Just installed the trial version of Poser 11 Pro, so naturally the first thing I expected to see was a rendered viewport (as with Cycles). Wasn't greeted with that, so went looking for a way to switch it on. I can't find anything other than switching it between Firefly and Superfly. I keep having to hit render all the time, just as with Firefly.

How do I make it behave like Cycles, so that it updates as I move the camera around and tweak materials etc?

Are you refering to a realtime render? Poser doesn't have that. There is the raytrace preview, that does work with superfly. You can find that under the windows menu.

Just installed the trial version of Poser 11 Pro, so naturally the first thing I expected to see was a rendered viewport (as with Cycles).

"as with Cycles"?

Cycles is a render-engine and implemented in some rendering apps (Blender, C4D, Poser, etc.). What you see in your preview window decides your application, not the render-engine.

Not realtime as such, just interactive, it's one of the things that makes Cycles, Cycles, but it doesn't appear to behave like that, wow

Sorry adp, missed your post. Well all I can say is they need to ditch Cycles and replace it with AMD's Pro Render which is Open Source, interactive, and hardware agnostic meaning you get GPU accelleration on both AMD and nVidia cards. AMD even encourage developers to integrate it into their programs. I'm afraid I'm not impressed by this Superfly thing in the least, I'd honestly rather use Firefly, and actually, unlikely as it is, I wish they could somehow enable Firefly to use GPU acceleration, even if it's only for certain calculations. I saw Bagginsbill demonstrate something called "Parameter Modulation" in Firefly, and man, it looked like a PBR render!

And here's a thought, something which admittedly might sound nostalgic but, you know what? PBR renderers are very fine indeed, but they inherit a problem where being physically based means we loose some artistic licence. It's like, when I look at online renders, comics etc, fantasy images, for some reason I always prefer them done in Firefly than Superfly. So an inherent problem with Superfly (and all other physically based renderers), is it makes your art look as if you want it to look real, even though that might not be the case. So it kinda even puts pressure on you, since the rendering pyhsics are spot on, it makes every model and texture other than the best, look very amateur, whereas with something like Firerfly, you are not entering that physically accurate realm unless you want to.

Sounds crazy, I know, but if I had to choose only one, I'd choose Firefly over Superfly, because the possibilities are superior, and as long as you learn the sort of stuff Baggins has learnt, you can do physically accurate stuff as well, so best of both worlds! If Firefly had Anamorphic bokeh, a way to make the Parameter Modulation knowledge Baginsbill has be easily usable, and preferably, some way to accelerate Firefly using a GPU, that would be ABSOLUTELY killer!

We'd have a sort of Hybrid Render engine that is only 'Physically Based' if and where we want to be. So damn frustrating that this stuff isn't released. I'd much rather pay Bagginsbill for a way to do Anamorphic Bokeh and Paramater Modulation in Firefly, than pay for this upgrade, and I'm not even joking, not in the slightest! On the plus side, I did read somewhere that Bondware are planning to improve the rendering situation, but I'm guessing that will be for Superfly, not Firefly, cause while I hope I am wrong, I'm guessing they're every bit as led down the garden path as every other developers appears to be, completely ignoring how much artistic licence and freedom is lost with a PBR-only renderer!

There is a reason why different render-engines exist. For "not realistic" renders, there are more faster alternatives than superfly. But Poser isn't for comics in the first place. Just look into the marketplace to learn it.

The PBR engine is meant to look realistic so why even bother to try it or use it if one want's an "artistic" render i don't know. Good thing we have a choice in the matter and can go back to the firefly rendering or one that is more "Artistic", The cartoon preview render.

Retrowave posted at 5:53PM Thu, 05 March 2020 - #4382619

... Well all I can say is they need to ditch Cycles and replace it with AMD's Pro Render ...

As soon as they do that i am out. Pro Render does not work on my Mac. It needs an AMD card and i don’t have one. In other forums i read that Pro Render is 10 times slower than Cycles, is that true? I can’t test it.

BTW they could add OpenCL to SuperFly for Windows just like Blender-Cycles has.

