No, because it's a different language version. Python 2 is in P11. Python 3 is the current language version and that is in P12. Alas, the two don't talk, hence the breaking of many scripts.

Does the node tidier include the missing Cycles nodes? No? Oh well.

I even bought a book and a kit on how to make more Cycles materials. Fat lot good that did me. Yeah, I could make the material in Blender, but I couldn't import it into Poser. The necessary nodes weren't there.

I better stop now, before I get angry and say something I don't really mean.

randym77 posted at 12:31PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418831

But it doesn't work in Poser 11. I guess Python isn't backwards compatible.

AHA! I was wondering if it would cover both, but yes, now that I think about the incompatibility of Python 2 and Python 3, I realize it's a totally different version.

That said, however, I wonder why Structure didn't leave the earlier version of Node Tidier available for those who don't have, and won't be upgrading to Poser 12 any time soon.

EClark1894 posted at 12:41PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418837

Does the node tidier include the missing Cycles nodes? No? Oh well.

That's not the purpose of the Node Tidier. It's purpose is to take the nodes that already exist, and move them around to an easier way to see them all, so it's easier to work with them. It wasn't meant to "add" any nodes.

Miss B posted at 1:04PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418839

EClark1894 posted at 12:41PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418837

Does the node tidier include the missing Cycles nodes? No? Oh well.

That's not the purpose of the Node Tidier. It's purpose is to take the nodes that already exist, and move them around to an easier way to see them all, so it's easier to work with them. It wasn't meant to "add" any nodes.

I know it wasn't but the nodes jumping around when I expanded them just frustrated me . They weren't the ONLY reason I quit trying to make materials for Cycles in Poser.

EClark1894 posted at 1:38PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418767

Actually, I was going to try to make materials for Poser, but missing nodes and nodes that jump around when you uncompress them, made me quit.

Maybe I misunderstood what you are talking about, but can't you just share the Mc6 file in the material library? There is a position for each node in them from what I can see?

@3D-Mobster: I fail to understand what you are questioning and meaning by share and position. Could you elaborate further on what you are implying?

hborre posted at 7:10PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418858

@3D-Mobster: I fail to understand what you are questioning and meaning by share and position. Could you elaborate further on what you are implying?

As I said I might have misunderstood what he meant, but it sounded to me like people were annoying with how nodes in the material editor behaves and them jumping around when they make materials or something. But maybe they mean something else?

3D-Mobster posted at 7:20PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418268

RobZhena posted at 7:45AM Mon, 03 May 2021 - #4418265

I don't like or use Superfly except to test my freebies because it is way too complicated and way too slow. Over the years, there have been endless threads about how to get something to look right in Superfly. You don't see those about Firefly. There's one thread on the Poser 12 forum right now about how to get skin to look realistic in Superfly. Skin looks fine in Firefly. Criticize me for not wanting to change my work flow, but to me it's about not making my work flow take much longer, such as by having to tweak a bunch of friggin' nodes. When I look at Superfly renders, the only things that look significantly better to me are glass and metal. I don't care about glass or metal.

Now, Poser 12 fixes the speed problem, but it also emphasizes the complexity problem because people are having to waste time because 12 doesn't handle materials the same as 11. Plus, Poser 12 nukes all the Python scripts I use every single day.

I am happy with my results in Firefly. I can quickly test numerous commercial light sets to get just the effect I want. It renders the materials of every product I own. New is not inevitably better.

It seems to me that a lot of people confuses Superfly with a confusing web of nodes all over the place. But that is where the physical surface node comes in. It is a cycle node just made easy, so you don't have to do all those crazy nodes.

I would say that all of the foregoing discussion about complex nodes demonstrates that your suggestion that the physical surface node is One Node to Rule Them All is incorrect. Way too complex and way too slow, at least in Poser 11.

RobZhena posted at 7:54PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418862

I would say that all of the foregoing discussion about complex nodes demonstrates that your suggestion that the physical surface node is One Node to Rule Them All is incorrect. Way too complex and way too slow, at least in Poser 11.

I think you misunderstood what I meant with it. The physical surface node from what I understood, is simply one which is made to handle the most generic cycle setup in one Node, rather than you having to make them from scratch through cycles. (Its some time since I heard it, so might recall wrong).

But from what I understood, everything you have in the physical node you could also make using cycles, there is no difference. besides you not having to combine these cycle nodes together all over the place yourself.

Whether its slower or not, I have no clue as I haven't tested it, but see no reason to think, that it should be.

