Quote - Those of us who know, technically, we're not allowed to say.

However, I will show you this image. I made it last night. It is white. It has right angles. There are no splotchies. It took longer to render, sort of like LuxRender.

Things look promising, on the splotchie front, then...

It's really slow though - I'm not sure it's the answer I wanted. I'm excited to see what Reality for Poser has to offer.

Quote - It's really slow though - I'm not sure it's the answer I wanted. I'm excited to see what Reality for Poser has to offer.

Is this with Irradiance Caching set to 100, that you're rendering BB?

The release of a Poser version of the Reality Studio bridge to LuxRender is definitely an interesting development... I'm hoping my GPU can be exploited, to some extent, as Paolo has indicated it might, by LuxRender.

I've been watching progress on Pose2Lux with interest... but was kind of holding out for the wxPython version and 64 bit mac support before I dove in further there.

The only problem with using the GPU as it is also with Cycles for Blender (and they ARE FAST) is that your limited by the amount of ram on your GPU. For instance, I have a 1 gig video card. As soon as I have a scene that reaches the one gig limit, I'm done. If that happens before your scene is rendered, you'll need to use the CPU to render. For portraits and simple scenes, GPU rendering is ideal (unless you have a smoking video card...lol). I'm not sure anymore if Luxrender can go from using GPU to CPU while it's rendering, but I don't think so. However, anything's possible I guess ;). I'll have to investigate...hehe.

Using Luxrender and the CPU IS really slow I'll admit, but the end result is really great. Sure, Poser has gotten better with Poser 9/Pro 2012, but if you want things like caustics you won't get them in Firefly - YET ;). I suppose I'm willing to wait because back in the day I started this whole 3D business with Vue d'Esprit and some scenes I had rendering for two days...

Laurie

Quote - It's really slow though - I'm not sure it's the answer I wanted. I'm excited to see what Reality for Poser has to offer.

Thank you Ted.

Quote - The only problem with using the GPU as it is also with Cycles for Blender (and they ARE FAST) is that your limited by the amount of ram on your GPU. 

That is true. Of course new cards will be coming out and it's likely that we will see GPUs with 8GB of RAM or more at affordable prices pretty soon.

In this regard I like how LuxRender is using the GPU: to accelerate the floating point calculations for raytraing.

This approach is not as aggressive as what SLG does but it doesn't run into GPU memory limitations, the RAM used is the one available on your motherboard. Over time it will be refined to make it more efficient and I believe that at that point we will have the best of both worlds.

Cheers.

Quote - ...Of course new cards will be coming out and it's likely that we will see GPUs with 8GB of RAM or more at affordable prices pretty soon.

Can't wait. I want me one of those....lol.

Laurie

Quote - In this regard I like how LuxRender is using the GPU: to accelerate the floating point calculations for raytraing.

This approach is not as aggressive as what SLG does but it doesn't run into GPU memory limitations, the RAM used is the one available on your motherboard. Over time it will be refined to make it more efficient and I believe that at that point we will have the best of both worlds.

Yes, this is the point I picked up on, on the LuxRender site...

I've got a 2GB GPU... so yeah, significantly less RAM for the SLG or Cycles type approach, than the 16GB I have on my mainboard... which itself isn't that much these days (although max for an imac).

Any pics of the new figures yet?

All the best.

LROG

Quote - Using Luxrender and the CPU IS really slow I'll admit, but the end result is really great. Sure, Poser has gotten better with Poser 9/Pro 2012, but if you want things like caustics you won't get them in Firefly - YET ;). I suppose I'm willing to wait because back in the day I started this whole 3D business with Vue d'Esprit and some scenes I had rendering for two days...

Laurie

My issue's gonna be, I suspect, that it can take a couple of days for some of my renders to come out of Firefly... because of the scene complexity.

Still, the last Vue render I did was running for about 5 days. So yeah, I'm not unused to lengthy render times either I guess...

