May I ask which is better to use to render a character in Poser 7?  Do I render with Poser 4 or FireFly screen?  If so would it be possible for someone to make a screen print of the options you use on the render screen so I can get a good clear render?

Thank you so much for your help.

BJ

I prefer the Firefly renderer to the P4 renderer mainly for speed (I have a 4 core processor).  Be aware though that the Firefly renderer is not perfect, and can manifest some really bad incorrect shadows, and seems to have problems with the Smooth Polygons option in some cases.  These are the settings I usually use:

Higher values for Raytrace Bounces is only of use when you have multiple reflective surfaces, and you need the reflection to reflect from more than one surface, or refraction/fresnel or somesuch.  Irradiance caching is mostly to do with Ambient Occlusion.

Thank you so much for your help.  I appreciate it.

BJ

Well, Firefly is certainly a more advanced rendering engine.  If you're not that familiar with setting things up, you might want to go with the Auto Setting at first. Try some test renders sliding the quality slider from Draft to Final at various degrees. See what looks good to you.
If you get a setting you like you could then go to manual and click "Aquire from Auto" and all the sliders will jump to the proper settings.
Also, not quite sure what you mean by "clear" render. That could many things, is it blurry? pixelated? too light? too dark? etc.

It's touchy - the default  settings give me meshlines and blur my renders more than I like, so I have to adjust those to:

Pixel Samples: 4
Shading Rate: .02

With shadow or raytracing ticked according to image.

Thanks both of you.

one tip. don't use the smooth polygons option shown above in the render options.

thats a Global Effect and overrides any and all smooth options set per individual mesh. it's better to actually set the mesh's smooth options indiviually, remembering that 0=no smoothing (Faceted) and 100= total smoothing.

Appreicate your help.

Quote - one tip. don't use the smooth polygons option shown above in the render options.

thats a Global Effect and overrides any and all smooth options set per individual mesh. it's better to actually set the mesh's smooth options indiviually, remembering that 0=no smoothing (Faceted) and 100= total smoothing.

That doesn't seem to be the case in my experience.  If I have Smooth Polys on the the render globals it will add the smoothing to any mesh that has smoothing turned on individually. Some models (particularly with straight sides) will warp out of shape with global smoothing on. To stop it from happening, I just turn off the smooth function for that individual mesh, and leave the Global smoothing on.

Just my method but hey, it works for me..

Boy, lots of tips.  Thanks.

Quote - one tip. don't use the smooth polygons option shown above in the render options.

thats a Global Effect and overrides any and all smooth options set per individual mesh. it's better to actually set the mesh's smooth options indiviually, remembering that 0=no smoothing (Faceted) and 100= total smoothing.

It's the other way around.  If you don't set Smooth Polygons in render options, nothing will be smoothed.  If you do set it, you can disable it by each item in the scene as desired.

More tips.  Thanks.

Quote - > Quote - one tip. don't use the smooth polygons option shown above in the render options.

thats a Global Effect and overrides any and all smooth options set per individual mesh. it's better to actually set the mesh's smooth options indiviually, remembering that 0=no smoothing (Faceted) and 100= total smoothing.

 

It's the other way around.  If you don't set Smooth Polygons in render options, nothing will be smoothed.  If you do set it, you can disable it by each item in the scene as desired.

sorry no.. your're wrong try it and see.... me and my beta testers found it's the way I stated.

Khai,

It is NOT a Global Effect override. The render setting determines if smoothing is even considered by the renderer. Enabling it in render options does NOT force smoothing on everywhere, but disabling it DOES stop it everywhere. If a prop says don't smooth, the global setting does not turn it on. It is not an override.

I'm surprised that you suggested that the others try it and see - when you didn't do so yourself.

Look there are four cases:

Global On, Prop On: SMOOTHED
Global On Prop Off: NOT SMOOTHED
Global Off , Prop On: NOT SMOOTHED
Global Off, Prop Off: NOT SMOOTHED

You're all in agreement about that, right? English is not a good substitute for Predicate Logic.

Smoothing Happens = (Global Smoothing Enabled) AND (Prop Smoothing Enabled)

Quote -
It's the other way around.  If you don't set Smooth Polygons in render options, nothing will be smoothed.  If you do set it, you can disable it by each item in the scene as desired.

sorry no.. your're wrong try it and see.... me and my beta testers found it's the way I stated. 

Khai - With all due respect to you and youe beta testers, pjz99 and bagginsbill are correct. As for me personally, it's really not a question of me needing to "try it and see"  because as I have already stated in my post above, that I do this all the time! 

