This pic doesn't do justice to what I'm seeing on my end.

 Thanks for the renders, looks good.

Notice how the red from the Mini 'lights' the surrounding road.

Cool.  Are you using an Enviroment Sphere? .... The P8 version appears to be much more natural looking.  (daytime ambient light)

Looks good Cspear!

dark and cs, thx fr the excellent renders.  in neither render do I see certain occlusion errors and other artifacts that some of the others were able to produce.  in both cases, please describe light settings, render settings and script settings in more detail.  material settings and geometires are also of interest, but for now it may be a good idea to limit the number of variables under consideration.

Quote - Cool.  Are you using an Enviroment Sphere? .... The P8 version appears to be much more natural looking.  (daytime ambient light)

B: > Quote - in neither render do I see certain occlusion errors and other artifacts that some of the others were able to produce.  in both cases, please describe light settings, render settings and script settings in more detail.  material settings and geometires are also of interest, but for now it may be a good idea to limit the number of variables under consideration.

A: yes, that's bagginsbill's env sphere for the sky.

B: render settings as in screenshot; 1 infinite light at 85%, raytraced shadows; no scripts in this one; for bright materials (close to white) I've found it's best to set diffuse values to 0.8 - 0.9 to avoid burn-out; most of the figures and props are the 'LeVillage' set available at DAZ, as are the vehicles - others are stuff from here or RDNA which I've had for years.

The thing that really slowed the IDL render down was the windows on the LeVillage buildings - I suspect they have reflection or specular nodes. I'll do another with 'visible in raytracing' disabled for these and see what happens.

Well, you only had one raytrace bounce... I imagine your 0.00 minimum shading rate is slowing things down more than anything (?).

But wow! what a lovely image! Is that the size of the actual render? (I'm not getting render times that low, but I tend to render at considerably larger sizes.)

Quote - Well, you only had one raytrace bounce... I imagine your 0.00 minimum shading rate is slowing things down more than anything (?).

But wow! what a lovely image! Is that the size of the actual render? (I'm not getting render times that low, but I tend to render at considerably larger sizes.)

The actual render was 993 x 734 pixels. I find that higher min shading rates make the image too fuzzy for my taste.

Still experimenting with settings and lights.
The figure is V4 and the Mech is something I modeled and rigged over the weekend. I am using 3 maps and various nodes.
Hope this is helpful.

Where the artifacts show up is where surfaces are lit mostly or entirely by bounced light.  In any case where you have shadows turned off for any light, or lit directly by a fill light, the artifacts may be harder to notice or not there.  This means when you have an IBL light in your image, and it has shadows turned off (which is typical, as far as I'm aware) then it may obscure or prevent this particular render artifact I've been complaining about.  This doesn't mean it's a fix all technique though.

Quote - 1- IBL light with A.O., no shadows, 65% (FillLight)

f.ex

If I remember correctly, Stefan Werner (stewer) was explaining that the renderer automatically disables AO on lights, when indirect lighting is enabled.

Quote - For comparison, here's the same scene rendered with P7 render settings: just over 4 minutes to render.

wrong. poser was in version 7 able to do AO. you dont use AO.
so saying that this is how it looks in 7 is wrong IMO.

plus it may sound mean but just showing simple clicks is not good enough IMO. GI is obvious 100% realistic and physical correct. but lets not act like GI is the only way to go. poser renders look fake because people dont take time to make them better. ILM,WETA and pixar were using AO and simple lights for years. 

dont be mad but it pisses me off that you posted a poser 7 render for comparison and you didnt use AO. AO

Yeah here's that info from Stefan about AO on lights:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2778431&page=3#message_3494060

Quote - Indirect light will skip AO on lights, as AO is the fast approximation of what indirect light is doing for real.

So really that 65% IBL is acting as an omni fill, which is the kind of thing (imo) that you shouldn't really require under GI, except maybe for simulating sunlight.  For indoor lighting imo it will always look wierd.

Quote - So really that 65% IBL is acting as an omni fill, which is the kind of thing (imo) that you shouldn't really require under GI, except maybe for simulating sunlight.  For indoor lighting imo it will always look wierd.

If i'm not wrong, BB said in another thread that using his environment sphere OR using an IBL light with IL enabled was more or less the same thing.
He said the IBL acts differently when IL is on, it projects the map on a 'virtual' sphere that surrounds the scene, the way his env sphere works.

They may do very similar things, but they aren't exactly the same in this context.  Ambient light emitted by some environment sphere will be occluded (create a shadow) by intervening surfaces, while IBL with shadows off will not - the IBL light will pass right through AND be bounced by indirect lighting (which is always going to be wrong).

 A tangent on this: WHERE do you people get good sky images for that environment sphere? I've looked at so many "equirectangular images" that my eyes bleed - but I found NO proper sky images. The few ones I found were all so small that it left them horribly pixelated.

Is it possible to use a sky node on the sphere? Or won't prodedural textures look right as reflections? I must admit I've only considered it, not actually tried it yet.

Quote - dont be mad but it pisses me off that you posted a poser 7 render for comparison and you didnt use AO. AO

I think you've misunderstood something, somewhere. I didn't detail my P7 render settings, so unless you can read my mind you don't know whether I used AO or not.

To put you out of your misery, the P7 render uses 1 infinite light with AO and 1 IBL without, which may sound a bit weird, but it works for me.

For the P8 render the infinite light was left as is (i.e. with AO still on) but I turned off the IBL

Have a look at the DOSCH HDRI image maps if you want to pay for 'em

http://www.doschdesign.com/

(assuming Poser can read .hdr images that is - you can convert them I believe)

Quote -  A tangent on this: WHERE do you people get good sky images for that environment sphere?

