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.

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