Just to be clear, when I say comics, I'm not talking about toon style renders or anything like that, I'm just talking about the general look a non-PBR renderer gives using its standard shading models etc. PBR renderers are geared towards photorealism, and aren't as good as non-PBR renderers at allowing you to stray from that. PBR renders look impressive in a photoreal sense, but that is not always wanted, especially in art, and to me PBR renders don't look as artistic as standard renders.

The same is true of iClone and the movies that come out of it lately. I totally love iClone, and Reallusion are certainly showing the competition how it's done. But for all its advancements, the movies coming out of it lately are not a patch on the stuff that used to, and I think that's a direct effect of PBR, cause suddenly, the creators of the movies appear to be sooooooooo bothered about realism that they appear to be forgetting what iClone movie making is all about, that being camera technique, lighting, and telling a good story. There was a time I used to actively keep up on everything that came out of it, but since the realism fetish kicked in, the movie making has gone downhill to the point I only bother to check for movies maybe once a month, as opposed to pretty much daily which is what I used to do.

Ironic thing is, when iClone was DX9, I was always quite vocal about iClone being behind the times in the render department. I kinda regret that now, although to be fair I did have a point since reflections were pretty much a no go back then! Just feels like everything has gone from one extreme to the other, and that's not good IMHO.

@Nagra - Sorry, missed your post. Pro Render is designed to run on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, supports GPU rendering on all platforms, and does so with AMD, nVidia, and even Intel graphics. Regards Bondware giving Firefly GPU acceleration through OpenCL, that is exactly what I wish they would do, cause I like the artistic freedom and control Firefly gives, in ways that Superfly does not. With Bagginsbill's Parameter Modulation technique built in, Firefly would effectively become a hybrid renderer, or at least that's the way I see it since he was getting results every bit as impressive as a dedicated PBR renderer.

Here's a PBR render Baggins made in Firefly using his Parameter Modulation technique, so just imagine this technique built-in to Firefly, and GPU-accelerated:

Retrowave posted at 7:07PM Thu, 05 March 2020 - #4382638

Pro Render is designed to run on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, supports GPU rendering on all platforms, and does so with AMD, nVidia, and even Intel graphics.

You are wrong, Pro Render on MacOS works ONLY with an AMD card. On MacOS it does NOT work with CPU or Nvidia.

GPU acceleration for FireFly would be cool but i don’t expect that to happen. Yes FireFly and PBR materials is possible but render times will increase dramatically due to ray-reflections. I made my own PBR tests with FireFly before BB and canceled it due to slow render times with real scenes.

There is a product for PBR with FireFly here at the Rendo market place. Search for vendor ByteFactory3D and PBR-Emulator.

The same is true of iClone and the movies that come out of it lately. I totally love iClone, and Reallusion are certainly showing the competition how it's done. But for all its advancements, the movies coming out of it lately are not a patch on the stuff that used to, and I think that's a direct effect of PBR, cause suddenly, the creators of the movies appear to be sooooooooo bothered about realism that they appear to be forgetting what iClone movie making is all about, that being camera technique, lighting, and telling a good >story.

Reallusion has entire suite of excellent products targeting the Non PBR, stylized and cartoon animation demographic for purchase right here in the Renderosity marketplace...?

https://youtu.be/V73djizCu8U

And of course a free live link to Unreal 4 for those needing higher realism for filmaking

Also Asking for AMD Pro Render for ,poser, will not give you an interactive viewport unless Bondware spends the Development Resources to add this ability to the core program.?

Of course existence/relevance Poser, Iclone CC ,Daz ,Fuse etc will all soon be sundered Moot by this New A.I. controled , Real time Interactive human Character Service For Unreal engine.......Game over citizens...Game over.? https://www.quantumcapture.com/ctrl-human

@Nagra - You might have tried or read about an older version. Here's a video where the AMD dev says that it supports GPU computing on a MAC and with support for different GPUs, not just AMD. Something else I forgot to mention is that it also has a machine-learning denoiser (also mentioned in the video).

Click here for AMD ProRender Video

@Wolf - Dude, that's just more crap designed to manipulate even more than the written form of social media already has. It is no threat to filmmakers or animators. It is only threat to the mental health of those sheeple whom the tech giants successfully con into using it. It will result in more mental health damage than we already have to contend with in society these days. Not surprising then, that the usual establishment suspects are all behind it (Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft).

