Well just came across this on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03DxgNy7dE&feature=g-all-u . Poser will be getting the awesome Reality plugin that was originally for Daz Studio.

This is so cool can not wait for this awesome plugin to come to Poser as we know how good Luxrender can be if used right and reality makes using Luxrender easier than other Poser/Luxrender plugins. :)

Well, it probably needed it's own thread!  Check the Siggraph thread for more Q&A from Paolo

Ah well if a mod can delete this thread please that be cool, thank you..

Actually I rather keep this one as the other has information about GoZ, Michi 4 and Tyler. We can have more focus on the subject of Reality 3 for Poser  here.

Cheers.

BTW, glad that you like it.

Cheers.

Thank you, I have version 2 and find it very easy to use. Am waiting with anticipation to see what new surprises you have for us. :)

Quote - Ah well if a mod can delete this thread please that be cool, thank you..

Sorry, I was not "downing" you're thread.  The R3 discussion was getting a little OT in the other thread.  Having this thread is probably needed.

Here is the Preta3d direct link:  http://preta3d.com/technology-preview-reality-3-for-poser/

For anyone else...

I am into it, too. I like lux much more now with hardware acceleration, which I just tried out yesterday.

Pret-a-3d did some of the changes to Lux material system necessary to support Poser mats that I talked about a long time ago but did not feel like doing myself.

So with more accurate material conversion and a faster render, it looks very good to me.

Thank you Bagginsbill.

I do remember your talk about adding some math operations to Lux. Truth to be told, addition and subtraction could have been dones otherwise, the Multimix texture could have been used instead.  I had to "sell" the addition of those operations to the Lux developers by virtue of the fact that having an Add and Subtract direct textures makes it a lot easier to write and debug materials than trying to use a Multimix "hack".

More can be done. Particularly I want to see how far we can push SLG. It is already very good in the lighting area, it just needs a few more refinements for the materials and it could become a great tool for fast, physically-accurate renders.

Cheers.

Just wondering if we have Reality 2 do we have to purchase Reality for Poser?

Probably be an upgrade, as these guys are in the buisness to make money. Sometimes software developers will give a ( bought recently window ) for a free upgrade but that usually is only around a month or so. So if you just bought the program, then maybe you will get a break, otherwise most likely will  have to pay some amount.

Tom

Quote - Just wondering if we have Reality 2 do we have to purchase Reality for Poser?

From the link above:

Q: Will users of Reality 2 be able to crossgrade to Reality 3 for Poser at a special price?

A: Yes. Pricing for the crossgrade has not been determined yet but it will be in line with our previous upgrades.

I need to try this SLG thing...

Quote - Just wondering if we have Reality 2 do we have to purchase Reality for Poser?

Crossgrade will be available. If you have Reality 1 or 2 yiu will be able to get Reality for Poser for just the price of the upgrade.

This and more is at the product information page: 

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

Maybe I'm doin' something wrong, but given each 60 seconds from the press of the Reality render button...one could argue the normal render is faster/better, due to better lighting/shading.  The SLG appears to be similar grainy-ness (though less apparent due to poor color).  See below (slg on right):

Lux and SLG behave differently so lighting might need to be adjusted for each one. With Reality 3 I expect to adjust a few things in the lights and materials converters to make the the difference between the two renders smaller.

Cheers. 

Yea, and I just realized the speed is probably dependent on the GPU capability.  On my laptop which is an i7, but only has a NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M...perhaps that is equivalent in terms of speed.

It is neat to be able to tweak the camera angle though...

Sort of off topic....

Does Lux support the ATI V series workstation cards yet?

Quadros and my motherboard do not get along together so well.

Quote - Sort of off topic....

Does Lux support the ATI V series workstation cards yet?

Quadros and my motherboard do not get along together so well.

GPU support in LuxRender is done via OpenCL. Any card that has OpenCL (this is different from OpenGL) drivers is supported.

Cheers.

My V8800 series cards have full OpenCl 1.0 support, I will have to try it again.

Should scream with 3200 stream processors.

Thanks :)

I came upon this thread by accident, this is great news!

Good luck and I look forward to the release of R3!

Good new Paolo!!!  Glad to see its finally comming out for Poser!

