Ah, you beat me to it!

Quote - Here it is.
Only illumination coming from the white square. Absolutely no lights in the scene.

Nice. Does altering the angle of the white plane alter the angle of the light reflected upon the figure or just narrow it..?

True area lights would be a lot faster than using IDL for this. And a word of caution is called for; the level of detail/calculation required to sample the environment well enough to do a perfect job of lighting via a relatively small, self-lit rectangle is extraordinary. The recent optimizations (compromises) that led to a significant speedup for IDL also led to some restrictions in how crazy you can go with this.

SM will be working on improving the utility of IDL in the coming weeks. These improvments will likely show up in a service release. By that I do not mean that it isn't useful as it is right now. I've shown you plenty of renders where the quality was good enough that you could use less aggressive render settings, giving us usable GI in a few minutes.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - > Quote - bagginsbill can you please show a render of a figure with one white square . i want to see how it would look if we would use a square like a window for area lighting. so something big like a window.

I can do it.
But can it be any figure?
Can it be my robot mecha?

any figure. but without lights.

You're talking about using a square with 100% white in the Ambient channel, rendering with Global Illumination on.  Do not confuse this with an area light as used in other rendering apps, this is just Global Illumination doing what it's supposed to do.  The term "area light" has a specific meaning in other apps that is not related to GI.

Also note, you pretty much have to have some kind of polygonal environment (a ground plane, at least) for GI to do very much of anything.

edit: manoloz got your point obviously, although note it would behave differently with a ground plane

i understand this. i just want to see if i can get with GI at least some lighting  from props with 100% control.

Huge!

Thanks for your renders

Quote - > Quote - Here it is.

Only illumination coming from the white square. Absolutely no lights in the scene.

Ah, you beat me to it!

can we somehow change specular lighting?

Sag mal Stefan, bei den flecken (am Boden) kann man da noch was an den Render Einstellungen verbessern?

Mazak

Quote - SM will be working on improving the utility of IDL in the coming weeks. These improvments will likely show up in a service release...

Much could be interpreted from that sentence... drools

Mein Bild wurde in einer Beta gerendert, die final version hat noch ein paar Verbesserungen für's indirekte Licht, und ich gehe davon aus dass eventuelle Service Releases auch noch die eine oder andere Optimierung mit sich bringen.

Quote - > Quote - Here it is.

Only illumination coming from the white square. Absolutely no lights in the scene.

Ah, you beat me to it!

:-) not by much. Nice image, btw.

Curious, isn't is, how the same request generated two different images, which use the same figures, but look somehow different in mood etc.

Quote - Mein Bild wurde in einer Beta gerendert, die final version hat noch ein paar Verbesserungen für's indirekte Licht, und ich gehe davon aus dass eventuelle Service Releases auch noch die eine oder andere Optimierung mit sich bringen.

Danke, echt Klasse Arbeit an Poser 8

Mazak

Quote - True area lights would be a lot faster than using IDL for this. And a word of caution is called for; the level of detail/calculation required to sample the environment well enough to do a perfect job of lighting via a relatively small, self-lit rectangle is extraordinary.

True, while indirect diffuse light can certainly reproduce certain area light effects, it's not a full replacement. Note on the other hand, that in my image you can also see how light from the box gets reflected off the ground and illuminates the back of the figure, which would be completely dark if there was just a plain area light.

pjz99,

I think most of the emphasis was put on getting the new programming and content right, not on re-working legacy content.

It doesn;t necessarily mean a fix for the figures needs to wait for a full service release of Poser. SM could issue a simple Cr2 updater (thaty did this with either Miki or Olivia if I recall correctly. For that matter you could make the fix and encode it and place it in free stuff if it causes you so many problems (not meant badly, just one possible solution).

Naturally this may mean that every clothing content malker for the earlier figures would may need to make updates as well, so I don;t really expect it to catch on. but it IS an answer.

Personally I think that SM will proably concentrate on the new rigging features in the Poser 8 figures. They do present a lot of new terratory to explore...

Note I don;t speak for SM in any way shape or form, I'm just suggesting a possible fix..

No supper for you, Stefan, until you make this work. :-) Just kidding.

Note: this is the low-res Ryan.

Now I'm going to dinner with my boss. :-) CU later.

Quote - i understand this. i just want to see if i can get with GI at least some lighting  from props with 100% control.

