Hi all!

I really wanted to put this in the vendor only forums because I would prefer to not alerting everybody to problems if there is a possibility to solve them first. However, the public forum is going to be way more active so there's a greater chance of actually getting some information. :)

I bought Poser 12 last year but took a break from rendering in Poser and was working on other things. The reason I bought it was I had just gotten a new computer with a GeForce RTX 3060 and decided to upgrade to Poser 12 immediately because Poser 11 did not support GPU rendering for my graphics card, which was too new.

I do remember running some tests back then and being impressed with the rendering times. What I don't remember is what I tested - although I assume it was a promo scene from one of my products, including clothing. I don't remember any issues with materials at that time. Perhaps I was inattentive, but from what I can remember, materials rendered the same as in Poser 11.

After a couple of updates (yesterday I tested rendering on both 12.0.757 and 12.0.1029 - I updated to see if it would fix the problems) Superfly renders now look completely different in Poser 12. No matter what render settings I use (CPU or GPU)

As we can see from the images, even the Poser 12 OpenGL SuperFly preview looks fine. It is only once I render that everything is messed up, from the figures to the clothing. And yes, I am aware that there is a skinning workaround for the figures to get rid of the lines. But that doesn't work for props. And lines are not the main issue here but material rendering.

The materials here are layered materials that were created by me to work -specifically- with Superfly. These materials don't even work in Firefly and aren't meant to. They work beautifully in Poser 11. Now the opacity on the layer is messed up. But not only that - things like displacement that is on the layer underneath renders differently as well once I remove the top layer.

So now I am wondering... is it my hardware? Some settings somewhere I have missed? I have updated my NVidia drivers and downloaded the latest Poser 12. The images shown are rendered in P11 and P12 using the exact same scene I set up and saved and also the same render settings. So they should look the same, right? I have searched the internet and can't find much except information on the figure lines workaround.

Or... have there been intentional changes to the SuperFly render engine so that it now works differently in Poser 12? It seems counterintuitive to me if it breaks content created for Poser 11.

One reason I am concerned is that among the few threads I have found discussing Poser 12 render issues, the discussion centers around workarounds and not around what might have changed with the render engine itself. As a content creator, requiring the end user to rely on workarounds is not a reliable solution at all.

What do customers here think? Have you tried rendering Poser 11 clothing with Superfly materials in Poser 12 recently? What were your results? How many of you are using Poser 11 still and would people be happy to buy SuperFly content that is recommended for Poser 11 only? I just don't see a way forward creating for Poser 12 if I can't test and get the same results as the end user. And if it does look like this for everyone... what does that mean for creating content going forward?

Actually, I can't find them but using Poser11, it's Cycles V1.x, whereas with Poser12: it's based on Cycles V2.x. And it's ture that the shine effect (not sure that's the right term to use) is more important

Using Poser12, this parameter must be lowered. That are a number of Cycles Nodes that have been updated and corrected because the calculations were wrong with Poser12. Supposedly it could be the same with the bump and displacement maps, even on a PoserSurface node.
Have you tried to use the PhysicalSurface node, to see if you can find a decent look on both Poser?

I can't imagine the difficulty for a vendor...

Thank you.

Well this is really bad news - since it breaks all materials previously created for Superfly/Poser 11. Guess I should be glad a lot of people haven't upgraded yet. And at least all my current products only have Poser 11 compatibility stated so I won't be held liable by customers.

If I do create anything new for Poser, it seems I will have to choose between restricting compatibility to Poser 11 - or try to make new Poser 12 friendly materials - which are at risk of breaking again the next time something gets changed. Also, it will make products in my store promising to do the same thing (SuperFly) incompatible with each other...

Seems too risky so I will probably focus on DS content for now. A real shame. I have always supported Poser and was planning to release at least a few products in that direction. Good thing I tested this before getting started on anything new. Perhaps a few years and versions down the line when we can be sure that things are stable, I can make content for Poser again.

I am thinking we can still do Poser 11 compatibility for the DS/PS-compatible props I am sometimes collaborating with on another vendor here as we tend to use simpler PBR materials for those. So at least there is that.

It's more the clothing that is going to have to wait. But then dForce is a lot of fun... I do want to create more complicated, hybrid dynamic clothing which dForce does really well.

There are a lot of technical limitations still for the cloth room to handle hybrid clothing well and I have given up on more than one ambitious project. With V4, I resorted to using a lot of tricks involving constrained areas but that tends to be unviable nowadays with LFs breast bones getting in the way. There are only so many options for free flowing, unconstrained clothing before one starts to run out of ideas. ;)

Just in case if you wondered why another Poser clothing vendor started doing DS clothing. There really are reasons other than just the sales.

I personally think you may be able to get more specific advice from fellow vendors on the vendor forum about product updates for P12. But I'm just an end user. I almost always tweak materials for clothes in P12 especially those created in earlier versions.

