Is there a way to put the poser 4 render engine inside of Poser 9 or later? I think it was last used in Poser 7. I got the idea from watching Star Wars: The Bad Batch because the style of rendering looks like poser 4. Is This possible?

Nope. Don't think it's possible at all.

If poser 7 had Firefly and Poser 4 as render options why can't Poser 8, 9, or 11 have it too?

Those versions completely dropped Poser 4 and eventually added Superfly in Poser 11. There were some scripting changes also between the version. Anyway, why stick with an aging render engine when there is a better feature. Too much bloat for a feature that would never be used again.

Because people have different render styles. Yes, Superfly is cool for rendering and looks very nice but it take a long time. It does not have to be ultra realistic for ever artist . Poser 4's render engine can easily go through thousands of frames in poser very fast. I would just like to be able to make nice animation with poser in a short time. With today's hardware The Poser 4 render engine would be a beast with only one computer. Hey, I just like the style and if I could some how get it on Poser 2014 by way of python it would help me tell my stories faster.

I still have a copy of poser 7 and can say that poser 4 render is very fast, but preview render is even faster. This test is the first p4 render I've ever done so I can't say how different preview is to it if it's a comparable alternative.

alpha3d803 posted at 12:39PM Tue, 11 May 2021 - #4418999

Because people have different render styles. Yes, Superfly is cool for rendering and looks very nice but it take a long time. It does not have to be ultra realistic for ever artist . Poser 4's render engine can easily go through thousands of frames in poser very fast. I would just like to be able to make nice animation with poser in a short time. With today's hardware The Poser 4 render engine would be a beast with only one computer. Hey, I just like the style and if I could some how get it on Poser 2014 by way of python it would help me tell my stories faster.

Maybe you are just doing something wrong. You will get really fast renders if you use simple (P4-style) textures with "Physical Root" in Superfly.

I made a test: 4 penguines from Poser11 stock with adapted materials, two Spotlights and one Infinity Light: Rendertime 10 seconds (on a transparent background, 1400 x 1400)

That was in Poser 7 using Poser 4 render engine. Do you do animation or stills? Do you get flickering in your animation with Superfly or Firefly?

If you did hair, dynamic clothing, Bvh motion, and full scenes I think Poser 4 render engine would win in rendering overall in the same program of 64bit app of poser. ( if it was in there)

11 and 12 both have a Firefly render engine.

The problem I have with Firefly is the flickering in the animation frame and the long render times.

Why not just install an older version of Poser on your computer, and use that for rendering?

There's someone who posts here sometimes who still uses Poser 5.

Did you now that Cycles is used for animation films? Go and look at Cycles homepage: https://Blender.org

You will get problems as long as you try to use Poser materials with Cycles, And Poser 5 lighting.

Best tip I can give: Try other software. Blender has a near realtime animation feature: the Eeve render engine. And is still "photorealistic".

IIRC, the animation flickering is due to IBL use in the scene. Using regular lighting should prevent that.

Thanks

I still have Poser 4 lol ... it's good for people that, you know, can't wait the last two seconds to take their food out of the microwave

Heh. I still have Poser 4 somewhere. I wonder if I can install it. If you're trying to render a long animation on a single computer, I could see the appeal. Except I seem to recall it crashed frequently, so I always rendered animations as a series of stills, so if it crashed, I could just start where it left off.

I have noticed that "old-fashioned" style animation seems to be popular. Like the Star Wars trailer the OP mentioned. The characters look like they escaped the 1990s, though the smoke and FX are way better than anything Poser 4 could do. A lot of people love Mitchells vs the Machines, which is 3D designed to look hand-drawn.

TwiztidKidd posted at 6:17AM Thu, 13 May 2021 - #4419048

I still have Poser 4 lol ... it's good for people that, you know, can't wait the last two seconds to take their food out of the microwave

that looks really cool. I'd like to see more recently made Poser4 render engines made here. I still must have Poser 7 somewhere.

I decided to open up Poser 5 and, using Poser 5 items, do a render with the P4 render engine included and another with the P5 Firefly render engine.

Poser 4 engine in Poser 5

Firefly engine in Poser 5, ray-tracing turned on

Mmmmmmmm...I prefer Poser 12 Superfly.

I don't care about Superfly either. Don't like its slowness (even with a modern graphics card) and especially don't like the weird preview.

Besides, if you want 100% photorealism, you actually need a mesh that is 100% photorealistically sculpted. (Which none of the available Poser/DAZ meshes is, anyway)

So I rather go for speed. The P4 renderer WAS fast, and the Firefly renderer WAS slow.

But I had 15 or so years to learn how to get the most out of it:

Here are two of my "Casuals" in one of my basic 3-Light settings:

Preview:

Render 4.6 sec:

Render 8 sec:

Here my render settings:

As I said, not going for photorealism. I try to safely stay "this" side of the uncanny Valley, going for a "unique" Poser look that pleases me instead of trying to keep up with the "professionals".

Similar lightset, modified for "indoors".

13.7 sec:

Poser 4 and its rendering is really very fast and high quality. I created three feature films in Poser 4.2 or Poser 11 with render settings as in Poser 4. This issue is solved.

https://rutube.ru/channel/798730/

Why did I use Poser 4.2 or Poser 4 renderer for Poser 11? The render of Poser 4 is very fast, high quality and does not create errors with the transparency channel, as in Poser 10/11.

The latest Poser developers have destroyed all the handy tools for creating professional animation. Professional animation is not limited to rendering in Poser. Therefore, animation blanks for rendering in Poser must have all the parameters for use in programs for building animation compositions. Renders in Poser 10/11 contain errors in the transparency channel and this is due to the rendering algorithm. I offered my recommendations to the developers of Poser 11, but they only made it worse. The main focus of Poser's development strategy was given to render quality, resulting in longer render times.

In any case, the render in Poser cannot be considered as ready-made material for immediate publication. Rendering in Poser requires mandatory additional processing in photo editing programs.

Render settings in Poser 4.2 and Poser 10 and render results in the image below.

Render times? I remember leaving my computer on all night to render something smaller than 640x480 in Bryce back around 1995. I remember renders taking hours in P5 on my old G4 400mghz. back around 2000.

Speaking of Bryce 3D: in 2001, it took my computer 21 hours to compute this picture (at the time: 1600x1200px)

With the pro version, 10 years later: 49 minutes for this version (1680x1050)

I created a Bryce test to determine render times in Bryce.

http://www.bryce-3d.narod.ru/bryce_test_eng.html

Bryce Test for multi-core processors:

http://www.bryce-3d.narod.ru/bryce_test_multi_eng.html

But I repeat again. Bryce and Poser were originally designed to create blanks with alpha and black and white masks. These masks allow you to divide the image of the scene into fragments, which are collected again in programs for creating multilayer compositions. You don't have to render an entire scene in Bryce and Poser for many hours. Using multilayer blanks from image fragments gives you the opportunity to reduce the final render time by several times. Therefore, Bryce and Poser are programs for the initial level of rendering, and not for the final one. Only in this case, you can create a long animation with minimal render costs.

My old video tutorial with subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze7FyvUworw

Not sure what it is about but my Antivirus blocked access to some dangerous web page!

Totally agree with you. YouTube is a very dangerous and viral Internet resource.

PoserUserFromRussia posted at 2:59 PM Mon, 25 April 2022 - #4437734

Totally agree with you. YouTube is a very dangerous and viral Internet resource.

Note that I'm not responsable of the reactions of my anti-virus...

I am using an AVG AntiVirus free. It has been protecting my computer for many years.

probably a false positive as my anti-vir stopped whining...