Regards iClone, are you saying they kept the DX9 renderer as an option? If so, that's great, but I thought it went DX11, pretty sure I read that somewhere!

Retrowave posted at 8:58PM Thu, 05 March 2020 - #4382648

You might have tried or read about an older version.

On MacOS ProRender is based on Metal not OpenCL and works on AMD only.

The latest ProRender comes with C4D R21 and on my machine it does not even pre-compute shaders anymore. When hitting render it simply crashes. Previous version of ProRender rendered on CPU, not fast, not very stable but worked somehow.

Sorry to hear that, Nagra, that video is a bit misleading then!

I was just checking-out that PBR-Emulator you mentioned. Gotta tell ya it brought quite a smile to my face. Not so much for what it is, but rather, the result, cause I love the look it gives. It's like some weird cross between a standard render and a PBR render, very interesting. I'm a bit puzzled by it though, I mean, it says it's a plugin, but how is it implemented? To hazard a guess I'd say it gives you a new object to use in the Node Editor, something that loads PBR textures. Is that right, or am I way off?

I'm not upgrading to Poser 11 (but hopefully Poser 12), so I'll be picking-up that plugin anyway, but I am still curious in the mean time!

Have a look a the official AMD ProRender site It clearly states that non AMD is supported for Win10 and Linux only, Win7 and MacOS require an AMD card.

No the PBR-Emulator is not a plugin. Its a material setup, a node framework where you plug your PBR textures in. I think it works with Poser 9+.

I have Poser 10 so I'm in luck then

Man, funny how things work out. I've just been looking at other products by the same vendor and it's obvious he's used PBR-Emulator on his renders for those products, and honestly, I could not imagine a better look for using on web comics, graphic novels or whatever. What I like about it is that it looks good but still has that ability to look arty without looking like a photograph. It doesn't look like a photograph or even feel as if it's trying to. And that's what bothers me about dedicated PBR renders, cause whatever you do in them looks as if you wanted it to look like a photograph even when you didn't. PBR-Emulator, however, demonstrates EXACTLY what I was trying to get at early on in the thread, because it allows us to retain control over artistic licence of the overall aesthetic.

I absolutely LOVE it, I mean look at these renders done with it; absolutely perfect for web comics and graphic novels since it looks colourful and artistic without looking like an attempt at photorealism that failed. You cannot do that with a dedicated PBR renderer that is 100% bent on accurate rendering physics, and for that reason, I hope Bondware continue to develop and improve Firefly with more features and accellerated performance wherever possible. Control over the overall aesthetic is something Firefly does incredibly well thanks to its deep rendering abilities and sophisticated node system, and this aesthetic right here is just one example of that!

Regards iClone, are you saying they kept the DX9 renderer as an option? If so, that's great, but I thought it went DX11, pretty sure I read >that somewhere!

Ummm...No..... the old DX9 Viewport had nothing to do with "Stylized Art" looks as DirextX is more a Realtime viewport display Function.

If you Want a more "retro" Look in Iclone ,or any other software for that Matter, you have the option of Disabling GI/IBL and lowering other render setting until you get that rubbish year 2002 look of the Poser4 or Iclone 5?

Did you watch the entire Iclone Content Achievement video I Just posted??

People have the option of Doing classic cartoon styles with the Reallusion cartoon animator software or poser 4/firely styles with Iclone basic ,all the way up to PBR/IBL /GI and UE4 Level realism with the live link plugin.... everyone is covered.?

And dont kid yourself with those canting anit-corporate screeds typed/posted on an Ipad from a company worth a trillion dollars. (possibly a bit less since the corona virus spooked the stock market)?

A.I. has arrived with this Qauntum Capture interactive avatar system for the FREE UE4.?

Small regional, community retailers and Family service providers, who cannot afford to hire live actors or pay Character animators will soon be able to have Attractive CG spokespeople for the TV/web advertisements/community outreach just like the big corporations

You cannot stop the future mate.?

Consider upgrading as Bondware just updated Poser11 to Support NVIDIA RTX cards so those who have invested in modern NVIDIA hardware will have better realtime rendering in poser.

