What is IBL. I have poser 7 and thinking of upgrading to poser 8 if the renders will come out much better. Someone mentioned IDL to me and i just wanted to know what it is and does?

You asked about IBL but mentioned IDL. They are different things.

IBL is in P7 which you have.

IDL is in P8.

IDL implements a calculation of light bouncing around between objects. Without IDL, you have to fake this secondary lighting. It is a big step forward in realism, particularly for interiors where the secondary lighting is not a constant through the whole scene. But even in a simple scene with a lone figure and some walls, the realism is greatly improved.

IBL doesn't take into account how objects not only illuminate each other, but they color each other. Place a white ball on a red table, and the bottom of the ball should be pink. Place another ball on a blue table, and the bottom of the ball should be blue.

You can fake either of these with an Image Based Light that has red or blue in the bottom, but you can't do both at the same time. This effect, called color bleeding, is really important. It happens in armpits and between legs, under the chin, behind the ear, etc. IDL does this.

Have a look at Carodan's image here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?image_id=2006376

That look (the lighting I mean, not the great pose, composition, etc.) was impossible before P8 without a tremendous effort on your part. Now you just turn on IDL.

Thanks BB, now for one more question. Should i switch over to poser 8? Will the renders i do become more "REAL" looking with poser 8 features? Such as IDL?

P8 renders faster and can better take advantage of new computers with more cores

P8 has other improvements such as lights with inverse linear and inverse square falloff.

P8 has soft ray-traced shadows that don't look grainy, because you can adjust the sampling rate.

There's no doubt in my mind that P8 reduces the effort to achieve realism over P7. And for certain types of scenes, it does things that P7 just cannot do, no matter how tricky you get with shaders.  So I highly prefer it.

Of course, if you're not going to make the effort to learn the new features and use them, then there won't be any difference except rendering speed.

If you're thinking of switching and money is no object (or SM announces great upgrade pricing) I'd consider waiting for Poser Pro 2010.  It has gamma correction, another important ingredient for realism. There are ways to incorporate GC into P8 and P7, but it's just a lot easier with Poser Pro.

So poser pro 2010 is going to be a better version then poser 8?  Also whats the difference? does Pro take different files?

Pro 2010 features will be the same as previous versions of Poser except for what BB outlined in his post.  The major important feature is gamma correction which is vastly ignored by many but is critical to how lighting is implemented into scenes.

Right.

Here is a summary of what I think are the most important key features with regard to rendering. There are many other things, like morph tool improvements, UI improvements, wxPython, but those don't affect your ability to produce better renders - they just change your workflow.

Poser Pro (today) is Poser 7 plus

• Gamma correction built into the renderer
• Network rendering (using multiple computers you own to share the load)
• 64-bit rendering (to be able to render much more content in one scene)
• More ways to import/export data for other applications and renderers.
• Output can be HDRI (to produce images to be postworked with more sophistication or to produce image content to be used in subsequent renders)

Poser 8 is Poser 7 plus

• IDL (for realistic secondary lighting)
• Light falloff (for realistic primary lighting)
• Soft ray-traced shadows with sampling control (for realistic shadows)
• Vastly improved hair rendering (real hair, not trans-mapped)
• Tone mapping (sort of does what Photoshop Levels does and allows squishing HDR data into an LDR image)
• More efficient use of multi-core CPUs

Poser Pro 2010 is all of that combined, plus other new stuff I can't talk about.
 

sweet, im gonna hold off then till pro 2010 comes out. Any idea when the release date is?  And about how much its going to be?

Any idea of release date? Yes, but if I told you I'd have to kill you.

How much? Same answer.

Oh, I forgot that I am allowed to give a hint. PPro 2010 will be released before May. Draw your own conclusions about what the real ship date would be from that.

i thought that GC will not be with poser .never.

i dont understand why GC needs to be in poser pro and not in poser 8. its not like you need to do more work then in poser 8 with TM. we know that GC is better then TM.

confused.

Any of the features of PPro could be in P8. You're looking at it the wrong way. You're looking at PoserPro as a premium version of Poser. It's the other way around. Poser is a light version of Poser Pro. By definition, a light version has some features removed, in order to offer a cheaper solution to a major subset of the market. You know as well as anybody that most users don't understand why GC is needed, don't understand why they have to re-think how they use transparency maps and displacement maps when GC is involved, and could care less about it and don't want to pay for it.

 BB,

Allow me to hyjack the thread for a moment.

Re GC... why (often) when I am using IDL with GC enabled do the colors appear washed out? When I turn GC off, the colors are deep and vivid. Am I underlit and GC is dragging things up to normal or is there something more fundimental going on.

Asked another way, is GC to video what an automatic gain control is the audio? Or is it something quite different? (Which, obviously, I'd like you to explain!) :)

D.

You're over lit, not under lit. Traditional Poser without GC required some form of compensation, otherwise things appear too dark. So many Poser light sets are loaded with extra light in order to manually GC the image by throwing more light at it.

WIth GC, you're seeing what's really going on.

Thinking of GC as a hearing aid which corrects your inability to hear things. Think of light as the volume control on a stereo. Before you got the hearing aid, you cranked up the volume so you could hear music. But then you could not hear the telephone ringing, just the music, and you did not have a proper perception of the sound in the room. Things are out of balance.

Now you turn on your hearing aid (GC), which corrects the real problem - that you don't hear very well. (The actual problem is that monitors do not display dark things very well.) Suddenly the music is too loud! You must turn the stereo volume down after you get the hearing aid. Then you can hear the music and the telephone.

 Many thanks! Exactly what I needed to know!