to Razor42 & the forum moderators I mint to hit the quote button my bad.

Razor42 posted at 4:33AM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240333

Sounds like a pretty steep learning curve to Superfly then, as Iray was producing stunning results right out of the box. Or is this something in the actual implementation of Superfly that makes it more difficult to get a general high quality across a wide variety of scenes?

@ martial, hmm my specs are nowhere near your own and I can run pretty much a whole bunch of things alongside Iray even both Blender and Photoshop. Is it possible to pause and resume a Superfly render out of curiosity?

I know, i know I probably mentioned Iray three times to many in this post. :)

I don't render much other then to test render the meshes I'm working on to see what they look like.I'm a huge fan of real time render engines.

anyways out of the box Iray is slow as a snail.makes good renders but 3Delight is light speeds faster then Iray.

I'm Guessing there's ways to make both SuperFly n Iray some faster.

I know there's ways to make Cycles faster.Not that I would call Cycles a speed demond more like a bulldozer.

I don't think any physically based render-engine is built for speed.

there more of a go watch a movie or a night render while you sleep kind of render engine

Yeah, to get professional looking results could take a while. I was reading up a bit on PBR yesterday, trying to find out what it actually means. It turns out that texturing is treated a bit differently. It all seems very scientific and a bit daunting to beginners. But at the same time very powerful and a way to get good results long term. Specifically it is a standard that if implemented correctly is supposed to give consistent results across platforms and render engines using PBR. Also, it seems that even Blender Cycles is not exclusively PBR, but 'supports' PBR. I am guessing it depends on what nodes you use.

So no wonder many skin material setups created for FireFly are not working correctly in SuperFly. I tried EZ Skin and it seems to give that whiteout effect with the basic P11 lighting where some simple clothing textures on the other hand, turned out ok. Correct me if I am wrong. So one thing we definitely need is a good skin shader for SuperFly, one that we can plug all our old skin textures into. That should take us a long way actually!

Got some interesting links though (none of these are specifically for SuperFly if course, but should prove an interesting read nevertheless):

5 Tips for Better Materials | Blender Guru

Realistic shaders tutorial in Blender and Cycles

Readings on physically based rendering

PBR In Practice | Marmoset

PBR Texture Conversion | Marmoset

Art Is A Verb - "Physically Based Next-gen Texturing for Artists" by Andrew Maximov

Some of this is highly technical and I anticipate that it will take some time before I produce decent renders and/or SuperFly materials for my products. It depends a bit on what supporting tools and assets will come out from either other vendors or from SM. So we will see.

I do believe that Dimension3D has released a tutorial here at Renderosity though (I hope it is ok that I post a marketplace link);

Introduction to SuperFly

Definitely getting that one soon, thanks D3D! Edit: Make that NOW lol.

"Superfly seems very good but too long rendering for me . I have tried 3 times but stop the rendering before the end . During rendering it is hard (very slow) to use my computer (i7 CPU, 32 gigs ram, GFX 960) even to access internet"

There definately needs to be a webinar or something to help new users learn the settings it seems.

I am not sure how SM configured their build but have found that the native blender cycles is quite usable on low spec machines

Here is a render I did sunday on one of my low end notebook laptops (gateway EC14 with 4 gigs RAM+crappy video card) nothing mind blowing here but extrapolate how well your main rig would perform by comparison

A stonemason set and one genesis 2 male lit by the free Smart IBL gui from HDR labs

.....And here is the free SIBL GUI for managing your HDR source collection

..BTW the bald dude render was set at 100 samples per bucket

RorrKonn posted at 1:48AM Tue, 24 November 2015 - #4240401

to Razor42 & the forum moderators I mint to hit the quote button my bad.

Awesome, thanks Rorr... :)

Here is another good source for some PBR info if your interested https://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide

Nice work btw, seachnasaigh!

Any tips on converting the EZ skin shader? I haven't gone through my library of SSS shaders from commercial figures and tested those in SuperFly yet - but I have been using EZ Skin in PP 2014 to convert Poser 8 style skin shaders to SSS. So now I need to figure out how to adapt skin shaders to SuperFly and keep or add SSS.

My main direction here is that I would like to eventually create 'rendered in SuperFly' promos to go with the SuperFly adapted clothing materials I would like to include in upcoming products. So I am looking to convert skin, hair, clothing and shoe materials (and textures if necessary) mostly.

