Hi all, have been exploring Superfly for a long time now and as many others (I assume) you constantly run into varies issues that is very frustrating and requires you to spend a lot of time trying to solve them. I have watch a lot of the tutorials posted about Superfly, but to me they always seem to avoid really going into details of how things work, what varies settings do and don't do and in the end it seems that they use the excuse that these issues can be fixed by tweaking settings, but they never seem to do or be able to do this in these tutorials, so even though you get some good information from these, you are still sort of left in the dark and still you are fighting with the same issues over and over. So I thought i would make a post where people can tip in with stuff they have discovered, things they find weird or problems they can't solve and hopefully we can share and maybe even combine all the knowledge that is floating around, as I find it very difficult to find information of how to work with Superfly, the settings and so forth.

So with that said, I decided to have a look at these settings and the Poser spotlight and especially shadows.

To test it I have created a simple scene, which can be seen below:

Its basically a box missing one wall and two windows on each side. A sink and a ball will be the test objects and the light is a single spot using raytrace shadows placed outside the box and shines into the room, the spot light have been changed to Inverse linear. All objects in the scene uses a basic PhysicalSurface material so no settings or textures have be loaded or changed.

I used the High quality preset that comes with Poser for the testing.

So I decided to test the shadow settings for the spot light, the above image have a shadow blur of 1 (Minimum) and 1 Shadow samples (Minimum).

This uses 20 shadow blur (Maximum) and 1 shadow sample (Minimum)

Comparing the two image its clear that Shadow blur have no effect. Increasing the shadow samples have no effect either. The second thing that seems off is the shadows themselves. The shadows casted from the sphere and the sink have no fallout, you would expect the shadows to be softer and less dense at the edge of the shadows, however they appear very sharp and unnatural. Here is a close up of the shadows with shadow blur 20.

The next thing which seems off is the shadow that is casted by the wall with the window from where the spot is shining into the room. The back wall where the sink and sphere is if looking at the corner is very dark, however the wall with the window is lit, even though the light is outside that wall.

Here is a zoomed view of the room.

So my first idea was that it could be caused by light bouncing and since one wall is missing it would appear black. So I added a wall and gave it the same material as the rest and closed off the room.

This is a render from the window opposite the spot.

Which made no difference. Keep in mind that these are rendered with the high quality preset, so you expect the shadows to be correct and its the same with the Ultra high settings.

Now the following renders are using these custom settings.

First of all it seems weird why these high quality presets doesn't use more diffuse bounces, but still even though these bounces are increased how do you control how soft shadows are with a spot light using Superfly?

how do you control how soft shadows are with a spot light using Superfly?

Change the scale of the spot light. Like in real life, the shadow softness in SuperFly correlates with the size of the light source.

stewer posted at 8:56PM Fri, 31 March 2017 - #4301053

how do you control how soft shadows are with a spot light using Superfly?

Change the scale of the spot light. Like in real life, the shadow softness in SuperFly correlates with the size of the light source.

That is excellent, dont know why i didn't think of that. Thanks :D

material for Superfly work a little differently as well. Take a look at this Cycles tute. I made my free shader based on this and I us it on everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3wghbZ-Vh4&t=890s

http://www.sharecg.com/v/86231/browse/7/Material-and-Shader/Poser-11-Superfly-Uber-Shader-1

Really nice tutorial lots of good information and very well explained. However im not a Blender user so all the stuff about grouping and so forth etc. is probably very useful for those that use it. :D

However after watching the tutorial, I decided to check whether fresnel effect was in the PhysicalSurface node, so I downloaded your materials and they are very nice and really like the way you have organized them.

But i made a test scene to compare things to see the difference. So I took your car paint and tried to recreate it with the PhysicalSurface node to see if I could see a difference with the fresnel.

Here are the two images that I rendered one is using the cycle material and the other is using the PhysicalSurface node, which obviously got me wondering....

