CuriousGeorge opened this issue on Feb 04, 2019 ยท 9 posts
3D-Mobster posted Tue, 05 February 2019 at 1:27 PM
I see, however I do think that it is an incorrect approach for several reasons. You write in the first post:
Which I fully understand and agree with why that is important to you and is one of the main reason, why you would want to use PBR in the first place and stay away from Firefly. Cycles and the Physical material node is in Poser are PBR nodes. Even though the standard Poser surface node can render in Superfly, Im not really sure that its well suited for PBR rendering, maybe someone can expand on that, if they know more about it. But for me at least, I stay away from it, except when I export into 3ds max as materials doesn't seem to work or get exported or imported there "correctly" otherwise.
PBR in it self make sure that materials look correct regardless of lighting conditions, which is basically the environment as the reflection of light from objects determines how we perceive them. Which is why PBR is so much better than for instant Firefly rendering, because in Firefly if you change the lighting, lets say from day to night, you can basically screw up a material, which can cause you to having to adjust either the material or the lighting to get whatever look you are after, which is both time consuming and annoying. And then when you change the lighting again you might have to go through the whole process again. Which is also why I personally don't think there will be any major, if any further development of Firefly in future Poser releases to come, but that is just a prediction :D
However when talking about PBR and why I find the emission strange, is because its sort of the same approach as someone "faking" materials for Firefly would use. But it ain't necessary and advisable to do with PBR, unless you are deliberately going for a weird effect of some sort. Because it ruins the purpose of PBR as I see it. Very few objects in real life have emissions, lamps, the sun, some animals etc have it. But for the most part very few things. So when you add it to a piece of ice and as you say you want it to work in any environment, it won't work during a night scene as the ice will suddenly cast light.
So I think a good way to look at it and the image you rendered above saying it "looked to bland for you", which I agree it looks less interesting. But keep in mind and compare it to a real life setup. You have taken a single piece of ice and placed it in a light grey environment, with nothing to reflect. I doubt that a piece of ice in real life under such circumstances would look very interesting either.
So what I would suggest you to try is to hide the background and add a HDR map to cast light so there is something to be reflected. Even try to delete all other light sources in the scene, maybe put it on a floor, duplicate it a few times and place more in the scene and then try to render again to see if it looks more interesting. Also remember to turn on caustics for both refraction and reflection.
If you are not sure how to set up HDR lighting let me know and ill show you. But I have to eat now :D