So, I won't need any shader conversions, I will have some cycles ready shader presets in my runtime?

You can't draw that conclusion - that you won't need any conversions. There are two conflicting goals that, so far, I cannot see how to resolve at the same time. (Note: I'm testing Superfly so I know how it works at the moment, not necessarily at release.) Superfly is trying to make it so the nodes you're familiar with just work, or even work better. For example, the tile or clouds work EXACTLY the same so you don't have to change your pattern generators if those are how you did it. On the other hand, the Specular node works better - the built-in one has Fresnel and Reflect in it, which instantly makes many naive materials (those that did not take Fresnel into account, nor have any Reflect node) suddenly look fabulous.

On the other hand, every material I've ever made has a Blinn + Reflect in it and while it does render something in Superfly, it isn't what I want. Because the new Superfly version of Blinn does both lights and object reflections, it is carrying the work of the Reflect node automatically, which makes the Reflect node that I add to Blinn superfluous and causes an unnatural doubling of the reflection strength. So, at the moment, I have to go edit EVERY one of my materials to remove the Reflect node which is no longer needed.

We're actively discussing how to resolve this problem. If we remain compatible, it will always require more nodes to achieve realism. If we have the physics added to the base poser surface node, then every dumb shader will look better, and every smart shader will look terrible, but nobody would ever have to make another smart shader.

It's an interesting problem.

I've been given some permission to reveal a bit of imagery. 

Here's an example of what I mean by new-and-improved, therefore not-the-same.

This material has no nodes at all. None. The shader is as you see it on the right. Look - fresnel reflections, just like I've been teaching you for 8 years but without a single node added!

This is the same shader in Firefly. Clearly if you WANTED this look, you cannot get it in Superfly. It's just not going to do this. 

This is the existing Firefly way to get nearly (or sometimes exactly) the same results as the physically correct Superfly. Does the simplification offered by Superfly mean you should switch or no? That's going to depend. Looking at one shader won't give you enough data to make that decision.

We are trying to control that, but what you are doing is NOT helping.  There is no need for this type of behavior to continue.  Please take a moment to read over the ToS again: http://www.renderosity.com/tos.php

Sweet, BB!  Love how compact it is.  Can't wait to see more.

While the dumb shader does look fantastic I'm afraid of what will happen when no one has to build another "smart shader".   That would assume we'd always use Superfly.  However, not knowing the render times I don't feel as if it's something that would totally replace Firefly for me.   Maybe for some ultra-realistic renders but if it's going to be much slower I'd prefer Firefly hence the smart shaders would still be useful.   If you could do a comparison render with Superfly dumb shaders and Firefly smart shaders and give us the time difference I'd appreciate it :)

Superfly will work in the queue manager, won't it? If my renders have the potential to jump back up to days to finish, I'll either never get anything rendered or I'll never get anything done in poser if it's tied up that long.

We're getting mixed reports about speed. In some situations, Superfly is much faster for the same quality output, while in other situations, Superfly doesn't even seem to want to finish rendering. So if I show something, you must take it with a grain of salt, please. Also, I want to point out once again -- it isn't finished yet -- changes will happen -- data I collect now may be wrong in a week.

I will also say that, at the moment, some things (like metal) you make exactly the same in Firefly or Superfly (two nodes) so it's not always about having no nodes. That may change, though. I've made suggestions how to do metal parameterization without any nodes.

Anyway - enough excuses.

Firefly: 3 minutes 35 seconds

Superfly: 1 minute 37 seconds

Cryengine have been supported physically base rendering in real-time (almost in no time), without waiting forever......

Poser is aimed at game development, why will it use slow physically base render, like cycles?

Poser is not only aimed at game development.

Please don't forget this is the Poser forum and this topic is about the new Poser Pro 11 upcoming release ..

Sure you can discuss and compare .. but try not to get overboard with it .. Unfortunate the Poser related posts get lost in it.

Renderosity has forums for other softwares as well to share full thoughts about .. Here we talk Poser ..

And even if you prefer other software in this forum we respect the Poser software, the artistic members who love to use it and those who are curious for it :)

 Luckely not Teyon .. otherwise I would be lost ;)

 Thanks Ted,  it's encouraging to see Superfly doing faster renders as I had expected a cpu based pbr to be excruciatingly slow like Lux.  Well, nothing to do but wait and see I guess and hope for the best.  Thanks again for your time.

