I want to learn how to render realistic portraits with Superfly. I am prepared for long render times. I've tried to figure out the settings several times, to no avail.

Can anyone post a great Superfly portrait and give the settings?

Here's my Firefly effort....

Core i5 8400, 8BG RAM, graphics on the motherboard.

Models:

V4.2 with Elite textures (Lana) from Daz, Wild Hair, V4 Gown No 1 by Caribe

Poser 11 Pro

Settings:

VSS Outdoor light probe "beach" and a dome.

Render time: 19 min, 20 sec.

::::: Opera :::::

Does this qualify? I don't have that much time right now. If you like it I'm happy to share what I did.

Some features in Superfly that are worth a note .... eye shaders need to be modified because reflections are more realistic and baked in reflections are no longer necessary. For one example.

A quick test to show why I like Super over Fire. FireFly

SuperFly

Check the shadows and look at the her nose.

render settings

Hope this helps.

Here's one of mine.

Single infinite light, Ez dome environment, Ez skin3, most but not all, other materials adjusted for SuperFly.

Here's one I did. PoserPro11, rendered with Superfly using my GPU in about 250 seconds.

Here is the setup of the scene.

M4 that has been EZSkinned (also has sub-d at level 2 as it has displacement textures too). The ring is from the morphing primitives, and is acting as a ring flash, and is the only source of light in the render. The scene is lit by a non-rendering infinite light only to allow me to see the scene in the preview window to work on. I am using depth of field in the render too.

Here are the render settings I used.

Here is the finished render, a straight .jpg export from Poser at 100% quality.

I'd start off simply with just a figure and using Snarlygribbly's EZSkin (I also use bopperthjis' EZSkin Cycles add-on) on the figure after adding a texture.

Then I'd use EZDome with a HDRI to provide illumination, rather than the default lights. This also gives something for eyes and other reflective surfaces to reflect.

Set a sensible render size for experiments. Then you can play with the different options in the render settings to see what may work best for you. You could set a high number of samples and with Progressive selected, stop the render when you think it's 'cooked' enough for example.

Thanks Rosehawk and bantha. Your renders, like mine, are "on the way" to higher realism. I played around with Superfly last night for a few hours, and could not get back to the level of my original post above, let alone higher, such as seen in the Iray renders in Daz Studio like this promo ...

Click here for Iray shader at Daz

note: i do not want to switch to Daz Studio.

boni, noted: take away maps with eye-reflection and anisotropic shaders out of eyes. My image above has that already in place, the reflection is of objects in front of her.

I just realized that I have a license for "Reality 4" for Poser. I'm going to drill down into that next.

::::: Opera :::::

Raven, your tutorial above and advice are terrific. I will follow them tonight.

I already use ezskin, a dome, and hdri.

I don't have a graphics card on my computer, only the chip(?) on the motherboard. Does that make Superfly rendering invalid, or simply take longer since the CPU has to do the work?

::::: Opera :::::

Superfly doesn't rely on a graphics card, it may just take longer as the cpu does the work. I'll do a comparison render using my cpu to give a time comparison. My system has an i7 2600k overclocked to 4.2ghz, 8 cores with multi-threading enabled.

I'll post the cpu time in a bit.

Okay, I could not wait until tonight. I called in sick to my boss. I am my boss.

Progress render now executing.

:: og ::

I turned it off, realizing focus distance was set incorrectly. Now rendering again...

Ha ha, love it, called in sick to the boss, you being the boss!

Using my cpu my render took 1010 seconds.I could have stopped it a little earlier but was out of the room when it finished! I also changed the bucket size down to 32 from 512 for the cpu render, as GPU's like bigger numbers.

Looks like you may need to adjust the focus_distance on your camera as your pic is looking very blurred!

If you are going to experiment with DoF, I would recommend visiting bagginsbill's freebies and downloading his camtarget.obz file. It's a replacement for the crosshairs you see when using the focal_distance dial. Backup the original camtarget.obz and replace it with bb's and instead of crosshairs that can be difficult to line up your focal point if it's not centered, you get a plane to show where the focus will be.

https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/Home and you'll find it in the File Cabinet section.

Amazing, the render I just did took 1123 seconds, on CPU only. Very close to your number. Intel Core i5 8400, 8GB RAM

I have to investigate the eye shader, it blew out.

Thanks for the bb focus tool link, i'll deploy it.