I don't believe I have ever said that the Physical node was a Node to rule them all, but rather that it is perfectly suitable to handle almost all normal or standard materials, like wood, metal, stone, paint, plastic etc. But that there are some things that it can't do, like water, glass, ice, which is why I made the other thread about Glass.

Also this doesn't concern any of the missing nodes that people talk about, this is a general issue with Superfly or Poser or what you want to call it.

But a lot of people, including myself, don't like using cycles because I don't know what is going on in it. I don't know what will happen when I use a Mix node and plug "fac" into a lightpath or geometry nodes -> Position or what it is called. I can't visualize what is going to happen or even why I would do it in the first place, because I have no clue what it means.

If you use the physical surface node with the exceptions of those mentioned above, it can handle it, by simply using texture maps. which are much easier for people to understand.

If you know that White is maximum Roughness and Black is no Roughness, then a Grey is somewhere between these. And therefore it is both visually and in general easier to understand when looking at a texture map. compared to looking at a lot of nodes.

And personally I haven't found any material I haven't been able to make using the Physical node with the exception of those materials mentioned above, and there might be others obviously, but can't think of them right now.

Where cycles is very good and if I understand what some people are complaining about when it comes to missing nodes, is because you can make procedural materials by building them from scratch and lacking certain nodes can be very annoying. But for most people, as others have also mentioned, they don't use cycles because they make little sense. Whereas the Physical node works pretty much exactly like Firefly and is visually easy to understand.

So I hope that made it more clear what I meant. Besides the ones I mentioned, what materials have people issue with creating using it?

3D-Mobster posted at 7:20AM Mon, 10 May 2021 - #4418861

hborre posted at 7:10PM Sun, 09 May 2021 - #4418858

@3D-Mobster: I fail to understand what you are questioning and meaning by share and position. Could you elaborate further on what you are implying?

As I said I might have misunderstood what he meant, but it sounded to me like people were annoying with how nodes in the material editor behaves and them jumping around when they make materials or something. But maybe they mean something else?

Okay, I had to go do a little research and dig up my copy of the Cycles Encyclopedia. BTW, while looking through the encyclopedia, I noticed two things, Poser has added two nodes, at least in P12, and some of the nodes have been renamed in Poser.

Here are the nodes that I have determined to be missing in Poser.:2049:

Colorramp node.....

Vector Curves node.....

RGB Curves node.....

Procedural node....

Point Density node.....

Attribute node.......

RGB node ( This is an iffy. It MAY have been renamed the Color node in Poser since RGB basically means the same thing.

Also there are NO output nodes at all. (Again, this MAY be integrated into the root Cycles node.

I did notice that Bondware has added two PrincipledBSDF nodes. One is for Hair.

I recommend checking out the Blender Manual linked here. You will get an overview of what each node will do with some examples. Well worthwhile if you want to seriously grasp the basics of cycle. There are plenty of tutorials posted on YouTube if you care to spend time watching the videos and taking notes. There are also plenty of images with shader node arrangements scattered throughout the internet and readily available if you do a Google search.

There is nothing that can be done about the absence of critical nodes, the coding in Poser does not lend itself to such features so you may need to be creative and construct an alternate compound node to fit your needs. Forget any nodes with curves, the feature does not exist at all in Poser and introducing them will destroy backward compatibility with P11. As for the latest P12 PrincipledBSDF and PrincipledHair nodes, they will prove useful. I've used the PrincipledBSDF node successfully for improved SSS for skin; the PrincipledHair needs to be worked with to achieve the right balance for strand-based hair, there hasn't been enough testing yet to find that sweetspot.

The color node or the simple color (firefly) could be used in place of the RGB node. My limited understanding is that the Attribute node is based on different functions of blender like the quick effects (smoke) and the node is tied to those. Or it's used as a way for more advanced users to create their own node function. Unless we get those options, the node is useless in poser anyhow. I believe the output node would be the equivalent of Poser's root nodes.

I think your list of nodes might be a little old. I don't see the procedural node listed in the current version of blender, and looking through the nodes, I saw a few others I don't remember in Poser, but I didn't double-check so I may have missed them. But I realize that blender is changing and adding frequently and it takes time to adapt the nodes to poser and test them to make sure they work as they should and don't cause the computer to explode. We may see some of the newer nodes eventually. I too hope for a color ramp and the RGB curves nodes. I know that you can use the FF color ramp sometimes and I have, but there are aspects of the cycles one that that old one doesn't have

hborre posted at 9:26AM Mon, 10 May 2021 - #4418903

I recommend checking out the Blender Manual linked here. You will get an overview of what each node will do with some examples. Well worthwhile if you want to seriously grasp the basics of cycle. There are plenty of tutorials posted on YouTube if you care to spend time watching the videos and taking notes. There are also plenty of images with shader node arrangements scattered throughout the internet and readily available if you do a Google search.

