I do a lot of layered renders, multiple characters in the same image...and with the old P4 Render engine, you could simply save your image, and reimport it as a background over and over to render new figures into the scene...thereby layering them to create crowds.

However, with FIREFLY, I've noticed that every render pass, the background blurs just a tiny bit.  Normally this isn't a problem that Photoshop can't fix...but with four or five passes or re-renders to do layering the background continues to blur and blur until it's just plain screwed up.  Now of course I usually just work it out in Photoshop...but it's time consuming.

Does anybody know how or if this blurring can be fixed?  I've already checked and I'm not using motion-blur settings...no special items are turned on...so I'm not really sure this can be fixed.  I'm thinking it's a firefly bug of some sort [no pun intended].  

But if anybody has any ideas, please let me know.  I'm just curious if this is something that only I'm experiencing.

Thanks.

If that were my workflow, I think I'd be using Photoshop rather than using Poser rendering resources over and over.

The truth is, however, that unless you're doing shadowless images, your approach is disastrous as far as lighting goes, since background images do not interact with your lights.

I am attaching a screen shot of my Firefly settings.   Irregardless of my work method, the fact remains that Firefly is blurring, however slightly, my background images for some unknown reasons.  I'd like to correct this, but have found no manner in doing so.   I've read over some other similar postings and the problem is not due to min-shade rate, as I zero that...I'm also using min on post filtering. 

As for the previously mentioned Believable3D comment on my technique, you might read up on  "Shadowcaster"...it's a great little method for putting shadows into scenes with characters and produces very realistic and believable [no pun intended] image combinations...without being "disastrous".  I like to use Bryce for background/environment creation and renders and then import the image produced there into poser where characters are then added.   It's easier than trying to shift Poser people into other programs.  It's a cut-n-run technique, but it does speed my workflow...and I'm producing a lot of images...so it's imperative to do my work fast.

Again, I'm not wanting to discuss techniques here...I'm looking for sound technical advice on fixing this blur problem.   So please everyone...stay on topic here.

Have you set the texture filtering to "None" for your background images?

No...can you explain exactly where that's at.  Probably a moronic question, but I can't find anything in my P7 manual about turning it off.

Thanks for the help!

It's in the Material room, at the bottom of any Image Map node, titled "Filtering."

The settings are None, Fast, and Quality. There's some info on it in the Poser Reference Manual, pgs 335 and 351.

I concur - I believe this is due to texture filtering. I just tested with and without filtering. After 5 iterations with filtering, the image was very blurry. Without, it stayed the same after 15 iterations.

The background image is loaded in the Poser "Background" material. You will have to be in the material room advanced view to fix it. And when used as a background, the node is not called Image_Map. It is called BG Picture.

 BB - Riddle me this...

What is the purpose of filtering if you get better results with it off? Why was it put in? I've just tried this and think I'll leave it off forever!!!! :)

It's a faster way of anti-aliasing than super sampling the entire scene.

When you have a texture image that has fine, regularly spaced details, such as parallel lines, and you render it up close so that the details are bigger than a rendered pixel it looks fine. But if you move the object farther from the camera, the details become smaller than a pixel. Then it's a crapshoot as to whether or not any individual detail is picked up by a given pixel or not. If you don't do something about this, you have aliasing, or worse, moire patterns.

Try making a texture image with parallel alternating black and white lines. Make some large, others medium, and some really small ones. Put this on a prop and render it at various distances and angles. You'll see all sorts of ugliness. Suppose there's a spot where there are 7 parallel lines spanning 10 pixels in the render. Instead of smoothly varying shades of gray, you'll see white, white, black, white, white, white, black, etc.

One way to avoid this is to super-sample the scene - i.e. use a very small Min Shading Rate. But doing that costs time on the whole scene.

Texture filtering generates smaller versions of the texture for internal use by the renderer. Each smaller version has the details smoothed out - essentially blurred - so that sampling them far apart picks up the same effective values as super sampling, but ONLY for this texture image. This greatly speeds up the render without producing aliasing. The renderer chooses which reduced size version to use based on distance and angle to the camera, on the fly. Effectively, it has pre-calculated, in 2D instead of 3D, a bunch of super-sampled versions of the texture. 2D super sampling is faster than 3D super sampling, and since it is automatically using different levels of super-sampling, it automatically adapts to the viewing distance and angle.