About speed, you don't really need fast renders in the poserverse cause typically people only render stills and are willing to wait overnight for them. Much more important is ease of use and compatibility and iRay is amazing in this regard. However 'evil' they may or may not be, DAZ have definitely done a lot of good work towards making iRay a real alternative to 3delight. SM could def. learn a thing or two from them in this. And note that as long as you have a decent current gen gaming card (970, 980, 980ti etc) iRay can be pretty fast as well.

Frequency posted at 10:24AM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240469

Any tips on converting the EZ skin shader? ... So now I need to figure out how to adapt skin shaders to SuperFly and keep or add SSS.

Thank you,Frequency. Actually, I've never used EZ skin. This is the simple setup I used - it probably would be improved with a specular map driving a Cycles Glossy Bsdf node or some such, but I haven't had time to try. I have found that using the Firefly Glossy node is usually has way too much effect, making her look plastic/waxy when rendered in Superfly.

I have had very little time to play - and so I have not been able to offer much specific advice. I can say this - I rendered these rings before in FireFly and with all the tricks I know I didn't come close to this SuperFly image quality.

Note - my signature, which complains about nonfunctioning ebot notifications, is still true. I have participated in a couple threads in the last day and I'm not getting notifications about responses.

So - I had hoped to come back here and find some competence restored in this web site. Nope - cya over at RDNA.

Ooooh, pretty! I'd be keen to learn the refractive caustic setup.

Thank you seachnasaigh! That looks very simple and elegant. I like that. So that is what I will go with to start with at least. :D

Sorry to hear that, bagginsbill. I'll be sure to check the forums over at RDNA also.

seachnasaigh posted at 1:16PM Mon, 23 November 2015 - #4240492

Ooooh, pretty! I'd be keen to learn the refractive caustic setup.

Well - there's nothing to it really. Here is the emerald. The absorption color is RGB 120, 240, 120. For ruby, use 240, 120, 120. For Diamond, just disconnect the volume.

By the way, FireFly was apparently introduced in Poser 5. Way before my time as a Poser user. Does anyone know what was used for rendering before then? Or was there no render engine in Poser before Poser 5?

The Poser 4 render engine was called the Poser 4 render engine. (after FireFly was introduced) See the second tab?

Here's the P5 dialog

bagginsbill posted at 10:17AM Tue, 24 November 2015 - #4240489

I have had very little time to play - and so I have not been able to offer much specific advice. I can say this - I rendered these rings before in FireFly and with all the tricks I know I didn't come close to this SuperFly image quality.

Smith Micro, please grab this image and use it in all your promos . . . with appropriate credit line of course.

Aiko 3 again, even tougher lighting conditions. Night, with moonlight backlighting Aiko, who is also shadowed by trees. Flames in the firepans are emitters.

OK, so what am I doing wrong? I opened PP11 with Andy, rendered him with Firefly, then with Superfly default settings. The latter looks rather rough ...

And here is a recent upload of mine, rendered in Firefly and then in Superfly with default settings. It hardly looks right ... so why?

Why ? Because Superfly render Firefly shaders instead Cycle shaders. A lot of people dont understand SuperFly is fully optimised for cycle shader, you need to re-learn all you learn (Yoda) if you want to take advantage of the power of SuperFly not just switching the render engine.

Thanks BB! (I started using Poser with Poser 8 myself).

Yeah, we are going to see a lot of renders based on FireFly materials to start with. That could give the wrong impression of what SuperFly is capable of.

I am going to have fun learning PBR, that's for sure. Something very good about that is it means gaining transferable skills, not only for Blender Cycles, but learning to texture for PBR in general. I am a lucky owner of 3D Coat also and they recently implemented PBR. I can see myself spending plenty of time in both 3DCoat and Blender in the near future. Quixel and Substance Painter also look promising (and reasonably priced), but I won't have time for everything at once. Now, if someone could just invent a time stretching device, which is the software I actually need most of all... :P

Looks like Superfly will take some learning and there is nothing really wrong with that except there was the comment made some time ago that there would be an easy way to use it but it would also allow those that wanted to look under hood to do so. Looks like we only got the look under then hood version.

When FireFly (FF) shaders produce black in SuperFly (SF), it's usually because there was one particular aspect of Cycles nodes that SM could not see a way around.

The "wires" that carry data between nodes come in two fundamental types in FF - 3-tuple or number. (The most common 3-tuple is to represent an RGB value, but there are other 3-tuples for non-color data such as Normal (N node), Position (P node) etc.)