So, the announcement is out and I have a technology preview that shows how Reality works:

http://preta3d.com/technology-preview-reality-3-for-poser/

Quote - Questions about Reality 3 (I can wait until the 7th for answers to these):

Does it have a setting to make single-sided materials double-sided (such as glass, or, say...a dragon's wing membrane?) automatically?

This is an old idea that I wanted to implement for Reality 2. I hope to be able to do it for version 3. If not, it will be implemented in a subsequent update. There are too many models out there that use single polygon glass or wall to avoid this issue or hope for more accurate models in the future. 

Quote - Stained glass setting using a Kd map for Kd and transmission color?

Sure.

Quote - Skin materials for more than the normal range of skin colors? (Say I want to render a blue-skinned chick or a green-skinned alien. Are there material presets that work well with these colors? As I understand it, human skin is predominantly red in its scattering, and that poses problems in Poser Pro 2012 for alternate skin colors)

Reality 3 will include a Skin material, I'll keep your suggestions in mind. There is no issue in setting the SSS with a color that is more suited for non-human skin.

Quote - Idiot-friendly transmission color settings for liquids or colored glasses?

  Count on it. It's already part of Reality 2, Reality 3 UI is much better.

Quote - Presets for a hefty bunch of gemstones? Metals?

There will be all kind of IOR settings for gemstones, glasses, fluids etc. To that you will have to add your color of choice. Metals have the common presets plus you can plug in your color and/or texture to create your own custom metals. For example, youc an have green anodized aluminum. It's really piece of cake with Reality.

Quote - Will it process and convert materials that use the Scatter materials from the material room? What blender nodes driven by grayscale images? What about blender nodes, period?

Yes, yes and yes :)

That was the whole point in making this program. Poser artists must be able to use any existing shader and get some reasonable conversion automatically. That is what Reality does. Then you have the Reality Material Editor to further refine the material and take advantage of Lux's unique materials and properties.

Reality 3 for Poser scans the whole shader tree of all materials involved and tries to convert as much as possible automatically. 

Hope this helps. 

Quote - But can you use a composed (with a blender node) textures in reality? I assume there is a texture involved in the skin material, otherwise it would be boring with all figures having identical skins

Blender nodes are automatically converted by Reality to the equivalent in Lux, so the answer is yes :)

Cheers.

BTW, if you look at the log of changes in the Lux codebase you will see that I added the Color Addition and Color Subtraction textures a few weeks ago. That was exactly to support Poser's Add/Subtract operations on color.

Cheers.

Can I make my own shaders and share them?

Laurie

I rarely comment in forums ( Yes I am a lurker lol)

well I just watched your preview of reality 3

and I a very impressed with what I see ,

I have Reality 1 for Daz studio but because I dont really like Daz studio I didnt upgrade to reality2

But I am very pleased to see Reality 3 for Poser .

I cant wait to buy and use it :)

Bravo Pret-a-3d!

I second that, Senyac. From another lurker. :)

Quote - Can I make my own shaders and share them?

Laurie

Yes, Reality includes ACSEL, the Automatic Custom ShadEr Loader. With ACSEL you can create your own shaders, save them and then load them automatically every time you use a certain figure/texture or object/texture in your scene. A companion service, free for all Reality user, called ACSEL Share allows you to share your shaders with all Reality users. Sharing and installing shaders from ACSEL Share is built-in inside Reality. 

You can also save your shaders to disk and share the .rsf (Reality Shader Format) with other users.

Hope this helps.

Quote - Can I make my own shaders and share them?

Laurie

Yes, Reality includes ACSEL, the Automatic Custom ShadEr Loader. With ACSEL you can create your own shaders, save them and then load them automatically every time you use a certain figure/texture or object/texture in your scene. A companion service, free for all Reality user, called ACSEL Share allows you to share your shaders with all Reality users. Sharing and installing shaders from ACSEL Share is built-in inside Reality. 

You can also save your shaders to disk and share the .rsf (Reality Shader Format) with other users.

Hope this helps.