I have to confess that I almost never use directly the material settings of the items I buy: I systematically use either one of Ghostship's setups, as a basis, or one basic setting that gives good results with Poser12.

At the time of Poser11, I often used to switch to EZSkin.

So Rhia, you would be fine buying a product made for Poser 11 and then tweaking it? That is some good news at least.

What would be the interest if I were to release a couple of Poser 12 specific addon packs? I could try one to see how it does. In my experience, full products tend to sell way better for me than addons, not being a top vendor. However, it can also be good to have some smaller projects running alongside larger ones.

In fact, it was with the idea of creating an addon pack for an older product that I ran into these issues. I could of course make new P12 materials and make that into an addon. Just started with Substance Painter and want to test out viable pipelines for both DS and Poser. :)

Y-Phil, that looks interesting. I haven't actually used the Cycles node at all yet. I have stuck to the root node for dual FF/SF materials (worked great in P11 for simpler materials). I have also used the PBR node, especially for layered metallics (which also worked well in P11 for SF only materials). Might look into the Cycles node, is that the direction things are generally going now?

I love your Short Bloomer set and yes, I did some material changes on them. I may futz with it tonight again to see what I can show you in that regard.

Vendors I buy from these days use either the Physical Surface or Cycles nodes for Superfly specifically, while keeping Poser Surface for Firefly.

I also have a question about normal maps - Is it confirmed that SF takes OpenGL (Y+) / MikkT tangent space maps like DS Iray does? Someone I know says that they can't get any type of normal maps to look right in Poser. I have been using them and thought they looked ok but we are doing very different types of products. This was also in Poser 11, perhaps there have been normal map bug fixes as well since then?

At least we have established that I am seeing an intentional change and not simply a bug. I would hate to make and sell custom materials for a bug .... unless it's a bee or a butterfly or something like that. ;)

One concern though is we don't know whether things will stay fairly consistent going forward, I assume into Poser 13 ... or whatever it will be renamed to if they are superstitious ;)

The thing with highlights in Poser 12 is that the new version of Superfly, following some advancements in Blender's Cycles, is more mathematically accurate with Roughness calculations (from what I understand). Where before there was a range of roughness that you could barely define (it looked like either too much or too little), now you can define the increments more correctly.

Sadly it was a matter of chosing between breaking some older content or leaving the renderer more limited and incorrect. For me, improvement is always the right choice.

The good news is that it's not everything - just things that were unfortunate enough to have been set as too much instead of too little LMAO! We really couldn't tell before, that's why I have a bunch of freebies with corrected materials for my products.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 3:55 PM Thu, 29 September 2022 - #4445507

The thing with highlights in Poser 12 is that the new version of Superfly, following some advancements in Blender's Cycles, is more mathematically accurate with Roughness calculations (from what I understand). Where before there was a range of roughness that you could barely define (it looked like either too much or too little), now you can define the increments more correctly.

Sadly it was a matter of chosing between breaking some older content or leaving the renderer more limited and incorrect. For me, improvement is always the right choice.

The good news is that it's not everything - just things that were unfortunate enough to have been set as too much instead of too little LMAO! We really couldn't tell before, that's why I have a bunch of freebies with corrected materials for my products.

I understand and it makes sense. What is most important to me I think is to find out if we will be sticking with this version for a while now... before I decide on how much time to commit to creating or altering content specifically for P12. :)

Some nice content for La Femme there in your store, btw. :)

As a customer, once thing I note and I appreciate a lot:  (as highlighted by Afrodite-Ohki) the fact that we buy an item made for Poser11, and we can download a freebie the corrects the mats for Poser12. And as the room on hard disks is huge nowadays (my first hard disk costed 1'800$  for 10Mb) it's easy to have both material settings side-by-side.

Frequency3D posted at 4:09 PM Thu, 29 September 2022 - #4445509

I understand and it makes sense. What is most important to me I think is to find out if we will be sticking with this version for a while now... before I decide on how much time to commit to creating or altering content specifically for P12. :)

Some nice content for La Femme there in your store, btw. :)

It should be safe to adjust for P12 - when you fix the highlights for P12, they still seem to work correctly in P11.

And thank you! :D

I covered this a while ago.

https://www.renderosity.com/forums/threads/2954618/cycles-glossy-node-skin-related-info

Well it turns out that the main problem with the layer was that some sort of bug in P11 made it so that Metallic and other channels did not need texture masking when they were set to 1,000 which made me skip that step. This particular layer was a PBR metallic procedural texture with no additional masking.

The other issue was that Displacement mapping has probably been improved with P12 and now needs a much lower setting so that it calls for separate P11 and P12 materials for a product if I want to use that.

Since I am moving over to Substance texturing anyhow, I will be starting to use Normal maps more and those seem to render exactly the same in P11 and P12. So there is definitely a way forward!

Meanwhile, I have released one freebie update (hopefully there will be more for other products later) - for the above product. If you own that one, you can download the freebie here:

P12 Superfly Update for Fabulous Flares