Wow, BB!  Now that's what I like to see.  Thanks for sharing those to us. 

Well, all I can say is -- I can't wait!

I am already in love with this new version.  My biggest hate/struggle is lights and lighting, and getting THAT kind of setting, the "real life" lighting if you will.  Especially emulating simple light bulbs.  To whoever implemented that, thank you.  SERIOUSLY.  :)

I, too, like what I see!   Could you tell us the render times of the two renders as well?  Do these new features increase it?  And if so, by how much?

Two of the new lighting features don't cost any time at all. But the big one is nasty sometimes. It depends on your scene complexity. I'm still learning my way around it - you don't always need to set it to maximum quality.

I didn't time the renders above, but I'd guess the old-style render was faster than it used to be, about a minute, and the new style was around 10 minutes. Not sure if I remember correctly how long it took.

I'm doing a nasty one right now - 22 minutes so far. But it has 3 point lights with ray-traced shadows that are shining through semi-transparent bulbs. This kind of thing is evil and always has been.

But based on what I've seen so far, if you do a couple dozen simple tests you can get to know how it behaves pretty well. Then you know how to set it up without testing, and you can do a final render while you sleep. SM did a lot of work to make it fast, but I told them that speed was really secondary. The most important thing is that things look real. I'm willing to wait until morning to see a big high-quality render if it's going to give me the results I want without a lot of goofing around with lights. Predictable results overnight is better than unpredictable results dealt with by several hours of tweaking.

 Um - would this be a bad time to ask if there is going to be any tooning/NPR?cel shaded options?
The sort of thing that would be suitable for a one-click/make-art girl like me?
Love esther

I could be wrong (still don't know all the new features) but I don't think there's anything new for tooning. We've had some discussion about toon shading features (and more sophisticated shader technology in general) - look for it next version.

Thanks for the info & examples, BB. What can you tell us about the hair room, & do you have any pictures to show us ? Thanks, Mike.

 okay, well at the moment I use olivier's shaders with shaderworks and it's not too bad.
Love esther

Quote - Thanks for the info & examples, BB. What can you tell us about the hair room, & do you have any pictures to show us ? Thanks, Mike.

LOL I haven't even gone in there, so I don't know.

Ok BB, thanks anyway. Probably early August the pics will start coming out. Mike

Meet "Battle Bob", rendered the old Poser 7 way. This was 3 minutes.

Kinda worth the extra 47 minutes, don't you think? Very nice!

...the better render is totally worth the 50 minute render, IMHO :)

When looking at my timings, keep in mind I'm doing these on a two year old laptop. Any current desktop with a Core 2 Quad is going to be 4 times faster.

Still, doing complex renders will be more plausible.  I know this sounds silly, but there are times when I refrain from answering a question in the forum because I can't find the words, but I know I can do it in a picture...it'll just take me 3 hours to render it.  And, by the time I'm at 50%, someone's already answered it ;) 
Plus, this will help immensely with my own renders...for me, LOL.

I just re-rendered the first two for timing. Old way was 30 seconds. New way was 19 minutes. I haven't done a direct comparison with P7 or PPro, but it feels like the P8 renderer is much faster at doing the same things it used to do.

Wooooooooow!
Thanks for showing and timing and all!
wants Poser 8 - now

The new lighting features are so worth the time!  Got a new Core 2 Quad a couple of months ago, now just need Poser 8 ;)   Hurry up!!!

Oh and how about an outdoor scene please :)

I'll do an outdoor one tomorrow. I'm rendering an 1800 pixel version of the first image for a magazine, and I'm going to bed. I expect to see goodness in the morning. :)

Hrmm... October trip to Hawaii or Poser 8?!?! Decisions Decisions!

Wouldn't Poser be a lot cheaper? LOL

Quote -  

please tell me that you didnt use the best settings here.

:( 

Great stuff bagginsbill, The lighting, shadows, everything looks much better in the new P8. I'm stoked.

Do you happen to know if they did any work with the setup room? Well, in any case I'm ready for the upgrade.

question for you bagginsbill.

some time ago, i had a conversation with one of the SM people where he hinted at the possibility of including "metadata". That is some sort of note attached or included on items in the library where you could give it a description or such.

Do you know if this feature make it to the final cut?

SOLD !!!!
 

