Over the past couple of years I have spent a great deal of time studying Physically Based Shaders and rendering. I have been studying with Digital Tutors and Gnomon Workshop and have converted all my modeling and scene development to Modo. Industry wide PBR is now the standard. My question is, as I am preparing to bring new products to market I am setting everything up to utilize PBR only. Do you all think this is a mistake in the current world of Poser. I am preparing both Daz and Poser versions. It is just a pain to create dual shader sets for everything. But at the same time I realize this would limit usage to customers who have poser 11.

There is a market for this ... there are several other people and we need more. I welcome it and I am sure others do as well.

Have you seen this product in the marketplace: PBR Emulator ? It lets Firefly emulate PBR and is usable in P9 up which could increase the customer base.

I would use PBR shaders if I my scene is intended to be photorealistic. If I were to create a fantasy or sci-fi scene, or a non-photorealistic toon or anime scenes, I may not want PBR shaders.

Personally I would like to see more Superfly shaders. I have a complete set just for the Physical Based Root that I made that I'm still considering marketing ...

thanks for the feedback

I don't know how widely used substance painter is but making the products SP friendly might be a plus for some people. By friendly I mean the UVs are laid out to work with smart materials and physical effects.

I have substance painter and substance designer and B2m, after you have worked with them for a while you begin to realize you can accomplish the same thing with photoshop.I like the Allegorithmic Suite of tools and use them often, but sometimes I feel I have more control with photoshop. Part of that I'm sure is I have been using PS for decades.

Boni posted at 10:11PM Wed, 25 October 2017 - #4316222

Personally I would like to see more Superfly shaders. I have a complete set just for the Physical Based Root that I made that I'm still considering marketing ...

While I was putting my directory together, one thing I realised was that there aren't that many PBR shaders for Superfly. My thinking on the subject would be to make the shaders available on their own and let the customers decide if they want to use them or not.

Substance makes great Poser PBR shaders. I use it all the time. The only problem is map size. You could easily be stacking multiple 4k or 8k mats for a simple diffuse colour chip on a material. I suspect PBR shaders for the Physical node would do would well.

raven posted at 7:13PM Sat, 28 October 2017 - #4316189

Have you seen this product in the marketplace: PBR Emulator ? It lets Firefly emulate PBR and is usable in P9 up which could increase the customer base.

That just made my day. I haven't been using Poser much for the last few years (aside from a project that I've been doing in Poser that doesn't use any figures). I felt like Poser and Daz were too focused on trying to leapfrog each other while not really moving in the direction I wanted to see. I bought iClone because I felt that being similar to a game engine I could justify making content as it would be usable in Unreal Engine or Unity with much less fuss. While I wish Poser had a viewport comparable to iClone, 3D-Coat, Marmoset, Eevee, etc., being able to render PBR materials in Firefly is something I had never considered possible. Wow. Neat.

I would like to see products with PBR shaders. That has been sorely lacking. I'm not sure about the "only" part. Going that way you will stand out in the marketplace. However, having both will allow you to sell to the broad customer base. I understand how much of a pain it is to set up two sets of materials. It's a lot of tiring work to get it right, but having no idea that anyone will use it. If you do go to PBR only, expect backlash. A lot of DS vendors switch to Iray only materials. The 3Delight users bitterly complain on the forums and will not buy those stuff.

I have personally stopped using Firefly, making materials for it is a pain, just try to load some of Posers default materials setups, its insane to say the least. I don't think you will find any render engine out there which requires such a setup to make a material, and then it even look wrong :D, I doubt even in the movie industry they would use something like that. To me its the result of a render engine which is outdated with very little future. Even if you manage to make a decent material, in most cases it wont work correctly in different lighting which is a huge benefit with PBR materials as its physical accurate and also there are simply things in Firefly that you cant do, because its not part of the engine.

My guess is that a lot of people are very used to Firefly and therefore most of their content have Firefly materials, which doesn't always render well in Superfly, meaning you might experience noise, fireflies, color issues and also that its not as simple to convert the texture maps to Superfly. For instant you could take Superfly textures and plug them directly into blender, daz3d or any other PBR render out there and they will work. But there is no easy way to transfer a lot of math functions, reflection and refraction shaders and expect good results. No one is forced to render in Poser, blender is free and so is Daz, so even if you don't like working in those programs for whatever reason. you would only have to learn how to render in them.
PBR I think have a vey bright future ahead of it, Because computers get faster and faster, which does little for the quality of Firefly renders, except them being rendered faster, but so will PBR, but with a lot greater quality and it probably wont be to long before its almost real time rendering in the viewport (At least I hope, think :D).

