Hi,

I recently went from my trusty Poser 10 to finally getting Poser 12 and having access to newer rendering technology.

Now rather than bemoan the fact that I was missing a scene that truly showed what Superfly is capable of, I thought I might ask for suggestions for example scenes. In the past, I felt it really helpful to adapt shader trees from some surface to something else. I like to call that "shader scrumping".

Far more important to me is how to use the Physical node for PBR textures like you would get at say "AmbientCG" or "PolyHaven". Sure, I understand the basics and have already played around BUT.... You see if you for example, have a set of texture tiles for a kind of Water. That's where I end up stumped because I don't want to resort to some cycles procedural set because I want to make use of those textures.

Interestingly, I have found that when it came to metal substances, I ended up dropping the roughness and metallic maps because it looked wrong otherwise.

A good tutor for this are example scenes or sets of materials. Weirdly map-based PBR material sets for Superfly are a  rarety as most seem to be procedural solutions unlike DAZ Iray where there are quite a few.

And so my question- Have you got any suggestions, solutions and helpful advice?
(assuming I have not completely confused you and you're as baffled, as if you were confronted by incoherent babbling of an intergalactic moose)

thanks

More than 4 years ago, Caisson published this thread:
https://www.renderosity.com/forums/threads/2954649/principled-bsdf-some-examples

In which you will learn some great examples of the Principled BSDF node, such as this:

Thanks....

the link is a great help.

Still open to suggestions for scenes and things that demonstrate superfly or provide some practical constructs for shader trees.

PBR materials are heavily dependent on the textures created for them. 

Can you post a screen cap of the PBR textures you are trying to use, including the metal and rough maps that you say don't work right?  Not the full resolution because they are probably copyrighted, but perhaps a small screen cap (say 250x250 thumbs or whatever). 

With the proper maps, all you should have to do is connect them to the corresponding inputs on the Physical Surface node, or the Cycles root node with Principled BSDF texture. 

Not gotten a chance to get back to my 3D pc just yet but I do have the links on hand... It's really two. One is a puddle https://www.texturecan.com/details/531/ and the other
is a tidal pool type ground https://freepbr.com/product/tidal-pools-1/

Ok so here is a snapshot.

As you can see, this is a physical node setup rather than cycles because the Principled BDSF didn't seem to go into how to do transparencies and liquid. (Aside from that, the guide was also unclear on how I would adapt a leaf texture set with the classic opacity/transparency maps.)

On a physical node I would have dialed down the opacity dial, plugged in all/most of the maps and possibly messed about with the scatter settings I barely get. Not terribly satisfying to be honest.

This one is the raindrops on Puddle from TextureCandotcom that I mentioned above. Only four maps with this one.

And lastly the Tidal Pools material from freepbrdotcom above. Since this is only partially transparent and there are no tr maps, this looked nothing like intended.

IMO, if you are using the dirty water texture with a flat plane, then you won't need refraction. Thinking about it, turbidity will influence how much refraction will occur.

The raindrop puddle will benefit from plugging the height map to the displacement channel, not the bump channel, as illustrated. You might want actual influence on a subdivided mesh to see a difference. The same applies to the tidal pool, except you might require a second flat plane to simulate water above it. I would need to play with it to achieve something satisfactory.

You know it's a bit frustrating really because in many ways the examples in the excellent principled bsdf guide are really quite far from what I am really looking for, which is a relatively reliable way for making use of tileable PBR texture sets. What I mean to say, is that some aspects of the guide did confuse me. For example, if I want to plug in a height map, where do I do that? It's simple enough in the Physical node but not so much in the Cycles one.

Equally, I am presently able to adapt an old Firefly plant/shrub/tree to superfly via the Physical Node but the Cycles way of doing dealing with transparency maps etc just eludes me.

Cycles with the PrincipledBsdf node is trickier, you need to combine settings with the Alpha and Transmission channels depending on the object's mesh.  This is how you can modulate translucency, although the alternate method is to connect the PrincipleBsdf and TranslucentBsdf nodes with an add node.  If you have the opportunity to broaden your Cycles knowledge, I suggest looking at some YouTube Blender tutorials.  Be aware, not all the Blender nodes exist in Poser, but there are enough to give you a starting point.