By default, the smoothing function for each object is "on" in the object properties panel, however, this smoothing will NOT take effect in a rendered image unless you turn smoothing on in the render settings.

If you turn smoothing on in the render settings it will smooth only the objects that you have it turned ON in their respective Properties Panel. If you turn it off for an object in the Properties Panel, it will NOT be smoothed in the rendered image.

On a side note, Poser automatically adds a "surface normal" smoothing to ALL objects you bring into it. (it is a surfacing issue, an illusion... like a bump map) so you will not get a totally "faceted" look to them unless polygons have been seperated. This is not something you can turn on or off, it is simply always ON..

The render global smoothing adds an additional "geometric" smoothing based on a spline or bezier curve calculation. (it actually displaces the geometry of the mesh) Much like a NURBS or Subdivision Surface object. This is the smoothig function that you can turn on or off.

edit: and by the way, "crease angle" is degrees, not a percentage.

between adjoining polygons will be smoothed. Polygons with crease angles over this

threshold will not be smoothed, and will be rendered as hard edges."

Which, uh, by the way should illustrate that all parties are kind of correct, because evidently some smoothing is being done on the first image.  :unsure:

edit: oops, this is what Syntrifid is talking about:

Quote - On a side note, Poser automatically adds a "surface normal" smoothing to ALL objects you bring into it. (it is a surfacing issue, an illusion... like a bump map) so you will not get a totally "faceted" look to them unless polygons have been seperated. This is not something you can turn on or off, it is simply always ON..

Quote - Which, uh, by the way should illustrate that all parties are kind of correct, because evidently some smoothing is being done on the first image.  :unsure:

Ah -that is the surface normal smoothing I spoke of, (the illusion, the surface looks smooth but you can still see the sdges around the border) I did however fail to take into account the crease angle parameter. Thanks for pointing that out..

Hey, you learn something every day :)  I had my head laminated a while back but occasionally some knowledge still slips in.

Quote - Hey, you learn something every day :)  I had my head laminated a while back but occasionally some knowledge still slips in.

LOL - here here :rolleyes:

I'm worng. I shall now fall on a sword to appease youall

btw bagginsbill? if we were in a room together in real life and you spoke to me like that, you'd have a black eye. you come across as arrogant.  you did'nt during the matmatic thread on metal. why the difference?

OK, I'm going to address a lot of points all in one response. I wouldn't normally do this, as I like to keep each of my individual responses to just one issue. But, this is my 997'th post and I'm trying to save up so that my 1000'th is somewhat more of a celebration than this.

Let's tackle the ad hominem stuff first.

Khai,

Put on your "Baggins is joking with me" or at least your "Baggins is my friend" state of mind and listen up.

I am ALWAYS arrogant. My IQ is high, which is a curse. I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where I thought the professors were clueless noobs about real engineering so I dropped out in the beginning of my senior year and started my own business. My horrified parents could not BEGIN to fathom WTF I was thinking. (I still think they at MIT know very little about software development in real life. I have a lot of recent MIT grads working for me – they’re smart, but they still need to be taught the art of crafting professional, production software after MIT is done with them.)

I find most people incredibly tedious. I can't stand wasting time so I don't let most people talk to me, but make them communicate in writing. I can then ignore them completely without having do deal with their “feelings”. To me, most of what people want me to think about is completely boring, and a huge waste of time. Furthermore, those things that I enjoy spending days puzzling over, that fascinate me to no end, most people think are a waste of time.  This is especially true of my wife.

I rarely attend meetings, unless I'm in charge of the meeting. I always use the words which best fit the meaning I'm trying to convey, often unusual words. This is an attempt to be accurate, precise, and save time, even though I know that most people think I'm only being bombastic. I don't care - if they can't appreciate the subtlety and economy of my phrasing then they don't deserve to receive the meaning anyway.

I am also very naturally violent. If you gave me a black eye (or tried to, more than once), you'd very likely find foreign objects lodged in your abdomen. This goes all the way back to childhood, when a bully who repeatedly slapped my head behind the teacher's back found a pencil buried in his forearm the next time he recovered his hand from my personal space.

My general philosophy of life is that the universe and everything in it conspires to maintain my mediocrity AND I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT!

In other words, I get along with almost nobody on the planet. If you merely find me arrogant, you're getting off lightly.

And yet, Khai, I wish you to know that I meant no offense. I don't know why I care, but the people here at Rendo and at RDNA (you included) who share my passion for this piece of crap software, ARE MY BUDDIES. I speak plainly to my buds - get over it.

