Aloha, smurfsters.

I finally got some time over the weekend to take a first look at my shiny Poser 12 upgrade, and aside form the already documented changes with glossy and roughness shader settings, there is one other thing that irks me, so I want to ask here if it is just user error on my part, or if there are actually changes to shadows (which I did not expect).

Here is a small excerpt from a scene (sorry, the entire thing cannot be posted here as it is heavily 18+). Once rendered in Poser 11.3, once rendered in Poser 12. Obviously, no changes whatsoever were made. The scene uses a single Infinite Light.

Poser 11.3:

Poser 12:

Light settings are these:

Parameters
Shadow: 0.940
Map Size: 1024
Red: 1.000000
Green: 0.984000
Blue: 0.914000
Intensity: 55%

Properties
Include in OpenGL Preview x (<- means checked as I do not have check marks on my keyboard ^_^")
Visible x
Animating -
On x
Shadows x

Infinite Light

Ray Trace Shadows

Shadow Blur Radius: 2.0
Shadow Samples: 24
Shadow Min Bias: 0.100000
Preview Shadow Map Size: 512

no Ambient Occlusion

Atmosphere Strength: 0.010000

As it looks to me, Poser 12 seems to completely ignore the Shadow Blur Radius setting. I even dialed it up to the maximum of 20, just to try it out, and the shadows looked the exact some as you can see up there. There is no visible difference between 2 and 20 shadow blur, which in itself sounds improbably for me. But hey, what do I know? (Don't answer, that was a rethorical question. ;-) )

So, are the shadows in P12 fully behaving as they should or is there actually something wonky going on? Oh, and any reason why on newly created infinite lights, the shadow map size under Parameters has a limit from -100 to 100? In P11, it was still -10000 to 10000.

Aloha, lords and ladies of the render pipelines.

If you are seeing a tremendous difference between both scenarios, submit a ticket and alert them. The development team is trying to fix all the issues as they come up.

I,ve seen the same thing happen in my renders, try rendering the scene twice in row, this some times changes the the shadows. From harsh cloudless sky, to overcast shadows. Or try rendering with the "apply post effects to render box" ticked. Maybe some one else can shed some light on why this happens?

Shadow blur radius is working in Poser 12:

However, try clearing the Poser Cache (in general Preferences) before rendering, as I have found that can affect how the shadows are rendered (absolutely no idea why!), in a similar way to that reported by RoseHawk above.

First of all, thank you all for tuning in. I have tried the suggestions from both @RoseHawk and @Snarlygribbly, though I am sad to say neither made any difference. I ran more tests with various settings, using different scenes I made over the last years and some new test ones. The baseline for me seems to be that Superfly simply ignores certain settings for lights. When rendering the same scenes with Firefly, shadows behave as they did before in Poser 11.3.

I will follow the advice by @hborre and submit a ticket, because I have the sneaking suspicion this may actually be a bug and not, as I first suspected, user error. ^_^"

Again, thanks to all of you. :-)

SpiritWolf448 posted at 4:37PM Mon, 23 November 2020 - #4405598

First of all, thank you all for tuning in. I have tried the suggestions from both @RoseHawk and @Snarlygribbly, though I am sad to say neither made any difference. I ran more tests with various settings, using different scenes I made over the last years and some new test ones. The baseline for me seems to be that Superfly simply ignores certain settings for lights. When rendering the same scenes with Firefly, shadows behave as they did before in Poser 11.3.

I will follow the advice by @hborre and submit a ticket, because I have the sneaking suspicion this may actually be a bug and not, as I first suspected, user error. ^_^"

Again, thanks to all of you. :-)

Thank you for having submitted a ticket: sorry if I'm late... I have tried a lot of things, including clearing all sorts of folders, cache, shadow cache, etc... And I've come to the same conclusion.

Hmm, I just had this crop up for me. Rendered the same scene three times in a row with very slightly different materials on some objects (trying to solve something else). The first two times, I had very soft shadows. The third time, I had crisp and sharp shadows. I hadn't made any changes to the light, I didn't even select it at any point. All three times using 12.0.306, superfly render.

So it's not just that superfly is ignoring this setting, it's that it honors the setting inconsistently. That's even worse, since you can't predict what the outcome will be.

Expanding on that, I just rendered 26 frames (multiframe render, to images) from the same file, with the same lighting. Frames 3, 18, and 19 have blurry shadows, all the others have crisp shadows. That's very annoying. I even dropped the blur radius to 0.2 but it looks like it is blurrier than before for those frames.

As a workaround, I set the shadow blur radius to 0, changed the light from infinite to an area light, put it at a height of 500 (for an outdoor scene), increased the scale of the light to 1000%, and increased the intensity to 400000%. The scale of the light defines the amount of blurring, 1000% at this height is moderate, 10000% is very blurred, 100% results in very sharp edges. The height will also matter.

Tested the same scene in both Poser 11 and 12, i've got the same issue with no blurry shadows in P12. Tried changing the blur radius in the properties as well as switching from ray trace shadows to depth map shadows.

no changes to be seen.

In case anybody wants to see if they can reproduce the issue, here's my dropbox link to the scene i've posted.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e682i7r3j52u0nz/Test%20scene%202.pz3?dl=0

feel free to check it out!

Necromuncher posted at 12:58PM Sat, 12 December 2020 - #4407241

In case anybody wants to see if they can reproduce the issue, here's my dropbox link to the scene i've posted.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e682i7r3j52u0nz/Test%20scene%202.pz3?dl=0

feel free to check it out!

I tried it, and got similar results. I did not change any settings on the file, and I cleared the Poser cache before rendering each time.

Poser 11:

Poser 12:

If my memory is correct we had to make some questionable changes to cycles to make shadow blur work in P11. We're investigating implementing those changes in P12. But, if you compare render times between P11 and P12 for the sample scene you'll find the P11 render takes roughly 6 times longer. If it's truly the Shadow blur hack that is causing this performance hit we may have to look for other solutions. On my system the P11 tender is 12.2 seconds where the P12 render is 2.3 seconds. Ouch!

Interesting. For me, P11 render was 6.3 seconds. P12 was 1.7 seconds.

Weirdly, it's slower using GPU rendering. 6.9 seconds for P11, 4.2 seconds for P12. (GeForce GTX 1080)

Try using an area light instead of whatever light you are using now, without shadow blur. How much render time does that "cost"? Because it will get you the same blurred shadow, just a little more trouble to set up.

ChromeStar posted at 7:46AM Mon, 14 December 2020 - #4407459

Try using an area light instead of whatever light you are using now, without shadow blur. How much render time does that "cost"? Because it will get you the same blurred shadow, just a little more trouble to set up.

Interesting. That worked, and actually looks better to my eye. Just changed the light in the test scene from infinite to area.

It took 2.13 seconds to render via CPU, 4.64 GPU. Weird, because usually it's much longer for GPU.

So in either case, it's faster than P11? I felt like area lights were pretty slow to render in P11, so I wasn't sure.

The hard part with an area light is that the amount of blur depends on the distance from the light to the object, so it harder to get a sense of how much blur you will end up with. But you can adjust it by adjusting the size of the area light. The bigger the light, the bigger and fuzzier that blur will be.

I would think Poser could implement shadow blur by treating a point light as a sphere instead of as a point. That makes more physical sense than treating it as a trait of the shadow itself. I don't know how it was done previously.

Yes, P12 is definitely faster. But there's much less difference in P11.

Poser 11, with an area light, cache cleared before rendering:

6.77 seconds CPU

7.02 seconds GPU

I checked some other scenes, and they rendered much faster with GPU, as expected. Dunno what it is about this scene.