::::: Opera :::::

Looking good ?

For eyes, Ghostship has a good shader over at ShareCG.

https://sharecg.com/bpmorton777

Raven, did you ever do anything with bagginsbill's eye model?

The Daz example uses "studio" lighting which like its photograhy equivalent is designed to make someone look good. One thought based on that is to get some studio light HDRI maps (eg HDRI Haven) and set-up a scene with figure+mat+ezskin and experiement with the lighting.

The image below shows the same figure and mats but with different light set-ups - studio lighting is on the right

Alright, 9:00 PM here in California on a Thursday night. I'm at an end with my Superfly investigation for now. With advice above and Raven's settings, I see how I could get far along my quest for realism in portraits. (Raven, by the way, that render of the great face you posted continues to amaze.)

The two images below are my current finals, first FireFly, then SuperFly. I know I could learn more about Superfly and improve the results, but I'm going to put that on 'pause' now, because I don't have the hardware. Superfly renders take 2.5 times longer. When I get my beast rendering computer with a strong GPU, I'll revisit.

Thanks for everyone who responded, any additional comments welcome.

::::: Opera :::::

Note: I switched skin texture to Danae's London. I love the way the eyes render with her settings.

Firefly, 8 minutes

Superfly, 22 minutes

Bonus image, Firefly with Wild Hair, a massive prop hair of highest quality, but which costs tremendously in render time.

I used a "studio light" in my previous example too. Here is a portrait with a HDRI as light source:

Hi Opera, sorry for the delay in replying, I've not been online for a couple of days.

No, I never really played with bb's eye (that sounded weird! ).

Your renders are looking good. I must admit, I'm glad to have my 980ti to render with, as Superfly is definately a lot slower on my cpu compared to gpu.

Thanks again for the comments about my pic, and glad I could help out some

Nice job there bantha!

I've seen references in this thread to EZSkin and EZDome..can someone point me to where these can be found ?

freyfaxi62 posted at 8:43AM Sun, 21 October 2018 - #4337970

I've seen references in this thread to EZSkin and EZDome..can someone point me to where these can be found ?

Snarlys place

As constructive and interesting as your example is, Ironsoul, we are talking about Poser's firefly and Superfly render engines.

Boni posted at 10:39PM Fri, 02 November 2018 - #4338817

As constructive and interesting as your example is, Ironsoul, we are talking about Poser's firefly and Superfly render engines.

The images are Superfly, I was hoping to convince the op to switch to a more sympathetic lighting model before comparing with Firefly

Your text confused me ... My apologies. Those images are wonderful!

Superfly is actually Cycles which is an excellent unbiased renderer that can go head to head with professional renderers costing $$$$. Keep in mind that it's still relatively "new" to the Poser community (uptake in the Poser community runs like molasses, people are still using P4 ffs) so people still have a long way to go to coax the best out of it. Firefly has been around forever so people have learned to squeeze some amazing results out of what is actually a technically inferior renderer.

This is done with Cycles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-rmzh0PI3c

And here's an old comparison of Cycles vs some other top industry renderers: https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/render-engine-comparison-cycles-vs-giants

It fares pretty well in that test (and keep in mind it's from 2015, since then Blender has been evolving at an exponential rate), and the results are subjective. Personally I preferred the look of cycles in a couple of those.

Performance will also increase exponentially as more people upgrade to current GPUs.

That was amazing. I can't imagine how many hours that took to create.

@Raven you may want to go in and add some wrinkling on that old man's throat. It looks really weird that his face is the age of a 60-70 year old and his neck still looks like he's in his 20's. Also not sure what's up with his ears but as it's not the focus, I guess it's ok. It's a cool render though. Just needs to be pushed a bit. If you have time, definitely revisit it.

Thanks Teyon. Yeah, I know about the neck, but at the time I was just testing out displacement using CPU rendering which had just been implemented in one of the SRs. For this thread I just loaded up the old .pz3 from then and rendered. I should have played around with the neck material but I was just being lazy to be honest!

So here we go then, an updated render. I took some of the displacement off from the ears thinking that's maybe what was off but they don't seem to look different ( although tbh to me they look fine) and massively increased the displacement on the neck. The problem is the original maps weren't as detailed for the neck/torso as they were for the face though.

The render was still only just over 4 minutes, but tweeking the settings to get it there took a lot longer!