If you have some links for cycles tutorials that'd be great

Honestly what you are finding out is that the Physical surface node is a compromise between Firefly and Superfly, and it isn't really a PBR friendly node. If you want to learn PBR quickly, don't use the pre canned node that is a compromise between two render engines. In your fluid example above there is a far quicker way to get fluids that have refraction, specular, etc... Leave everything from Firefly somewhere else, because it no longer applies... Let me give you a quick and easy example.

Create an empty scene with no lights (delete all of them), set the scene to hidden line display so you can see what you are doing.

Go to the material room and set the background shader to look like this, make sure to check cast light... You will need a good HDR file to cast the light.

Poser has a few. Polyhaven has tons of them.

Add a prop and set the material to look like this (It is the glass shader that comes with P12 with the IOR changed to 1.33)

Set your render settings where caustics are turned on. Similar to this. Obviously pick whatever hardware you have, cpu, gpu.

If you did everything correctly, you should get something like this... You can not do this with the canned physical surface node that was for skin, and not much more....

This is literally PBR, without using anything PBR other than an HDR image.

I know that my sound odd, but it is. You can add textures to the water, etc, to make it look far different.

The best way to learn PBR, is to be able to wire it up yourself first... And more importantly have an environment for it to interact with...

I would start with any Blender tutorials on how to set up materials. Look for ones that are simple and ones that don't use nodes Poser excluded, like color ramps.

Just about any of the Cycles material tutorials will work.

I forgot to add that the examples of how to use tile able textures are included with Poser.

It is literally a matter of hooking a divide node to the textures scales and will work with any texture setup for the most part.

Thanks.

In fact, I had already explored HDRs but seeing as the background never actually resulted in a dome, I felt them unsatisfying. Then I tried out Snarrly's EZDome but found almost no SIBLs. Not being ready to give up, I then installed an app (and very good it is too) to make those SIBLs myself but only partially felt I knew what I was doing.

In most cases, I was never really happy because the HDRI method always proved too bright and awful for any scene where I would want to use Emissive textures. For example, if you check out Polyhaven and the nighttime HDRI, you'll find most are not really nighttime but actually look like dawn-light.

So I went back to regular ground and skydomes, merely modifying the material to provide Emissive light from the dome.

And building Cycles shaders from the ground up.... Hmmmm... As hborre mentioned, Cycles is tricky and I'm in for what seems to be an immense learning curve.
Very daunting all in all.

Did make use of your example of course.

EzDome in it's EnvHemisphere variant with a pure-Sky SIBL made from the "BelfastSun" Hdri. Felt it needed a cracking bit of floor too so... took it literally.

Thanks.

In fact, I had already explored HDRs but seeing as the background never actually resulted in a dome, I felt them unsatisfying. Then I tried out Snarrly's EZDome but found almost no SIBLs. Not being ready to give up, I then installed an app (and very good it is too) to make those SIBLs myself but only partially felt I knew what I was doing.

In most cases, I was never really happy because the HDRI method always proved too bright and awful for any scene where I would want to use Emissive textures. For example, if you check out Polyhaven and the nighttime HDRI, you'll find most are not really nighttime but actually look like dawn-light.

So I went back to regular ground and skydomes, merely modifying the material to provide Emissive light from the dome.

And building Cycles shaders from the ground up.... Hmmmm... As hborre mentioned, Cycles is tricky and I'm in for what seems to be an immense learning curve.
Very daunting all in all.

I find that with HDRIs you need literally no extra lights in addition to them whatsoever (except ones to light up your scene so you see what you are doing but which do not render). There used to be a ton of sIBL sites around a few years ago, I downloaded a ton back then. I google search turned up a lot of them still active, though alas sIBL Archive, the largest one, no longer exists. Nighttime HDRIs are hard to find but not impossible.

No lights, indoors HDRI on background node, glass, wine and wood Cycles shaders:

I have found that working with Snarly's EZDome and sIBL HDRIs, you don't need the actual HDR image to provide luminance to the scene. You need to convert the HDR luminance to a 'pure' format. This, combined with the JPG background, illuminates the environment better. Third-party programs are needed to manipulate the HDRs; Picturenaut and HDRShop can modulate the luminance. Unfortunately, HDRShop is no longer available.