There seems to be confusion about PBR being slow. The implementation of PBR is not slow - it is the implementation of unbiased rendering that makes things slow.

PBR in game engines is faster than any render we work with. It's not the cost of calculating a reflection strength based on Fresnel rules that matters - frankly that's practically for free. What's costly is firing off additional rays to simulate diffuse reflection from a 360 environment, which Firefly IDL + IC dramatically avoids. But that's "biased" rendering, which cheats constantly in order to gain speed.

Note that the number of rays needed to stumble upon a caustic is even larger - unbiased path tracing is NOT good at this and Cycles isn't really set up for caustics. Yes it can find them, but not in a few minutes, or sometimes not even in a few hours.

"Cryengine have been supported physically base rendering in real-time (almost in no time), without waiting forever.....Poser is aimed at game development, why will it use slow physically base render, like cycles?"

As opposed to what??.... Cry engine?

I really wish people would actually read up on the uber Hardware requirements for those impressive cry engine"realtime" videos  they watch on the internet ,before suggesting it for poser users.

If I'm thinking of SuperFly as a replacement renderer... can Superfly make something non-PBR like a toon shader?

For non-PBR related stuff you may be better off using Firefly, which is partly why it's still around. That said, there probably is a way to do it, I have not experimented with Toon Line shading at all.

Question for bagginsbill (anybody else need not apply):

Can you create in SuperFly a situation like this:

which requires being able to create, for the red ball, this shader:

transparent if it is a camera ray, diffuse otherwise.

Question for bagginsbill (anybody else need not apply):

Can you create in SuperFly a situation like this:

which requires being able to create, for the red ball, this shader:

transparent if it is a camera ray, diffuse otherwise.

So far, no. This is one of my concerns, which I raised before i even got a copy to try. There are a bunch of things Cycles can express that are completely unreachable features if all we have are ported Firefly nodes. This is at the heart of the matter - what is the goal of adding another Renderer? Is it better looking implementation of Firefly nodes, or is it everything the new renderer has to offer, using its exact algorithms and parameterizations, which means abandoning the backward compatibility thing?

Note however, that you can accomplish your invisible but reflected red ball in Poser - set "Visible in Camera" to off, but "Visible in Raytracing" to on.

Still - even if there is a way to do that particular case, there are not ways to do other things. Such as use a different normal for specular than for diffuse (to simulate a glaze coating on a piece of wood).

On the other hand, every material I've ever made has a Blinn + Reflect in it and while it does render something in Superfly, it isn't what I want. Because the new Superfly version of Blinn does both lights and object reflections, it is carrying the work of the Reflect node automatically, which makes the Reflect node that I add to Blinn superfluous and causes an unnatural doubling of the reflection strength. So, at the moment, I have to go edit EVERY one of my materials to remove the Reflect node which is no longer needed.

Is that something that could be scriptable?  I personally would rather have to run a "SuperflyFixer" (a la SceneFixer or ChangeGamma) on existing materials and have the expanded feature set of Cycles availible than to have full compatibility by incorporating the existing limitations of the Firefly node set...

On the other hand, every material I've ever made has a Blinn + Reflect in it and while it does render something in Superfly, it isn't what I want. Because the new Superfly version of Blinn does both lights and object reflections, it is carrying the work of the Reflect node automatically, which makes the Reflect node that I add to Blinn superfluous and causes an unnatural doubling of the reflection strength. So, at the moment, I have to go edit EVERY one of my materials to remove the Reflect node which is no longer needed.

Is that something that could be scriptable?  I personally would rather have to run a "SuperflyFixer" (a la SceneFixer or ChangeGamma) on existing materials and have the expanded feature set of Cycles availible than to have full compatibility by incorporating the existing limitations of the Firefly node set...

Sure - for the most part I use a Color_Math:Add to combine a Blinn and Reflect - if that's the idiom it's easily found and fixed. I'm not sure that everybody does what I do, though. Most people just straight-up plug the Reflect node into Reflect_Color. Then you have to wonder if they also plugged a Fresnel_Blend into Reflect_Value. If they did, you can presume to know what's going on there and remove both. There are other idioms that are less obvious, though.