My issue is not to understand the descriptions or at least most of them.

But for example in the other thread "One glass shader to rule them all" someone asked about diamonds.

So here we have a nice one:

I can see what is going on and what effect im after.

But when simply starting with a cycle shader, it just doesn't make a lot of sense how and why I would connect different things.

This is the final image of a shader I copied.

And the result:

But to me at least, the shader itself doesn't just seem logically to me, meaning starting with the cycle node and then just adding stuff. And obviously that would probably make more sense the more time you spend using and building them, and trying out different things. But my huge interest in making stuff, is not the technical side of creating shaders. I much more prefer to use others. So im happy others really enjoy making and sharing them, but for me personally Im more interested in the artistic side of just making stuff or what to say.

But thanks anyway, I do occasionally look in that manual you linked.

RedPhantom posted at 9:51AM Mon, 10 May 2021 - #4418904

The color node or the simple color (firefly) could be used in place of the RGB node. My limited understanding is that the Attribute node is based on different functions of blender like the quick effects (smoke) and the node is tied to those. Or it's used as a way for more advanced users to create their own node function. Unless we get those options, the node is useless in poser anyhow. I believe the output node would be the equivalent of Poser's root nodes.

I think your list of nodes might be a little old. I don't see the procedural node listed in the current version of blender, and looking through the nodes, I saw a few others I don't remember in Poser, but I didn't double-check so I may have missed them. But I realize that blender is changing and adding frequently and it takes time to adapt the nodes to poser and test them to make sure they work as they should and don't cause the computer to explode. We may see some of the newer nodes eventually. I too hope for a color ramp and the RGB curves nodes. I know that you can use the FF color ramp sometimes and I have, but there are aspects of the cycles one that that old one doesn't have

Well here's the thing... I did mention that I saw where Poser had included the Principled BSDF and the Principled Hair BSDF nodes to Poser 12. I was trying to be fair by mentioning them. And I grant you that the Cycles reference book that I used has probably gotten a little dated. Cycles is moving on. But which is more like to be happening, Cycles losing a few nodes to get more in line with Poser, or Poser needing to add a few more nodes to get more in line with Cycles? Now, I'll probably need to buy another Cycles encyclopedia soon to find out what new nodes it's added. Truth is, I may wait a while since Cycles X is about to come out, putting Poser even further behind than it already is.

3D-Mobster, your diamond looks great. I tried to build maybe that same Blender mat, but it kept coming out too dark and too blue. I couldn't get it right. Of course, I didn't use a good diamond object either. I tried building one from a Bucky ball and cone, but it was too sloppy. I've gotta get a good diamond object.

VedaDalsette posted at 2:11PM Mon, 10 May 2021 - #4418921

3D-Mobster, your diamond looks great. I tried to build maybe that same Blender mat, but it kept coming out too dark and too blue. I couldn't get it right. Of course, I didn't use a good diamond object either. I tried building one from a Bucky ball and cone, but it was too sloppy. I've gotta get a good diamond object.

Might also be because you are not using an HDRI map to light the scene, otherwise it will have nothing to reflect etc.

You can get a lot of free ones here:

https://hdrihaven.com/

Thanks! I've gotten a lot of hdrs from hdrihaven. Great resource. Anyway, yesterday I DID use an HDRI map to light it, but it was hopeless. So today I tried your mat (AND I finally screwed my head on straight and looked for a diamond object in freestuff and found a good one!). I used the Superfly Loop lighting with an HDRI. (Tried it without the lighting and it looks kinda the same, only slightly darker.)

The diamonds have a lotta colors, so maybe I should double-check the mat setup, but, at least, they look like diamonds instead of blue glass now! Thanks so much.

Figured out what I did wrong. In the Red, Green, and Blue glass nodes, I had the roughness at .001 (like the white one). Changed them all to 0 like in your example. And I subdivided them for the halibut.

The diamonds belong in Cybertenko's treasure chest. (A different kind of chest than the usual chests you see on Rendo.)

if anyone is still interested in the original Tidy Node script that structure did, it is in his file locker expressly for sharing... it should work for any version of Poser prior to P12. .

