Has anyone else noticed a loss in detail between P4 and firefly rendering, even with texture filtering?

I have mostly in close up it seems to me that the pores of the skin are more detailed and sharper when using the P4 render engine. But the pores loose detail and sharpness when using the firefly engine. Most of the time I've seen a big difference when an image is rendered up close.

Click image to see full sized. Perhaps it's just because I don't know how to use FireFly, what setings to enter. But IMHO, FireFly sucks! In my experience FireFly looses a lot of detail in the textures, and blurs the edges of objects. When P5 first came out, I remember a lot of people raving about how good it was, I don't see it as good, I see it as pathetic, based on the results I get. I stand to be corrected on this, like I said, perhaps I am not using it correctly. I'm including two comparison renders. The scene was constructed in P4, using five Poser box props and the ground plain, all with the same grid texture map applyed. An image was rendered and saved as an uncompressed JPEG, then a the pz3 saved. The same pz3 was then rendered in P5, and an uncompressed JPEG saved. Bothe images were then identicaly post processed in PSP 5 to add text and some slight compression. Above is the image rendered in P4. In my next post will be the P5 FireFly image.

Here is the P5 FireFly image. P4 wins hands down! Click image to see full sized.

Click image to see full sized. Here are the Render Options I used in the P5 FireFly image.

The min shade rate needs to be turned way down to get any kind of detail. I normally run it at .01. It is set stupidly high on the default.

Turn on Raytracing.
Try with a lower "Minimum shading rate" (say 0.1).
Having this set small enough is critical to reproducing fine detail in textures, transmaps etc.

I like it so far. it takes a few minutes to render stuff, but since I'm also a Bryce user, I don't notice..;)

P5 FireFly with Raytracing and Minimum shading rate = 0.1 nruddock, after your sugestions the resolution is much improved, but still not up to the P4 standard.

Try bumping the pixel samples up from the default of 3.  Will cost some in render time, but can much improve antialiasing and detail with FireFly.  In my limited experience, texture filtering mutes detail.

John

It might be that antialiasing (called "post filter" in Firefly) can't be switched off, as it can in P4.

Attached Link: Why doesn't hair render properly in Firefly?

Don't use texture filtering.  That will make the image blurry, and cause seam problems with many textures. 

The link above has a lot of great info on getting the best from Firefly.  I love Firefly myself, but it does have more of a learning curve than the P4 renderer.

For a final render, I usually set the shading rate to 0.05 or lower.  Not 0.1.   0.01 is more like it. 

Also, shading rate must be set for each item in the scene, not just in the final render settings.  (This is actually a good thing.  You can set different shading rates for different objects/parts, to save render time.  Also, it lets you do test renders at a higher shading rate, no matter what each object is set to.  When you're ready to do your final render, you can lower it in render settings, without having to tweak each object in the scene.)

BeyondVR, Changing the "Pixels samples" from 3 to 9 made very little diffrence, if anything the image was slightly more blured.

Each object also has it's own "Minimum Shading Rate" setting, so to get really low shading rates you should set the MSR of objects to 0 to allow the scene MSR to take effect.
In other words the render MSR = max(object MSR, scene MSR).
See P5 ref. manual p347, P6 ref. man p340.

randym77, Thanks for the link, I will check it out. Changing the "Minimum shading rate" from its default value to 0.1 made a significant improvement to the resolution, chaiging it from 0.1 to 0.01 did not seem to make much (if any) diffrence.

Probably because you didn't change the shading rate of the objects in the scene.

Though it depends on the texture.  "Noisy" or highly detailed textures tend to benefit most from lowering the shading rate to really low levels.

Another thing to try is to set the max texture size to about the same size as your render size.  It's explained in the link I posted.  This can help the image look sharper, without slowing down your render times as lowering the shading rate does.

Thanks nruddock and randym77. When I set the shading rate to 0.05 in both the Render Options *and* the individual objects the resolution approaches the P4 resolution. I will try reducing the shading rate further. But what a ball ache! It's bad enough setting the individual shading rate in the 5 boxes, a human figure has about 30 finger joints, not to mention all the other actors. With a few figures in the scene it would take me till christmass to set the shading rate! Is there some setting somewhere to set the default shading rate for props/actors? No wonder I still do most of my work in P4, life is too short to use P5! P.S Texture filtering was off in all images posted.

IIRC, someone posted a Python script that lets you change the shading rate of everything in a scene.

But you may not want to do that.  It will make rendering really, really slow.  I usually set the shading rate individually.  For example, hair often requires a lower shading rate than anything else, because of the kind of texture it has.   A really low shading rate may be needed for a closeup of Vicky's face, but not for a full-body shot.  Etc.

Lesbentley.. could you please post the texture you used? (or the whole PZ3) - I'd like to see if there's a difference between Poser 5 and 6...

(since I haven't used Poser 5 in ages and I've never had any "blurring" problem in Poser 6)

The shading rate is not accessible in P5 python.