Looking at what I wrote, frankly I don't see much arrogance. Yes I admonished you here:

----- "I'm surprised that you suggested that the others try it and see - when you didn't do so yourself."

So what? All I did was admonish - i.e. counseled you, gently and earnestly, against doing something you really should avoid. In this case, you should avoid saying “you’re wrong” to people who are actually right. ( I acknowledge that’s a hard one to decide up front, so the best general policy is don’t ever say “you’re wrong”. Instead say “that’s not what I learned from my experiments”, but I could be wrong. Or as SYNTRIFID said, “That doesn't seem to be the case in my experience. “. Unless you’re me, then you don’t have to say that. ;-) ) And you should avoid suggesting they should do some experiments to learn and understand their mistake until you, yourself, have done the experiments, and verified that your theory is supported, not contradicted, by all the facts, and that at least one of the facts contradicts the other persons theory. I did not slam you or flame you. I still stand behind those two points. I hardly think you should PUNCH towards my BRAIN for that. But I'd actually enjoy it if you tried. :) I love adrenaline.

The rest of what I said was entirely about the topic, except for the comment that English is not a good subsitute for Predicate Logic, which is absolutely true and if you don't find that observation particularly pithy and apropos in this situation, well ... you're not me, then. (I took one course at Harvard - the best course I've ever had. It was on the accurate specification and production of software, by eliminating English in favor of Predicate Calculus and the development of software exclusively through Formal Methods of mathematical derivation from the specification. It was unbelievably useful.  I don't write buggy code any more except when I think I can guess at a solution and skip the Formal Methods. You know what is stupid? MIT didn't even think this topic was interesting and had no such course in the computer science curriculum.)

Now back to the issue. Since you all clearly confused the crap out of yourselves with your incomplete experiments (PJZ!) let me try to explain again, and show you all the facts.

There are two issues that have been discussed here, and only ONE OF THEM IS RELEVENT to the render setting "Enable Smoothing".

Please read this wikipedia article on "Flat Shading" versus "Phong Shading". Then come back.

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading

OK so you understand what Phong shading is? Good.

SINTRIFID first raised this behavior, without naming it. “On a side note, Poser automatically adds a "surface normal" smoothing to ALL objects you bring into it. (it is a surfacing issue, an illusion... like a bump map) so you will not get a totally "faceted" look to them unless polygons have been seperated. This is not something you can turn on or off, it is simply always ON..”

SINTRIFID is talking about Phong shading. However, SINTRIFID has not explained all the facts. (In other words, SINTRIFID is WRONG but I’m not going to come out and say that.)  Anyway, Phong shading is not simply always ON. Of that I’m sure.

There is at least one thing which enables/disables Phong shading in Poser. (There could be others that I’m not aware of, so I chose my phrasing carefully.) That is the Crease Angle parameter on the actor. Enabling "Smoothing" has nothing whatsoever to do with Phong shading. Phong shading happens if the angle formed by two polygons is below the crease angle. Flat shading happens if the angle formed by two polygons is above the crease angle. I do not know what happens when the angle exactly equals the crease angle, as I have found it too difficult to do a completely precise, accurate, and definitive test. I also am not sure if Phong shading happens ONLY when Smoothing is not happening. When they both happen, they are hard to tell apart.

So what SINTRIFID (and I suspect many others) failed to try (and therefore failed to explain) is why did PJZ99 produce a render that was both flat shaded and Phong shaded EVEN WITH SMOOTHING ON or SMOOTHING OFF? It was not smoothing, as PJZ99 believed. It was Phong shading based on the Crease Angle of 15 degrees. PJZ99 (mistakenly seeing Phong shading and believing it was Smoothing) suggested that “Color me surprised.  So Khai is partially correct, and others (me) are partially incorrect, and vice versa.”

Nope – faulty logic there and bad observation skills – that’s what’s at work here. The theory that explains the facts is that Phong shading is controlled by the Crease Angle. Yes the documentation says Crease Angle only controls smoothing, but the documentation has many theories that are contradicted by the evidence. The Crease Angle controls Phong shading and Smoothing. If the Crease Angle threshold is not met, then no Phong shading occurs (it is flat shaded instead) and no Smoothing occurs.