 How much will it cost to upgrade from pp2014?

They have not yet set a price as far as I am aware of, but here is a link to the site where it will more than likely be available when it is released:

http://my.smithmicro.com/poser-pro-2014-upgrades.html

You will need to click on the upgrades tab 

All the new stuff sounds fun.

Would be cool if Poser had a new or multiple UI's and the camra,lights control where more professional.

I just hope the interface will let me make menus & dials big enough to read with my bad & aging eyes. In Poser 7 I had no trouble enlarging them to my liking, not so in Poser 9-up. Have to fiddle with my Windows settings & still run into issues. :-(

All the new stuff sounds fun.

Would be cool if Poser had a new or multiple UI's and the camra,lights control where more professional.

 

All fine as long it's not a Kai Krause revival ]:)

It took me a whole year to get used to Poser 4's interface...lol. Was NOT an easy thing ;).

Laurie

Well, Poser UI can be better in many ways, but I think that it is a great easy to use and intuitive interface, [edited]

Just look other applications. You have to study 20 tutorials to lnow how to start using it.

Coming from a graphic artist background and software like Photoshop, Quark XPress, etc, I found Vue d'Esprit 2. I took to that software right away. Great interface. When it came to Poser 4, I didn't find the Kai Krause interface intuitive AT ALL. Bryce was a nightmare and in some ways still is. While it might be an interesting interface, it's certainly not intuitive. Sure, we all got used to it, but that's not the same as it being intuitive for a new user.

Laurie

I don't think the interface is terrible. There are two controls, maybe three, that need a serious update. All this ignores hotkeys, of course.

First, the camera controls. That really has to be updated. Does anyone actually use that little face in the middle to select a camera?  And the little white buttons you have to hover over to see what they do isn't intuitive in the least. Those two raised palms aren't obvious either. The trackball and the pointing fingers for left-right/in-out are okay and I use all the time, but the rest? Yeesh. Otherwise, I use Netherworks camera control panel to select and modify the camera settings. So the obvious solution, at least to me, is to merge the two: keep the trackball and the left/right/up/down/in/out control (perhaps updating them), replace the camera select with either a button panel or a menu dropdown, and right click and flyout menus off the selected camera (as used by Netherworks) for the camera options.

Second obvious one is the light controls. There's probably as many opinions on how to update that as there are people, but there are obvious shortcomings. The lighted globe is, again, not terrible in that it allows you to quickly adjust lights and where they are pointing, but there are obvious shortcomings.

1. There's no differentiation between types of lights. If you click on one of them, unless that light source happens to be in the field of view or you look at the parameters, you can't tell if it's a spot, a point light, an IBL, or an infinite light.

2. If you have a bunch of lights with the same orientation (say a row of spotlights on the ceiling of an interior scene), they'll overlap and you can't select a specific one from the light control, but have to select the one you want from one of the menus. If there's a bunch of lights close together, it's still unnecessarily difficult to get the one you want.

I'd say drop the thing entirely. Really, the only thing's it's good for is infinite lights. IBL controls using it are pointless, it can't be used to place point lights (and having an "orientation" on a point light is a stupid concept anyway), and its controls are nearly useless for spot lights.

A replacement could be a light panel consisting of four buttons (infinite/spot/point/IBL). If no light of a given type is present, the label is grayed out or whatever to indicate it. To select or add a light of a given type, click the button that opens a flyout menu where you can add, delete, select, or modify lights of that given type.

The third control I'm "Enh" on is the Dots. Not terrible, but someone can probably come up with something that works better.

This thread is supposed to be about the new render engine in Poser 11. Please keep it on topic and stop derailing into all these other aspects that have not been brought up by Smith-Micro yet, as it just creates a breeding ground for more arguing and hostility.

This thread is supposed to be about the new render engine in Poser 11. Please keep it on topic and stop derailing into all these other aspects that have not been brought up by Smith-Micro yet, as it just creates a breeding ground for more arguing and hostility.