There is no difference in them as far as I can see.

However this is what the materials for each of them look like and don't get me wrong I know a lots of yours is because you can change color and material.

Cycles

PhysicalSurface

Im pretty sure all the materials could be made using 4 texture maps for each material when using the PhysicalSurface and don't misunderstand me, because im doing these comparisons and test because I want to learn, but it seems like a very complicated process with all these nodes and adding and mixing things together when using cycles, it seems like most of these things are build into the PhysicalSurface node already and more convenient to simply build on that.

What exactly is the benefit of using cycles? I could imagine that skin might be easier to make with cycles, but i really don't get why this cycle node is so fantastic and i really would like to know, I feel like im missing something with this node somewhere.

If you render a red material with glossy, that's how it will look, basically. Ghostships shader is a different implementation of a PBR shader, with different inputs. it will probably be easy to replicate things with the Physical Root Node, if you know how to handle things like metallic. Since both should work with PBR maps, both should give very similar results. But building such a shader from scratch or looking at the internals helps (at least me) to understand whta's going on and how things are done.

The main idea is to use a set of maps which defines your material, with things like roughness, metallicness, bump and normal. There are some sites which sell or give away texture sets for physical based rendering. And the results can be pretty close to photorealism, even on a very coarse mesh.

This is a single sided plane. The textures make all the details.

Yeah, thats what I mean, maybe we don't really disagree that much :D

And I understand you argument that its nice to know what happening under the hood, for me its more the theory behind it that interest me. For instant in the tutorial if you haven't seen it, I think the first part is very good, because he explain the theory and how it works etc. And then he moves to how he builds it with all these nodes which really don't interest me, just show me the shader if you know what i mean, and it was quite difficult to concentrate after the theory because i wanted to test it with the PhysicalSurface:D

To me and maybe Im wrong it just seems that cycles and mixing all these things together are for people that are very interested in the more technical parts and those that ain't are just interested in the end result.

But you have all these software solutions today that can paint these maps for you all in one go and you just hook them up, so they help move the workload from the technical side towards the more artistic side or what to say.

This is from Substance painter which i use and its a base shader that you can then modify etc. and once you are done you are left with X amount of maps that you can just plugin to the PBR node that you use, that being Iray, Superfly whatever.

To me this looks very nice as a starting point and its easy to hook up and so on. Now if you should make the same one using cycles, wouldn't you end up needing these maps anyway and still have to add and mix all the things together to get the correct shader?

And these programs are not exactly unpayable, Substance painter cost 150$ 3D-coat is 99$ so to me it just seems like a lot of problems and headache having to go through these cycles setup compared to doing it in these programs and make a setup that a non technical person can understand....but again as I said, I don't really think i understand the benefits of the CyclesSurface node, because you can still use all the cycle nodes with the physicalSurface node.

I am not a technical person. My shader is a result of "monkey see, monkey do." The shader is meant to be used without ever having to open or edit the main node and you certainly do not need to understand what is going on inside of it to use it. It's like a different version of the physical root. Also, the physical root has bugs in it that make it not render all lights in a reflected or diffuse surface in a GPU render. (kind of important if you want faster renders in Superfly.) Also the PR does not do refraction. Take a look at the JPG that I included in the zip that explains what the various parts do. The PR is basically a compound shader that is hard coded and the user cannot open it up and look inside.

I use my shader on EVERYTHING and it always makes the image better.

But if you needed to make an material like the one i showed above where its not a uniformed color or the ones you have in your images, which looks nice btw. Wouldn't you have to start mix and added stuff together to get the correct reflection where there are paint and where there are rust for instant?

Are there no way to get refraction in the physical shader? I haven't really tested a lot of glass or water using it, but agree it weird that they haven't added such channel to it.

My shader takes the same maps that the physical root can. all the data ports (roughness etc.) can take maps that tell the shader where to be rough, where to be reflective etc.