Tidy Nodes Python - original

drop the script at the end of this path:

Runtime:Python:poserScripts:scriptMenu

someone please correct me if i'm wrong on that path - i may be misremembering as it's been a long time mucking with such things... thanks!

Thanks, Giana!

I think it will work anywhere you put it, but if you want it to show on the scripts menu, you have to put it there. (I usually run Python scripts using File -> Run Python script instead.)

you're welcome :)

thanks for the tip!

Thank you so much Giana! Very much appreciated! :)

I just went through the sticky thread of Poser 12 renders on the Poser 12 forum, and in my humble opinion, the number of truly outstanding render can be counted on the fingers of one hand, most of them by a single vendor. Ah, Superfly.

You are assuming everyone who renders Superfly posts on that thread. A better sampling would be to check the galleries and using Superfly snd Poser 12 specifically as keywords. I personally post on the galleries only and I imagine many people are the same, for various reasons, most of them not vendors or not commenting in forums a lot.

RobZhena posted at 8:38PM Mon, 17 May 2021 - #4419302

I just went through the sticky thread of Poser 12 renders on the Poser 12 forum, and in my humble opinion, the number of truly outstanding render can be counted on the fingers of one hand, most of them by a single vendor. Ah, Superfly.

Not really sure how you determine the potential of a render engine like that? You can take the best of the best render engine on the market, that doesn't mean that it will just automatically throw out super images one after another. For an image to look interesting or good, it requires so much more than a specific render and there is a good chance that a lot of people capable of making such images, spend a whole lot more time on them and have a completely different background than the average Poser user have, they might also have access to programs that they might not have.

This is from Zbrush, would you call that a good render, that Superfly impossible could do?

My guess, is that you would agree that the model is interesting and looks good. The render it self is absolutely nothing special and could easily be done in Superfly. That doesn't mean that Zbrush render engine is awful and bad.

This is also from Zbrush..

Where a lot of compositing have be done in Photoshop. So I looked up his profile and this is what it says, have removed his name just in case:

My name is *** and I’m a passionate character artist. I have done various tutorials for 3d World, 3D artist, zbrushworkshops.com and have also been working for Pixologic as a beta tester for ZBrush. I’m currently employed as a senior character artist at *** in Stockholm, Sweden where we do game cinematics and other VFX jobs.

My point being that I highly doubt that the average Poser user have a similar background. Get a person like this to render something in Superfly and give it the same treatment that he would do with any of his renders and I bet you that it would look pretty damn good.

The problem most people seem to have when you read posts like these, is that they expect the 3D render to look absolutely amazing and interesting without any post work, when the truth is that they rarely do.

I think people still don't really know how to get the best of out Superfly. While they've been using Firefly for almost 20 years.

A lot of Superfly renders still look unpleasantly grainy to me. And it seems to be really hard to get hair to look good in Superfly. The renders that really impress me have been ones without humans in them.

randym77 posted at 10:10AM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419421

I think people still don't really know how to get the best of out Superfly. While they've been using Firefly for almost 20 years.

A lot of Superfly renders still look unpleasantly grainy to me. And it seems to be really hard to get hair to look good in Superfly. The renders that really impress me have been ones without humans in them.

Honestly I think that is an issue for all renders or in general 3D, whenever we deal with humans, skin shaders and hair are really not easy to make good.

Even if you take something like Nvidia hairworks, it looks cool, and do believe it is one of the top of line things for making hair in games at least. It still looks slightly off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IltIVf_TeFg&ab_channel=NVIDIA

Then you have the whole skin shader etc. So in Posers defence, most 3D apps (at least from what I have seen) have a hard time dealing with these things. Especially for us hobbyists, that doesn't have a long career in professional 3D, even in a lot of hollywood movies etc. with huge budgets, the characters still seem to struggle with these issues.

For the most part, the grain is simply because people don't bother waiting for it to render. Not saying that Superfly couldn't improve on it, but PBR rendering just takes slightly longer.

Superfly got a very rough start back in the day when it turned out its implementation was missing a significant number of nodes that were key in many a popular Blender tutorial. This left a lot of people unsure how to work around the limitations of the Cycles implementation, and made the learning curve even steeper than it already was.

Some were able to make something work, but quite a few of those work-arounds were very complex and weren't easy to adapt by less knowledgeable users (this being the vast majority). Add to that a very sparse selection of built-in materials, something that over five years on has not meaningfully improved (why is there no default library of dozens of common materials?), and it's little surprise that Superfly became 'too much of a hassle' for many users. It didn't help that many prime content creators had by then started moving away from Poser, which meant that there was also no supply of examples to learn from.