Well I've used sIBLEdit to farbicate my own SIBLs from HDRs but that's as far as I've come.

And there are indeed few Sibls to be had out there.

The program does have a learning curve. I have used it in the past to generate my own sIBLs also, although I had to improvise on the reflective and environmental maps. I haven't used it in quite some time; I should revisit the software again.

Thanks.

In most cases, I was never really happy because the HDRI method always proved too bright and awful for any scene where I would want to use Emissive textures. For example, if you check out Polyhaven and the nighttime HDRI, you'll find most are not really nighttime but actually look like dawn-light.

HDRI's are not created equally, just as you discovered. The lighting levels can be drastically different in HDRI's, and that is what the spec is for to begin with. Sadly the background node in Poser is about as basic as it gets, and has no way of dealing with the differences in HDRI light levels.

Technically there is a highly configurable dome in Poser, but there is literally no way to display it properly in the preview. That doesn't mean that it isn't useful, but it does have some limitations.

I personally don't use an additional dome in Poser, and find it counter productive to add another one that does far less, most with less options... My default scene presently uses this shader, which Ironically can do more than Poser even supports doing with it... IE, some if it doesn't work in Poser, but does in Blender.... 

Translation and perspective of the dome being one of the things Poser doesn't support. Which are minor issues to deal with.

Here is a very useful background shader for using HDRI. I have it all spread out so you can see how to make it, and the user node to change settings are highlighted...

It can do some things that are very useful, change gamma, adjust the lighting without affecting the background, adjust the background without affecting the lighting, etc. It can also blur the background, and most setups simply can not do that. This one blurs the light and the background at the same time, but if you are duplicate the blur section and do it on either side of the light path split independently, or just the background, or both. This is a fairly basic setup, and you can get even more creative with the vertex math if you want to.. It isn't perfect, but can get stunning results with basically any hdri.. Some of the night time ones take some experimenting with to get to render properly, and that has more to do with the limited layers in the HDRI than Poser.

This is the number one reason I highly recommend learning these nodes... You do not have to be an expert at it to do amazing things.

The nodes that come pre canned in Poser have specific usages, but are basically useless for a lot of other things....

If you want to use a dome, this shader can be configured to work with a dome as well. 

Will need some time to build that node tree because those functions are indeed very useful. (or will be once I know which bit does what)

Have found that with a lot of Blender Tutorials, there is a trend to do a youtube "Look at how fast I can do XYZ with sprinkles on" which no sane human can follow without
getting a mental stress fracture.

Interested in the dome you mentioned. Is that to be found in the Poser12 Content or can you turn the background into a dome? I mean, if I use EZDome, it also doesn't display in the preview either so..

On the whole, I am taking to Poser 12 despite the fact that it is time consuming to get to grips with Superfly. I was relatively adept with Firefly and its Daz equivalent 3Delight and have seen a lot of Physically Based Renders using Iray that were extremely underwhelming in comparison. Might be just my impression but in a lot of cases, the pictures had really boring lighting and complete absence of effects.
Since my preference is for Fantasy and Sci-Fi type stuff, I do have a love of light and effects. Think there used to be a product (discontinued) for Tenebroso Lighting for Daz, which would have been right up my street. Equally, I love volumetrics and so far, Superfly still feels a bit sterile in comparison but that will change I expect.

But Poser 12 has certainly gained my interest, even though most of the scenes and products made for Superfly seemed to be targeted at the IKEA Catalogue side of 3D Art, whereas my element is more in the realms of Prae's Hairs and things that remind me of indipendent music and UK Rpg scene of the 1980s.

You don't have to load a dome in Poser when using Superfly... You just change the shaders on the background, in the material room of Poser.

Cycles, which Superfly is built on, automatically has a dome in every scene without physically adding one.. It can also do more than a physical dome is capable of, as far as advance ray manipulations go, up to Poser 12. I am not sure if that is still the case in P13 thou, because I don't use a dome. P13 is a better version of Superfly, by far, especially if you GPU render. No I am not trying to sell you P13, but do want you to understand there is a substantial difference from 12 to 13.

