randym77 posted at 11:20PM Tue, 04 May 2021 - #4418435

I prefer Firefly. I sort of fell in love at first sight with Firefly. It was such a huge improvement over the P4 renderer. I was one of those who spent hours adjusting the old MAT files to take advantage of Firefly. (I happened to come across some of them recently, and boy, do they look terrible. Not sure if Firefly changed, or my aesthetic did, but they're baaad, LOL.)

I don't particularly want to do photoreal renders. My style has always been more illustrative than realistic, and I'm more likely to use Photoshop to make a render look hand-drawn than I am to try for something that could be mistaken for a photograph.

I also found Superfly really slow and noisy. That's been improved in Poser 12, but I still prefer the look of Firefly. It seems clearer and sharper, somehow.

I also find a lot of Superfly renders fall into the uncanny valley for me. I think part of it is that some things can look SO realistic, like skin and eyes, but others are very difficult. Like hair. It either looks painted compared to the rest of the render, or it has a really plasticky, Barbie doll look.

Firefly, to my eye, has a more similar level of fakeness for everything, so is less jarring to me.

I think this is where a lot of people misunderstand PBR, it is very good for doing realistic renders. But doesn't really have anything to do with that. Even if you are doing none realistic renders you are still interested in the lighting being correct and that you can adjust it without your materials getting screwed up. Which will happen in Firefly, if you adjust the light, you would potentially have to fixing your textures to look correct in that new setup, which is a huge benefit of PBR.

The main issue when people make cartoon images is that often the materials etc, they used are not specifically created for it, but rather they turn photorealistic ones into a cartoon looking one, which might not always work very well.

Superfly is slower, there is no doubt about that, and with anything in 3D we all wish that it would be faster, so I don't disagree with you on that. :D Hair is often an issue, because it is extremely difficult to make. Poser hair room doesn't really allow for making good hair and its not particular Posers fault, because even the more professional hair applications are extremely difficult to use if you have to style dynamic hair. So often hair are more or less like helmets you put on your character, which can often end up looking a bit stiff.

But for instance these are PBR renders as well, but with materials that support such toonish look.