PBR or texture based materials could in theory circumvent the imperfect Cycles implementation, but PBR requires a whole lot of new textures that many older Poser products simply don't have. That's where the lack of many new releases comes in again. Without a steady supply of new products, the Poser library of many users remained fixed in the Firefly era with no textures to support PBR renders and no Cycles materials to make Superfly seem worthwhile.

To this day the number of Superfly material packages is very limited. Poser itself still for some reason offers barely anything useful on this front.

It's a shame, too, because it is very possible to make Poser Superfly render great images. It's just a huge hassle to go spend hours reworking textures and materials rather than making actual scenes, which is what I suspect most users simply want to do.

You sum it up eloquently and elegantly, @adosity. If nothing, lack of normal maps makes a ton of figure skin maps hard to convert without outside help. Lack if decent tutorials with simple language explaining whai is what specifically for Poser users is also an issue (there are attempts on this forum, but I must confess I grew frustrated trying to actually reciprocate ANY of those, literally on my P12).

So we forge on. But the lack of help and P12 Superfly specific content is felt keenly for those who aren't already gurus of nodes.

I see what you mean about Hairworks. Nice animation, but the shaders don't quite look right. Though I'd be happy with static hair. I use dynamic hair, but mostly for posing, not for animation.

I like the idea of less dense hair if you're further away. Kirwyn did a sort of version of that for his Genesis dynamic hair (which was created before DAZ took the name - it has nothing to do with DAZ). The hair had two skullcaps, each with hair, so you could use just one for distance shots, and both for closeups.

adosity posted at 10:58AM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419426

Superfly got a very rough start back in the day when it turned out its implementation was missing a significant number of nodes that were key in many a popular Blender tutorial. This left a lot of people unsure how to work around the limitations of the Cycles implementation, and made the learning curve even steeper than it already was.

Some were able to make something work, but quite a few of those work-arounds were very complex and weren't easy to adapt by less knowledgeable users (this being the vast majority). Add to that a very sparse selection of built-in materials, something that over five years on has not meaningfully improved (why is there no default library of dozens of common materials?), and it's little surprise that Superfly became 'too much of a hassle' for many users. It didn't help that many prime content creators had by then started moving away from Poser, which meant that there was also no supply of examples to learn from.

PBR or texture based materials could in theory circumvent the imperfect Cycles implementation, but PBR requires a whole lot of new textures that many older Poser products simply don't have. That's where the lack of many new releases comes in again. Without a steady supply of new products, the Poser library of many users remained fixed in the Firefly era with no textures to support PBR renders and no Cycles materials to make Superfly seem worthwhile.

To this day the number of Superfly material packages is very limited. Poser itself still for some reason offers barely anything useful on this front.

It's a shame, too, because it is very possible to make Poser Superfly render great images. It's just a huge hassle to go spend hours reworking textures and materials rather than making actual scenes, which is what I suspect most users simply want to do.

I believe it have been like that for a long time, despite many users having pointed it out. A program like Poser mainly exist due to its content and for a long time (Not blaming Renderosity) it seems that those in charge of the development of Poser doesn't really get it. Which is sad.

Keep in mind that Daz is their biggest competitor and it is free. You want Poser to stand out you have to make something unique and the easiest way to do that in my opinion and what clearly drives a lot of users are the characters. And Poser in my opinion need to deliver it with top of line characters each release, you can't release characters that are outdated or that people don't think is attractive or want to work with.

And I completely agree in regards to the materials, which I can understand why confuses people, because those they have included and call Superfly materials are not PBR materials, meaning they don't make use of the roughness, metal settings, but is rather a weird Firefly textures, using fake maps to work (or not work), but the problem is that the material doesn't work in PBR, because its completely wrong. And its extremely complicated compared to what a true PBR texture look like.

The one on the left is the Superfly material and the one on the right is how the true PBR shader of brass should be, look at how differently the materials react to light.

If the material weren't ruin already the moment you change the lighting conditions, its destroyed. And keep in mind I haven't actually increased the lighting in the scene, I only change the color of the ground the spheres are sitting on to complete white and the sphere on the left is behaving completely crazy.

It makes no sense that they make Superfly and marketing it as a PBR render to then supply it with wrong materials, which does nothing to ruin it and confuse people of how to use it. To me, its like they have this idea that it has to work in both render engines, so it doesn't matter if its correct or not. Its such a weird way of doing it. Because Firefly materials will not work in Superfly, they are build completely differently, because they are faked.

