hornet3d posted at 9:45 PM Thu, 2 March 2023 - #4457473

I love to play with the materials in Poser and to kit bash many of the outfits but I accept that I may well be in the minority of Poser users.  I love Superfly but accept that it did raise a few problems when using Firefly materials particularly when is came to figures but life has moved on.  These days it is fairly easy to  easy to find a character with Superfly materials and there are scripts with can make a decent job of converting Firefly materials to Superfly at the click of a button.  OK it is another script but if that is what is needed to keep the cost of the main program down and let users fine tune their own installation then so be it.   The truth is that Firefly still works and there are few hurdles to using Superfly if that is what users prefer.  These days Poser provides a powerful piece of software that is relatively stable and at a cost not beyond the pocket of the average hobbyist.  Of course it can be improved but by using the scripts available it can be tuned to do a great deal more at minimal cost.

So far Bondware have, I believe, made a relatively good job of cleaning up Poser and adding to the existing program.  I am happy to buy Poser 13 based upon their efforts with Poser so far and to use scripts to make the program even more powerful yet easier to use.  It has come a long way since Poser 5 and, for me at least, it has been a journey of both fun and discovery.

I basically agree and I am probably also a low level tinkerer. 

I do not understand the Superfly bashing. Superfly is a fantastically versatile tool and a superb render engine. First and foremost, it is not locked to NVIDIA like IRAY, but it will work with AMD hardware as well. Secondly it provides both a physically based method, like IRAY with the use of the standard set of PBR textures, but it also includes a way to make high quality procedural textures, which is light om memory and produce wonderful pictures.

I understand that for those less tinker-minded there needs to be texture packages, and there are. Really good ones too. Like VinceBagna's or the one produced by the late great Dimensiion3D.

As an aside a tip: If you find porting textures for old figures, like V4, to Cycles difficult. Try using the Physically root node and simply attach your available textures to that. Even just doing that will give absolutely decent results.

And if that doesn't float your boat, then I am happy there is still a very effective render engine in Firefly.

Both bases covered as far as I am concerned.

So I have some wishes for P13, which will probably not be fulfilled. At least not all of them. And I'll be cursing that I do not get what I want. But I'll buy the thing anyway I am sure.