After spending most of my day off yesterday rendering a number of tests and not getting the results I was expecting, I've concluded that I clearly have much to learn about Poser's Material Room and understanding how nodes work before I'm comfortable using Reality for rendering anything more complex than a single V4 with SSS enabled.  Otherwise, if something doesn't render correctly in Lux, I can't be sure if it's a material conversion problem, or an issue with the material nodes in Poser, and it would feel really great to eliminate the guesswork I'm currently dealing with.  The only way to do that is to educate myself.

Time to make like Bagginsbill and learn.

:: wrings hands ::

SO... who can point me to some good, in-depth tutorials?  :)

Hi.

I would suggest to actually work with your materials in Reality. Otherwise I don't see how you would solve the issues by changing the materials in Poser.

Reality has its own material editor exactly to allow you to customize and adjust the materials. Poser's materials can have considerable complexity. Some of them convert without need of any change. Others mightr require adjustments.

The good news is that the Reality material editor is a lot simpler than the Poser's one. You just need to become a bit familair with it and for that I'll gladly help you.

If you post a screenshot of a material that you need to adjust with the description of what you aim to obtain I will do my best to help.

All the best.

Luxrender takes some learning too...the more ya know about it the better you'll be. Luxrender shaders are easy to sort and you do just a little reading you'll find that they're easier than Poser's materials.

And btw, Reality doesn't do the rendering, Luxrender does ;). Just sayin. LOL

Laurie

Quote - Reality has its own material editor exactly to allow you to customize and adjust the materials. Poser's materials can have considerable complexity. Some of them convert without need of any change. Others mightr require adjustments.

Right.  It's knowing when adjustments need to be made and how to make them that I want to learn.

Quote - The good news is that the Reality material editor is a lot simpler than the Poser's one. You just need to become a bit familair with it and for that I'll gladly help you.

Thanks, Paolo.  I appreciate that.

I do have one question you may be able to answer without screenshots (I don't have access to my PC at the moment):

Why is it that, regardless of whatever content I have in my scenes, every material but those for M4 and V4 always converts to Glossy in Reality?  It's like Glossy is the default shader type that Reality treats anything that isn't skin, leaving the user to figure out what to manually convert it to.  I thought Reality was supposed to be smarter than that while still allowing us the flexibility to further tweak the materials ourselves?

Quote - And btw, Reality doesn't do the rendering, Luxrender does ;).  Just sayin. LOL

Oh, I know, Laurie.  While my experience with it was brief (three renders two years ago), I worked with it long enough when it was still a DS-exclusive plugin to understand the difference.  ;)

Quote -
I do have one question you may be able to answer without screenshots (I don't have access to my PC at the moment):

Why is it that, regardless of whatever content I have in my scenes, every material but those for M4 and V4 always converts to Glossy in Reality?  It's like Glossy is the default shader type that Reality treats anything that isn't skin, leaving the user to figure out what to manually convert it to.  I thought Reality was supposed to be smarter than that while still allowing us the flexibility to further tweak the materials ourselves?

Materials in Lux have a type. These are the material types available:

• Glossy

• Matte

• Glass

• Velvet

• Cloth

• Metal

• Car paint

• Mix

• Mirror

• Layered

And maybe a couple of others that I forgot. Poser materials have no type. There is nothing in there that says "this materials describe a metal." So there is no precise, unambiguos way of knowing what the Poser shader is describing. 

The most general material that Lux has is Glossy so that is what is used by Reality. Then the program traverses all the nodes in the Poser shader to trieve the necessary information, like the textures used, how they are combined (Color Math, Mix, Add, Subtract etc. ), how they are used and what values there are for bump, specular, specular color and the like. 

The resulting material is configured as close as possible to the original. This is a lot of automatic conversion that is done in t ablink of an eye and which would take several hours, or even days, to be done manually.

From that point Reality provides a material editor. If the process was completely automatic then I could have saved eight months of development for the material editor :)

The reality is that Firefly and Lux are very, very different renderers. And that is the attraction in using Reality. If Lux was a "Firefly on steroids" then there would be little reason to use it. 

The fact that Lux is so much different is the reason to use it. 

The fact that Lux materials have a type simplifies many things. For example, if you need a material to be metallic simply change it to be of type Metal. The buillt-in properties of that metal, which require no work from you, would require a plethora of Poser nodes to be approximated. In Reality you don't need any of that. Simply change it to Metal.

Same for glass. The remaining parameters are basically fine-tuning. 

So, Reality does a lot of heavy-lifting to convert the Poser nodes into the equivalent Lux Textures. In Lux the term "texture" is the equivalent of "node" in Poser. The rest is up to you, which is what you want to do because only the artist can judge how to adjust some things to achieve his/her vision. That is not something that can be programmer nor should ever be programmed :) The small adjustments are what make art ... art.

Hope this helps.

So,  the bottom line is that I would be wasting my time learning how nodes work in Poser since Reality only converts what it needs for Lux anyway.  If I want to use Reality - and I really do want to use Reality - I'll be better off learning how to just use the editor.

Yes, it would make no sense to learn the Poser nodes to make use of Reality. Subscribe to out youtube channel and keep an eye on the new videos that will be posted soon.

Cheers.

Thanks for clarifying.  I'll stay out of the Material Room and focus on the editor.

Stick with it Nyghtfall, I too was frustrated until some very helpful tips from Paolo.  I LOVE Reality now.  Can't get enough of it.

Just a little reading on Luxrender materials makes a lot of stuff make sense. The Luxrender wiki is worth the read ;).

Laurie

Quote - Just a little reading on Luxrender materials makes a lot of stuff make sense. The Luxrender wiki is worth the read ;).

Laurie

The wiki is certainly worth a read perticularly the sections on lights as well as materails.

The big plus I find with Reality is the ease I have with the materials.  For example if I want a metal I just select the Metal from the type and within that I can pick the type of metal i want.  It may not be exactly what I am liiking for but it as a very good starting point and the tweaks are easy from that point. The same can be said for glass and minerals/gems which I find difficult to build in Poser. That is not to say that Firefly cannot get close but I am no BB and I need all the help I can get.

Although my knowledge of Posers material room has slowly grown most of my favorite ones have been purchased, Reality looks like it will save me a fortune as I can make my own with ease.  Reality is no magic bullet but it does certainly do a lot of the heavy lifting.

I have just started playing with volumes and this shows so much potential, am now going back to a few graveyard scenes I did a year or so ago to add a lot more atmosphere- quite literally.