Unless SM has added selective compositing control of GI and other effects (like lighting) - and since they haven't bragged about this highly useful and valuable feature, that isn't likely - then you won't have 100% control at all.  You'd only do something like that if you had a very specific effect in mind, like a glowing instrument panel illuminating stuff nearby (think Star Trek control panels).  Otherwise a simple light is likely to be much easier to work with (or even an array of lights) as well as quicker to render, based on experience with other GI rendering apps.

Quote - It doesn;t necessarily mean a fix for the figures needs to wait for a full service release of Poser. SM could issue a simple Cr2 updater (thaty did this with either Miki or Olivia if I recall correctly.

You don't get this bug.  It isn't with the content, it's with the way Poser interprets it.  Failing to fix it means fucked up content, asymmetrical bends, and workarounds for all non-lazy content providers who realize this bug FOREVER.  FOR EVER.  That is bad.  Fixing it may require updating some rigs that were jacked with to try to work around the bug, but in many cases (e.g. the many people who don't get this bug) the content creator will have just done Figure -> Symmetry and not rigorously checked every single joint, every single falloff zone.  In these cases it is likely that fixing the bug will require no change to existing CR2s.

Bagginsbill's render

Quote - Here's where I run into a little problem. The glowing rectangle is outside the room, shining in through a large doorway. The figure looks fine, but the room needs some work. This was with maximum values for IC and ILQ.

In other rendering apps, I would say stochastic samples is too small.

First off, thanks to those with Poser8 for giving us a sneak peak at what it has to offer and for putting up with everyone's questions and comments regarding same.

With that, another question. I find that in Poser Pro when animating with AO the areas darkened by the AO tend to jump around with every frame. I don't quite know why, I think it has something to do with the fact that AO is calculated anew for each frame on a bucket by bucket basis.

Anyways, is this "jumpy AO" issue something that has been addressed with Poser8, or is it something that is made irrelevant with the use of the new GI lighting system?

The new AO algorithm thingy is monstrously faster than before.

they have new AO?

Not a new interface, but improved, tweaked and etc code. I'm no coder, so I cannot really say how come it is different,  but I CAN see render times with AO turned on render much faster.

What about artifacts, manoloz? I almost gave up on AO because of the black splotches everywhere.

incredible. i always use AO. its IMO very powerful and very practical.

Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination are "kissing cousins", so I don't think it's very surprising that AO got improved with all the work that has been put into GI.

Quote - What about artifacts, manoloz? I almost gave up on AO because of the black splotches everywhere.

poser 7 SP3 fixed this.

No splotches on my AO renders. I'ld render an example, but I'm rendering a big archviz scen right now. If nobody beats me to it, I'll throw a render once the machine is free

so what do you folks consider a reasonble box to use poser 8 in .. or 7 for that matter?
sorry to throw this out a bit, but all this new and improved lighting has to play havoc with rendering .. or not ?

Quote - With that, another question. I find that in Poser Pro when animating with AO the areas darkened by the AO tend to jump around with every frame. I don't quite know why, I think it has something to do with the fact that AO is calculated anew for each frame on a bucket by bucket basis.

That may come from the caching that is being done to accelerate AO - instead of calculating AO for every single shading point, it only calculates them at some and interpolates in others. The "irradiance caching" slider will control that ratio. For AO, setting it to 100 will make it calculate AO explicitly for every pixel, and would probably fix the interpolation artifacts you're seeing at the expense of extra render time.

Whoops, my bad I re-read your instructions and see that it was the buttocks bones your talking about not the thigh.

Yes I see the problem now. and it appears in the new figures as well, apparently Poser reads the right side is read as a minus and the left is read as a plus. Is this what you see and are talking about? It also appears in every figure I've checked with a buttocks set. Is this what you are getting too?
again sorry for the first pics and mistake and thanks for helping me understand soething I hadn;t noticed before now.

Please note, that bug happens to appear on Sydney at the left and right buttocks - in other figures it can occur in other places, for example on DAZ SP3 it occurs on the shins.  I suspect that it has to do with the order in which bones are read in as the CR2 is loaded but I don't know.  In adding bones to an existing figure - say, you want to add bones to Simon's chest so you can move his pectorals around - this bug may appear and cause problems.  If you're rigging an original figure it can also appear.  It shows up in rigging conforming clothing, e.g. you'll find very few conforming high-heel shoes for DAZ SP3 because the bug produces asymmetrical bending once the shoes are conformed onto the character.  Even if you hand-edit the CR2, and key in mathematically symmetrical values, once they are read in by Poser the bug still appears.  It is a very, very bad bug for the content creator.

edit: additionally, the same CR2s will be read in correctly by DAZ|Studio and interPoser Pro/Cinema 4d.  The Poser knockoffs actually read Poser content better than Poser.