Beginning to think BB really stands for "Bravo Bill!"
Credit Card primed and ready. Bring it on!

Quote - When looking at my timings, keep in mind I'm doing these on a two year old laptop. Any current desktop with a Core 2 Quad is going to be 4 times faster.

Based on that conversation we had back in January about shadows and the dungeon cell rendering (originating in a discussion about Poser comics), probably faster if you're running a 64 bit OS.  For the smaller ones the difference won't be noticeable (when it takes about 7 seconds to render, and extra second or two doesn't mean much), but having all that memory available really helps for the big scenes.

That first Battle Bob: just three point lights?  Doesn't look like complicated shaders.  Back in January, when I tested a similar render (3 point lights, shadows), it took 20 seconds (quad core, 64 bit Vista, 8 gigs memory).  So about 12 times faster.  Obviously I have no idea what the new feature settings would do, but as a WAG I'd say maybe 20 minutes for that second one on my machine if I was testing.

A lot will also depend on the tweaks to the render engine: when I've compared some render times in various software I have, sometimes the newer machine and a newer renderer have had a synergetic effect, and producing faster than you'd expect.

Quote - Wouldn't Poser be a lot cheaper? LOL

Well since my brother's paying for all the lodgings and my airfare is paid for by having air miles out the wazoo, all I have to pay for is food. So no, Poser won't be cheaper even if I eat like a pig. I'll still probably do both and eat a lot of rice for a month or two on my fixed income.

o.k., thx fr the excellent examples, bill.  it's clear from the last two pages that users are eager to try these new features - indirect diffuse and possibly indirect specular.  render times are reasonable for hi-quality settings.  the part about the toon renders: IMVHO poser 7 already had good tools to do professional-quality cartoons, but users were intimidated by the shader set-ups needed, by the extra compositing step in APS (in some cases) and by some other small details.

Quote - > Quote - Wouldn't Poser be a lot cheaper? LOL

Well since my brother's paying for all the lodgings and my airfare is paid for by having air miles out the wazoo, all I have to pay for is food. So no, Poser won't be cheaper even if I eat like a pig. I'll still probably do both and eat a lot of rice for a month or two on my fixed income.

Your definition of eat like a pig must be different than mine. :-) Last time I went to Hawaii I spent $200 to $300 a day on food and drink.

Quote -
That first Battle Bob: just three point lights?  Doesn't look like complicated shaders.  Back in January, when I tested a similar render (3 point lights, shadows), it took 20 seconds (quad core, 64 bit Vista, 8 gigs memory).  So about 12 times faster. 

I think you're right on there. The shaders were nothing - just your ordinary color map node and nothing else but settings on the surface node.

However, transmapped hair is still a bitch.

Quote - some time ago, i had a conversation with one of the SM people where he hinted at the possibility of including "metadata". That is some sort of note attached or included on items in the library where you could give it a description or such.

That was desired, but scrapped for this release anyway. Metadata is still in the plans, and a lot of the plumbing for it is in place. But the ramifications of getting content tagged in all the right ways, along with the necessary UI and other functions to allow the user to edit metadata would have led to an unavoidable delay in shipping the product.

There is a search engine, though, and it works quite well even with just folder and file name fragments.

I often can't remember where I put shaders since I have so many. But now, for example, when I'm looking for my shadow catcher, I type "catcher" and it finds it damn fast.

i refuse to belive that in 2009 Poser will be the only 3D software that has raytraced shadows without ''samples''.

whats the point of soft raytraced shadows if they look like grain?

Quote - > Quote -

That first Battle Bob: just three point lights?  Doesn't look like complicated shaders.  Back in January, when I tested a similar render (3 point lights, shadows), it took 20 seconds (quad core, 64 bit Vista, 8 gigs memory).  So about 12 times faster. 

I think you're right on there. The shaders were nothing - just your ordinary color map node and nothing else but settings on the surface node.

However, transmapped hair is still a bitch.

Always will be, I'd suspect.

Quote - Great stuff bagginsbill, The lighting, shadows, everything looks much better in the new P8. I'm stoked.

Do you happen to know if they did any work with the setup room? Well, in any case I'm ready for the upgrade.

Yes, but I don't understand it, having never ever gone in there.

