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