hi, i've noticed that my characters look weird where displacement maps are involved, so i did a little testing. Rendered the same scene in both Poser 11 and 12 and got different results (Superfly).

here's how i set up the node.

The shadows in Poser 12 are very harsh. I've read about issues with soft shadows in another thread, but it appears that the ridges are softer in Poser 11, while mainaining the same max. depth / elevation. There's also this flat looking area that goes across the middle-left part of the sphere and I'm not sure if these black areas around the left edge are even shadows.

What am I doing wrong? or is this simply another bug / issue with the new renderer?

thanks

Uncheck that Reflection_Lite_Mult box and re-render. That particular feature should never be used except when working with a very reflective surface. This is really an obsolete feature that should be taken out entirely. Unticking the box might eliminate the dark areas in the P12 render, but I couldn't say for sure. I am leaning away from using the PoserSurface for Superfly renders where there is a better alternative.

Try adding a couple of levels of subD to the object? Superfly uses vertex displacement and that object looks too low-res for that amount of detailed displacement.

thanks for the quick reply. unfortunately, unchecking that box didn't help. also, the sphere has natively 12288 triangles and is set to have 2 subdivision levels. Below you can see the sphere with a subdivision level of 4. Sub-D on 5 won't render anymore

(at least i don't want to wait for 10 or so minutes only to render a sphere :P )

I can't reproduce your problem. What lighting and background are you using?

Octaves are set to 1 on the Fractal Sum node, try increasing to 16 or decreasing to 0.1. I can see facets on the object so it doesn't look hi-res to me, maybe the data going in isn't fine enough? If that doesn't affect it, let's see a screenshot with wireframe?

the octaves are set to 1 because i need the "hills" to be smooth. I've set them to 16 and you can see the result below. if you wish to check out the whole scene, here is the dropbox link to the .pz3 https://www.dropbox.com/s/56x09qa94tbl0l9/Test%20scene.pz3?dl=0 feel free to check it out :)

I've had this issue. Simplest solution was to add a zero to the displacement value, lowering it by 90%.

cyberdome posted at 10:33AM Mon, 21 December 2020 - #4407833

I've had this issue. Simplest solution was to add a zero to the displacement value, lowering it by 90%.

thanks for the suggestion! I did try to change the strength before, but there's a small problem there. While your approach fixed the issue with the weird, overly dark shadows, it also reduces the maximum height of the "hills" which i need to keep.

I also tried changing the infinite light to an area light, in the hopes of fixing "something" but it didn't really work. It made the hills look smoother, but the shadows were still too dark.

I have the same issue. This shows up on layered skin tight on lafemme. The yoga pants (hamelon, I believe). It uses a displacement map to give it thickness and edges. Super nice thought, if it worked. But it doesn't seem to.

Not sure the displacement map was working at all in Poser 11. Setting it to zero in Poser 12 and the renders look pretty much the same.

displacement at 0

displacement at .006 (units are meters), subd=2

nodes:

Firstly, the effect doesn't even look like displacement. I see no geometry change. It looks like a bump map. The shadows are blunt. The displacement map does go smoothly between light and dark.

I also upped the subd=4. Took a bit longer to setup the figure, didn't take any longer in the render.

I want to say there's a very slight displacement visible at the edges. Maybe it only really works with crazy subd'd meshes. Which means it's not a good thing for this. Does it not spot subd the mesh as needed? And, certain distances and values would produce little more than a bump effect anyway. Why bother upping the mesh when the actual deformation is not visible, only the shadowing affect? I'm in pretty darn close, here. The effect is not even visible on this mesh, even at subd=4 from anything other than extreme close up. The mess of a shadow is visible, however, from the International Space Station.

The shadows are still completely out of whack. The lights are ghostship's superfly lights,

I experimented with a cylinder (primitive) and procedural tile texture. At subd=0 it produces only over the top shadow shadow effects but messy to no distortion of the mesh. Units meter, displacement 1 (a cm?). No scales on the cylinder. Just as poser makes it. I grouped the sides and top, to create to materials, sides and top, so I could apply the texture to just the sides.

The tiles were gray 50%, the mortar, black. smooth of 1 on that.

Same thing, with subd jacked to 7 (the same as when it's 4, really).

