Honestly, the old firefly materials in Poser need a complete overhaul.  There have been corrections and repairs done to many nodes over the different Poser versions, and the implementation of FF shaders has changed, thanks to Bagginsbill.  I do agree that there should be more Superfly-centric materials, but which format would users be comfortable using in their scenes: PoserSurface, PhysicalSurface, or Cycles?

hborre posted at 12:20 PM Fri, 8 November 2024 - #4491138

Honestly, the old firefly materials in Poser need a complete overhaul.  There have been corrections and repairs done to many nodes over the different Poser versions, and the implementation of FF shaders has changed, thanks to Bagginsbill.  I do agree that there should be more Superfly-centric materials, but which format would users be comfortable using in their scenes: PoserSurface, PhysicalSurface, or Cycles?

I kept telling them to make a new Simple Material tab in Poser that's just a more user-friendly setup of the PhysicalSurface root. That's the fastest best way to set things up for Superfly.

I remember playing with a free app a couple of years ago (it's on my old computer) named Materialize. You make your own pbr image files. It was pretty easy, IIRC.

https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

Materialize is a stand alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images. You can create an entire material from a single image or import the textures you have and generate the textures you need.

VedaDalsette posted at 4:07 PM Fri, 8 November 2024 - #4491152

I remember playing with a free app a couple of years ago (it's on my old computer) named Materialize. You make your own pbr image files. It was pretty easy, IIRC.

https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

Materialize is a stand alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images. You can create an entire material from a single image or import the textures you have and generate the textures you need.

I use it from time to time to create maps for older textures. It is good if the inputted image is good quality, absolute trash if the inputted image is low-rez.

hborre posted at 12:20 PM Fri, 8 November 2024 - #4491138

Honestly, the old firefly materials in Poser need a complete overhaul.  There have been corrections and repairs done to many nodes over the different Poser versions, and the implementation of FF shaders has changed, thanks to Bagginsbill.  I do agree that there should be more Superfly-centric materials, but which format would users be comfortable using in their scenes: PoserSurface, PhysicalSurface, or Cycles?

Personally I use both PhysicalSurface and Cycles depending on the need. But I would say if you want to make things accessible for newer users, go with PhysicalSurface. It's simple, it supports displacement and bump set up exactly the same as PoserSurface (you can do both in Cycles but the strength settings are on completely different scales), and it previews properly.

Regarding the SuperFly material sets, I use all the ones mentioned so far (except the semi-precious gemstones, how did I miss those???) but I find that Vince Bagna's are the ones I am constantly going back to. (But they would preview better if they still had a PoserSurface root set as the Firefly option.)

And I would absolutely like to increase my library of materials.

I would say Physical Surface would be the best for now--I like Cycles for skin a lot, but the Physical Surface offers a good transitional root for recovering Firefly users.

lsauvage posted at 12:19 PM Fri, 8 November 2024 - #4491137

An other thing, a quick win for developpers, very usefull for us. One would be to allow the addition of queue renderer that are not in the same local network. Do not discover it, let me type the ip of the remote queue render. So i can rent a cloud machine, install my queue render and render my animation quicker. When it's over, i stop paying the virtual machine.... Could even be better if we could share a password / key with some fellow users of the forum in there so we could mutualize our render power when needed too be more efficient.

this would be amazing! I have no chance to render with gpu and my renders need upto 8 hours 😪 It would be so cool to let us render with a cloud machine... or the far away Computer of my family members with high end technic 😜

midinick posted at 7:20 AM Sat, 9 November 2024 - #4491174

lsauvage posted at 12:19 PM Fri, 8 November 2024 - #4491137

An other thing, a quick win for developpers, very usefull for us. One would be to allow the addition of queue renderer that are not in the same local network. Do not discover it, let me type the ip of the remote queue render. So i can rent a cloud machine, install my queue render and render my animation quicker. When it's over, i stop paying the virtual machine.... Could even be better if we could share a password / key with some fellow users of the forum in there so we could mutualize our render power when needed too be more efficient.

this would be amazing! I have no chance to render with gpu and my renders need upto 8 hours 😪 It would be so cool to let us render with a cloud machine... or the far away Computer of my family members with high end technic 😜

I am not seeing how that would be a quick win for the developers....

That introduces other operating systems to support that are not currently supported.... It would also be introducing even more hardware to support... Servers don't normally run rtx cards, they run Nvidia A100, H100 or AMD instinct server cards, that are multi tasking and shared between VM's.... The use similar programming, but not exactly the same.... AMD isn't even supported in Poser, nether are Intel server gpus that are gaining a lot of market share....

What would the return for that investment be for the developers actually even be? That could easily cost millions just to code and test it, just internally to the dev team....

I don't see any return on investment, other than ending up with a bunch of people to lay off afterwards and being millions in the hole from from coding it and purchasing/leasing/renting the hardware to even begin to code it on........ Then you are still right back to who will test it, or even use it....

Sure you can rent an H100 server for about 80 bucks a day, but that is per user in many cases..... That is 30k a year, per user... 10 devs, 300k a year just for the server... So you are better off buying it..... 100k a year for 20 devs and support staff, and you just passed 6-10 million with all the things people forget about, for one year....  Suddenly you need to sell way more copies a year, just to break even.... And if you don't, its done, instantly.... That isn't a risk businesses normally take with their own money, and Poser isn't using someone else's money on the stock exchange, to warrant the risk versus return.......

While it may sound like a good idea for the few that would actually use it. The logistics and risk are extremely high, and pointing right at failure before you even start.... 

We used to have this option, and people tend to forget that.... Lots of people claimed they wanted a option that could be used with render farms...

They got it with the Lux exporters, and basically no one used it. The developers that did it quit doing it because there was no return to warrant continuing it......

Nothing has changed, the group that would use it is to small to generate a return on investment....

Your are surely right about the investment in render farm, but I'm not asking that the queue render changes and supports H100. Only that i'm not limited to the LAN and the auto discorery function.allowing the typing of a remote ip is not big work.

If it was possible  i could send from the PC I rent from shadow.tech (GPU NVIDIA® RTX™ A4500) renders to my  local old machine with its 2 1070 GPUS without the need of mouting  private virtual network that is difficult. 

I think you missed some points....

When you see a server that says "Rent my RTX A4500", there may not be any A4500s in the server...

It more than likely runs it on an A100 or H100 that is shared between multiple VM's..... I can set up an H100 to be shared as any NVidia card you want it to appear to be, that is how that works.... A4500, A6000, whatever you want it to say. That is how that works with VM's....

There may not be any A4500s there, because they are limited in how many VM's can actually use them at once by memory. They only have 20 gig to split up.... An H100 has 80gig, which is 4 times as many VMs per slot.....

But there could be A4500's in older setups, that are not really worth renting.......

Let me explain why....

If there are actually A4500s in it, they are shared the same way H100s are. With Proxmox or something similar... You are not getting all of that gpu at any point because it is a shared gpu, being shared with multiple VM's at once.... You are most likely renting part of that gpu, not all of it... And it you do get all of it, you get time slices of it....

You are also renting a gpu that is slower than a 3070........................... Think about that, then think on that some more.......

A local 3070, which can be found fairly cheap basically anywhere, and is faster than a A4500.... 

You could by a few 3070s for what you will spend on the service. I have seen them sell for under 200 us.....

3060s go for under 100, and are about the same speed you will get out of a shared A4500....

Buy used 3070 gpu, and you will always have a faster gpu in your system. Buy a used 3060, and it will be faster than the remote A4500 ever could be....

That will cost millions less than what you propose, and has zero chance of bankrupting Poser.....