Paolo, questions:

a) (in what way) are the Poser channels Alt_Diffuse and Alt_Specular supported? Because IMO that's where most of the conversion routines go nuts.

b) can we - especially as a community, with freebies etc - build a Poser Materials Library that i) looks well in firefly and ii) works will in Lux after conversion, so we can use FireFly as a kind of previewer while building scenes? That is: can we establish specs for such materials? So we can have mats that serve both engines, instead of mat libs for each separately.

BTW: R3 looks really good, I'm a fan already.

For others: as it stands, the Lux GPU output is not always the best quality not is it the fastest solution. The first is in the path algoritm used, the second depends on the machine. The GPU acts as a hyperfast single threaded device servicing CPU calls. When there are many fast CPU cores, the GPU becomes the bottleneck. In my case (i7-990X, Ti560) using the GPU reduces the CPU load below 50%, so the GPU-render and the GPU-less render finish in about the same time. With less / slower CPU cores or an even much faster GPU, the GPU render is in advantage.

Quote - Good new Paolo!!!  Glad to see its finally comming out for Poser!

Thank you Matt. You were there since day one, I apprwciate your continued support.

Wow, this new plug-in looks impressive. I'm pretty sure I'll get it.

Will Reality 3 also allow for creating/using any materials I would like to make? Let's say I want to just want to configure the bitmaps in poser, but do my own thing for the rest of the materials in Reality 3... would that be possible?

I like to experiment with different things when going for a specific look, so I'm hoping there is a way to use whatever materials are available in Lux for whatever I want, and manage it all from Reality 3. Maybe the answer is obvious to everyone here, but I don't have DS, nor Reality 2.

Quote - a) (in what way) are the Poser channels Alt_Diffuse and Alt_Specular supported? Because IMO that's where most of the conversion routines go nuts.

They are scanned completely and all the relevant information converted. Yes, it's not easy but it was imperative for me that the conversion would take in account the data in those inputs. As you said, most of the action happens there and so there's the need to preserve the data that shader writers have created. 

Quote - b) can we - especially as a community, with freebies etc - build a Poser Materials Library that i) looks well in firefly and ii) works will in Lux after conversion, so we can use FireFly as a kind of previewer while building scenes? That is: can we establish specs for such materials? So we can have mats that serve both engines, instead of mat libs for each separately.

Absolutely. One of Reality's main features is its Material Editor. With it you can take full advantage of Lux's physics-based materials and edit them as much as you want. You can then save the shaders to disk and share them via a free service called ACSEL Share. ACSEL stands for "Automatic Customs ShadEr Loader" and it loads the customs shaders automatically whenever you add the assiciated figure or object to your scene. ACSEL Share is  a free service that allows Reality users to share and install shaders for Reality. Access to ACSEL Share is built inside Reality.

Quote - BTW: R3 looks really good, I'm a fan already.

Thank you very much!

Quote - Will Reality 3 also allow for creating/using any materials I would like to make? Let's say I want to just want to configure the bitmaps in poser, but do my own thing for the rest of the materials in Reality 3... would that be possible? I like to experiment with different things when going for a specific look, so I'm hoping there is a way to use whatever materials are available in Lux for whatever I want, and manage it all from Reality 3. Maybe the answer is obvious to everyone here, but I don't have DS, nor Reality 2.

Yes, you will be able to edit the materials to your heart's desire. One of the main features of Reality is in fact its full-fledged material editor. In fact you will be able to start with the converted material form Poser and then add to the complexity of it as much as you want.

Cheers.

Quote - Yes, you will be able to edit the materials to your heart's desire. One of the main features of Reality is in fact its full-fledged material editor. In fact you will be able to start with the converted material form Poser and then add to the complexity of it as much as you want.

Well, I'm sold. Thanks.

Quote - > Quote - a) (in what way) are the Poser channels Alt_Diffuse and Alt_Specular supported? Because IMO that's where most of the conversion routines go nuts.

They are scanned completely and all the relevant information converted. Yes, it's not easy but it was imperative for me that the conversion would take in account the data in those inputs. As you said, most of the action happens there and so there's the need to preserve the data that shader writers have created. 

I have to speak here. I have not directly seen Reality 3 yet, but what Paolo describes here deserves huge respect.

I wanted to do this but did not have the patience. I got bored. This is a very difficult problem to solve.

I suspect that there will be minor differences between the Poser shader and the Lux shader - these are inevitable. But the very idea that Paolo has made the attempt to convert automatically is huge.

Huge!!! Are you listening? I know what I'm talking about.

This is impressive. I can't wait to see the conversion in practice.