And if you compare the setup for both sphere, they look like this, look how simple the PBR setup is, compared to the Firefly and trying to fake it and then it still looks wrong:

So why would they ruin Superfly (PBR) because of Firefly users, when they know it doesn't work, they must know that these materials are not true PBR. But obviously people looking at them might think, well sure these are Superfly textures, otherwise they wouldn't include them. But look at the difference, when using the correct PBR node, compared to trying to fake it. Of course the Superfly is going to look as bad as Firefly, because it doesn't make use of the benefit it has, but rather tries to fake it as well. Its not a good way to sell Superfly or PBR, when they choose to include non PBR materials as if they were, because people look at these and think they have to make them like that.

And again I think the issue is, they were/are (Hope Renderosity changes it) so keen on keeping Firefly alive that they are willing to ruin the newer stuff in Poser, to me its just baffling I don't get it. They want to maintain Firefly, that is perfectly fine, but then make specific materials for it and don't try to make a PBR/Firefly material that doesn't work and try to sell it as if it is. Even content creators not especially well into PBR, might use these metal materials as a starting point, thinking that they are perfectly fine.

Stop it!!! :D

randym77 posted at 12:14PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419429

I see what you mean about Hairworks. Nice animation, but the shaders don't quite look right. Though I'd be happy with static hair. I use dynamic hair, but mostly for posing, not for animation.

I like the idea of less dense hair if you're further away. Kirwyn did a sort of version of that for his Genesis dynamic hair (which was created before DAZ took the name - it has nothing to do with DAZ). The hair had two skullcaps, each with hair, so you could use just one for distance shots, and both for closeups.

I actually tried using poser cloth room for hair and you can get it to sort of work, but the problem is as you increases the number of hair it sort of breaks down :D Personally I don't make any animations, so hair dynamics is not especially important to me, but it would be cool if there were a very good and easy to use solution.

Rhia474 posted at 12:58PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419428

... So we forge on. But the lack of help and P12 Superfly specific content is felt keenly for those who aren't already gurus of nodes.

And speaking of not having to becomes nodes gurus, where would one find good starter sets of SuperFLy textures, especially procedural?

I remember people trying to use the cloth room for hair back in the early days of Firefly. I think they mostly just textured fairly large pieces of cloth to look like hair. For certain styles, it was okay.

Dynamic hair can be useful even for still images. Even the best hair doesn't have morphs for every situation. This is Kirwyn's dynamic hair, made longer and with a glossier shader:

There really was some nice work done with dynamic hair years ago. Kirwyn had some fantastic ideas, and there were a lot of different shaders that ranged from realistic to shampoo-ad shiny. But really, there's been no improvement in the Hair Room since Poser 6 or 7. (I think the above image was rendered in Poser 7.)

Eronik posted at 1:22PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419442

And speaking of not having to becomes nodes gurus, where would one find good starter sets of SuperFLy textures, especially procedural?

This is were PBR becomes very handy :D

I believed we talked a bit about it earlier, the substance painter etc? And if you have followed along in this thread, one of the benefits of PBR is that it works across different render engines... hint hint :D

This is a PBR texture from: Freepbr loaded directly into Poser's Physical node, using the four common maps you need (Diffuse, Roughness, Metal and Normal). Which means that you can use any PBR texture you can find on the internet that use them and use them directly in Poser and expect them to be correct. You want them tileable you can probably find them. I found this site just doing a quick search. :)

This is how you hook it up:

Thing to notice, the diffuse might be called Albedo

Set Roughness and Metal to 1, and make sure that Roughness, Metal and the Normalmap when you load them in is set to Custom gamma value 1.0 in the load box.

randym77 posted at 1:37PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419444

I remember people trying to use the cloth room for hair back in the early days of Firefly. I think they mostly just textured fairly large pieces of cloth to look like hair. For certain styles, it was okay.

Dynamic hair can be useful even for still images. Even the best hair doesn't have morphs for every situation. This is Kirwyn's dynamic hair, made longer and with a glossier shader:

There really was some nice work done with dynamic hair years ago. Kirwyn had some fantastic ideas, and there were a lot of different shaders that ranged from realistic to shampoo-ad shiny. But really, there's been no improvement in the Hair Room since Poser 6 or 7. (I think the above image was rendered in Poser 7.)

