brewgirlca opened this issue on Oct 04, 2011 · 73 posts
wimvdb posted Wed, 05 October 2011 at 2:13 AM
There are a couple of things which are different between PP2012 and previous versions.
Gamma Correction is now used for both Preview and Rendering. You can now turn it on or off in the Firefly render settings. So turning GC off will make the preview look more like PP2010. As basicwiz said - use the script to adapt the bump, specular, transmap and displacement textures for Gamma Correction; they should be set at 1.0 for black&white maps. Both the flat color and the hair thinning is probably caused by incorrect setting of the Gamma Control for these maps.
If you do not use Subsurface Scatter, Scatter or Custom Scatter, the Subsurface Scattering setting in the Firefly Render settings will make no difference at all
Lights in PP2012 are now more accurate, but they are an approximation. There is also a limit: Only the 5 brightest lights will appear in the preview. You can toggle lights on or off for the preview in the property settings of each light.
In the preview IBL (not IDL) is now visible. In PP2010 it was only a white infinite light. So the intensity and color are changed depending on the IBL map.
Shadows in preview are low resolution. You can adjust the accuracy and sharpness in the render settings for the preview by adjusting the preview shadow map size. Remember that this will increase memory usage.
Remember you can always turn HW Shading off in the Render Settings ! Preview tab. Then preview should look exactly like PP2010.
Gamma correction is a powerful feature and is easy to use when you start scenes from scratch. It is not as easy to convert older scenes because getting the exact same output as without Gamma Correction means adjusting light intensity of all lights and shadows. But you can always turn off GC for that scene if you don't like it.