SamTherapy posted at 7:08AM Mon, 03 May 2021 - #4418258

It takes too long to get a decent image on my old, slow machine, for one thing. Just a simple image with one relatively simple model - my MK1 Dalek, for example, takes 37 million billion and a half years before it stops looking grainy.

I can't, for some reason, get my head around the new approach to materials. I can get pretty much what I want, or a reasonable approximation thereof, in Firefly but in Superfly? Noooo.

Finally - and this really is the deal breaker for me - it doesn't support Displacement, which is something a lot of my stuff relies on. Yes, I know about Normal maps - although I haven't ever tried to make one yet - but in my experience, they don't look anything like as good as Displacement.

So, a triple whammy. If, at some point, I can upgrade the machine, I may look at Superfly again but until then, nope.

It does take slightly longer to render, so clearly it's a nice to have a fast computer, but when is it not? :D

The reason it might take such a long time to get a clear image, can be due to mesh lights and wrong materials. Especially mesh lights are not good in my experience at least, but honestly they don't seem good in any renders I have tried to be honest, not only Superfly.

But since Superfly is PBR, it pretty much work with just 4 basic maps. Diffuse, Roughness, Metal and Normal, then you can obviously add opacity etc. You just have to use the Physical surface node, the only thing it doesn't handle well is glass, ice etc. where you want to use a cycle node instead. At least when it comes to the most basic materials, you don't really need anything other than these 4 maps. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with displacement maps, from what I can see.

Keep in mind that normal maps are very different from displacement maps, in the sense that displacement maps manipulate the geometry itself, so if you don't have enough density it won't work and in most cases ruin your object. Normal maps just work as a 3d bump map. But here is an example of displacement map in Superfly.

As you can see the top left square is just 1 poly, so the displacement doesn't work at all, as we increase the density it gets better. The last one have a SubD of 2, which gives a lot of details, but you will also quickly kill your scene :D