That is so very nice looking hair, that looks very good, I think

Thanks. I know it's too glossy to be realistic, but that's my taste. I have not been able to get dynamic hair to look very good at all in Superfly.

I had success using some of what VinceBagna made for P11, some of those dont work well in P12 any more. Now if someone could explain how to add things like etchings on metal armor...

Bump would seem most appropriate?

...AFAIK displacement requires a correspondingly high resolution of subdivision in Superfly. Not really practical, besides something like etchings would best be served by bump. Displacement would be ridiculous overkill.

The single biggest thing that made Superfly easier for me to understand was realising that Specular has a completely different meaning -

• in Firefly, Specular is a hack to provide fake reflections (to use raytraced reflections in Firefly you would have to add a Reflect node to the material)

• but in Superfly, as everything has real raytraced reflections all the time, Specular means Base Reflectance.

This is why Firefly is often claimed to be faster. It isn’t, it’s just doing a lot less work. If you add Reflect nodes to every material to compare directly with Superfly you will find that speed difference …. quite different. For kicks, try adding some strong DoF too. Like for like, Superfly is way faster.

The second thing that helped me was a basic understanding of the PBR Metal/Rough workflow. Like, the difference between metal and not-metal. Base reflectance vs fresnel. What roughness means.

And start simple. The Physical Surface is good simple root that can do a lot of materials. Use the most basic light setup there is - a single white infinite at 100% intensity. Take Andy (or any simple prop with a single mat zone), make him metal. Then colour it. Then not-metal. What is the difference between roughness at 1, at .6, at 0.05. Add some procedurals as bump, see what difference it makes; add some more to roughness. Experiment. Get the basics first then move on and apply to more complex materials. Don’t start with skin ;)

And don’t bother with normals unless you know what tangent basis is, or the difference between OpenGL and DirectX, just use bump. It’s easier.

I have a thread going specifically for examples using the Principled BSDF here - volumetric SSS, glass, foliage, PBR textures etc.

If anyone wants to read about PBR, these are great sources of info courtesy of Marmoset Toolbag -

PBR Theory

PBR in practice

PBR Conversion

(I didn’t get it when I first read them, but the pictures are good. Eventually it sunk in.)

Oh yeah. The only nodes ‘missing’ from Superfly are those that have User Interface elements that Poser doesn’t have - the ability to draw curves, for example. Back in 2015 the developers decided that, given the number of nodes affected and the amount of time it would take to write all the code needed for the UI, which was not trivial, there were more important things to do.

They did a lot of work to enable mix ’n’ match as far as possible between existing Poser nodes and new Cycles nodes, and with the three root nodes you can create a single material with one root for Firefly and a different root for Superfly, and the render engine will use the right one. They also mapped all the new nodes as close as possible to the existing Poser nodes, so that a Superfly render with old materials would have a chance of not being terrible. This has created a very flexible material system but it is not often possible to take a material someone else has made for Blender and copy it directly for Poser node for node. However, being physically-based means that it is easier to create materials for Superfly without needing highly complex shaders if you can get to grips with some of the basics.

caisson posted at 4:12PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419457

The single biggest thing that made Superfly easier for me to understand was realising that Specular has a completely different meaning -

• in Firefly, Specular is a hack to provide fake reflections (to use raytraced reflections in Firefly you would have to add a Reflect node to the material)

• but in Superfly, as everything has real raytraced reflections all the time, Specular means Base Reflectance.

This is why Firefly is often claimed to be faster. It isn’t, it’s just doing a lot less work. If you add Reflect nodes to every material to compare directly with Superfly you will find that speed difference …. quite different. For kicks, try adding some strong DoF too. Like for like, Superfly is way faster.

The second thing that helped me was a basic understanding of the PBR Metal/Rough workflow. Like, the difference between metal and not-metal. Base reflectance vs fresnel. What roughness means.

For me, it's that it is easy observable in the real world.

• A metal is something that is an electric conductor. And you always work with the outermost layer. So a painted metal pipe for instance is not metal as there is paint.

• Roughness is easy understood, if one looks at it, like how "dirty"/beaten or uneven an objects surface is. A mirror have 0 roughness so its reflection is very high. A piece of wood have a high roughness and therefore doesn't reflect like a mirror.

So its pretty easy to take any object look at it and describe it based on these two values.

• The diffuse color is simply the color of the object, nothing else.

• Normal map is just a 3d bump map that is autogenerated. (No one makes these by hand, that would be insane), so as you said a grayscale bump map can do if needed.

