Digitell posted at 11:34AM Tue, 04 May 2021 - #4418395

@3D-Mobster- What you are saying makes complete sense very true..BUT.., what about the artists/customers that already have tons of stuff in their libraries that dont render so well with Superfly. If they prefer Firefly, because that is what the bulk of their library works well in..and all content creators are now making only items that work in Superfly..that would leave out the Firefly users. So the most logical thing to do would be to provide materials that work well in both Superfly and Firefly. It would not be good to only provide 1 and not the other..That is my opinion.

There is nothing to do about old content, unless the content creators or people themselves make new textures. Which they could grab a free copy of Substance painter and learn the basics and would be able to convert the textures fairly quick. Given that they already have all the objects with UVs etc. But besides that, nothing as I can see it would be able to fix that, since a lot of the stuff was made before Superfly even existed, so it obviously weren't taken into consideration. But I can see it from both sides, the content users and content creators, but ultimately I still think everyone wins from a transition to PBR.

For users of Firefly, certain products might not work correctly in Superfly, which is obviously annoying. But for the most part you can render it in Superfly so it looks good enough. For instance I only use M4 and V4, which doesn't have Superfly textures, but still you can render them and they look fair enough in my opinion.

On the other side as content creator, you spend a shit load of time modelling, Unwrapping and in general preparing all these objects, and you want to deliver the best possible product to people. So seeing your hard work, getting butchered in Firefly is really annoying, especially because the amount of time you have to spend with it trying to fix the materials is absolutely insane in my opinion. Which is obviously a process that content users won't know about. But I think most content creator will agree that it is not easy to work with Firefly, especially compared to the quality you get out of it. Not saying that some people can do it very well, as some people have a very good knowledge of it and how to use it. But it is the few rather than the many. This is from a work in process of a soap dispenser I made for a new product, which is going to be part of a whole house, but it is rendered in Superfly. Should I make the materials for it in Firefly, given that Im not the best at using it, I could probably spend 30-40 minutes simply trying to get to something that I would find acceptable. Like the plastic, soap etc. But still it would be far off from the quality of the Superfly render. Which again would annoy me, because I want to deliver the best quality and what I vision it should look like, and PBR just helps so much with that.

Superfly as such doesn't exclude anyone, ultimately it will still be up to the content creator to decide whether they want to make materials for Firefly, Superfly or both of them, actually the benefit of PBR is that you will also automatically get materials for Iray in Daz3D at the same time, so it actually include more :D. Besides that a lot of the maps used for Superfly will function well for Firefly anyway. So Firefly users wouldn't notice a huge difference, they would still have the same issue as they have now, with inconsistent quality in the materials. But for content creators it could greatly increase the quality of their products and workflow, and make sure that products are working well together across the marketplace.

So again to make it very clear :D Its not a Firefly or Superfly kind of thing, one doesn't prevent the other. But rather to improve the consistency between products.