The "wires" in Cycles (aka SuperFly or SF) come in three flavors - 3-tuple, number, and "closure". The "closure" type of data is the output of a shader node - those that appear with names ending in Bsdf. Historically we called these "lighting" nodes in FF. Lighting or Closure nodes include Diffuse, Clay, Blinn, Anisotropic, Reflect, Refract, etc. In other words, when running SF, all the legacy FF lighting nodes are producing closure data, whereas under FF they produce 3-tuple or color data.

Because closure data is not actually just a 3-tuple (it's not a color it's a probability and a color and an alpha and some other stuff), Cycles refuses to let you deal with closure data as if it is a color. (I do not know why - I can only say it is what it is. If I had built Cycles, I would not have made such a limiting design choice.)

Therefore, it is illegal to process the output of a lighting node with color manipulators. If, for example, the output of a Scatter goes to Color_Math for post processing before reaching the Alternate_Diffuse input of the root node, Cycles will just ignore all that and give you blackness. You have to move color manipulations to the other side of any lighting nodes.

There are a couple exceptions. One is that a Blender node (not the program, but the FireFly node called Blender), when fed closures, is actually replaced with a MixClosure under SF. I have tested this many times. I'm less sure about other exceptions, but I recall Stefan mentioned maybe that Color_Math:Add with both chips set to white will become an AddClosure automatically, and so that special case is supported. There may also be an exception for HSV under limited circumstances, such as Saturation = 1, Value = 1, Hue = 1, and color chip is white.

It is generally a simple matter to rearrange the order so that color manipulation is done BEFORE lighting (i.e. before becoming a closure). If the shader satisfies that criterion then generally speaking it works fine both in FF and SF.

However, there are other reasons you may not get what you want. For example, most of my FF shaders add together a Blinn and a Reflect. I do this because FF has always (and still does) only used the Blinn with lights and only used the Reflect with objects. To get reflections of both lights and object you have always had to use both nodes. Well - in SF, Blinn reacts to lights and objects. Reflect also reacts to lights and objects. Therefore the sum of these gives you duplicate reflections resulting in the extraordinary unrealistic appearance of silicon on everything. So the irony is that when you do the "best" PBR in FF, that same shader becomes decidedly unrealistic under SF.

In such cases, it's better to build a hybrid shader.

If, like so many naive Poser users, you NEVER bothered with even attempting realism, and you don't have the reflect node, just the Blinn, or worse, just the basic built-in Specular on the PoserSurface root node, then that renders pretty nice in SF because you were always missing those reflections of objects and now they are there.

I tried to come up with a suggestion that SF should detect certain PBR idioms in existing FireFly shaders and deal with them. For example, I suggested that the FF Reflect node should not function under SF, since the Blinn or Specular handles reflections just fine. They thought such "magic" would be too confusing. They thought that might make some people confused.

Personally, I think what they chose to do is CERTAIN to make some people confused, whereas the magic version would have just worked.

Whatever - it is still possible to make changes in an SR. I did not convince them that my high-quality PBR shaders that look as realistic as possible need to work in SF - they figure if you went to the trouble to load a BB shader, you'll go to the trouble to load a new BB hybrid shader that works in FF and SF, or maybe you'll just abandon FF and the point is moot.

Here's one of my attempts using the Cycles shaders and SuperFly. I got some initial ideas for a skin shader for Blender and Cycles from the Web. I applied my tweaked version to Mk2, using image maps from one of the texture sets in my library ( LiuYan character, to be exact ). I don't have any decent bump map images for Mk2, so the skin looks a bit unnaturally smooth.

There's a single area light above the model, and a spot light forward and to the right of the character. I didn't do anything special with the hair, so that's still using the Firefly materials.

Here is one of Aiko3. Used cycles shader for the skin. The hair ( Dixie Hair ) used the old Firefly shader. The dress I converted to use cycles shaders, but didn't do anything special with it. I used two lights, an area light above and a spot pointing at the character.

I seemed to lose some saturation when I exported the image, so I adjusted in PS.

Just playing around with the cycles node 'volume scatter' on the poser skeleton. Whisp effect done in photoshop. pauline as she loads with a canned pose from the universal poses folder. Adjusted just the fingers and tweaked the bangs on the hair. expression is from paulines face library, with minor tweak using the expression handles

Render preset: High Quality scatter

22:22:41 - SuperFly: Start rendering on device Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz.

