randym77 posted at 12:41AM Wed, 05 May 2021 - #4418440

Toonish is okay, but not really what I'm going for. I like images like the one used for the Poser 12 splash screen. No way would anyone mistake it for a photograph. The hair is just real enough. It doesn't distract by looking fake. The image is romanticized, idealized, but not really toony.

And I have never found a Superfly material that makes Poser's dynamic hair look good. It doesn't exactly took realistic in Firefly, but you can get a glamorous, shampoo-ad look with it.

And actually...I am not that interested in getting the lighting correct. I just want it to look nice. I will often turn off shadows on certain things. Just as with a photograph, I might darker some parts of an image and brighten others. I don't want to duplicate reality, I want to improve on it. ;-)

Dunno if you've seen this thread, but Erogenesis posted in defense of Firefly a couple of years ago:

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2936633

I like his crowd scenes. I sometimes do large crowd scenes, and even rendering in pieces and pasting them together in Photoshop...I can't imagine doing that in Superfly. Not until it gets a lot faster.

Obviously if one does not care about lighting being realistic/correct, which is perfectly legit, then PBR is of little interest. :)

And as I said, working with dynamic hair is a nightmare, doesn't really matter if its Firefly or Superfly, the whole process is nasty :D And would probably think that making a good hair shader is easier compared to styling the hair in the first place, so it looks good. So personally I don't mess around with it. In such case, I wouldn't favour either of the render engines.

I read through the post and the arguments and he/she does have sort of a point. But also makes it clear that he/she is stuck with Firefly materials for the objects used, which doesn't always render to well in Superfly. He (just going to refer to him/she as he, as I don't know the gender) also point out that noise is an issue and that using Octane would be nice etc. And even though it might be better (haven't tried it) it also have noise issue just as all PBR renders, as far as I know. So its a constant battle for everyone as far as I know, and people use denoisers etc to get rid of it, which can be good, but on the other side, a lot of people actually add a bit of noise to their images afterwards in PS, because it makes them look more real rather than the Barbie/plastic look you talk about, as it looks more like it is a photograph taken with a camera. And even people that uses these other render engine might just let it render all night. So it is an issue in general with PBR and not just Superfly.

Of the images he have shown in the thread of the Firefly ones, I really like the last one, not sure if there is some post work going on or whether it's just the complexity and composition of the scene, but it looks very nice. But to me at least, the rest of them seems off when it comes to the lighting, having this sort of flat or dead look you often get from Firefly renders, like the shadows and shading is not really what you would expect.

This is obviously a personal preference, but I don't like this half realistic look. Where you use very realistic models, with detailed textures etc. to then butcher them in flat lighting. And its not a critic of his work, because I think it's an issue with Firefly more than anything else, because it is extremely difficult to get good looking images out of it. And in general lighting is very difficult to do good in my opinion, struggle a lot with it myself. But to me, I prefer it being clearly cartoon or realistic, the inbetween doesn't work in my opinion.

This is a render done in Iray by one of the content creators here on Renderosity, which I think really show the benefit of PBR and how much more alive renders become. The slight noise in the image, works very well and makes it look a lot more real than if it was just a smooth render, think its a very good image.

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/vyk-ritchie-for-v-8-1/149326