However, I think Poser is a little too aggressive about which super-sampled image to use. We see it using a more blurred version than it needs to. I have never found a way to adjust this, and it happens to varying degrees depending on the size of the original texture image.

When you turn off texture filtering, you are giving up that super sampling, which means very small features can be lost. But the features that are not lost are sharper. So you have to choose - sharper, but inaccurate (perhaps even missing chunks of) details, or smoother more accurate details.  On eyelash transmaps, you really do want to use texture filtering. On skin, maybe not. Maybe you don't care if a mole disappears, as long as other larger features are still sharp.

 Interesting.

I've decided: I want to buy a clone of you to sit on my desk and answer all my questions. 

Seriously... I am learning all sorts of things about Poser that I never dreamed existed. IT's quite exciting. I hope I'm not making a pest of myself. I sincerely appreciate your being willing to share your expertise with old farts like me who ask long strings of really stupid questions.

:)

Regards,

TW

You haven't asked anything stupid even once.

I love answering these questions. The only time I mind is when they are PM's. Then I'm answering in a way that reaches only one person, instead of thousands, and also if I need to answer that again, I'll have to type it, versus just giving somebody a link to a thread.

THANK YOU ALL...you've just solved a problem for me that has plagued me for the longest time now.    Modus...sincerely...you are awesome.  Bagginsbill...thanks for the details and advice on it.  I am off to make work right for once!

I too agree...shouldn't the default settings be off, rather than on?  I'm about to start turning it off on everything...I really hate that blurring effect...especially on hair.

My appreciation to all of you for the quick and intuitive feedback.

And if ya'll start selling answer-clones...I want one!

I'm surprised that texture filtering applies to background images. I think filtering was actually my first thought, but didn't figure it would apply here.

Will have to watch that if I use a background image in the future.

Imagine you were using a 4K by 3K (12-megapixel) photo from my camera as a background, but you're rendering 800 by 600. So for every rendered pixel, there are 25 background image pixels. Those have to be dealt with somehow. If you don't do texture filtering, then you're only pulling out one of every 5 background pixels from each row or column to put in the background of the render.

So super-sampling definitely applies to background images.

What doesn't make sense, and I mentioned this, is that if the background image dimension exactly matches the render dimension, then there is no reason to be using a reduced-resolution version of it. I don't know why that happens.

Yeah, that makes sense. Of course.

Turning off texture filtering has cured my ills I believe...or at least cured it more than it was.  I have noticed a little bit of slow-down in render speed if I turn off tex filtering for characters or props.  

You'd think that if it's having to less work, it'd be faster, huh?  Go figure...

I am disturbed at this as well.  My backgrounds are always 900 x 707...just a weird little set of dimensions I work with, so my image is the exact window size as my Poser settings...so I'm perplexed as well as to why it would do that. 

Then again, most of this goes over my head and I'm modest enough to admit it.  Thanks again for all your help!

It has to do a lot more work if you shut off texture filtering. The reason is that it can't efficiently cache texture tiles in RAM.

Instead of just pulling up the matching resolution tile from a MIP map (which requires filtering to create) that might very well be in memory already, it needs to read a lot more tiles, and that requires more hard disk access sooner or later. If you have several threads do that at the same time, CPU usage collapses and your render takes a lot longer.

This effect might be more or less pronounced, depending on what surface a given texture is on, and what resolution the original texture has.

Quote -  Interesting.

I've decided: I want to buy a clone of you to sit on my desk and answer all my questions. 

Seriously... I am learning all sorts of things about Poser that I never dreamed existed. IT's quite exciting. I hope I'm not making a pest of myself. I sincerely appreciate your being willing to share your expertise with old farts like me who ask long strings of really stupid questions.

:)

Regards,

TW

Amen to that. I've started a collection of BagginsBill's quotable quotes. I.E., a sort of database of his shaders and suggestions and all that. Just in case we have a storm here in Oz (happens frequently) and the internet cuts out and I can't get on here. I'd go through withdrawals!

Jag, either in freestuff or in the python forum you should be able to find scripts to turn off filtering for an entire scene instead of doing in one material at a time. Freestuff gave an SQL error or I would have tried to find you a direct link. I use the one by SVDL as you can select a single figure, or prop or the whole scene.