There is nothing to discuss. Nerd3d vanished, leaving the poor Teyon to not-respond (since he appears not to have been cleared to state even if he is alive or dead) and bagginsbill confirmed that at least currently only the previous FireFly nodes are avalable (therefore critically crippling what you can do with the renderer). Since it is August, people are on vacation so, even in the most optimistic hypothesis, nothing can come before early September. My take is that the users reactions have been quite different from what they were expecting (instead of kudos, well grounded critisms) and now they have to decide, discussing with the accounting people what to do: go ahead and disappoint a lot of people, with the easily foreseable effect on sales or bite the bullet, do more work, spend more money and take more time than what was budgeted for. If this is true, expect a long time (easily many months) before further communications.

Amazing that Poser adds more and more features, and all people seem to want is more photorealistic views of some girl's rack.

"Cycles can express that are completely unreachable features if all we 
have are ported Firefly nodes. This is at the heart of the matter - what is the goal of adding another Renderer? Is it better looking implementation of Firefly nodes, or is it everything the new renderer has to offer, using its exact algorithms and parameterizations, which 
means abandoning the backward compatibility thing?"

Well in my opinion, the goal of adding another renderer is to deploy Everything the new render has to offer.

Take the Example of Vray for Maxon Cinema4D
when we finally got that professional film production quality renderer 
added to Maxon C4D ,years ago, we were told bluntly that you need to 
use vray's native& separate material system to get the professional results one has come to expect from the Vray system.

Now while they did include a token "material converter" for any of your existing image based C4D materials the results were inconsistent and often unusable.

so the Community of users got to work creating many online repositories of  Pure Vray materials for C4D.

From my perspective this obsession with"backward compatibility"
ultimately stifles development and keeps software& OS systems trapped in the  crumbling caves of the past while others who take the bold steps to innovate quickly surpass you in the commercial marketplace.

I admit to not being much of a "node wrangler" myself but my limited experience with cycles  nodes has me quite impressed with its power, beauty and elegance.

IMHO it would do a major disservice to poser users to cripple it 
over some sentimental attachment to the past.   

It's an obsession with backwards compatibility because some people have spent tens of thousands of dollars on stuff for this program (as well as Studio, for that matter), including probably your own merchandise. You wanna be the one to tell them their stuff doesnt work anymore? Be my guest. Suggestion: keep your asbestos suit handy. You're gonna need it.

"It's an obsession with backwards compatibility because some people have spent tens of thousands of dollars on stuff for this program (as well as Studio, for that matter), including probably your own merchandise." 

So those who spent "thousands of dollars" on Eight track Cassette  tapes,Vinyl records or who bought the $50,000 version of "Alias Wavefront Maya for Windows NT should have not been forced to ever spend any more money by the uni-directional nature of the space/time continuim?

Time has a very predictable effect on software&technology.

Why should poser consumers be insulated while other real world consumers are routinely forced to accept that"oh!..they dont make/support product/feature x anymore".

" You wanna be the one to tell them their stuff does'nt work anymore? Be my guest. Suggestion: keep your asbestos suit handy. You're gonna need it."

Uhhmm... no... my "Animated pose sets" for V4 are in PZ2.. a poser native format.
when the Day comes that the old beloved PZ2 is no longer supported by poser/Daz. 

Then burden falls upon me.. THE COMMERCIAL PRODUCER to switch to whatever the new standard may become for saving figure animation Data.

..or remain cowering in the crumbling caves of the past blathering on about "backward compatibility "while other character animators erase my vestigial products from the market with the new standard...

This is not rocket science.

 You wanna be the one to tell them their stuff doesnt work anymore? Be my guest. Suggestion: keep your asbestos suit handy. You're gonna need it.

It will always work in firefly.

I think people forget that there are levels to that 'backwards compatibility'. Things like mesh and morphs and skeletal rigs are one thing; this is where things can be rendered useless. Shaders, Lighting, these are really on a throw away level. I started using Vue because of the more flexible lighting system it had (among other reasons). Learning new methods of setting up ligths, or using shader nodes is not  in the 'It Cost Me Money$$!!!' category; you can recreate old light sets with new lights. Replace shaders with other shaders. Most of what's out there shader-wise for Poser is either free, or was part of something else. They could replace that system and the learning curve would not be that great. If they used something like OSL, there would be tons of pre made shaders for people to just plug in and go.

