shvrdavid posted at 10:28PM Sat, 29 June 2019 - #4355275

I have read a lot of this thread, and there seems to be some general misconceptions about render engines, in general. One is that Superfly is Cycles. Well, yes it is... Cycles from about 4 years ago...... Cycles has advanced miles since then.

One thing I would like to see in the next version of Poser, is api support for whatever render engine you want to use. There are so many free engines out there it is scary. Cycles, Iray, AMD Prorender, etc, just sort of scratch the surface.

Adding the proper api support has many advantages. Top of the list, is that you might not have to do anything to Poser to use the next version of (insert any) render engine. Things like new versions of CUDA for example, would be updated in the render engine and not be bound to the base program. Another thing is driver issues. Who has a better chance of getting driver issues fixed? Rendo or a render engine? Yeah, that's what I thought... lol

Next is that the end user can choose what engine to use, based on the hardware, content, experience, etc, they happen to have.

Binding a render engine into a program is an issue, and all you have to do is look at any program that has done so when the next version of whatever render api comes out.

Leave the render stuff in the engine, and write a program api to talk to them. Yes many programs have built in engines, Firefly in Poser, Cycles in Blender, etc. The difference is that programs like Blender have the api set up to add basically any render engine you want to it. Most 3D packages do this with proper api setups.

It is time that Poser do the same, and stop embedding engines into the program that can't easily be updated when the engines are.

Plus, it's great that your entire GUI is not tied up for the minutes or hours of the render. I also loved in Luxrender being able to change the lighting during the render. Man, that saved so many re-renders. Tweak the intensity and temperature of all the lights individually, if you set it up to be that way. niiiiice. Plus, renders can go off to external engine. Which can attach as many network slaves (local or remote) as you have access to.