shedofjoy posted at 9:46PM Sun, 01 November 2015 - #4234632

Im not sure if I read this correctly, but there will be a new render engine called superfly and it will only support gpu rendering in the preview? fair enough it will hopefully make the previews nicer, but what about the main render? I did hear also the reason being the texture quantity and amount of ram on the Graphics card. but what if I want to do a limited amount of textures and have lots of onboard ram, and as time goes on more pc's will have higher specs. I myself bought a GTX970 with 4gbs of memory so I could do just that in reality4. sadly it feels to me that the next version of poser is going to be nothing that innovative, i hope im wrong.

No... You may have read it wrong, or maybe you simply associated GPU with preview modes erroneously. Superfly is an integration of blender's photo-realistic rendering engine "Cycles" into Poser. I've heard it said that it was a response to Daz integrating nVidia's iRay into D|S, but is probably just as much a way of getting caustics, colored shadows, etc. into Poser, since Firefly doesn't have those abilities. I think it might be PBR based, but I haven't read anything about PBR materials handling in the viewport, or even how Firefly materials will look in the viewport when changed to Cycle's materials.

That's kind of unnerving when looking at Poser's competitor iClone. I'd always hoped the time would come when Poser's viewport/preview modes would be of high enough quality that they could be used for animation and Firefly just for stills or important beauty shots. Not only does improving the preview seem an afterthought, but it keeps getting harder to create materials that look good both in preview and final render (and at least somewhat similar, obviously).

Superfly/Cycles is CPU based, but supports modern nVidia GPUs through CUDA (AMD users are again left out). Like with Reality, we'll have to adjust lighting and materials to take full advantage of it, though the developers have had to consider how much of Cycles we'll be able to use versus how much it should resemble something we are all already used to using.