ironsoul posted at 1:00PM Sat, 08 May 2021 - #4418745

I would just like a objective discustion on if Superfy was good or bad. My own option is it works ok but I#m not a pro.

I personally love it compared to Firefly, which shouldn't be understood as Firefly then equal useless, because it have its uses. But to me the key arguments for Superfly are these:

1. PBR workflow, which means that it is highly adoptable between several applications which also uses PBR (which is almost all of them today). This means that you can easily transfer textures and materials from one application to another. Hardly any application as far as I know, can work with Firefly textures. Which means that you have to set them up in whatever program you are using if you want to get the most out of them. Whereas you can almost just plug and play PBR textures into another application and expect a very similar result.

2. PBR materials react much better to different lighting environments than Firefly does, meaning you could potentially have to fiddle with your materials the moment you change lighting because they suddenly look different than what you would expect.

3. Its much easier to create textures for, which you know work well across several render engines. They are in general also a lot easier to understand, as you basically work with "largely" two types of materials, metallic and non metallic and in most cases, its fairly easy to understand, wood equal non material and iron equal metal. :)

4. For a market like Rendo, there is a much better chance that content fit well together if everyone uses the same basic technic of making stuff, my metal would be exactly like someone else's. A good example is the "One glass shader to rule them all" thread, look how different people make glass, which is because we have to make the shader from scratch. Not needed in normal PBR only when you have to mess with cycles.

5. Much more realistic lighting, which is preferable regardless of whether you want to make toon renders or realistic ones. You can always adjust and manipulate an image later on, but it is almost impossible to fix bad lighting. Unless you do some serious paint over.

6. Firefly is good if you need something fast and for something specific. But where realism is not important.

7. Pretty much all professional 3d tools today (if not all) uses PBR, so you can create textures in them and get instant feedback and not having to jump back and forth between programs all the time and things not looking as you thought, to then go back and make new adjustment.

8. Downside with PBR is that it is slower to render.

These are just what I can think of.