22:37:18 - SuperFly: Rendering time: 876.50 seconds.

22:37:18 - SuperFly: Rendering memory: 1118 MB.

poser cycles render , wip skin shader adapted from a blender tutorial , atmospheric lighting and tweaks done in photoshop , I have to say as a max and maya user , i HATE blenders UI ..freakin zbrush makes more sense than that .

As someone who struggled for years trying to use MAX, I have little issue with Blender's UI... go figure. As someone who has had Daz Studio since DS3(?) and have never got past the stupid library structure, but figured poser in a few weeks...go figure. I didn't need the advertising images because I already knew what cycles could do (although I acknowledge the value of doing so for those who don't know cycles). The reason cycles is important to me (and WAY better than Iray) is that I do sequential images like book illustrations or graphic novel type things, and I want my images to look like they came from the same renderer. ATM I have to use Blender or Carrara for outdoor scenes because they both have instancing. I can open Poser figures in Carrara and export to Blender from there. Being able to do the majority of scenes JUST in Poser is a big deal for me. If they add support for instancing Blender wold just be for making stuff and Carrara would probably die (it's already dead to DAZ). So... when I've finished waiting for the indexing to finish... maybe next week.. I'll start playing with an idea that I joked about earlier on another thread... to see what Superfly can really do that Firefly couldn't.

I think a lot depends witch app ya started with. I started in TrueSpace .I had a very difficult time with LW.but C4D felt a lot like TrueSpace so. LW ,Softimage.Blender all feel a lot a like to me.

The first thing that drives me nuts is why they can't put a simple move,zoom,ratate icons in there app's.

but I'll use what ever app has the tools.

I sculpt better in MudBox then zBrushes ,it's just smoother.but zBrush has all the tools thou so.I use both.

I do wish Poser would get a more up to date UI.I always assumed zBrush coders took a lot of acid.Only explanation I can think of for that UI.but I use it just fine.

Allegorithmic ,Blender,Poser all use the nodes n wires .

I can't remember all those node n wire ,hotkeys etc etc.

Blenders free cause they couldn't sell it.Softimage is gone.n LW's not what it once was.

They just never get users want simple,fast UI.

No argument from me, RorrKonn. Blender would be so much better if they could settle on a UI

hornet3d posted at 2:44AM Wed, 25 November 2015 - #4240720

Looks like Superfly will take some learning and there is nothing really wrong with that except there was the comment made some time ago that there would be an easy way to use it but it would also allow those that wanted to look under hood to do so. Looks like we only got the look under then hood version.

Since I'm not rendering jewelry or anything overly complicated, I've found that using a very simple 3 part diffuse, specular, and bump (or normal) map with sane looking settings (e.g. no specular nodes plugged into ordinary diffuse maps or entirely blacked out) is working out quite well in Superfly. For skin, I just add a very simple subsurface skin node -- like Pauline has -- and make some of the unnecessary eye surfaces invisible/transparent. If the specular maps are decent, they seem to do a lot of the work, though it takes a bit of experimentation to get good looking settings.

I also have to remind myself that my "posing light" set-up doesn't work in Superfly. But otherwise, getting a decent looking result is mostly a matter of dismantling all the hacks and work-arounds -- and digging through the texture folders for specular and normal maps that a lot of Daz vendors create for DS, but never use in Poser. (May be true of some Hivewire vendors, too.)

To be sure, there's none of the WOW! factor you get from really amazing shaders, but the results are certainly quite passable as I learn to do more.

I posted these elsewhere, but here are a couple renders of V4 I did in SuperFly. #1 feature you need to fix - we need good bump maps. I still mostly rely on a Turbulence node because it's better than not using it.

In these images, I used the same pose and textures, but I changed the shaders a bit. The lip makeup and bump is procedural and the first image also has procedural tiny color variations on forehead, nose, and upper cheeks. That was done with the FireFly Spots node but SM made that work in SuperFly just the same. In fact, these shaders are entirely using none of the Cycles nodes, just FireFly shaders that work well in SuperFly.