PJZ99 also said “Which, uh, by the way should illustrate that all parties are kind of correct, because evidently some smoothing is being done on the first image” PJZ99 was confused. It was some Phong shading and smoothing. In the next render, PJZ99 said “Last one, Smoothing is OFF in render options.    Color me surprised.  So Khai is partially correct, and others (me) are partially incorrect, and vice versa.” Here’s where poor observation skills really interfered. In this render, only Phong shading was happening. There was absolutely no smoothing. PJZ99 made an incorrect observation.

Look closely at those two renders. Do you see a difference? I do. It’s plain as day. If you don’t, then you should not be making strong arguments about how you think Poser works, because you can’t see subtle differences.

Now let me tell you what to look for in case you didn’t find it. The first one has some distinctive black edging between the second and third column of polygons on the sphere. That’s because it was at that point that smoothing (DISPLACEMENT) transitioned suddenly from happening to not happening. This produced a discontinuity in the surface, resulting in a shading anomaly (black edge). Whereas in the second render, those black edges have disappeared, but the polygons in the first and second column are still smooth looking. Right, that’s because they are Phong shaded. That’s why they look smooth. There is no Smoothing in that render because Smoothing was Disabled in Render options. The evidence is plain – the displacement derived black edges are gone.

Smoothing (in Poser) is the automatic application of DISPLACEMENT to create roundness in place of flatness. It has exactly the same purpose as Phong shading, but does it better. Phong shading merely calculates the variation in surface Normal for the geometry-matching curve, whereas Smoothing actually calculates and uses the TRUE POSITION as well as Surface Normal for the geometry-matching curve.

They look very similar but the key difference is in the SILHOUETTE. It is by the silhouette that you can visually tell the difference between Smoothing and Phong shading. And so I have rendered for you an image that has many facts in it.

The render has no diffuse light, just specular light. This is so you don’t get all confused by the Phong shading at the edges.

The balls in the leftmost column have Crease Angle = 0. Column 2 have Crease Angle = 15 degrees (like PJZ99 did). Column 3 have Crease Angle = 20 degrees. And column 4 have Crease Angle = 90 degrees.

The first two rows are one render, where the global render setting has Smoothing enabled.

The top row of balls all have smoothing enabled on the prop. The second row all have smoothing disabled on the prop.

The third and fourth rows are also one render of the same balls, where the global render setting Smoothing is disabled.

Observe – in the 2dn, 3rd, and 4th rows there is no smoothing whatsoever. All the silhouettes are faceted. There is still Phong shading wherever the crease angle threshold is met, but I’m not showing you much of that because I turned off the diffuse light. You can see it in the specular reflections.

The only row where smoothing occurs is in the first row. It occurs only where the Crease Angle threshold was met. The smoothed geometry has a curved silhouette that is clearly visible in the third and fourth column.

But notice the specular highlight on columns 3 and 4? It’s always smooth there in every row!! That is NOT because of Smoothing. The faceted silhouette shows us there is not Smoothing on most of those. That is Phong shading and it’s happening because those polygons meet at angles that satisfies the Crease Angle threshold.

I could show you lots more pictures but I can only attach one per response and I’m not going to use up my 998’th and 999’th responses on this thread. 

If I seem a bit put off in this thread, it's because we're wasting a lot of time worrying about a very small issue in Poser that I understand perfectly and I told you exactly how it works and so what the hell are we talking about for so long? THE END :biggrin:

Darn it I screwed up and have to post again to correct myself. I did not mean to say this:

*So what SINTRIFID (and I suspect many others) failed to try (and therefore failed to explain) is why did PJZ99 
*SYNTRIFID correctly answered why PJZ99 saw "smoothness" (phong shading). 

Sorry about the confusion, and any other mistakes I made.

Bill, you're a smart guy, and very helpful, and you share much valuable information, but - that's really overkill.  And by the way, the confusion here is really EF's fault - "Smooth Shading" is how it's referred to in the P7 manual, and the term "Phong shading" is never used in conjunction with what you're describing, only with the lighting node of the same name.  The manual really lends one to believe they're the same mechanic, they're actually covered in the same section (chapter 15).  You're operating under different assumptions and definitions from those set by the manual, and while yours might very well be more correct, it doesn't help anyone for you to get irritated when someone leans toward the manual.

There's no reason for a ginormous slam-dunk large-font post justifying your sharpness up front, you could have just let it go by and that would have been that.  If you recognize you get along with almost nobody, and that people find you bombastic, as you say, then you might do well to curb that instinct. 

Eh, I'm not offended. :lol:

Serious thanks to Bagginsbill for again teaching me something I should have understood better long ago. (I too believed the manual and left it at that.)

Oh, and I'm really looking forward to BB's 1000th post!!  Big Yay!!!