I think many of us purchased... or are thinking of purchasing... Poser 8 for its ability to use Indirect lighting.

Personally... I am finding it difficult to achieve decent renders using indirect lighting and GI.

I appreciate that the subject has been discussed in other threads, but the details of how to use it correctly, settings, etc., are scattered within threads with a Huge number of posts covering many aspects of Poser 8 in general..

Could the Poser 8 Gurus please reveal the secrets of using Indirect Lighting and GI within Poser 8 in a more... dedicated thread..? Pleeease..!

Once you're reasonably satisfied with the GI lighting (do test renders with low settings to get an idea of where the light will bounce, etc), scale the entire scene up 10,000%, hit render, and then go do something else or use another computer :)

Why scale the scene up 10,000%? :huh:

As far as I can tell, any combination of settings has problems with artifacts of one form or another.

I saw your artifacts, pjz. They disappear once high settings are kicked in.

I am rendering V4 close up illuminated by nothing but two glowing boxes (no lights) and AO in nodes. Her hi-res skins.

Render settings low = artifacts.

Render settings cranked = gorgeous renders.

indirect light quality = 100%
bounces = 6
Irradiation cache = 50
Pixel Samples = 36
Min Shade Rate = .21

no tone map, i am not ready for the adventure of finding out what that is yet!

800x500 renders in 1/2 hour
Q6600 quad
8 gig RAM

I'll post a render or two later today.
I think the GI is great. No free lunch.

I read elsewhere that Stewar says no need for such 'high' I.Cache but I am working backwards: as I continue to get great renders I'll keep turning the settings down to get better timings.

I have not even begun to engage HDRI lighting, domes, etc.

::::: Opera :::::

P.S. I miss the OpenEXR format dammit. Looks like it will be 6-9 months until Pro is out and I get it back.

Quote - I saw your artifacts, pjz. They disappear once high settings are kicked in.get it back.

I rendered at the highest settings the app supports (and higher than that, via Python commands for GI bounces and # of stochastic samples), and I get artifacts.  Are you rendering a single naked figure, or what?

Here, try this scene file.
http://cid-b233dcaeefa9709c.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Poser8%20samples/Test%20for%20Stewer.zip

. poser 8 doesnt have openEXR? does this mean that we can not save the render as HDR? 

Yes, just a single naked figure so far, but also with Poser strand hair.

I'll try that Stewar scene later.

Correct you cannot save a render to OpenEXR format in Poser8.

Quote - ...close up illuminated by nothing but two glowing boxes (no lights)...

Render settings low = artifacts.

Render settings cranked = gorgeous renders.

indirect light quality = 100%
bounces = 6
Irradiation cache = 50
Pixel Samples = 36
Min Shade Rate = .21

Could you please explain about the glowing boxes..?

What sort of dimensions... how do we make them... glow..?

Could you maybe show a pic of the setup you used prior to render..?

Many thanxz.

If you're at the stage of rendering a single naked figure, I wonder how you can conclude that artifacts never appear in any combination of scene or settings.

Quote - Could you please explain about the glowing boxes..?

The Ambient channel of a material now acts the way you'd expect to: it makes the material emit light of the supplied color value, and that light can illuminate other stuff.

Quote - > Quote - Could you please explain about the glowing boxes..?

The Ambient channel of a material now acts the way you'd expect to: it makes the material emit light of the supplied color value, and that light can illuminate other stuff.

Thanks for that pjz99 :-)

Worth noting that "Number of raytrace bounces" render setting also controls the number of GI bounces - it shouldn't imo, but that's what it seems to do.

Never mind prz.  I am happy. You are not. I never meant to imply 'never.'  will be posting renders later.

Have a nice day.

::::: Opera :::::

pjz really? the raytracing bounces is what control the lighting bounces? so if you have set it to 1 it will only have one bounce? 
so we can control it ? 

Seems so.  On the other hand, this will include reflection depth, so imo it's not really an ideal way to do it, but I guess it's better than not having any control at all.

PJZ: the reason for scaling the scene 10,000% is that it significantly reduces the size of the artifacts, to the point where they virtually disappear with high render settings coupled with the scaling. A million tiny artifacts look much better than a few hundred large ones.