First using area lights (indoors)

Next using one infinite light and EnvSphere (outdoors)

Not even a week since release. Excellent

I have a Dell PC i7 GTX260 graphics card. Using Poser 11 standard copy
The problem is that when I try to render the figure, the computer crashes. Losing all the time invested in creating the character. Any thoughts on how I should proceed.

lighting for architecture and lighting for human skin, sees 2 separate render disciplines.

can both look good together in same scene?

kentphoto posted at 9:24AM Wed, 25 November 2015 - #4240849

The problem is that when I try to render the figure, the computer crashes. Losing all the time invested in creating the character. Any thoughts on how I should proceed.

always save your scene before rendering -- regardless of what app.

kentphoto posted at 11:24AM Wed, 25 November 2015 - #4240849

I have a Dell PC i7 GTX260 graphics card. Using Poser 11 standard copy
The problem is that when I try to render the figure, the computer crashes. Losing all the time invested in creating the character. Any thoughts on how I should proceed.

Note the GTX 260 series doesn't even have a gig of Ram. (In fact most of the GTX 500 series doesn't have enough ram for most GPU render solutions.) Are you rendering CPU or GPU?

Another Aiko 3...

piersyf posted at 10:50PM Wed, 25 November 2015 - #4240833

No argument from me, RorrKonn. Blender would be so much better if they could settle on a UI

Ya ,No I'm not a fan of Blenders UI but it is getting better or I'm just getting use to it ;)

Gimp,C4D has a very customizable UI. You can make Gimps,C4Ds UI just about anyway you want it.C4D even has a LW's UI. I'm sure you can make it close to Autodesk also.

If all App's UI where 100% customizable .would solve the Waked UI problem.

Blender has a lot of Power ,Love the Price but the Modes gets me. Modes slow you down its not as if 3D don't make a snail look fast anyways.:)

bagginsbill posted at 11:05PM Wed, 25 November 2015 - #4240840

I posted these elsewhere, but here are a couple renders of V4 I did in SuperFly. #1 feature you need to fix - we need good bump maps. I still mostly rely on a Turbulence node because it's better than not using it.

In these images, I used the same pose and textures, but I changed the shaders a bit. The lip makeup and bump is procedural and the first image also has procedural tiny color variations on forehead, nose, and upper cheeks. That was done with the FireFly Spots node but SM made that work in SuperFly just the same. In fact, these shaders are entirely using none of the Cycles nodes, just FireFly shaders that work well in SuperFly.

First using area lights (indoors)

Next using one infinite light and EnvSphere (outdoors)

Nice Renders.I'm thinking since your the shader Guru around here .You could add a SuperFly tutorial book and or some SuperFly shaders ,lights etc etc to your store.

Since it's plain to see they need all the Super Fly Help they can get.. Just a thought :)

OK, not the same quality renders here AT ALL, but maybe of technical value to some...

the old 'dream house' front gates... 1920x1080, IDL using default dome in Poser11, one infinite light, 4 bounces. Rendered in 3 minutes 22 seconds. Notice some mesh artifacts around the centre round bit.

Same scene, same settings, rendered in Superfly. Note that the geometry/texture problem is gone. It might interest people to know that this rendered in 5 minutes 17 seconds using GPU (GTX970), and 55 seconds using CPU (i7 hex core). Don't assume GPU will be faster... it depends on what you are rendering.

Rendered in Carrara. Why? Because it's an old render engine and this rendered in 30 seconds. Also, Carrara does instancing, so this can be populated with lots of trees and flowers and stuff to make it pretty. Finally, I can export this to Blender and render it in cycles there (when I figure how to make the MCscript work...), and use Blender's instancing to do the same. Currently there is no script to gather the data in Poser to port the scene to Blender. Of course, they could implement instancing in Poser and save me the trouble of porting twice...

A_Sunbeam posted at 3:58PM Thu, 26 November 2015 - #4240689

OK, so what am I doing wrong? I opened PP11 with Andy, rendered him with Firefly, then with Superfly default settings. The latter looks rather rough ...

Nobody seems to have answered your question, so I'll tell you (you might know already but others might not). It's to do with samples. Default pixel samples is 3. Try it with 10 and you'll see a massive reduction in grain. In Blender cycles a good 'finished render' is at 100 samples, but it looks like SM have done some sort of factoral reduction (maybe 10 to 1?) because just off the bat it looks like 10 samples in Superfly is around 100 samples in Cycles. I could be wrong... anyone know?

Can some try render interior scene something like over here selling TrueForm ?

Thanks in advance,Jura

piersyf posted at 3:06AM Thu, 26 November 2015 - #4241017

Same scene, same settings, rendered in Superfly. Note that the geometry/texture problem is gone. It might interest people to know that this rendered in 5 minutes 17 seconds using GPU (GTX970), and 55 seconds using CPU (i7 hex core). Don't assume GPU will be faster... it depends on what you are rendering.