If it's not perfect, I can promise it's not his fault. This is really important. The conversion of arbitrary Poser shaders is very difficult, given that Lux attempts to be realistic at all times and Poser shaders are often unrealistic.

So many Poser shaders are based on hacks that only work in a limited lighting context.

I would love to produce a set of shaders that are accurate both in Poser and after conversion by Reality 3.

The problem, as I've identified in another thread, is that we must recognize and separate the goal of procedural "pattern" from procedural "response to light".

LuxRender introduces (at least tries to introduce) an absolutely realistic response to light. It is not stylistic, not expressive, not open to interpretation, not illustrative. If you seek any of those things, do not use LuxRender.

But if you seek realism, pursue LuxRender, pursue Reality.

This is a very exciting time for Poser users.

" "recognize and separate the goal of procedural "pattern" from procedural "response to light" "

Precisely.

Looking forward to Reality 3 release. 

 Well said BB!

As someone who really appreciates more realism in renders, I am very excited by what Paolo is making happen here. Very excited!

Eric

I have to speak here. I have not directly seen Reality 3 yet, but what Paolo describes here deserves huge respect.

I wanted to do this but did not have the patience. I got bored. This is a very difficult problem to solve.

I suspect that there will be minor differences between the Poser shader and the Lux shader - these are inevitable. But the very idea that Paolo has made the attempt to convert automatically is huge.

Huge!!! Are you listening? I know what I'm talking about.

This is impressive. I can't wait to see the conversion in practice.

If it's not perfect, I can promise it's not his fault. This is really important. The conversion of arbitrary Poser shaders is very difficult, given that Lux attempts to be realistic at all times and Poser shaders are often unrealistic.

So many Poser shaders are based on hacks that only work in a limited lighting context.

I would love to produce a set of shaders that are accurate both in Poser and after conversion by Reality 3.

The problem, as I've identified in another thread, is that we must recognize and separate the goal of procedural "pattern" from procedural "response to light".

LuxRender introduces (at least tries to introduce) an absolutely realistic response to light. It is not stylistic, not expressive, not open to interpretation, not illustrative. If you seek any of those things, do not use LuxRender.

But if you seek realism, pursue LuxRender, pursue Reality.

This is a very exciting time for Poser users.

Thank you bagginsbill, this is high praise indeed. 

I have spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing the shader trees of several materials, including the things that you have done. For example, the procedural textures used in the material for the Latchworm gave me a clear idea of what can be done with Poser materials. Thank you for making those.

There are indeed many tricks done with Poser nodes that are used to simulate certain properties of real objects and it is probably not possible to do a 100% perfect conversion but if I get to 85% accuracy I will be a happy man. That and the fact that Reality 3 has a complete material editor so that the adjustments will be well withing grasp of the user.

One things that is easy to simplify is the reflection nodes. Those are completely unnecessary, AFAIK, because reflections are one of the very strong points of Lux. This, of course, means that you will need to surround your modesl with a real environment, but that is easy to do and it leads to better, more accurate results. Anyway, removing the reflection channel was a big help. The rest is in the "mediation" of the Alt Diffuse and Alt Specular, plus bump and displacement.

I'd like to add one thing about lighting. You can get extremely creative with lighting and Lux. Let's remember that visually-striking movies, like LOTR, Domino, Alien and many others, have been shot with real lights. Just because Lux computes light with physics that doesn't meant that we are relegated to "documentary style" imagery :) 

Anyway, I appreciate the kind words. They make all these months of mind-numbing research all worthwhile :) 

Thanks again.

Quote - As someone who really appreciates more realism in renders, I am very excited by what Paolo is making happen here. Very excited!

Thank you very much Erik. 

You're most Welcome Paolo!

  Eric

Quote - > Quote - As someone who really appreciates more realism in renders, I am very excited by what Paolo is making happen here. Very excited!

Thank you very much Erik. 

One thing that will be interesting to see between Reality 2 and 3 is the problems with fireflies and artifacting that occurred when using Daz Studio / Reality 2 and Lux 1.0 RC1 & 2 and well even 0.8 and 0.9.

I found where artifacting and fireflies happened was with either shiny materials and some textures.  Could be that I just never let it go long enough but the case with the example below was about 500 to 600 Px this was a test to see how my actual pic went but as you can see all that mess on the clothing this was the problem I had most of the time with certain materials.

Not sure what was doing wrong but it seemed to really only affect shiny materials and if that was a matte material there were not so many problems.