That said yes, there would be a lot of whining about the favored 11 year old light set not working at one click anymore. More power means you have to bother to learn to use new features of the program. Nothing is free. Ever.

Maybe the question you guys should be asking yourselves is this: just what do you expect from a four hundred dollar program? If you want full photographic realism and perfect reflections and all these other toys, maybe Poser and Studio just arent for you anymore. Maybe it's time you moved on to the higher end programs where you can get all that and more — and at a price tag appropriate to the power you now seem to expect. 

These programs, by and large, are for hobbyists, overwhelmingly so. That doesnt mean development should end, but at the same time, what is the point of putting in these higher end resource hogs that only a few percentage points of the user market is even going to bother with?

And yes, it does come down to a market that has invested a lot of money in this stuff. They are your principle market share, whether you like it or not. And they're the ones who are going to look at this stuff and say, "What the hades do I need that for?" I dont even want to think how much time and energy went into developing Poser's Hair Room. How many people actually use it? Probably not enough to warrant all the development time. Why it's still in there is a complete mystery to me, but hey, whatever. Neverthless, it's a perfect example of a "feature" that takes up a lot of development time and energy — and that hardly anyone uses. So what's the point of it?

Yes, development should continue. New features should be put in place. But sticking a Maseratti engine in a Prius? Dude, go buy a Maseratti. To be frank, you're just screwing it up for the rest of us.

Amazing that Poser adds more and more features, and all people seem to want is more photorealistic views of some girl's rack.

Well, that is something that Poser needs to be able to do properly before adding anything else.  That means the breasts should react naturally to gravity, deform when the arms are crossed and, of course, look like actual human skin.  Going on version 11 and we still aren't anywhere close, IMHO.

"It's an obsession with backwards compatibility because some people have spent tens of thousands of dollars on stuff for this program (as well as Studio, for that matter), including probably your own merchandise." 

So those who spent "thousands of dollars" on Eight track Cassette  tapes,Vinyl records or who bought the $50,000 version of "Alias Wavefront Maya for Windows NT should have not been forced to ever spend any more money by the uni-directional nature of the space/time continuim?

Time has a very predictable effect on software&technology.

Why should poser consumers be insulated while other real world consumers are routinely forced to accept that"oh!..they dont make/support product/feature x anymore".

" You wanna be the one to tell them their stuff does'nt work anymore? Be my guest. Suggestion: keep your asbestos suit handy. You're gonna need it."

Uhhmm... no... my "Animated pose sets" for V4 are in PZ2.. a poser native format.
when the Day comes that the old beloved PZ2 is no longer supported by poser/Daz. 

Then burden falls upon me.. THE COMMERCIAL PRODUCER to switch to whatever the new standard may become for saving figure animation Data.

..or remain cowering in the crumbling caves of the past blathering on about "backward compatibility "while other character animators erase my vestigial products from the market with the new standard...

This is not rocket science.

Where is that "Thank you" or "Like" button, when you need it most?

"Uhhmm... no... my "Animated pose sets" for V4 are in PZ2.. a poser native format."

For the moment they're a native format. But I guess if that changes and your customer base leaves, you wont mind, right?

Just checking.

Maybe the question you guys should be asking yourselves is this: just what do you expect from a four hundred dollar program? If you want full photographic realism and perfect reflections and all these other toys, maybe Poser and Studio just arent for you anymore. Maybe it's time you moved on to the higher end programs where you can get all that and more — and at a price tag appropriate to the power you now seem to expect. 

These programs, by and large, are for hobbyists, overwhelmingly so. That doesnt mean development should end, but at the same time, what is the point of putting in these higher end resource hogs that only a few percentage points of the user market is even going to bother with?

Yes, development should continue. New features should be put in place. But sticking a Maseratti engine in a Prius? Dude, go buy a Maseratti. To be frank, you're just screwing it up for the rest of us.