For those on the AMD side of things, IIRC poser 11 exports to FBX Just like Daz studio thus you have the option of exporting you favorite poser content & figures to Blender on Linux , just as I Export my custom built content &Daz people to Blender to use my AMD hardware with cycles ,prorender and of course EEVEE.
?

Wolf, having this sort of conversation with one such as yourself is pretty pointless to be honest. Your reply shows you don't really understand what I'm getting at when you say stuff like "the rubbish look of DX9". The look is an aesthetic, and what you see as rubbish, is idealistic to anyone wanting that particualr aesthetic. My point is that PBR renderers that are 100% bent on photorealism, will not allow you to do that, so in effect, they remove the artist's artistic licence to generate the aesthetic they require. So to someone wanting the DX9 aesthetic, Cycles is rubbish, Octane is rubbish, Lux is rubbish. DX9 is just an example of an aesthetic, as is the strange Standard/PBR hybrid renders you get from doing this stuff in Firefly, as seen in my previous post. For that purpose, Firefly is idealistic, whereas Superfly would be rubbish!

I'm not even going to get into conversations about that digital avatar stuff. other than to say that mocap already had a nail in its coffin long before it even got started. The future for animators is synthesised, procedural motion generation. No one is going to give a crap about mocap, body suits or anything that revolves around that stuff once synthesized procedural motion really takes off. The future is having a bunch of sliders to adjust, that generate and control the motion and randomness etc of your digital actor. Trust me on this, the future is NOT running around a huge hall sweating your bollocks off in a jumpsuit rigged with dots and body sensors, just to grab some mocap that could be done in seconds using a powerful synthesized motion system.

I watched the video you posted, but again, I was not talking about the toon style. Those images in my previous post are a perfect example of what I meant, something ideal for online comics and graphic novels. Something that looks like a 3D rendering while still managing not to look like a photo, and retains a colourful, arty look!

Well guess what mate, Cycles is really really rubbish at that aesthetic, whereas Firefly clearly rocks at it

not even going to get into conversations about that digital avatar stuff. other than to say that mocap already had a nail in its coffin long before it even got started. The future for animators is synthesised, procedural motion generation. No one is going >to >give a crap about mocap,

Right.. The A.I. does not use mocap. ?

"Automated Animation

Instead of traditional techniques like motion capture or keyframing, CTRL Human generates animation programmatically in real-time inside the Unreal Engine.".?

Embrace the future. ?

Wolf, I think the clue for its existence is in its name "CTRL (CONTROL) HUMAN". It's just one of the ever-expanding ways that establishment companies get to record everything you do and say, cause in order to interact with something like that, you need to do and say, and that's all the establishment are interested in, what you do and say.

The people behind that crap are Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, the same establishment monsters time and time again. And mark my words, the ONLY effect it will have is on the mental health of the people who use it. I won't be one of them, just like I never wore "Glass" for Google's benefit, just like I never posted a word on Facebook for Zuckerberg's benefit, and just like I never submitted my identity to Google for god knows how many establishment bodies' benefit. I'll "embrace" what I know is right, not what the establishment wants me to embrace.

So in short, not interested mate, not in the slightest, not even when it becomes free and available in Blender

Just wanted to rectify something I said regards the CTRL Human system Wolf mentioned. I just took a more detailed look at it and in fact it is NOT the project I thought it was. It is in fact along the very lines I was suggesting is the future, so pretty cool. There is, however, something very similar in development by the establishment that is designed to manipulate and abuse the public that WILL cause unheard of mental health issues for those who use it. Oddly I cannot find the damn thing, and I cannot remember what it's called, but I'm pretty damn sure the word "Human" was part of it.

Hopefully those groups fighting against it were successful in having it banned from ever going into production, but if they haven't, no doubt it will pop up again in the future, and trust me, you'll know it when you see it. It was a shining example of the psychopathic establishment, and the absolute sheer contempt it has for society. It was a seriously nasty piece if work!

But no, the product Wolf talks about is not it, and looks quite cool.

I was checking out ProRender on my system and it was extremely unstable. Froze up my system, crashed the video driver - running current drivers on a 1660., so not an old model, either. Had to hard-reboot my system several times just while trying to render with it.

