As I recall being told when I first got into this (midway through P6), the point of using image maps which are an integer multiple of 2 (256, 512, 1024, etc) was not speed, but memory efficiency, that Poser set aside texture memory in blocks of this size, so that a 1030 pixel map took up a 2048 memory block.

     I have never made any effort to confirm/falsify this.

     If true, then using using integer exponent sized maps would affect speed if you were approaching process memory.

*"I really think that a cost-effective balance has to be sought between mesh detailing and displacement detailing."*As true in Poser as in most things, that's why the bell curve is, well, a bell and not a pit.

"I like to put the cookies on the lowest shelf, so that even the smallest children can reach them.)"

And much appreciated. Pirates were usually smelly and ridden with syphillis anyway :-) * *

Well, all joking aside, what's your plan for Poser's future then ?

With all the joint fixes out there, Vicky 4 has developed into a state that's pretty much "Good enough" for the majority of users as well as content creators.

I mean, if I didn't care about realism and just wanted to use a "nice", "easy to use" figure, I just would use her myself.

Can't beat her support, can't beat her versatility.

So, just to "have fun" and "make pretty pictures", all that newfangled stuff like SSS, IDL, IBL, weightmapping etc is actually not needed.

It's mostly confusing for newbies and hobbyist users anyway, so why bother in the first place ? We had nice lights before, we had great bending figures before, we had great looking skin before. We had great renders made using Poser 4. Some you might even call "art".

So, what's the plan then ?

Having a big Party until we can commemorate the 10.000th Bikini made and the 50.000th Dial Spun Vicky "character" ?

Or should we pushing on, stealin' and lootin' and plunderin' and taking no prisoners, until one fine day we can load our figures into Poser, add some lights and scenery, and out comes a render that looks like a perfect photograph ?

Much to the chagrin of "The Industry", because it will be so easy that everybody can do it in a few minutes.

I don't want to leave people behind. I want Poser to be as easily accessible to everybody as it always was. Maybe even easier than it is now.

But that takes technical progress. And leaving those behind whose artistic ambitions are perfectly satisfied by rendering Vicky's latest mini-skirt.

Is that's why a lot of my postings cause opposition ?

Do I disturb the peace by pointing out that what we have now simply isn't good enough, yet ?

I'm sorry for that, then.

But it's hard to stop caring.

I applaud content creator that keep things simple.

Poser 8,9 and even Poser 10 are still 32 bit applications limiting RAM to 2GB, or 3 with a trick.

Keeping memory load under control while maintaining functionality and the possibility to use multiple figures in the same scene drives content creators to keepthings "simple" and most of all usable.

Poly count and texture size both eat memory.
Texture caching helps in lowering memory use.
Rendering with a lower Bucket size 32 to 16 to 8 or even to 4 also leads to lower memory use.

But stick to the "standard".

A Bucket size of 10 is???? Throwing resources out the door.
A texture of 2000x2000 is throwing resources out the door.

What I personally find are a complete loss of energy are specular maps.

Skin shines in all directions in the same way.
Skin is skin, and reacts to the light it is receiving.

To get a good and more or less realistic render all you need are:

Diffuse texture and a bump map.  Bump to get the impression of depth without actually doing soimething.
Or:
Diffuse texture and a normal map. Same as Bump map.
Or:
Diffuse textrure and a displacemet map. Here you tell the renderer that there are actually a lot more polygons....And you can add some real and fine detail to a lower Polygon mesh. => Brow hair with actual depth without modeling each and every hair. :-) Now that would require a extremely dense mesh. :-)

The future?
Find the common sense between polycount and displacement. 

(personally I abandonned bump maps some years ago, and never used normal maps in Poser.)

"Nice & easy to use figure".

I started with Poser with Poser 1.

I still have to find the very first : "Nice & easy to use figure".

There are none. All figures, including the latest ones have tons of errors.

Over the years, at least half, if not more of my Poser hobby time, went into correcting faulty figures.

That is where the future of end user friendly is.

The very first error free figure.

"The very first error free figure."

Give her enough polygons (Or better even, make a low res and a high res version), a good mesh topology and base her shape on an actual human being and I'm 100% behind that.

:-)

Most errors are not in the object file.

Object files have symmetry errors and welding errors. Those can mostly be corrected.
And an object file is like clay. You can shape it to whatever you want.

Most errors are in the rigging & magnets, and all the other stuff they sometimes put in; Dependencies, left-right JCM's errors, bones, zones.

Left - right symmetry, that is the biggest problem.

"As far as I see it, the superiority of displacement maps over mesh detail is a myth"

What nonsense. Displacement maps are not a myth but a necessity. For a lot of reasons. Also you should not show only the displacement map but the total result of all the maps, ie diffuse, bump, specular, cavity and so on. But for me I need only to see one character by Mec4D, that is enough. OP tries to argue against the whole professional industry.

What will be the next? That the earth is flat?

?

"a necessity"

Nothing can compete against an artwork of 2-3 million polygons made by an talented artist. The only way to realize such art in everyday life is with displacement (and other) maps. You can try to recreate with 200000 polygons until the day you die, but you will never get even near.

A far better way to compare would be to show two renders of a highpoly (2-3MB) masterpiece. One say with 50000 polys and the other with 200000 polys. In both case with displacement (and other) maps made by an expert.

Then we could vote if the quality improvement was worth the extra time and cost which of course could be used instead to other quality enhancing labor.