"I thinks I just felt a rift in the Force...", Yoda said.

would advise caution in re: posting rendering artifacts here, prior to general release of first public version.  in addition, whilst all developers may be justifiably proud of the new version, not all may wish any undue publicity.

 BB's hint that something happens tomorrow...
on CP Karanta has released "Alyson Dynamic Dress Closet"
With this set you will get 10 dynamic dresses for Alyson (Poser 8 female). 

which is on sale until August 15th
one would have to assume nobody would close a sale before the character is released :)

http://www.contentparadise.com/ProductDetails.aspx?id=11097
or
www.contentparadise.com/ProductDetails.aspx

interesting observation. Maybe they will announce the release tomorrow at Siggraph and put it on sale on 8/5 or 8/10.  Now wouldn't that be cool :)

still the question remains...will it run on my old AMD 64/3200+ 1.5gig ram computer ?

We've covered this a bit. Poser 8 runs faster than Poser 7, if you ask it to do no more than you asked of Poser 7.

If you ask it to do Poser 8 things, like GI, it will be slower. How much slower depends on how much you ask it to do. If you ask it to render like Maya, it will be very slow indeed, unless you have a very fast machine with 4 or 8 cores.

Re-posting the timing results from the 3-tank render on page 44 of this thread.

*I just re-rendered with timing turned on, using the last scene, with 3 tanks. Keep in mind I don't even consider the IBL+AO version usable. I'd probably do more complicated lighting and postwork to get this type of image to look good in Poser 7. But let's compare anyway.

IBL+AO = 169 seconds
IDL = 227 seconds

Quote - interesting observation. Maybe they will announce the release tomorrow at Siggraph and put it on sale on 8/5 or 8/10.  Now wouldn't that be cool :)

Maybe it will be at the First Friday Bazaar for $1.99...

NAHHHH! :tt2:

Quote - so what do you folks consider a reasonble box to use poser 8 in .. or 7 for that matter?
sorry to throw this out a bit, but all this new and improved lighting has to play havoc with rendering .. or not ?

I run Poser 7 on everything from an old AMD 4300 to an i7. The same with Poser Pro and Poser 8

http://my.smithmicro.com/win/poser/index.html

... On the Windows side, I use XP, XP 64, Vista, Vista 64...

All can run the programs. The i7 is the fastest Rendering. Poser 8 flies with the i7

Oh, by the way.. it is for sale.... http://my.smithmicro.com/win/poser/index.html

Enjoy

Has anybody on the dev/beta teams tested Poser 8 with Windoze 7 64 bit..?

I doubt it will be a problem as Poser Pro works fine, but it would be nice to get confirmation prior to the release of Poser 8.

**
                         ** OMG..!!!

Here is the full listing of the Poser 8 offerings.

http://www.contentparadise.com/SearchListView.aspx?catid=7&cat=Software

Downloading right now :-)

Quote -

Downloading right now :-)

Me too :)

I bought three Poser 8 licenses;  can I use the same downloaded installer for all three computers, activating each with it's own unique serial?

Quote - I bought three Poser 8 licenses;  can I use the same downloaded installer for all three computers, activating each with it's own unique serial?

As far as I know - it's the same file for each order as long as they are on the same platform, and you will only need your unique serial.

Correction... Trying to download right now :-(

So far download of Poser 8 installation file 625.6 MB has crashed 3 times... at 300 MB and <200 MB.

I am getting a very slow download speed of 168 Kb/sec although my line is capable of and regularly achieves a download speed of 2 MB/sec.

Just a question:
there is no introductory price and no additional content for early buyers?
I hope so, in that case I can wait until the servers are not that squeaking under a heavy load.

Quote - Just a question:
there is no introductory price and no additional content for early buyers?
I hope so, in that case I can wait until the servers are not that squeaking under a heavy load.

There is a special offer for the full version for $199.99 for a limited time that will be sent to email subscribers with a special link later today, but no additional discount on the $129.99 upgrade version of Poser.