Quote - I rarely comment in forums ( Yes I am a lurker lol)

well I just watched your preview of reality 3

and I a very impressed with what I see ,

I have Reality 1 for Daz studio but because I dont really like Daz studio I didnt upgrade to reality2

But I am very pleased to see Reality 3 for Poser .

I cant wait to buy and use it :)

Bravo Pret-a-3d!

Spectacular stuff, Paolo!  And that is ONE TOP NOTCH video you made.

Quote - I rarely comment in forums ( Yes I am a lurker lol)

well I just watched your preview of reality 3

and I a very impressed with what I see ,

I have Reality 1 for Daz studio but because I dont really like Daz studio I didnt upgrade to reality2

But I am very pleased to see Reality 3 for Poser .

I cant wait to buy and use it :)

Bravo Pret-a-3d!

Thank you very much. Glad you liked it!

Quote - Spectacular stuff, Paolo!  And that is ONE TOP NOTCH video you made.

Thank you very much, happy to know that you liked the video.

Cheers.

Quote - Any pics of the new figures yet?

All the best.

LROG

I have pictures I'm just not able to post them. :/  Sorry. 

Quote - > Quote - Can I make my own shaders and share them?

Laurie

Yes, Reality includes ACSEL, the Automatic Custom ShadEr Loader. With ACSEL you can create your own shaders, save them and then load them automatically every time you use a certain figure/texture or object/texture in your scene. A companion service, free for all Reality user, called ACSEL Share allows you to share your shaders with all Reality users. Sharing and installing shaders from ACSEL Share is built-in inside Reality. 

You can also save your shaders to disk and share the .rsf (Reality Shader Format) with other users.

Hope this helps.

Awesome :)

Paolo, I think you've all but sold me on Reality 3! ^_^ I loved Pose2Lux, but I had a hard time with the materials, so if it's got a slightly less-technical interface while still allowing me to tinker with material guts, I think that's a good thing.

Teyon....any hints as to when we might get any sort of peek at the new figures? Ze suspense is killer, maaaaan.

Thank you LaurieA and Hana-Hanabi. 

Glad that you like it.

Hana-Hanabi, I don't have a clue. Cooper is out at Siggraph and it's really up to him to call it. I don't think we're technically showing them to the masses yet. They were supposed to be sneak peeked at Siggraph, which isn't the same thing as officially announced.  So I may end up sitting on these renders a bit longer (which is good...I could probably make better renders).

That is rather awesome looking Paolo

Thank you!

The new plug-in architecture looks like a major plus too?

Ahhh. Okay. That makes sense. Sad sense...but sense, nonetheless.

"You can also save your shaders to disk and share the .rsf (Reality Shader Format) with other users."

Interesting so theoreticaly  the Poser/Reality 3 users could build a nice community repository Much like the ones we have For Vray and Maxwell

Free Mats maxwell

http://www.vrayforc4d.net/portal/materials/

This would be a good thing for you guys IMHO

Well Done Paolo!!

Cheers

One thing more about the custom shaders..

Do you have to create them IN Reality or can you import Blender setups somehow? I would REALLY like the latter since I have access to ALL Luxrender has to offer there ;).

Oh, and I wonder why you called it a plugin in your video (which it is) but called it a render engine in the press release? Just thinking out loud ;).

Laurie

Thanks Paolo,

The integration with Poser and the material room looks excellent, much better as I expected.

Looking forward to its release!

Thank you wolf359

With the ACSEL Share service you can also subscribe to notifications so that, when new shaders are shared, you will receive an email to alert you of the fact.

Cheers 

Congratulations Paolo on Reality for Poser! I'm very happy that Poser users will finally be able to use it.

After using Reality for quite a while I tried both of the free versions, for both DAZ Studio and Poser, but....... well let's just say that for workflow, ease of use and features, Reality is definitely the way to go if you want to use LuxRender, and version 3 looks even better.

Coldrake

Quote - That is rather awesome looking Paolo

Thank you very much monkeycloud.

Quote - The new plug-in architecture looks like a major plus too?

That is what makes it all possible.