Superfly and Cycles are both very powerful render engines, but as you delve into atmosphere, etc, they work a bit differently than some render engines. That doesn't mean they can't do it, just that you have to look at it a bit differently when setting it up. One thing to keep in mind with Superfly, is that it doesn't have built in color correction the same way Cycles does. And the render engine was designed to use it, even if it isn't there.. P13 has a lot better Post FX, and the ability to save and load settings for it. But it doesnt have the same presets Blender does...

If you don't want to build the shader out, I put it in my file locker here. https://www.renderosity.com/filelocker/57229/download?key=1944 It isn't saved in a Poser file structure, so you will have to copy it to where ever you want to put it manually versus how you install content.... No guarantees on how long it will stay in the locker if I need the room for something else... Link could die in the future.

Thanks again.
That shader tree will be a great help because time is my single biggest problem the 3D hobby and any time-saver is worth it's weight in gold.

As far as Poser 13 is concerned, you're preaching to the converted. Meaning if I could, I would.

Trouble is, I treated myself to a deal on Poser 12 this Christmas to finally give Physically Based rendering a go, now that I also have a suitable rig. Going to have to wait a while with a further Poser 13 investment.

Your welcome.

Watch the contests here, sometimes they give away Poser as a prize in them.

Certainly making progress and taking your advice to heart., Step by step.
Making use of one or two really useful nodes. In this case, I had found a rather nice cling film texture from texturecan for a piece of clothing but the opacity map was too transparent for the look I was going for. So I thought I'd look for a node to pop inbetween to make the opacity map brighter and thus make the thing less transparent.

The AO node is not recognized in Superfly.  There are some problems with it from what I understand.

There are a LOT of things SuperFly does natively that FireFly needs to be told to do. AO is one of those things. Any of the "Raytraced" add-ons for FireFly and not needed for SuperFly. Reflections for example are just always present in SF. For the most part SF will just ignore those nodes. Node connections that won't work for SuperFly are represented by a dotted line in the material room.

hborre posted at 12:45 PM Tue, 14 January 2025 - #4492836

The AO node is not recognized in Superfly.  There are some problems with it from what I understand.

Ao is technically the absence of color, and nothing more.... The Superfly AO node does indeed work for that....

Here is a very simple example of how you do it.

What this shader does is mix what you want, with zero, which is black. And that is exactly what AO is...

What is missing in Poser, is the color ramp node used in Cycles to easily control it....

But you can do it with a brightness contrast node just as easily....

AO does indeed work in Superfly in Poser, just not in a way you might first think... You can't bake it to the lighting the same way you can in other apps either.

But you can get close with a spaghetti mess of math nodes controlling the normal....

Mixing with zero is your friend with AO. The AO is done backwards here so you can see the affect better... Plug the Principled into Closure2 to do it the right way...

It will even extends from one object to the other, look at her feet....

I played around with the textures you linked and they seem to work ok. But as with anything that transparent, it really depends on the scene lighting matching versus how they made the textures for the roughness. You need a lot of light for them to work, and the proper angle to that light..

You only need 4 of the maps to get it to work in Poser, and this is how I did it. There is really no need any AO on plastic in Superfly, in P12, but it could need it in other engines. Note the texture nodes have a number after them. 2.2 is scene default for the diffuse color, everything else is set to 1.0. You change that in the pop up box when you load the texture. This is normally how textures are set up in Superfly, 2.2 on diffuse, and 1.0 on basically everything else....

Depending on the lighting the roughness map will need adjusted to get better specular reflections off of the plastic wrap... They work well if the lighting supports how they made the maps. This is the conference table in Posers Runtimes and the Dancing Hall HDRI from Polyhaven.

Cool texture site, never new that was there.

Ahhhh thanks everyone for posting. Really helpful although the offending AO node, may not be what you thought it was.,

In Scooby Dooh fashion, I fear I must now unmask the offender.
It was mr AO Map!
You see Mr AO Map was in a sneaky relationship with Diffuse Map via the Mix Node.
(thanks to a very interesting albeit less theatrical post from caisson in the BSDF thread)

That method from Caisson is something I always do if my texture set comes with an AO map simply because I don't like maps going to waste. It'd really be superfluous otherwise but you can use it to add to you diffuse map.

I habitually set the diffuse map gamma to 2.2 and the others to 1. It's become a bit engrained  to be honest but it's also because I like to get rid of issues before they happen rather than go back and look for a culprit.

shvrdavid you really have got that cling film to look good there.

