Does anyone actually use Poser as a final renderer, where they surround a figure with walls and objects? I never tried that because it seemed impossible to position and group objects with precision and ease. And all objects would have to be imported and retextured in Poser, a major hassle. Also, the shadows are harsh. I've always used Poser just to render a figure, then cut n paste it to a scene done somewhere else. I've also tried exporting a frozen 3D "obj" figure into bryce but it needs an hour worth of texture re-fixing and still never looks as good in close-ups as it does in Poser.

A lot of people here use Poser as a final renderer. They just use lots of touch up, or learn how to hide the short comings of the renderer.

I use Poser for my final renders. Below is a interior scene from an animation I rendered entirely in Poser.

Video clip (MPEG format, 1.37MB)

Positioning objects isn't quite so difficult if you learn to use the different camera views (Front, Left, Right, Top, etc.).

You can download a number of walls, scenes, and other environment objects from Renderosity's Free Stuff and other sites in native Poser format, with textures already applied.

As for the shadows, they don't have to be harsh. Play around with each light's parameter dials:

Shadow determines a shadow's intensity or darkness. The value defaults to 1 (very dark), but for lighter shadows, try a value of 0.6 or 0.75.

Map Size determines the sharpness or definition of the shadow. Set it to higher values for sharper shadows, or lower values for fuzzy, indistinct shadows.

You can also experiment with a material's ambient colour values to wash out the shadows on a particular surface.

Little Dragon, its amazing you did that in Poser4; how did you get mirror reflections?

Very nice Little Dragon :)

What other options are there for rendering?

Attached Link: Jedi Animation

I NEVER use poser as a final render only as previsualization Poser (including poser5) Does NOT have the type of volumetric lighting needed to simulate real world indoor and outdoor environments. and certainly no ability to create worthwhile Global illumination A small example here is the Visible overhead spotlights lining the Corridoor in ths animation i renderd shortly after the propack to cinema plugin was released

Abridged explanation:

The "mirrors" were transparent. I put the camera behind the mirrors and rendered the scene repeatedly (once for each reflection).

Next, I put the camera back inside the room, flipped the rendered reflections horizontally with a third-party utility so that they would be mirror images, and imported the rendered reflections into Poser as backgrounds.

Since the mirrors are transparent, you can see the reflection-backgrounds behind them. All you have to do after that is make sure the scene is perfectly aligned with the background, and do a final render to get a complete scene.

It's not that difficult to set up the initial reflection angle and align the scene if you use some of Poser's built-in tools, like the Camera Dots and Paste-into-Background.

It's when you add a second mirror and a moving camera to the equation that something like this will eat up your entire weekend. :)

Here are some test renders I made earlier. Since I was only testing the technique, I often used Wireframe mode and Current Display Settings to render the reflection.

Test Render #1: Single Mirror (MPEG format, 759KB)
Test Render #2: Multiple Mirrors (MPEG format, 841KB)
Test Render #3: Moving Camera (MPEG format, 631KB)

At no time did I have additional characters or duplicated geometry in these scenes. Everything behind the mirror is an imported background video, rendered previously in Poser.

I have to agree with wolf359, sadly. trueSpace spoiled me badly with its lighting features. Maybe Poser 6 will have omni lights/point lights.

Maybe it's time for me to break down and buy Truepose... (Waits for Konan to pounce. :) )

Amazing, Little Dragon, goes to prove that no matter how limited an application is, some users will find ways to overcome those limitations. Thanks for the explanation. Great work!

Great animation Little_Dragon, I am very very impressed.

I do, all the time.

I tried using Bryce as a final render, and went crazy remapping everything. I then got Vue, and use it all the time. Love the lighting and rendering. However, there are some effects I just love in Poser. I'm a volume light cone junkie. Using it and Nerd's fog prop gives me the volumetric effects I want for close up shots. Vue works better for me in bigger scenes, and where I want to use special effects without all the hassles I have to go through in Poser to get the same effect (reflections, etc). I almost always use Corel Photo Paint for touchups. Especially the funny bends you get with Mike's shoulders and the sharp lines when posing joints tight. Between Corel and Paint Shop Pro, I get most as good effects as in Photoshop. Photshopo is on my personal wish list though.