AMD makes great hardware. I love their CPUs, and their GPUs seem fine, if a bit power-hungry. But they seem to have a problem with reliability on the software end, especially drivers. It seems spotty at best based on a variety of reports I've read here and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I've never had a problem with Cycles, IRay, or anything else NVidia related. Across multiple system configs and video cards (all NVidia).

Now, if Cycles were to add solid AMD support, that would be great. Let it be completely hardware agnostic.

Retrowave posted at 7:53AM Sun, 15 March 2020 - #4382638

@Nagra - Sorry, missed your post. Pro Render is designed to run on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, supports GPU rendering on all platforms, and does so with AMD, nVidia, and even Intel graphics. Regards Bondware giving Firefly GPU acceleration through OpenCL, that is exactly what I wish they would do, cause I like the artistic freedom and control Firefly gives, in ways that Superfly does not. With Bagginsbill's Parameter Modulation technique built in, Firefly would effectively become a hybrid renderer, or at least that's the way I see it since he was getting results every bit as impressive as a dedicated PBR renderer.

Here's a PBR render Baggins made in Firefly using his Parameter Modulation technique, so just imagine this technique built-in to Firefly, and GPU-accelerated:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, once I had managed to get Superfly to render nicely with some of my older content I have never looked back the last time I did a Firefly render was years ago. The discussion tends to remind me of the Vinyl / CD debate where the many 'experts' said anything on CD was too clean and did not have the warmth of Vinyl but then is it not have to pops, bangs and clicks either. Each to their own I say, stick with whatever floats your boat.

The version of Cycles that Poser uses was old when it was put into Poser many years ago now. Cycles today is worlds better than what's in Poser. You might want to learn more about Cycles before jumping to conclusions about it. Second of all, Cycles has worked in preview in Blender since before it was added to Poser. Poser just doesn't support using it there. Third, showing that you can render metal and shiny things well with a dark plain background avoids pretty much all the reasons that Cycles was needed.

The reason Firefly is problematic in most modern scenes is down to hard weaknesses, some of which your renders make really clear, IMHO. Its GI (IDL) is splotchy, and works so bizarrely that it can't be made efficient in any modern sense. That's not so visible on surface with details, but it's glaringly obvious on anything solid or simple. It doesn't support caustics, so rendering glass in any way that works is out of the question. Which also interacts with that GI/IDL problem, since then your only solution is to fake refraction with transparency, and transparency with reflection and IDL grinds FF to a halt. Hence your completely unrealistic windshield and problematic water. Its SSS is also problematic in terms of efficiency. It also only works properly if you specifically use the node that doesn't allow you to change the scattering radii except by pull-down presets. There's a lovely softness to FF's scattering that I really appreciate, but nothing that improves on SF's scattering so much I'd choose it. And more importantly, modern Cycles has random walk scattering, which works so much better and more realistically than the algorithms available in Poser. Then there's translucency. FF just doesn't support it, regardless of what the Poser root node says. FF also only partially supports emission shaders. You can kind of fake it with IDL, but it creates blotches and renders slowly and doesn't illuminate much even with settings in the 1000s unless you're using a huge mesh. Even in the old version of Cycles in Poser, it's not hard to light cleanly with meshes in SF.

Firefly can definitely make beautiful renders. But it also forces anyone who wants to render, say, regular jewelry with gems or a wall with a window that isn't its own actor, to come up with outlandish hacks just to have something that looks halfway decent. And I know, because I've made those hacks after trying everything I could to avoid them. They can come out OK, but often they take forever to render and tend to look like the hacks they are. In terms of shading, it only handles reflection and albedo/diffuse solidly. Literally everything else, from emitting to refracting to scattering, has significant problems and limitations. In a world where DS offers Iray for free, Poser can't survive being restricted to a renderer that can't render caustics, can't render translucence, has splotchy, error-ridden GI, has splotchy, error-ridden emitters, and is mad slow the moment you add transparency to anything.

That all said, by far what makes Poser's SF renders so much less realistic than Blender's Cycles ones is less about the renderer and more about Filmic's superior color management. I'd really love to see that in Poser as much as I'd like to see modern Cycles features like adaptive microdisplacement and random walk SSS.