Since Renderosity now owns Poser, does this mean that Renderosity is providing official support? That is to say, by experts on the Renderosity payroll who will address specific questions in a timely manner? Or do these forums constitute the support system?

That is a very good question that deserves at least one bump. SM is closing the Poser forum on Sept 2 so all things Poser should be here and at Hivewire3d (Plug).

In the meantime, do you have an issue?

For now, you may contact Rendo for POSER support at... store@renderosity.com .

I'm sure an "official" address will pop up soon.

quietrob posted at 11:22AM Wed, 21 August 2019 - #4359989

That is a very good question that deserves at least one bump. SM is closing the Poser forum on Sept 2 so all things Poser should be here and at Hivewire3d (Plug).

In the meantime, do you have an issue?

Well, I have mysteries- like, is it really the case that Preview mode can't see hair-room hair? This makes for a serious lack of utility for the comic modes. It means I can't create my own hair for renders through Preview mode except by going outside to a 3D modelling program like Blender, so things that I thought were major reasons for getting Poser really seem to be useless. I feel like I bought a grab bag of programs that don't play nicely together, a bunch of legacy assets with similar problems, and not an actual integrated posing/rendering system. However, I would be thrilled to death to find out that this merely poor documentation and my lack of understanding of how things really work. I really DON'T want to feel that I should have just bit the bullet and mastered Blender from the get-go.

This is a picture of andy with hair room hair in preview mode. Have you tried creating hair? do you get error messages when you do so?

I've created some hair, and the preview shows the abstract, like above, of where the hairs are supposed to be, but it does not show any of the attributes of the hair, like thickness or color.

You can do a pretty quick spot render of the hair.

Preview mode and also Cartoon mode can see the hairs. Just tried it my self to be sure.

ghostman posted at 12:21PM Wed, 21 August 2019 - #4359999

Preview mode and also Cartoon mode can see the hairs. Just tried it my self to be sure.

They see an abstract of the hair, but if, for example, you crank the root and tip thickness up to 9, they don't see that, and they don't appear to see color or any other attribute of the hair.

Also, as a different issue, is there any kind of smoothing control for hair in Firefly or Superfly? If the hair is given much thickness there, it tends to render as separate chunks, it doesn't smooth between segments like the skin does.

The Bondware/Renderosity official support page is here: https://support.posersoftware.com/portal/home

But, you should probably understand that no 3D program will preview the same as a Render.

In Poser 11 you can use the Raytrace Preview to get an idea what renders will look like. It's accessed from the Main Menu with Window>Raytrace Preview

Amazing. I never tried that. It's why I still consider myself a sophomore. Thanks for the tip!

Glitterati3D posted at 2:34PM Wed, 21 August 2019 - #4360006

The Bondware/Renderosity official support page is here: https://support.posersoftware.com/portal/home

But, you should probably understand that no 3D program will preview the same as a Render.

In Poser 11 you can use the Raytrace Preview to get an idea what renders will look like. It's accessed from the Main Menu with Window>Raytrace Preview

Well, I get the idea of a preview mode, but Poser is confused about it, because the cartoon render features only work in Preview mode, making it a final render mode. I would love it if the cartoon render features worked in Firefly.

Thanks for the support page info- and that raytrace preview looks pretty useful, good to know about that.

HKHan99 posted at 8:42AM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360005

ghostman posted at 12:21PM Wed, 21 August 2019 - #4359999

Preview mode and also Cartoon mode can see the hairs. Just tried it my self to be sure.

They see an abstract of the hair, but if, for example, you crank the root and tip thickness up to 9, they don't see that, and they don't appear to see color or any other attribute of the hair.

Also, as a different issue, is there any kind of smoothing control for hair in Firefly or Superfly? If the hair is given much thickness there, it tends to render as separate chunks, it doesn't smooth between segments like the skin does.

You can specify Style Options in render mode in Poser. Try checking off the Antialiasing checkbox.

Also, you can find more on Style Options in the reference manual pages 506 - 509.

EClark1894 posted at 7:48AM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360095

HKHan99 posted at 8:42AM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360005

ghostman posted at 12:21PM Wed, 21 August 2019 - #4359999

Preview mode and also Cartoon mode can see the hairs. Just tried it my self to be sure.

They see an abstract of the hair, but if, for example, you crank the root and tip thickness up to 9, they don't see that, and they don't appear to see color or any other attribute of the hair.