It seems the subd needs to get the mesh down to the level of detail required by the displacement map. Manually. Am I missing something, here? This seems a bit stupid since, you know, computer... really fast ginormous calculating machine should be doing stuff like this FOR me. It's 18 Xeon cores and 128GB of RAM, and a really fast GPU (which I can't use because... well Mac. Apple doesn't play nice with devs. Nvidia doesn't either, but "winvidia" is a market worth the effort :)

Also, the smooth texture doesn't seem to produce a smooth curve for the displacement. Is there a better map I need to use? I can only go 256 shades of grey. But the result doesn't seem to be 256 levels of displacement between the extremes.

I could deal with that but for the shadows. They don't make any sense at all.

SuperFly does not do micro-poly displacement like FireFly does. If you crank the Sub-D up like you did then there is enough vertexes to displace. MicroPoly displacement is on the wish list. Currently it is not stable in Cycles so is not in Poser either

I would think Lafemme has enough polys to not need all that subdivision. I've certainly had displacement work fine on V4 clothing (in superfly) without needing subdivision at all. But there are props I've had to crank up to 4 to get any detail, which can really eat up some render time. I suspect the cylinder primitive does not start with very many polys.

On the lafamme yoga pants, did you try simply raising the displacement value?

I'd also be curious if you get the same results switching to a PhysicalSurface root node instead of the Poser root node. I've mostly been using PhysicalSurface on props where I have to do any work with the materials.

What is your unit of measure in Poser? Meters, inches, centimeters?

Also maps used for anything but color should have gamma = 1

No micro-poly displacement. Got it. Why-ever not? It's not exactly a "new thing".

meters are my normal units

La Femme is actually pretty light on polys, far as I can tell. But it looks like she was made to subd well, if it's needed.

Yes, the cylinder is low poly. Unless the subd is cranked, the displacement really only results in shadows, no?

There's still no explanation of the weird shadows. I'm assuming is calculates shading NOT from the result of a displaced mesh itself, but rather from independent math. The shadows still make no sense.

Imma go back and do this again, with a bit more control. Changing the gamma, as BB mentioned.

Also, I assume the resolution of the image map has a lot to do with it as well. update to come.

as far as why there's no micro displacement, superfly is based on Blender's cycles render engine. When poser 11 first came out, cycles didn't have it so superfly couldn't either. Since that time cycles has been updated and it's been added. I think I remember reading the poser team is working on implementing it, but I can't say for sure without scouring the whole site, or at least all the poser forums, and there's no timeline on when they'll get it done.

As for the rest of your questions, I've put aside displacement until they get the micro displacement done because it's almost useless without it.

Micro Displacement is still in Beta on the cycles side. They have it but it is not fully stable yet. as far as I understand. So yes it will be great once it is stable and can put into Poser. And once it is in then the object will be moved so the shadows are created by REAL geometry and the side will poke out instead of being smooth.

What the heck is poser using to calculate shading, though?

The displacement map. That's la femme's UV template. La Femme (pro, which shouldn't matter). units=meters, displacement .1

subd=0

subd=3

The mesh is smoother (of course). but the shadow. It does not relate to the geometry, as rendered. Which gets back (I think) to the origin of this thread. Micro-displacement aside, the shadow seems wrong.

The lighting is superfly studio 3 (a bunch of spots). Maybe should be mesh lights?

Opened the same scene in Poser 11 (latest of that). Changed nothing. Rendered:

"Also maps used for anything but color should have gamma = 1"

Why is that Baggins?

bagginsbill posted at 2:43AM Thu, 11 February 2021 - #4412408

Also maps used for anything but color should have gamma = 1

Why is that Baggins?

In a nutshell, it's because gamma encoding is not used to produce numbers in displacement maps - it isn't how they are representing heights. They're linear values and so you should not apply any gamma correction when reading them. Gamma encoding is not used to produce normals - it isn't how they represent angles. They're linear values and so you should not apply any gamma correction when reading them. Gamma encoding is not used to produce specular coefficients - it isn't how they represent specularity. Gamma encoding is not used to produce roughness maps - it isn't .... blah blah blah.

Only color images that were intended from the outset to be copied directly into sRGB monitor pixels have gamma encoding, so these are the only images where it is appropriate to apply gamma correction before using them for shader calculations.

Would that cause the strange shadow effect?

No effect in cycles P11 and completely unrealistic over the top shadow in Cycles P12. Same source file. I don't know how cycles renders the shadows but it doesn't seem to be displacing the geometry, then calculating shadows from that displaced geometry.

That may have to do with other shader changes made between 11 and 12. Strip the figure of any other shaders and see what the displacement does.

Good idea. I'll try just a color and displacement map.