But then again I never fiddled around with Realities settings so could have been that too. :)

But to the main part I will be most stoked about seeing what Reality 3 brings and does better in Poser I am very excited. :)

Quote - One thing that will be interesting to see between Reality 2 and 3 is the problems with fireflies and artifacting that occurred when using Daz Studio / Reality 2 and Lux 1.0 RC1 & 2 and well even 0.8 and 0.9.

This is typically a material definition problem. Meaning that the glossiness is beyond what it should be. You can easily fix this issue by looking at the brightness of the specular color. In general it should never go beyond 1/4 scale if you don't have a specular map. For example, if your specular color is a shade of grey, you should keep it below 30, 30, 30. If you have a specular map for the material you can go much higher because the specular map will keep the individual pixel values withing range. 

This is in connection with the glossiness strength. From your example it seems that the dress is extremely shiny. Lowering the glossiness might help. Also, the skin seems over-exposed so you might want to look into that. Pure white in the diffuse channel is generally better avoided. Use something like 204, 204, 204 instead.

Lastly, avoid Distant Lights at all costs. I noticed that people coming from Studio or Poser lighting often have  the habit to use those light fixtures. That is understandable because they are often necessary with biased renderers. With Lux they should be avoided completely. They are unncessary and create all kind of issues. Use mesh lights instead.

Hope this helps.

I don't think Reality can do much to solve fireflies. Fireflies are a rendering artifact in Luxrender..

You'll need to let it render longer, sometimes scenes require thousands of Samples/pixel. I've had scenes render for 2 days before I was satisfied. :)

Ahh thank you Pret-a-3D &  Flenser for the information, the skin is pale coz of the subject of the picture, the light I think was a mesh light but not sure. And will work on the glossy side of things but am really hanging out for Reality 3 because I like using Poser for the bulk of things I do over Daz Studio.

I knew it wasn't Reality, but I always wondered why Lux Render did this sort of thing, shows how much I have yet to learn about it. :)

Quote - I don't think Reality can do much to solve fireflies. Fireflies are a rendering artifact in Luxrender..

You'll need to let it render longer, sometimes scenes require thousands of Samples/pixel. I've had scenes render for 2 days before I was satisfied. :)

Actually FFs will not go away with longer rendering. In fact they can get worse. There is a difference between FFs and render noise, they are not the same. FFs are caused, generally, by a combination of overlighting and glossiness set too high. With glossiness I mean thet combination of specular and glossiness strength. Those two should always worked together.

Render noise is just a function of the render not having enough data. There are many ways of optimizing the scene to make it render faster. Of course it all comes down to processor speed. Having a modern quad-core or higher will help greatly. 

Experience with Lux pays off greatly. I never have FFs in my scenes and very rarely I feel the need to do any post processing for tonal adjustment or such. Of course I have been using nothing else but LuxRender for the past 2.5 years so that amount of experience helps :)

Cheers.

Quote -  the skin is pale coz of the subject of the picture

That is perfectly fine, you can have surreal skins with Reality and Lux, just make sure that you use colors that could be realistic, as in "physically plausible". For example, if you have an actor in a movie who needs to have pale makeup there will be no possibility for thast makeup to reflect 100% of the light. That is what pure white, 255,255,255, does. It simply doesn't exist in nature. So, a very light shade of grey, 199,199,199, together with lighting, will do the trick while still being physically plausible.

Hope this helps.

Ahh cool thank you will try that out. :)

Quote - Actually FFs will not go away with longer rendering. In fact they can get worse. There is a difference between FFs and render noise, they are not the same. FFs are caused, generally, by a combination of overlighting and glossiness set too high. With glossiness I mean thet combination of specular and glossiness strength. Those two should always worked together. Render noise is just a function of the render not having enough data. There are many ways of optimizing the scene to make it render faster. Of course it all comes down to processor speed. Having a modern quad-core or higher will help greatly. 

Cheers.

This is a very good point that does tend to cause some confusion in what went wrong during a render.

FFs are areas that are out of range (blown out), and subsequent sampling only compounds the problem. Thats why it continues to get worse.

Render noise is almost always a lack of data causing the calculations to be within range, but not what they should be. This can have many causes, but usually stems from a incorrect color creeping into the calculations somewhere. A hole in the enviroment (or lack of) that the render engine can see in one of the calculations is just one example.

Trade offs have to made sometimes, but knowing what caused the problem in the is the key to getting around it.