POVRay materials, etc. I believe you may also need to use the .pz3 to get transparency correct, not sure. You can also import Daz Studio scenes but I haven't tried that. FlyerX has been constantly improving the program and adding new features and it's definitely a 1st rate application.

As is Pov-ray. PoseRay creates a material include file for Povray and it's much easier to text hack that and change settings and textures easily as compared to Poser's laborious GUI. It's worth the effort, the renders will be better.

"As I use poseworks python scripts, the Unimesh realism kit and several shaders, looks liek I'll stick with Poser6 for now." That's probably a sound approach. If you want/need to look at a different rendering solution, then probably Vue or Carrara would be better. I think one or both of those is supposed to have some level of support for Poser 6 materials and I'd bet that Shade does or soon will. One advantage of bitmaps, they're portable to virtually every renderer :-)

"...it's much easier to text hack that and change settings and textures easily as compared to Poser's laborious GUI." I absolutely agree that Poser's material settings are ponderous, though for some people, hacking a text file is probably never going to seem easier than even the most ponderous GUI :-) Basicaly, using the .pz3 is the method that the PoseRay manual describes and I think it's a good way to learn the basic process. I'm not sure that the rank beginner should jump in with an .obj file and start editng POVRay material files, but that's just my opinion. Personally, I'm a programmer so I actually enjoy writing application code. For some reason though, I loathe editing text to create a picture--maybe if POVRay had a nice IDE with all the conveniences I'm used to with Visual Studio but maybe not even then lol, it's a mental block I suppose. I think that lightsys is a wonderful idea for instance, something the Poser needs, real world lights but my eyes glazed over after looking at it. I'm sure it's probably relatively simple but like I said, mental block. If you can show me some simple examples of what goes where, maybe I can even develop a simple front end to add those lights. I'd also be interested in learning if there is a way to add/remove POVRay materials to PoseRay's list of presets. I definitely agree that POVRay is a great application but the code/script metaphor will always tend to limit it's appeal to those who prefer that approach. As it stands, using PoseRay, is definitely faster than Poser's material settings, especially using the POVRay materials, so I hope PoseRay continues to make more of that functionality easily accessible. I go by the 80/20 principle here. I want GUI/wizards/presets, etc. to get me at least 80% of what I need and then I can decide what elements are worth manual tweaking to get the extra 20%. I may decide the "glass" material preset is perfectly good enough for a bottle on a table in the background. The "silk" preset for the main figure's dress may be worth tweaking a bunch of cloth parameters to get "just right." Even then though, I really do want some nice sliders/dials/checkboxes or whatever to make those adjustments and a preview window to boot.