basicwiz opened this issue on Apr 07, 2009 · 88 posts
pjz99 posted Tue, 07 April 2009 at 8:54 PM
I don't know why anyone should feel reluctant to name a product that does not work well. If you buy something and it has a real technical problem, then you shouldn't feel like you will get punched in the groin if you let someone else know about it - although it is good manners to try to work this out with the vendor first of course!
Some comments about those render settings:
Min shading rate to 0.1 or lower is never ever going to hurt quality of the render. It can only help. It might cause higher memory usage problems on Poser 6 and older, but it won't ever make anything look the worse.
Increasing Pixel Samples mainly improves antialiasing. It also can't ever hurt render quality to make it larger. Raising it above 3 is good advice, and can help smooth out jagged pixelation edges and "stair stepping" effects.
Raytrace Bounces mainly affects reflection and refraction, although I suppose if you had an AO effect BEHIND a refracting surface, or visible in a refletive surface, it might matter - e.g. if Raytrace Bounces is set to 1, and you have a piece of "glass" with refraction enabled for that material, and behind it you're expecting to see some material-based Ambient Occlusion, you won't. I don't know that it affects AO quality though, it's either on or off in this context.
I've never touched Min Displacement Bounds, and from the material shown there, the displacement amount is so small that I don't see why adjusting this setting should be necessary. Min Displacment Bounds is intended to avoid "patch crack" artifacts when dealing with a pretty un-subtle displacement effect, where the micropolygons created by displacement can fall outside of the bucket being rendered (bucket size of 32 means 32x32 grid of pixels, a pretty large area). Read your manual for more info here.
The skin material you're showing has displacement, so if you want it to be visible, the render setting "Use Displacement Maps" would have to be on regardless of what else is in the scene ;)
Bucket Size does not have an effect on render quality unless you set it to something stupid like 1 (1 pixel by 1 pixel). It affects memory usage and speed.