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Without decent GI support you wont get much 'HDR' in an HDR render. With IBL you will but that limits you to only what lighting you can find.

That depends on how much work you're willing to do. I can make an IBL probe image from any Poser scene. Put a mirror ball in the scene, zoom in on the ball, and render the reflections from the ball. You can then use that render as an IBL probe, just as if you had actually photographed a mirror ball.

And since Poser Pro can save the render to an HDRI exr format, that mirror ball probe you just made has full dynamic range built into it.

Quote - And yes rendering in HDRI is very very useful as it lets you do all sorts of neat tricks in postwork. However this requires an unbiased 'raw' HDRI you can tweak in Photoshop and the like. Can that 'in built gamma curve' be turned off or is it always applied ? Also can you render to HDR formats like .hdr or .OpenEXR ? 32 bit tiffs ?

When you do HDRI rendering, final gamma correction is disabled implicitly. The resulting image is an unbiased linear representation. SM demonstrates this on the poserpro web site. Similarly, when you use an HDRI as an input component, PoserPro assumes it is linear, and does not pre-compensate the image, as it would for LDRI.

And yes you can render to .hdr or .openexr. I'm not sure about the 32 bit tiff.

Quote - > Quote - Poser Pro's displacement bugs are finally squashed, and displacement is as good as anything else out there. Best quality setting in the rendering advance options are pixel samples=8, shading set to 0

Does it support float displacement maps now ?

 
It always did. Its just that the 8-bit images people use for displacement maps are integers 0 to 255. Poser 7 introduced the ability to read 16-bit and (I think) 32-bit TIFF files. Those produce much more precision on displacement. You can also use HDR or OpenEXR as input for displacement maps.

Since Poser 5, I have been producing displacements using procedural nodes, particularly math nodes. They have always been smooth and continuous, without any stair stepping. Internally, all shader math, including color math or numeric math, is floating point. But if you drive an algorithm with integers, such as with an 8-bit gray scale displacement map, then you get quantization.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)