What does the price have to do with anything?  Blender is free, as is Daz|Studio...  Carrara is in Poser's price range...  Is there some "quality cap" where $400 programs aren't supposed to get any better?  Where are the $600 or the $800 programs that improve on Poser?  Yes, it is a $400 program, but many of us have been paying the upgrade price for many years and have invested much more in Poser than a mere $400.  What does the upgrade price get us on top of what we already have is the real issue.  Is the addition of an open-source rendering engine available for free in blender going to be worth the $150 upgrade price to the next version?  There is nowhere to go for serious Poser users...  Hosting Poser scenes in other higher-end programs doesn't magically solve all of Poser's shortcomings. I don't know what high-end resource hogs you are talking about, but your argument could be applied to stopping Poser development altogether.  If it already does x% of what y% of people buy it to do...  Why add more to it at all?  Because they decided to make a "Pro" version and claimed it would integrate with professional pipelines and appeal to non-traditional users of Poser.  A feature that uses a lot of resources isn't necessarily a high end feature; ray-tracing is much more computationally intensive than scanline rendering, yet ray-tracers have always been a dime a dozen.  This insistence that Poser is a hobbyist program undermines SM's efforts to position Poser Pro as a professional tool.   

So, since I don't want to ruin anything for anyone, what features should SM be adding to their $400 program that wouldn't be wasted on us lowly hobbyists?  I'm really unclear on this.  I'd consider Cycles a higher-end renderer than Firefly, but in that it produces similar results in seemingly much less time I can't call it a resource hog or say that it's in any way an unwelcome addition.  I fully sympathize with those trying to decide whether its more important to maintain compatibility with existing content or to unleash the full power of Cycles to demonstrate its superiority over Firefly.  

"What does the price have to do with anything?"

I"m sorry, you think this stuff comes for free? Hey, if it's in Blender, THEN USE BLENDER.  But to insist that Smith Micro install every single little thing you've found along the way in your voyages through the 3D universe is, well, ridiculous. And yes, you've paid the upgrade price. No one said you have to, but you did. Maybe instead of payingfor every single upgrade, you might look at the features and say to yourself, "Hmm, dont need that. Think I'll give it a pass."... which is precisely what would happen with all this higher-end rendering capabilities that only a few folk like yourself seem to think is so absolutely necessary and which wreaks havoc with now legacyitems.

I repeat: the people who have invested more into this program than just the upgrades are the customer base for it. And if you do something that messes with that huge investment, you will lose that customer base. It's that simple. 

Turning off the notifications. Have a nice day, eh?

"What does the price have to do with anything?"

I"m sorry, you think this stuff comes for free? Hey, if it's in Blender, THEN USE BLENDER.  But to insist that Smith Micro install every single little thing you've found along the way in your voyages through the 3D universe is, well, ridiculous. And yes, you've paid the upgrade price. No one said you have to, but you did. Maybe instead of payingfor every single upgrade, you might look at the features and say to yourself, "Hmm, dont need that. Think I'll give it a pass."... which is precisely what would happen with all this higher-end rendering capabilities that only a few folk like yourself seem to think is so absolutely necessary and which wreaks havoc with now legacyitems.

I repeat: the people who have invested more into this program than just the upgrades are the customer base for it. And if you do something that messes with that huge investment, you will lose that customer base. It's that simple. 

Turning off the notifications. Have a nice day, eh?

You were unable to answer a simple question, so I guess you don't know either... If I'd been asked I would have suggested a PBR-based GPU solution optimized for animation, rather than a CPU renderer optimized for stills.  Just because I disagree with your perspective on Poser development doesn't mean I agree any more with the actual direction of development.

If I'd been asked I would have suggested a PBR-based GPU solution optimized for animation, rather than a CPU renderer optimized for stills.  Just because I disagree with your perspective on Poser development doesn't mean I agree any more with the actual direction of development.

I'm not saying I don't agree, either.  I bought Reality because Firefly is just too slow for the quality it produces.  Another CPU renderer was the last thing on my list of things to add, that doesn't mean I won't use or benefit from it.  I'd just have been more excited if improvements to the physics, better weight painting, geografting or something like that were also chosen for the sneak-peek.  I understand that Cycles is but one improvement and was shown because it is already able to produce output.

As if AmbientShade's comment from Thursday at 12.20 AM was never posted... This feels somehow like the Star Trek (TOS) episode 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield'.