incantrix opened this issue on Oct 24, 2010 ยท 55 posts
millighost posted Mon, 25 October 2010 at 1:29 PM
On-Topic:
For me there are essentially 3 questions, that remain for deciding if PoserPro 2010 is more worthy than Poser 8, and that could not be answered by the otherwise omniscient internet:
Can PP2010 output more than 8 effective bits per channel?
On the smith-micro site they write that PP2010 can output hdri images. That does not necessarily mean that the images produced contain more levels per R/G/B than an 8-bit png file, but it probably does, at least for the main image. But what about the multi-pass rendering with PSD- output? For example, an output of a higher resolution depth-channel would really be useful.
Can PP2010 read textures with more than 8 bits per channel?
The best case would be, if PP2010 could read hdri images, just as it can write them. However the product page only says that it can write (explicitly), not read; but can it, for example, read 16-bit tiff?
Is the gamma-correction facility an all-or-nothing switch in PP2010?
Assuming that PP2010 handles images with more than 8 bits per channel, the one (and only) point where GC still would be beneficial is, when displaying something on the screen (render window and material room in particular) even when gamma is otherwise disabled, in the other cases a converter (like e.g. imagemagick) would probably suffice. From what i have read it sounds more like that there is a big GC-on/off switch where one could enable or disable GC, but not partly.
As a side note i am also wondering what the color-dialog from the material room might look like when GC is enabled. In Poser8 i get a color dialog that lets me choose RGB values in the range 0-255, which have at least a small resemblence to what i get without gamma correction, like: "Choose the color that your totally diffuse material, lit by a white lamp, would encode to in the resulting png-file.", so i can e.g. enter a 127 for a material that reflects 50% of the light. But with GC, do i have to enter 186 to get the same effect (since gamma(186/255) = 127/255), or can i enter 0.5 (meaning that i can enter decimal values), or is it something different (would not surprise me, if 127 still works, because of compatibility)?