That's a good idea, I'll try that.  Although bump/displacement settings would need some attention, for each and every material, that's at least a surmountable problem.

pjz did you solve the problem with those ugly black spots? 

Yep, and the dependent parameters editor should make those things easier to adjust based on scaling :)

ice-boy: no, but I did :) Read my first reply in this thread.

you mean the one where it says 6 bounces?

6 bounces is not normal.

No, he's talking about scaling the scene up.  I have a render running right now testing that myself.  It appears that this forces the renderer to use many more rays, based on the number of red dots (which I presume to be ray hits, but I dunno) and based on the render time so far - which is MUCH longer, but if it renders cleanly that's not a big concern.

but still. GI needs to work without scaling.

Occurs to me that scaling up the scene and lights will probably break light attenuation/falloff but I'm somewhat less concerned about that, one thing at a time.

Quote - but still. GI needs to work without scaling.

Yes, yes it does, but I'd at least like to have a workaround in the mean time until a patch is prepared and released.

is anyone other then you getting those problems? 

It may be that other users are just not composing scenes that will provoke it (e.g. a single naked character generally won't).  It shows up most obviously where there is a lot of corners and crevices where rays seem to be "dying early".

Hi
@ pzj99
Im curious IIRC Dont you have C4D with AR3??

Yes, but since I'm currently trying to market Poser content it rather behooves me to try to get the stuff to look good in Poser.  Eventually I'll give up on this and move on to character modeling and rigging in Cinema/MOCCA.

Oh and as far getting Away from poser rigs altogether, its something I am consider as well for Character animation especially for the Hair and softbody dynamics.

Cheers.

Very perceptive, wolf. It is a "young" GI engine, and I expect it to get better very quickly as a wider audience puts it through its paces. Frankly, during the Beta, most of the testers never even turned it on, I think. Most of the tester's reports had to do with how the library behaved with runtimes running into the terabyte range. :-)

#1 tip for newcomers to indirect light: Turn on your shadows! We're trying to simulate reality here, so make sure the light you put in that scene is reasonably realistic too.

If you have shadows turned off, objects that should be in the shadow and dark will cast light on surrounding surfaces, making areas taht should be shadowed even brighter! Talk about glowing nostrils...

i am getting a nerv-breakdown.

people using GI without shadows. i knew it would happen he he he he he

Quote - i am getting a nerv-breakdown.

people using GI without shadows. i knew it would happen he he he he he

Well to be fair Many poser users have no experience with a  true GI  render engine so there will be a learning curve hopefully not too steep.

Cheers

... to be even more fair many posers have no experience with shadows either...

Quote - ... to be even more fair many posers have no experience with shadows either...

Sad but very true

Cheers

I'm still waiting for the tips here folks. HSV has been mentioned elsewhere in conjunction with IL as has tone mapping but nobody's said where those features are located to be twiddled with that I've found. Also, for IL to work, does the ambiant object need an ambiance value of 1 or greater? I'm not having any luck with objects in the decimal ranges shedding any light.

InTel Mac, only in P8 about 2 hours. If I use the light sets that came with P8 in the poser 8 lights folder I get artifacts in places in shadow areas like under V4's armpits and along dress shoulder strap areas against her body. Use some of my other light sets no artifacts. Same render settings. But need more time to examine those lights. Busy trying to get my scripts from PPro copied over and get all my runtimes connected.

when using the glowing posersurfaces, e.g. glowing boxes, try posersurfaces with higher polygon densities to decrease artifacts.  try increasing glowing box ambient above 1.0 for brighter illumination in a no-light scene.

I second the request: can we see some screen shots of render settings? How many lights do you have in the scene? What are the light settings?
Obviously, these settings may not work for everyone, but it'll give a good starting point.

And most importantly, what are your system specs? Are you rendering a beautiful scene at 100% quality, but it takes 10 hours on a 64-bit, quad-processor system with 32G of RAM?

The reason I ask for some sample render settings is that last night I tried to render a scene using indirect lighting using one light, a V2 figure, the ground plane, and set to 750x750 pixels.
After 30 minutes, the entire Poser 8 screen was "white", which is the way Windows says "This program isn't responding to requests to redraw it".
By comparison, a global-illuminated scene in Lightwave, at Enhanced-Medium setting, and 1000x1000 pixels is almost finished in 20 minutes... and I can see the render progress as it happens.

