I always turn it off on character and hairs.

Quote - "I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops."

You must compose scenes much faster than I; for me, rendering is the fastest part of the process... "smile"

Quote - "I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops."

You must compose scenes much faster than I; for me, rendering is the fastest part of the process...

Quote - > Quote - "I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops."

You must compose scenes much faster than I; for me, rendering is the fastest part of the process...

You know, WandW, I was thinking the same thing. It generally takes me several hours to get my character as I want it, THEN the real work begins of populating the world with settings and props, not to mention setting the lights. I guess you and I really do work slowly! 

Is SSS only useful for renders that include organic items (like people) and not so much for other items (like buildings, vehicles and such)?

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - "I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops."

You must compose scenes much faster than I; for me, rendering is the fastest part of the process...

You know, WandW, I was thinking the same thing. It generally takes me several hours to get my character as I want it, THEN the real work begins of populating the world with settings and props, not to mention setting the lights. I guess you and I really do work slowly! 

On any given scene, I'm normally futzing with it from sunrise to sunset, tweaking, retweaking, never satisfied :). Putting it to together definitely takes the longest time ;).

Quote - Is SSS only useful for renders that include organic items (like people) and not so much for other items (like buildings, vehicles and such)?

Skin, milk, some water situations, some juices, some fruits and veggies... just about any object where the surface has some level of translucency, would also have some degree of scatter going on.  Quite often it's not enough to require representation in a render, as homogeneous translucency and proper IOR in reflection/refraction params are enough to make a realistic representation that, in a render, would fool the human eye.  I know some people in the 3dsmax world that use the MentalRay Fast SSS skin shader for everything except metals, because they like the way it blends multiple specular levels.  Not sure if you could do the same thing with EZSkin (ie., run it on a surface, then just disable the SSS part of the nodes), and be left with the multiple specular effects.  I know it uses some reflection as well as alt specular parameters to do the specularity FX, which is useful on far more surfaces than simply skin.  I'll  have to play with that and see for myself.  I love how it works on skin, so why not cloth, leather, etc.

I reckon representations of lots of materials would benefit from some degree of sub surface scatter?

As Maxxxmodelz says, it more down to what actually benefits from it, in terms of what is basically all about fooling the eye/brain into perceiving realism in a render...

;-)

Quote - Do you guys have multiple PC's doing the render? I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

If you want high speed renders, Firefly is not the best choice. Firefly will do amazing renders, but not at what I would consider high speed.

To do high speed rendering, you really need two things in a render engine.

GPU rendering, and farmable buckets to other machines. Plan on spending a small fortune on the engine licenses, cpu boxes, and network to do it as well. 15 to 20k a box. Fiber network, etc...

That will give you 6400 stream processors with ATI FirePros, or 1792 Cuda cores with Quadros, per box. A scene that takes 10+ min on a cpu would take no time at all on a gpu network like that, as in seconds....

Then there is the electric bill that goes along with running all of that....

Some stones and gems look amazing with scatter.  Jade looks fantastic

Quote - Is SSS only useful for renders that include organic items (like people) and not so much for other items (like buildings, vehicles and such)?

 Or, the OP could just use the Pose2Lux script, export to Luxrender and render ;).

Laurie

Quote -  Or, the OP could just use the Pose2Lux script, export to Luxrender and render ;).

Laurie

True.  I love Lux.  So much so that I invested in the Reality 2 exporter for DazStudio, and have Pose2Lux for Poser exporting.  Great freebie, and I think as an exporter it gives a lot of creative freedom to set parameters for Lux the way I want them.  Even moreso than Reality does.

However, that said, I'm having a blast working with the Firefly renderer in PP2012 right now.  Trying to get similar results that I'm used to with Lux.  Results aren't too bad, and not too far from what I can get through Lux actually.  Although nowhere near as easily achieved.

I've never been able to get the results I get in Luxrender or Cycles in Poser ;). Sounds like we need a tute from someone with the know-how...hint hint....lol.

I guess my problem is that I sorta understand the materials and how to do emitters in Luxrender. I don't really understand them at all in Poser. Figure that one out...lol.

Laurie

Quote - I've never been able to get the results I get in Luxrender or Cycles in Poser ;). Sounds like we need a tute from someone with the know-how...hint hint....lol.

I guess my problem is that I sorta understand the materials and how to do emitters in Luxrender. I don't really understand them at all in Poser. Figure that one out...lol.

Laurie

Well, once I get testing and experimentation down to a science, and know that the settings and parameters I'm using for my own results are cross-compatable with people on systems that may not match the specs of mine currently (the machine I'm using is a monster, with a lot of processing power and memory), then I'll def make a few tutorials to help others get there.  But right now, it seems like some people with older systems or not much horsepower are having trouble duplicating the results simply because the render hangs on things like hair, or the raytrace requirements.  Even though they could probably get the same results using Lux to crunch at the scene like you said, Firefly seems to require a lot more mem or processing power to do the same kinds of things.

Quote -  Or, the OP could just use the Pose2Lux script, export to Luxrender and render ;).

Laurie

I'm trying it right now, let's see what happens.

It's a little more involved than that. You should read the big thread about Luxrender. However, do not expect to get renders out of Lux in 8 to 10 minutes. Lux is an unbiased renderer (Poser's Firefly is a biased renderer), in other words, some images can take 48 hours or more for high quality renders. However, metal, glass and excetera will look more like real would items. It is a trade off. I don't like the long wait, so I returned to Poser. But do check it out.

Quote - > Quote -  Or, the OP could just use the Pose2Lux script, export to Luxrender and render ;).

Laurie

I'm trying it right now, let's see what happens.

Just a warning: if you don't use the Lux gpu rendering you're in for a much longer wait than a Poser render.

Yeah, that's true. I can't use the gpu version of Lux. Can't use it with my video card so when I've used Lux it was with the version that does cpu rendering.