See, I am a sucker for user interface. For me  how a program does something is as important as what it does, if not more. That's why, for example, so many of us use Poser. It's the ease of use, the way the UI is designed etc. 

I try to give the best user experience possible with Reality and there were some limitations in the Python integration of Poser, before SR3, that needed to be addressed. Still I was determined to make this happen and so I contacted Smith Micro. I contafirst met with Larry Weinberg and Steve Cooper and we sat down and discussed the issues that I had. It helps that the Smith Micro's office is ten minutes from my home office :)

We literally talked for two hours after which Larry told me that they would gladly extend their Python interface to implement some of the services that I needed. That was really extra cool and I commend the Poser team for their flexibility and their spirit of cooperation.

SR3 is still in development so I'm not going to give details about this, the NDA still holds, but the new Add-on framework that we jointly defined is a big step forward to make plugins easy to install, load and integrate in the Poser interface.

Reality 3 is actually mostly written in C++. It runs as a separate application that communicates with its counterpart in Poser. In this way there is no risk to interfere with Poser's event loop, OpenGL preview or any other activity. It also means that the OS is in charge to split the CPUs between Poser and other tasks, including Reality. This makes it very efficient to run the plugin. 

All right, enough technical babbling, I'll go back to writing code, Novemeber will come fast!

Cheers.

Sounds good Wolf

I wonder what else might now come along, on top of the new plugin architecture mentioned... in due course... that would maybe benefit from the apparently deeper level of integration?

Thank you Paolo for your contributions to making that happen too...

Quote - Do you have to create them IN Reality or can you import Blender setups somehow?

The shader are created in Reality. With Reality I doubt that you will feel the need to tweak by hand anything. Some of the most challenging issues of the past were how to edit Lux textures. I believe that there is complete support of the most relevant parameters in Reality 3. There might be some obscure, rarely used parameter that is not included but event the small stuff is included.

Of course we will have to talk again once it's release and, of course, there will be room for improvement.

Cheers.

Quote - The integration with Poser and the material room looks excellent, much better as I expected.

Thank you, much appreciated.

Thank you Coldrake, high praise indeed.

November?  C'mon, you can beat November!  :tongue1:

(re-opens my lighting in Poser tutorial...sigh...)

Working around the clock 3doutlaw :)

Thanks.

Fantastic video Paolo, thanks for the preview!

One question.....is it November yet??!!!

Thank you Michael, glad that you liked it. Working around the clock to make it happen :)

Any word on when the new figures will get here.........?

Thanks for the preview Paolo! I've watched it twice & now need a cigarette (and I have never smoked hehe).  The new "Skin" material brings up a question: Will their be a capability to drive the SSS functions via nodes or image maps as you can in the Poser Mat room material tree? This would allow for blood maps & depth driven effects in a simpler shader without requiring actual volumes for the surface.

"Enquiring minds want to know" ;-)

Thank you Alex.

Reality converts the nodes to a system of nested textures. Textures are the Lux equivalent of nodes in Poser. For example, the Lux Mix Texture, which mixes two textures of any kind, is the equivalent of the Poser Blender node.

I am still defining how the Skin material will work so, if you or anybody else, has suggestions I'm more than happy to listen :)

Cheers 

please forgive me if this was asked already,

does Lux render poser animations? 

can this new s/w export a frame range?

Quote - please forgive me if this was asked already,

does Lux render poser animations? 

can this new s/w export a frame range?

Yes, you can render animations as a group of frames. You then create the video using your favorite video editor. Reality automates the process of generating the frames for animation byninterfacing with Poser's timeline and it gives you the option to select any range in the animation.

Cheers.

Thanks!

i'm looking forward to trying again to render something like this VRAY render

Quote - i'm looking forward to trying again to render something like this VRAY render

Yes, no problem in making something like this with Lux. You have to work at it, as the original artist did. But you do get the same kind of realism from Lux. 

Cheers.

Quote - Any word on when the new figures will get here.........?

Yeah, when are they due for release?