Granted, I know this is the first version of Poser to attempt real GI lighting, so I wonder if my settings are too high... or if my computer is too old to handle all the calculations that Poser is doing.

You have to look in other threads, too. There are about 12 Poser 8 threads running, one of which has been going for weeks with screenshots and renders and info. I suggest you subscribe to them all, and read everything. Sort your forum by last reply, and you'll see where the action is.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2778408&page=3

@ bagginsbill

I understand that Poser 8 has to calculate... stuff... when using indirect lighting before the final rendering phase.

My question is... are all the little red dots meant to signify anything to the user... other than an indication that calculations are being made for the indirect lighting..?

I was thinking that if they don't actually mean anything, or aren't 'readable' would we not be better off without them. Wouldn't the calculation and render phase be much quicker if the program didn't have to plot all the dots in the preview window..?

In effect... its like doing 2 renders at twice the time of the actual render.

Quote -

@ bagginsbill

I understand that Poser 8 has to calculate... stuff... when using indirect lighting before the final rendering phase.

My question is... are all the little red dots meant to signify anything to the user... other than an indication that calculations are being made for the indirect lighting..?

I was thinking that if they don't actually mean anything, or aren't 'readable' would we not be better off without them. Wouldn't the calculation and render phase be much quicker if the program didn't have to plot all the dots in the preview window..?

In effect... its like doing 2 renders at twice the time of the actual render.

LOL!!! ( the re-Education begins)

Hi that prepass ( red dot pattern) is as necessary to calculating light in a GI render as sanding is to is to finishing a peice of fine wood work.
In C4D AR3 we have to option to "hide" the prepass but it still Occurs
just hidden at the same speed

You want GI in poser you have to be patient.

Cheers

Cheers

The dots tell us how closely spaced the GI samples are. If we observe them too far apart in some area we think needs more detail, we raise the Indirect Light Quality. If we observe them too close together, and we think we don't need that kind of detail, we lower the Indirect Light Quality, to gain speed. It also shows us how much work is being performed and we may choose to do an area render, or recompose, in order to avoid difficult areas during a test render.

The time it takes to put the dots on the screen is zero.

I'm getting to know them now, and I can optimize my render just by watching it a little while.

@ wolf359 and bagginsbill

Thanks. I was about to say... 'ahhh, now I understand'... but in truth I don't.

At least I now know that the process is neccessary, and can at least understand that part.

I can use Poser and its lights, shaders, etc., but have little idea as to why what does what.

The clue is in the tiltle of this particular thread.    :blushing:

If you put AO in nodes with Indirect, consider removing the AO from the eyelashes of human characters. Huge rendertime hit for AO on lashes with IL

I have reduced my bucket to 8 as an experiment. FF was leaving edges at bucket seams with it at 256 with IL on.

In all cases only lighting with primitive with ambient at 1.0

Number of Bounces creates accumulating brightness. IL with glowing boxes at 1.0 ambient, no other difference except bounces of 1,3 and 6, the more bounces, the brighter.

As Miss Nancy said above, one can turn up the ambient beyond 1.0, and if this lets me "get away with" fewer bounces and thus quicker render time, that will be a good thing.

That is, if fewer bounces does not degrade the beauty of the final illusion significantly. I don't want to be "not using enough bounces just so I can say it is GI".

::::: Opera :::::

I thought the little red dots were Poser's version of a little hour glass.

LMK

Quote -
Thanks. I was about to say... 'ahhh, now I understand'... but in truth I don't.

It's simple, really. The red dots indicate the frequency and spacing of samples, as has been said. More samples, more accuracy with bounced light, but longer render times.
Have a look at this link:
www.except.nl/lightwave/RadiosityGuide96/

It's for LightWave, but the idea is the same, and towards the bottom shows how the GI dots and guides help with determining accuracy vs. render time.

V4 in Poser8 GI

Only illumination is from several glowing boxes, the one behind her having a gold procedural material.

Only shadows from AO in nodes.

Took over an hour to render, but I probably had some settings over cranked. No Postwork

::::: Opera :::::

Nice effect operaguy, but yeah I'd say it's ovedone somewhat.
Looks cool though.