What was your bucket size? GPU rendering typically benefits from much larger buckets than CPU rendering - try 256 for a start.

Bucket size was the same for both... don't remember what the size was but either 64 or 32. I didn't save the scene, but thanks for that, I'll try it next time... so much to learn!

OK Jura... not the scene you wanted, I'm sure, but you reminded me of something I wanted to test. Almost 2 years ago now I started a thread on rendering single faced architecture models in Firefly using IDL (https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2878037). Basically because of the massive light bleed through the joins between faces. I wanted to see how Superfly dealt with the same geometry. So here it is:

This is at 25 samples and is still a bit grainy, so render times aren't worth posting yet (still long). What I wanted to check for is light bleed. It appears there is still some, but nowhere near as much as through Firefly. This model is 'out of the box' with original textures, just rendered with Superfly. There is no additional geometry to blank off corners. I should also point out that I turned on caustics. I should also point out that there is no balcony on the model, and no ground plane in the scene. The blue light on the ceiling and the nearside right wall is from the skydome, the yellowish light around the right window is backscatter from the wall and floor. Also, there are NO internal lights here... it is fully lit from the skydome and a single infinite light set to be the sun. Also, the light is at 12,800% and the skydome at 128, which by my previous explorations of Firefly equates to a roughly 2 second exposure with 100ASA film. This is a full stop above what Firefly would cope with, so I am VERY pleased. Considering the original model was made for Poser 5, I have to give a big thumbs up to those who did the node transfers from Firefly to Superfly!

25 samples??? With these settings, rendering that scene on my computer whould be finished by christmas - if I'm lucky. ;)

piersyf posted at 1:39PM Thu, 26 November 2015 - #4241038

OK Jura... not the scene you wanted, I'm sure, but you reminded me of something I wanted to test. Almost 2 years ago now I started a thread on rendering single faced architecture models in Firefly using IDL (https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2878037). Basically because of the massive light bleed through the joins between faces. I wanted to see how Superfly dealt with the same geometry. So here it is:

This is at 25 samples and is still a bit grainy, so render times aren't worth posting yet (still long). What I wanted to check for is light bleed. It appears there is still some, but nowhere near as much as through Firefly. This model is 'out of the box' with original textures, just rendered with Superfly. There is no additional geometry to blank off corners. I should also point out that I turned on caustics. I should also point out that there is no balcony on the model, and no ground plane in the scene. The blue light on the ceiling and the nearside right wall is from the skydome, the yellowish light around the right window is backscatter from the wall and floor. Also, there are NO internal lights here... it is fully lit from the skydome and a single infinite light set to be the sun. Also, the light is at 12,800% and the skydome at 128, which by my previous explorations of Firefly equates to a roughly 2 second exposure with 100ASA film. This is a full stop above what Firefly would cope with, so I am VERY pleased. Considering the original model was made for Poser 5, I have to give a big thumbs up to those who did the node transfers from Firefly to Superfly!

Hi there

Thanks for posting this,really appreciated there

Those single faced geometry always has been pain to render in Poser,I've same model I think is Downtown Apartment,but yours render looks OK,did you used Area lights or not,this will or can help you with better lighting

Regarding the render times,this has been rendered with CPU or GPU and regarding shader,did you modified shader ?

Agree about the light bleed,this has been pain with this model and many others where I needed to use something which would block the geometry etc,this has happen to me with several models which are single faced

But still thanks for posting the render and for posting the insight how and what has been improved on this front.

Regarding the times and render,have look I've done render in IRAY,interior scene and render time after 1 hour and 45 mins has been so grainy(with blurring I would say has been "usable") and there I've used single figure etc and this has been rendered with EVGA Titan X which I overclocked which didn't helped at all with faster times,then I exported same model or scene to 3DS MAX and there I've tested this on render engine which our company developing,there Titan X has been slow(spoke to developers and they said,they didn't updated CUDA and OCL for GTX9xx/Titan X),switched to my trusty old R9 290 and same render took me 40mins,with V-RAY same render took me 46 mins with very average settings,hard to say,due this I always will be bit careful with PBR and expecting fast render times,everything depends on settings and HW used

Thanks again for posting this and really appreciated for yours insight

Thanks,Jura