Your bump setting is set to zero which is wasting the map connection.  Also, I am trying to make sense of the color math mix you are combining with the Diffuse/AO.  Did you mean to use the MixClosure node?

hbore, you've caught me with a bit of sloppyness there wit the Bump...


As for the AO map... it's explained in this thread https://www.renderosity.com/forums/threads/2954649/principled-bsdf-some-examples

Speaking of AO and Surperfly: excerpt from the page: 
https://www.posersoftware.com/documentation/13/HTML/index.htm#t=Poser_Reference_Manual%2FMaterials%2FNodes-Cycles%2FShader.htm

The current implementation of OptiX does not support the use of the AmbientOcclusion node in shaders. If you need to use Ambient Occlusion you will need to use a different hardware rendering option.

Y-Phil posted at 1:09 PM Wed, 15 January 2025 - #4492861

Speaking of AO and Surperfly: excerpt from the page: 
https://www.posersoftware.com/documentation/13/HTML/index.htm#t=Poser_Reference_Manual%2FMaterials%2FNodes-Cycles%2FShader.htm

The current implementation of OptiX does not support the use of the AmbientOcclusion node in shaders. If you need to use Ambient Occlusion you will need to use a different hardware rendering option.

Steps in the image below will come out all black in P12 if AO is rendered in Optix.

I don't think that version of Cycles P12 used supported Optix AO in Blender either.

It works fine in P13, because it is a much newer version of Cycles. 

This is a P13 render, not a P12 one... I am sure people can imagine the steps coming out all black (0) in P12 in Optix, because they will.....

If I had to guess, that part of the P13 manual either never got updated, or very few people even know it works now....

But if anyone has P13, they way I showed for this way of setting up simple AO, does indeed work with Optix.

Again, I see some more limitations of my Poser 12. Hmmm well one day I will upgrade but for now I have to live with those or work around them.

By the way, I was meaning to ask. Do any of you know of a bug in Poser 12 when you drag and drop multiple images into the material room, in order to set up a PBR set?

You see, every 10th attempt to do so results in a peculiar bug where the images don't land in the room and I get that unsightly +whatever number of images I wanted to drop.
I expect that bug will have been alleviated in P13 but I just thought I'd ask if I'm alone in that with P12 or if there is some workaround.

Slightly off topic... Anyone else miss RuntimeDNA?..... Ignore that and do go on, I love learning tricks and whatnot...

Hmm.... Drag and drop in P12, I don't remember if there were issues with it or not.

Honestly, I rarely use that feature that much.

Drag and Drop was updated a lot in Poser 13.3.686, but I don't know if it fixed the issue you are seeing or not.....

 https://www.posersoftware.com/article/725/announcing-poser-133686-release

What I miss the most about RuntimeDna, was the people. I have not heard from many of them in years.

I have seen that bug, in Poser12 probably. Indeed, from time to time, Poser seem to look for something in the whole list of runtimes, that stops and creates an empty Image_map node, on which you may re-drop the same bitmap.
Not sure it subsists in Poser 13
RuntimeDNA was fantastic at the time, luckily there are a few awesome experts on board here.

I've experienced that problem with P12 also.  As far as I recall, it has been corrected in P13.

Sorry for the wait, it was my Birthday yesterday and I was a wee bit indisposed.

Here is a... let's call it a quandry.

Cycles surface, using the anisotropic bdsf on an older bit of Sci-Fi clothing converted to the lovely La Femme. Except it's coming out all black even though all
the nodes before are relatively ok. What am I doing wrong? (you can see the original colour on the neck and in the textures of the nodes)

Actually never mind. Stuffed it all into the main node and it worked.

Happy belated Birthday.

Oh I was meaning to ask about Superfly velvet settings. You see, a lot of Daz clothing has a very, slight velvet touch to it.

Unfortunately my attempts at replicating that
using velvet BDSF and the like failed abysmally. My result always came out far too strong, when the Daz original only really has a light sprinkling of noise.

I have 2 velvet shaders. If wither of these looks like what you want, I can post the setup.

The setup would be great, thank you

The first is a bit complicated, so I uploaded it here. It was CC-0 so feel free to use it how you want.

The second is simple