Here is a good place to start. Also try searching Google images for 'equirectangular'.

EDIT: if you have Vue, you can set up an atmosphere and render it as equirectangular - I've achieved some good results using the PLE.

Quote - For the P8 render the infinite light was left as is (i.e. with AO still on) but I turned off the IBL

That means AO was turned off after all, in the P8 render (taking stewer at face value).

Quote - Is it possible to use a sky node on the sphere? Or won't prodedural textures look right as reflections? I must admit I've only considered it, not actually tried it yet.

You mean clouds?  There's no reason procedural textures can't be used like this, but you need to have some kind of gradient - the sky is not a flat, uniformly colored thing.

Quote - > Quote - For the P8 render the infinite light was left as is (i.e. with AO still on) but I turned off the IBL

That means AO was turned off after all, in the P8 render (taking stewer at face value).

Indeed, but ice-boy seemed troubled that I hadn't used it for the P7 render, when in fact I had.

For what it's worth, I'm trying to be scientific about putting P8 through its paces to try and determine 'best practice' so I'm changing as few parameters at one time as possible.

Early indications are that Specular nodes really bog the renderer down whereas Reflection nodes don't - well, not as much. Also, turning on or off smooth polygons in the render settings or on the object itself  influences those nasty dark splotches, but not in a way that makes any sense to me yet.

I believe the P8 manual (or some piece of official P8 documentation, at any rate) says to disable smooth polygons when using IDL.

I didn't really have any comment about that, as simulating outdoor light is not something I've put a lot of effort into, I mostly do indoor lighting.

Quote -  A tangent on this: WHERE do you people get good sky images for that environment sphere? I've looked at so many "equirectangular images" that my eyes bleed - but I found NO proper sky images. The few ones I found were all so small that it left them horribly pixelated.

I highly recommend Phillippe Hurbain's site (www.philohome.com) that is linked to on BagginsBill's page that cspears mentioned a few postings ago.  Some of the best I've found so far.

Quote - I believe the P8 manual (or some piece of official P8 documentation, at any rate) says to disable smooth polygons when using IDL.

That sounds like nonsense, no offense.  If the manual actually says that, uh, wow.

I'll see if I can find it. It may have been in the post-installation Readme file, can't remember exactly where I read it.

Pretty sure it isn't in the manual, I just spent some time reading all the sections that deal with indirect lighting.

Ah, I guess my summary was a bit exaggerated, sorry. And technically it's about raytracing rather than IDL.

Here's the actual quote from the installation readme:

Quote -
 

• There are some situations where polygonal smoothing and raytracing should not be used at the same time since shadows at the edge of object can appear with black artifacts. Disabling smoothing or disabling raytracing solves this issue. If you are using reflections, try disabling polygonal smoothing or adjusting the shadow bias to minimize or eliminate artifacts.

 

• Raytraced shadows or reflections cannot always accurately take into account micro-polygon smoothed or micro-displaced polygons.

 

Yeah that's a separate issue - also disappointing though, I'd have hoped this was improved in Poser 8.

Quote - > Quote - dont be mad but it pisses me off that you posted a poser 7 render for comparison and you didnt use AO. AO

I think you've misunderstood something, somewhere. I didn't detail my P7 render settings, so unless you can read my mind you don't know whether I used AO or not.

To put you out of your misery, the P7 render uses 1 infinite light with AO and 1 IBL without, which may sound a bit weird, but it works for me.

For the P8 render the infinite light was left as is (i.e. with AO still on) but I turned off the IBL

you are aware that this is not how this works right?

if you have AO on the infinite light and use an IBL then the IBL will destroy everything. you need to have AO on the materials or on the IBL to make the it darker in the  ambient part.

so no offense but hte point of AO is to get soft ambient shadows when things are close.and in the shadow parts where its flat from teh IBL. and you dont have them because you use AO on the infinite light.
what i am saying is that you didnt use it right. so i still stand by my words that you made a bad example when you compared GI to the oldschool IBL.

you can really see the lighting difference in the recesses around the building windows.  The windows have more depth.

Quote - Yeah here's that info from Stefan about AO on lights:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2778431&page=3#message_3494060

Quote - Indirect light will skip AO on lights, as AO is the fast approximation of what indirect light is doing for real.

So really that 65% IBL is acting as an omni fill, which is the kind of thing (imo) that you shouldn't really require under GI, except maybe for simulating sunlight.  For indoor lighting imo it will always look wierd.

As I posted in another thread today, IBL works differently with IDL.

When IDL is on, IBL is projected on an infinite sphere. Shadows are correctly produced if something gets between the rendered object and blocks visibility to the infinite sphere, no matter how far away the blocking object is. This is wildly different from AO, which only looks at nearby things. With IDL and IBL, a building will prevent a large part of the sky from lighting things around the building. Of course, the building itself will bounce skylight from other parts of the sky onto the backs of local figures and props, which is also a fabulous reason to use IBL for outdoor, if you do not use my Environment Sphere for scenery.

Something like a closed room with no windows (a box) COMPLETELY blocks visibility to the infinite IBL sphere. So in a box, IBL does nothing whatsoever if IDL is on. Only light sources inside a closed room will matter. If there are windows, then the IBL will influence things inside the box, bot only to the extent that the window provides visibility to the virtual infinite IBL sphere.

If you use my EnvSphere, it completely blocks all visibility to the infinite IBL sphere. So the ambient lighting will come from my EnvSphere instead, and automatically match whatever scenery you've loaded on it. There is no point whatsoever to use both EnvSphere and IBL. The IBL does nothing in that case.

AO on a light is ignored when IDL is turned on. AO on an infinite light decreases realism, so it's great that Poser ignored any instructions to do that when IDL is enabled.

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