Also, as a different issue, is there any kind of smoothing control for hair in Firefly or Superfly? If the hair is given much thickness there, it tends to render as separate chunks, it doesn't smooth between segments like the skin does.

You can specify Style Options in render mode in Poser. Try checking off the Antialiasing checkbox.

Also, you can find more on Style Options in the reference manual pages 506 - 509.

Preview mode just doesn't see the actual hair parameters, regardless of Style Options. It renders more-or-less black threads with some shading. I'd be happy to be shown to be wrong, but in several different threads nobody has done so.

This is blue hair room hair with a tip and root width of 25 in preview mode with color comic style.

This is the default (blonde) hair room hair with default settings in Preview mode.

This is the default hair with tip and root width set to 25 in Firefly.

You can see that changing color and thickness has almost zero effect in Preview mode.

Sounds like what you want to see in Preview is how everything will look in the final render. I don't think that's how the preview mode is supposed to work.

I've only gotten error messages and roadblocks when I've tried the hair room. I will say I can see what you mean about the preview mode looking pretty scraggly. I can see the color changes but the hair thickness...that can't be right.

Are any of your samples finished or Area renders.

Have you tried Area rendering in lieu of preview?

EClark1894 posted at 9:01PM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360162

Sounds like what you want to see in Preview is how everything will look in the final render. I don't think that's how the preview mode is supposed to work.

I want the comic modes to see and render what you can set in the hair room. The fact that they are attached to the Preview mode when they are in fact a final render mode just confuses the issue. I would be happier if they made this modality part of Firefly, then I would have no issue about what does or does not show up in Preview mode.

quietrob posted at 9:04PM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360164

I've only gotten error messages and roadblocks when I've tried the hair room. I will say I can see what you mean about the preview mode looking pretty scraggly. I can see the color changes but the hair thickness...that can't be right.

Are any of your samples finished or Area renders.

Have you tried Area rendering in lieu of preview?

The Firefly renders are Area renders. As near as I can tell Preview doesn't do area rendering, but maybe I'm missing something.

HKHan99 posted at 12:45PM Sat, 24 August 2019 - #4360193

quietrob posted at 9:04PM Thu, 22 August 2019 - #4360164

I've only gotten error messages and roadblocks when I've tried the hair room. I will say I can see what you mean about the preview mode looking pretty scraggly. I can see the color changes but the hair thickness...that can't be right.

Are any of your samples finished or Area renders.

Have you tried Area rendering in lieu of preview?

The Firefly renders are Area renders. As near as I can tell Preview doesn't do area rendering, but maybe I'm missing something.

Not trying to be funny here, but it doesn't sound like you know what an Area render is. Obviously Preview does area renders. Look below.

To select the area render function select the smaller camera over the Preview window, Now select the area you wish to render. I drew a small retangle around Andy to see what he would look like once he was rendered.

Huh. When I do that it just rerenders the preview window. Maybe I need to re-install this thing. And, funny or not, I do know what an Area render is, because I did it on the Firefly renders above, as noted, and quoted, above. What I'm finding aggravating about Poser is that so many things are idiosyncratic, AND the system seems somewhat unstable- so, since I don't have much experience, I can't tell if something doesn't work because I don't understand it, because it doesn't work with the thing I'm trying to make it work with normally, or I'm running into some bug that may or may not be part of Poser. I think long-term users are used to all this, but for a newcomer a lot of it looks like poor design and a lack of care about customer experience. I've started learning Blender, and the difference is profound. The latest version of Blender is very powerful and has considerably more features that Poser, but it's still much more integrated and coherent. The only difficulties I've experienced so far are in interfacing with 'outside' stuff like models and add-ons from third parties, which is to be expected- and even those have been much smaller and more easily solved than what I've experienced with conflicts between parts of Poser that supposedly all one program and in-house assets. I paid money for Poser and I would certainly prefer to like the program, but it has been pretty annoying so far. I think if Renderosity wants it to have a future, they're going to have to do some major cleanup, updating and feature creation to make a smooth-running package, because Blender already IS that, and it's free. And 2.8 is not nearly as hard to learn as earlier versions were. If Blender were to pump out some good tutorials directed at the pose-and-render demographic, they'd bite off a huge chunk of it in no time. Honestly, I hope Renderosity does fix Poser and make it what it purports to be- a user-friendly way to pose and render scenes. If they just want to hang on to it to drive content sales, though, it's going to die. Since they just bought it, they can't be blamed for its history, and I wish them well. I just hope they actually care about the product. In the meantime, I'm learning Blender, and loving it.