"At GDC 2013, Epic Games released the Unreal Engine 4 "Infiltrator" demo, running 100% in-engine in real time, showing off UE4's high-end rendering features as well as the latest tools."

"Infiltrator" demo

I don't know how many vendors include PBR materials in their products, but I think its sad if people in the community refuse to support them due to that, because its not helping moving things forward. Most vendors work with other programs as well and are most likely somewhat up to date with what is going on besides in Poser and Daz3d. It would be a lot better if the community started moving towards PBR and demanding that, as it would make products they invest in last a hell lot longer, as it doesn't seems that the general setup of PBR materials are changing anytime soon, if ever.

But I fully understand the frustration that people might have with Superfly or Iray, because renders can take a long time, there might be varies issues like noise and so forth. My best advice is to make sure that objects used in the scene are actually PBR friendly, because wrong ones can cause problems and also a lot of issues can be fixed if you simply render your image larger (10-100%) than what you need and then resize it.

There are people that always want to be "on the cutting edge" and then those that just want "what they're used to." If a content-producer only wishes to serve part of their possible market, that's their own concern.

However, if a content producer wishes their product to be desirable for the broadest part of the possible customer base, they do the extra work to make that happen.

It's really that simple. Heck, some people still use their old Poser 6 copies, get enjoyment from them and still buy new products they can use with it. At the end of the day, one has to decide what customers one wishes to serve and how much effort one is going to dedicate towards doing so. That work could be the difference between selling fifty copies or a hundred copies. Or, maybe not... :)

I never use Superfly because it is just way too complex to produce good results, and I buy product frequently. You can make PBR textures that work fine in Firefly/3Delight. Deacon215, for example, sells clothes for DS with iRay textures that render fine outside of iRay and in Firefly when I re-rig them to work with Poser figures. Here is a G3 hair piece that I rigged for V4, here parented to my Heroine Paulette freebie for Pauline. This is an iRay texture on the hair. This is a quickie render.

These are iRay textures on Deacon 215's Scythian Archer set.

Both are Firefly renders, just to be clear.

What does it look like in Iray?

Look at his product page here at Rendo.

It looks the same.

RobZhena posted at 9:12PM Mon, 06 November 2017 - #4317436

I never use Superfly because it is just way too complex to produce good results, and I buy product frequently. You can make PBR textures that work fine in Firefly/3Delight. Deacon215, for example, sells clothes for DS with iRay textures that render fine outside of iRay and in Firefly when I re-rig them to work with Poser figures. Here is a G3 hair piece that I rigged for V4, here parented to my Heroine Paulette freebie for Pauline. This is an iRay texture on the hair. This is a quickie render.

Was wondering what you mean with it being to complex to produce good results with Superfly?

That you can use PBR textures with Firefly is correct, but there is no difference, meaning they are just texture maps so a diffuse map for PBR is the same as one for Firefly, and you could probably adjust the rest of the maps and use them in firefly as well. The difference is in the engine and shader and how it use the information in the texture maps. In PBR you work with metal/roughness and you can use a grey scale map to tell the engine how metallic a surface is simply by using a single texture map and add a greyscale roughness map to tell how rough the surface is. In Firefly you would have to setup reflections etc. And even if you do that its not physical accurate as with PBR, because it handles light correctly. And Firefly will die at some point simply due to that, there are not really any way around it. Even if you were to do some cartoon render, there are no reason why you wouldn't want light to be correct as i see it, and as far as I know there is nothing in PBR that would prevent a cartoon shader.

Oh, heavens, I read the "show us your Superfly renders" thread at the official forum, and people spend vast amounts of time fooling with nodes and materials and lighting to get a nice image. When I look at the output, I see no better result except for stuff, like glass and metals, and I'm not interested in rendering glass and metals. I have to use EZ Skin to convert most human figures to even work in Superfly. There's absolutely no reason why Firefly will ever die. It works.

Setting up nodes can be time consuming, but for most materials the only root you need is the Physical surface root which you can plug your textures into. At least as a starting point its very powerful. Metal, glass and water are very good in PBR but isn't that just good? Its hard to render anything without there being some sort of metal or glass at some point.

This is two images of a basic bowl from poser on a plane, one using standard Firefly material and the other a standard physical surface node. I think the difference between them is huge when it comes to quality, especially when the only difference is the render engine and the root node.

The Firefly render is rendered at very high render settings with indirect lighting. The biggest issue as I see it with PBR renders are the amount of time it can take to render if you are using wrong settings.

This is a comparison if both render engines are using the physical surface root.