Anyone know what may be causing this? I checked my model and can't seem to find anything wrong with it. Some of my models are getting this in FireFly and others aren't and I am pretty consistent in how I create and edit my models so I am pretty baffled at the cause here (and the remedy) ;o)

Any ideas and help are greatly appreciated. I am trying to make some of my older (P4) packages P7 and FireFly friendly.

Thanks,
~Will

Problem solved thanks to SVDL.

It appears that FireFly craps out when an object is small and this is the result. Adding a figure or larger prop to the scene solved the problem. Ummm.. a bug that should be addressed methinks.

~Will

Why would it need to be addressed?  You normally don't render something that small by itself, in which case there's no problem, and if you are rendering only a single item that small for some reason, scale it up before rendering.

Quote - Why would it need to be addressed?  You normally don't render something that small by itself, in which case there's no problem, and if you are rendering only a single item that small for some reason, scale it up before rendering.

Considering that some items in an older  product I am updating for P7 are figure embellishments, they are relatively small in scale. Therefore, I TEST them to scale when making them version compatible. I WAS UNAWARE OF THE BUG IN FIREFLY as I am sure others have run itno it as well, unaware.

Well, regardless, it's a bug in the software and should be addressed. Not that I don't see your point, however, had someone else not pointed me in the right direction as to the problem I could have spent countless wasted hours trying to figure out what the problem was (believing the issue may have been somewhere in my material settings or OBJ even though everything checked out).

Considering I am a content developer, wasted time is wasted $$$. No other rendering engines I use have this problem (regardless of the 3D software that I use.. Hexagon, Rhino w/Flamingo, Lightwave, DAZ Studio). IMHO I consider it a bug and should thus be addressed in any future releases or service releases.. this is what I would do as a developer, if I was aware of the issue.

Generally speaking when something I've built renders up black like that the first thing I do is reverse the normals.  So far it's cured the problem every time.

Quote - Generally speaking when something I've built renders up black like that the first thing I do is reverse the normals.  So far it's cured the problem every time.

Yeah Slinger, that would be the first guess, but I know the normals weren't reversed as I am anal about my models. I always analyze the direction of normals in Rhinocerous before they are ever exported for UVmapping and Poserizing. But nontheless I double checked the normals in the models I was having problems with and as I figured they were okay. Then I tried triangulating them, welding them, etc etc.. all the normal stuff hehe, but to no avail. Of course it urned out to be a FireFly issue in the end, but I had already wasted about 3 hours which bit into my project time which should have been finished last night. I just finshed it this morning thank goodness. No harm no foul though, but I am starting to hate P7 and FireFly :u)

~lol~
I should have known you'd already checked the normals every which way.  Definitely an issue that Firefly developers need to address.  If there was no  "issue " then nobody would have noticed it.

The cause of this behavior is the fact that Poser objects are very, very small. Try importing a Poser .OBJ directly into another 3D app - it'll be extremely small. For example, when I import into 3DS Max, I scale up by a factor of 250, so a human figure will be about 6 feet tall in the Max universe.
Firefly is not a render engine developed by Curious Labs, its origins are 3rd party (used to be called Vortex, as far as I remember). So it's not surprising it was not built from the ground up to render these extremely small objects.
I'd say it is a fundamental flaw in Poser, not a Firefly bug.

Quote - The cause of this behavior is the fact that Poser objects are very, very small. Try importing a Poser .OBJ directly into another 3D app - it'll be extremely small. For example, when I import into 3DS Max, I scale up by a factor of 250, so a human figure will be about 6 feet tall in the Max universe.
Firefly is not a render engine developed by Curious Labs, its origins are 3rd party (used to be called Vortex, as far as I remember). So it's not surprising it was not built from the ground up to render these extremely small objects.
I'd say it is a fundamental flaw in Poser, not a Firefly bug.

I see. I didn't realize it was 3rd party. Yeah it would be a Poser flaw ;o)

Yeah I often scale up in Rhino by a factor of 130-150 otherwise certain Rhino functions fail with regularity. Especially fillets.

Interesting issue.