The way I read it, the point of this thread is to demonstrate that the use of low-poly meshes and displacement maps is not always the best way forward in Poser.

For some situations it is a good strategy, but for others it isn't.

"The way I read it, the point of this thread is to demonstrate that the use of low-poly meshes and displacement maps is not always the best way forward in Poser.

For some situations it is a good strategy, but for others it isn't."

Exactly. Thanks.

Both SmithMicro as well as DAZ push the LowRes mesh + SubD + displacement map approach.

No alternatives. It's "my way or the highway" for them.

Would you use a Formula I car to drive your kids to school ?

Would you try to win a Formula I race in your family car ?

So why do you think the way "The Industry" has set up their workflow to render one-off figures custom made by professionals to create big screen movies also has to be the best workflow for your typical Poser figure used by hobbyists to create still pictures on average sized PCs ?

Can't you imagine that different circumstances also demand different solutions ?

Sorry, Vintorix, but she's a few Poser versions behind...

Here is "Jackie" as he renders in PP-2014.

Behind him another copy, but this time using the BagginsBill/EZSkin single-texture shader.

Every render option enabled.

No "bump/displacement/specular/whatever" maps necessary.

That's all dead weight.

No fiddling with a gazillion of "control" maps necessary.

"Or should we pushing on, stealin' and lootin' and plunderin' and taking no prisoners, until one fine day we can load our figures into Poser, add some lights and scenery, and out comes a render that looks like a perfect..."

photograph?

I'm sorry joepublic, that's not what I want at all as a digital media/cg user.

Maps is not something you use to make anything better, they are used because there is no other way to make it work. There are a lot of other considerations, you may want multiple figures on the scene, you may want to animate..on so on.

If you have seen a V4 animation with Marvelous Designer you know the feeling of true joy. All the years you never have seen anything like it, not even from Disney! What a kick! But then you hear your poor brand new nuclear powered 16GB computer with GTX 680 straining with the effort almost to give up and you understand what you are up against.

So there are a lot of factors to take into consideration and as usual, art is long life is short. To advocate a stance that go against a lot of people who are more successful than you in fact 99% of the professionals isn't very smart, if I may say so.

But Joe, take heart! Semmelweis in 1850 also was one against the many but in the end he was right! Maybe the same will happen with you.

Figure on the left has displacement, figure on the right is bump only

Excuse ignorance, what's the difference between bump and normal mapping?

A normal map knows from what way the light is coming but a bump map only fake it. I never have succeeded to make a normal map behave in Poser though. Works fine in C4D.

Looks like those xurge suits could use a math node attached to the displacement map, I'm seeing obvious splitting at the seams from incorrectly used displacement. Also, both seem to have detail around the turning edge of the form, this is impossible with bump mapping... are those tiny protusions modeled into the suit?

"...photograph?

I'm sorry joepublic, that's not what I want at all as a digital media/cg user."

And because you're not interrested in photorealism you want to deny it for all those who are ?

Photorealism is by far the absolute hardest thing to achieve in CGI.

That's why Poser needs all that tech stuff and that's why it needs figures to be built in a certain way.

You can have non-realism easily in Poser 4.

Or simply switch off all the techie stuff in PP-2014 and use the figures that are available now.

Where's the problem ?

What's the point of your remark ?

If Poser could do photorealism, will it be less useful to you ?

That's the kind of commentary that actually angers me because I truly can't understand them ?!

Will the ability of easy photorealism invalidate your non-realistic art ?

Actually Xurge uses a math node with his displacement maps. You must do that in Poser to ensure that medium gray (128,128,128) is the color that do nothing..but perhaps you had something other in mind? He also use a elaborate metall shader which I can not see in the picture above.

But regardless of technical deficits, he is ranked #1 by many, certainly by me. That is a reminder that it is the art that is the most important component. The name is CG "art".

Bump and displacement maps are the same - grayscale data is used to determine height. The difference is the way the map is used by the renderer - displacement will affect the geometry, bump will not. Displacement costs a lot more in render time than either bump or normal maps.

A bump map affects the surface normal based on height; a normal map replaces the surface normal with an RGB value that "can represent the z, y and z coordinates of the surface normal of the high-res mesh" (from Scott Spencer's Zbrush Character Creation). Bump and normal maps both fake detail. At least in theory, a normal map created from the comparison between a high and low-res version of a mesh should carry more accurate info than the bump - but I haven't yet seen a clear demonstration of this.

So when adding detail to a mesh with a map and the silhouette of the mesh needs to change, displacement is best - if not, use a bump map or, if you have the facility, try generating a normal map.

Note that normal maps come in different flavours too - object space or tangent space, plus different apps/renderers could have different requirements. Octane requires the green channel to be flipped, Poser does not - so a normal map that works in Poser wouldn't work correctly in Octane ....

Of course he works many hours with the Photoshop master file before taking it to Poser.

Joe, Your images have no texture and clearly the mesh image is superior. It would be superior if a Tx was applied to. A mesh is useful insofar as it carries the Tx. It it is not carryring a tx then then use a 4000X4000 Tx map for the dsp map. 

A bit of info on support for Non-Powers of 2 maps in GPUs. Near as I can tell, if the GPU doesn't support NPOT maps then you fall back to software rendering. I assume this would be relevant for Octane etc. A cool everything you ever wanted to know about your GPU utility (including NPOT support on the textures tab).