This is Alyson, same as the first page promotional image. But I didn't like her stock face. She has quite a few good variations. I used the Ethnic morph "Maria" at .64. No other morphs were used.

Obviously I used my VSS shaders on her skin and eyes. (But you can't see her eyes because of the visor). The stock figure just doesn't look real with good lighting alone. Skin has to be dealt with properly, and VSS provides the necessary specular and SSS. I did not use material based AO or gamma correction, as those are no longer needed. I probably should have adjusted the color tint a little, as this looks maybe too red, but you get the idea.

The jacket and helmet shaders I left as is, except for the visor. It had a really terrible shader on it. I downloaded a free "scratched" image from cgtextures, then used that to build up a scratched coated plastic material for the visor.

I also used my Environment Sphere with a free equirectangular image attached. The EnvSphere provided the background, the ambient lighting without any IBL (!), as well as the realistic reflections in the visor. One free prop provides 3 matching effects. Magic!

The only light is a single infinite light at 75% intensity.

Render time was 57 minutes.

so no IBL and no AO? so it has a special GI lighting system? i hope IBL is still inside if we want to use it.

so no SSS for poser 8 . to bad he he :) 

1 Light...I say again - WOW!

IBL and AO are still there, but the results I'm getting with GI are far superior.

i see superior results.

but you know what i am afraid BB? that poser 8 will have a GI system but no soft raytraced shadows. i think this never happened in the last 10 years with a software.

it will bring people back to poser. since they are so obssesed with  ''GI''.so smart move from SM. thats what they wanted. but i still think with SSS and good area lights we could make better renders then fake SSS ,bad shadows and GI.

 
Let's take one thing at a time. Remember our experiments with rendering larger than needed and then scaling down? This took care of the grainy shadows problem without any new software.

Here's the same bowl and chips render, done at 1800 pixels, then scaled back down to 600 pixels. The soft shadows are now smooth. Zoom in on this and the original and do a flip test.

Look around at other details - the can and bag textures rendered better with more detail. Rendering large is the way to go.

I'll tell you something else about the GI that surprised me.

Much of what I thought was SSS in human skin is actually multiple diffuse reflections between skin surfaces. For example, even without my VSS shader, I see slight additional redness between arms and body, between fingers and toes, and between chin and neck.

This is because the skin reflects pink light onto other areas of skin, so wherever they are close they appear more red, as well as darker because the ambience from the environment does not reach into there, particularly blue light from the sky.

So for human figures, I care a little less about SSS, since I was mistaken about where these effects were coming from. They are the result of diffuse inter-reflection, not sub-surface scattering.

isnt this color bleeding? i think  what makes a skin alive is SSS.

I agree we need SSS for perfect photorealism. Nevertheless, the departure from reality has been decreased by GI, a lot. There will always be some departure from reality. If you want it 10 times smaller, we need to use another renderer. We could wish that the SM engineering team was 30 people, but it isn't. As far as I know, pretty much one guy wrote all the new renderer stuff. You want them to put 5 people on rendering technology improvements, then be prepared to pay $800 per copy.

Here's a demo. Crappy quality, but quick. I cranked up the Diffuse_Value on the balls to make it more obvious.

Besides which, for perfect realism we'll probably need to start brushing up on our morphing and posing skills - the subtle imperfections start to look a lot more glaring the closer we get to realism.

is this GI working with image based lighting ? for example in your outdoor render did you use an image to get the right colors from the sky,trees,....? 

No I didn't use IBL. I simply used my environment sphere as always, which is self-lit. The GI automatically sampled it.

I could use IBL and it would do similar sampling, but you would not have the positional effect, where moving an object changes its lighting. IBL ignores position - only looks at orientation.

With GI and the environment sphere, if you put a wall between the figure and the EnvSphere, then the wall will block the EnvSphere light and supply its own light. This would not happen with IBL.

Quote - Besides which, for perfect realism we'll probably need to start brushing up on our morphing and posing skills - the subtle imperfections start to look a lot more glaring the closer we get to realism.

Totally. I was fighting the low-polyness of the jacket. Had to turn on smooth polygons, but even then it doesn't look right. Frankly, I don't like the jacket geometry much at all. The molded shoulders and breasts are totally unrealistic. But I had to put something on her because I didn't want to post a nude. SM is going to be using these for promos.