Whereas if you work with fake materials and have to replicate an object, its a lot harder to describe it and even harder to put together all the nodes.

3D-Mobster posted at 7:15PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419446

This is a PBR texture from: Freepbr loaded directly into Poser's Physical node, using the four common maps you need (Diffuse, Roughness, Metal and Normal). Which means that you can use any PBR texture you can find on the internet that use them and use them directly in Poser and expect them to be correct. You want them tileable you can probably find them. I found this site just doing a quick search. :)

This is how you hook it up:

Thing to notice, the diffuse might be called Albedo

Set Roughness and Metal to 1, and make sure that Roughness, Metal and the Normalmap when you load them in is set to Custom gamma value 1.0 in the load box.

That site is amazing. I'm rendering a quickie tabletop (wood) with a patterned brass texture on a ball, and it already looks 200% better than most stuff I tried as 'Superfly shader' before for those type of textures.

Thank you. Off to obsess a bit and experiment. Those tutorials Caisson posted go WAYYY over my head. Heck, most of his explanations go way over my head, I really need small words. Or just tell me 'this goes here, hook it up', this is the value. LOL.

Rhia474 posted at 7:56PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419468

That site is amazing. I'm rendering a quickie tabletop (wood) with a patterned brass texture on a ball, and it already looks 200% better than most stuff I tried as 'Superfly shader' before for those type of textures.

Thank you. Off to obsess a bit and experiment. Those tutorials Caisson posted go WAYYY over my head. Heck, most of his explanations go way over my head, I really need small words. Or just tell me 'this goes here, hook it up', this is the value. LOL.

Completely agree with you, because a lot of people confuses Superfly with a complex web of cycles nodes, adding this and multiplying that. Which is very useful when creating certain shaders, like the glass one we had a long discussion about in another thread and some diamond shader. So you still need a few of them for these materials, which is obviously a shame, because such materials should have been supplied with Poser, these would have been extremely useful. Like having a good PBR glass shader, water, diamond, gems etc. Where the physical shader struggles and because these are the ones that 95% of all people have issues with, because they don't know how to hook up all these nodes.

What is especially nice with PBR textures (using texture maps as above) is that they are extremely easy to read or understand. And since you have used some of the textures from that site, you would probably agree that they are very easy to understand, because they are just grayscale maps, the more white there is, the more rough a material is, so you can simply open the roughness map in Gimp or Photoshop and adjust the white/black values, if you want to make it more or less rough. You don't have to worry about any of the other maps.

And again, since these are PBR you know that they will look correct regardless of which lighting you use and that they will look the same for someone else that uses it as well.

Because as you can see in the example I showed above with the brass spheres, lets assume it was part of a product, so I adjust the lighting in my scene so it looks good in my promotional renders, however anyone that would buy it, might get completely different results, because the material react so differently depending on the lighting they use. And its extremely difficult for content creators to combat this, because how could we? We can't test all lighting settings that people might use to make sure that the product looks like we intended. But PBR solves most of these issues, despite the glass, gems, water etc. because they require cycle shaders and people might create them differently. So I would suggest (If you like the results of the glass shaders in the other thread) that you copy them down and save them to your library. Because it seem to work for all types of glass.

3D-Mobster posted at 9:52PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419446

This is a PBR texture from: Freepbr loaded directly into Poser's Physical node, using the four common maps you need (Diffuse, Roughness, Metal and Normal).

Thank you for the link. I just downloaded about 20 of them, and bookmarked it to look for some more. That's definitely a great resource.

Agree that Bondware really should include some good Superfly shaders with Poser, and indicate which renderer they're meant for. The dynamic hair shaders included (and the dynamic hair) look god-awful rendered with Superfly. Even some Poser 11 Superfly shaders no longer work in Poser 12.

This must be a right pain for vendors, with basically three renderers to support (or at least consider). At this point, there's probably a lot more people using Firefly and Poser 11 Superfly than Poser 12, which makes it hard to get rid of one.

3D-Mobster posted at 10:34PM Tue, 18 May 2021 - #4419446

This is a PBR texture from: Freepbr loaded directly into Poser's Physical node, using the four common maps you need (Diffuse, Roughness, Metal and Normal). Which means that you can use any PBR texture you can find on the internet that use them and use them directly in Poser and expect them to be correct. You want them tileable you can probably find them. I found this site just doing a quick search. :)

Thanks for the link Mobster! Except that all this PBR talk is really making me thirty for a cold PBR :)

To your health!

Wow, that glass shader is amazing! ?