Deecey posted at 5:21PM Fri, 20 November 2020 - #4405237

Poser has never handled normals well. Firefly literally could not use them at all. The displacement system for Poser was also jacked. Most programs and render engines utilize a gray-scale image in which black is deep and white is high and gray is neutral. This allows the surface to be manipulated in and out at the same time. Poser reads black as neutral and anything gray to white rises in height. You can make a negative (-1.0) setting to get indentions but it requires mixing maps which is wasted effort. So many things could have been fixed and none of these things ever gets improved. Like all Firefly needed was caustics and some tweaks - along with new lighting improvements. But instead they focus on superfly which is slow and ridiculous. Why not work on a bridge to one of the fancier game engines that are now free? Oh wait...that's what DAZ is doing! Again, behind the line on getting ahead, Bondware. Ultimately running the wrong direction.

If I might be a bit bold here ....

On one hand, you are suggesting that Poser should have stuck with FireFly instead of moving forward with Cycles/SuperFly.

On the other hand, you are suggesting that Poser should move forward again and go with a bridge to a game engine.

I'm confused ... should the devs look backward, or forward? At some point, software has no choice but to look forward. Python 2 is reaching end of life. Flash is reaching end of life. Decisions had to be made at some point on what had to be done to replace them. Which means moving forward.

I'm not trying to be insulting, or to rain on your parade, but old technologies are always replaced with new as they become obsolete. If one waits too long, more users are left with no other choice. I have 3 versions of Cinema 4D installed on my system because of plugin incompatibilities, and some of those plugins were pretty costly. All of the plugins I purchased for R19 and before no longer work in R20 and R21, and the newer ones I purchased don't work in the older versions. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

I made two separate statements. Don't twist them and try to make me look like I'm not sure of my direction. That's a debate tactic and I can assure you I am well versed in such things. I stated that Firefly was a quick and solid little render engine that needed improvements (such as caustics) and some better lighting. It could have been drastically improved but Smith wanted to move into a render engine like Daz's Iray. So rather than fix what they had, they decided to tackle something completely new (superfly). So now they have a whole new engine with bugs of its own and its still slow and pretty shabby compared to say Iray. End of statement.

The next statement I made was that it's not a big leap to create bridges for other programs. DAZ has just released a bevy of free bridges. Iclone now has a DAZ and Poser content pipeline option to directly import DAZ and Poser content. These programs are succeeding because they are expanding their compatibility. Poser is going the opposite direction by limiting its compatibility (aka, cutting off python scripts and DSON). Why is Poser the only program not capable (now with 12 at least) of importing anyone else's content? DAZ uses Poser...Iclone uses both...Poser uses??? See my point?