I always use Poser as a final renderer. Granted I do use PS to touch up and maybe add some special effects, because I love postwork. I also think that know matter what program you use for a final render, you should touch up the Poser character's joints in postwork...just my opinion. :-)

One of the nice things about working with furry characters is that the fur covers up all the broken-mesh joints.

I made this pic totally in Poser, only postwork is the light dots in the rats eyes... and my signature.

And yes, it's SUPPOSED to be that dark ;o)

Usually I work in Poser only, I'm too lazy to import the figures into other programs. I have Bryce but I don't like the colours Poser stuff gets in Bryce. (OK there might be a possibility that I just haven't figured out how to DO it properly in Bryce G)

I'm a believer in using the right tools for the right job. If you want to make props, use a dedicated 3D modeller. If you want to make characters, use a dedicated character creator. If you want to render scenes ... you get the idea. If you try to put everything in one package you get something that's too unwieldy to manage. I think it's best to regard Poser's rendering abilities as a quick preview tool, not a serious renderer. Sure, you can push the Poser engine to do some remarkable things, but you do have to work for it. I would hate to try and compose a really large complex interior scene in Poser. For a start, the camera positioning is soo clunky to work with. Moving around a large complex scene in Bryce is a breeze.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=238481

I always use Poser for a final render. I have no problems with that. I do check an image for imperfection and if needed, I correct those with PhotoShop. This latest image in my gallery was rendered in Poser and there is no postwork other than adding my sig. I've tried Bryce but hate the time spent texturing things exported from Poser. Many artists here will do that.

Poser renders are fine, of course, if all you want to do is put Vicki up against a backdrop and make a close-up portrait. The problem arises when you want a complex setting that can be viewed from several angles. In Cherokee's picture above, for instance, it's obvious that the forest scene is a photo cunningly placed behind a bunch of props to mask the junction between the backdrop and the floor. The scene works when viewed from that direction, but don't move the camera! The picture here was very quickly cobbled together by taking an existing scene file and dropping a Poser figure in from a recent picture. It's just for demonstration. That big dungeon is made up mostly from Bryce primitives, plus some Poser statues. It's a complete room. No "missing walls" required to let you see into it. I can move the camera where I like. I can place figures anywhere. I wouldn't like to try the same sort of thing in Poser. Navigating round it would be a nightmare. The time spent texturing Poser exports in Bryce can be reduced with a few tricks. One is to use Grouper from www.castironflamingo.com to reduce the Poser figure to only a few separate meshes (according to the number of distinct textures). The other is to keep pre-textured stock figures on hand, and transfer the textures over to the newly-imported figure with Ctrl-Alt-C and Ctrl-Alt-V.

And just to prove my point, here's a totally different camera angle. I just dragged the camera to a different spot, that's all.

Phantast, is that Bryce ?

Little Dragon, very impressive work around. Did you use motion capture files for the dance or did you key frame it yourself (either way nice job)? Also, to the others who have posted images in this thread. It is fun for me to see how far people have gone beyond the apparent limitions. I am constantly in awe at the cool things people are doing with the tools they have. This community is doing things that rival the results of what other people are doing with multi-thousand dollars 3D packages.

Sorry if this sounds a little too warm and fuzzy but it is my oppinion anyway.

Keep up the great work.

Dan Farr

Ming, it certainly is. I prefer Bryce to Vue because, despite the ease of importing Poser models to Vue, scene-building like that setting above is easier in Bryce than in Vue. Also, one has more control over texturing of Poser elements in Bryce, and frankly, I'd rather use the Bryce texture lab than the Poser one. Maybe that will change with P5. So actually, I don't worry much about the time spent texturing in Bryce, because time spent there is time saved from texturing in Poser. Usually I'll apply only minimal textures in Poser, and do all the detailed work in Bryce. Then by copying and pasting textures from one figure to another (which you can't do in Poser) I actually save a lot of time in the long run. Where the time goes is: 1) Watching the progress bar for Poser .obj export 2) Watching the progress bar for Grouper read 3) Watching the progress bar for Grouper convert 4) Watching the progress bar for Bryce import That is the tedious part. Everything else is quick and easy.

Thanks. You probably saved me a couple of hundred bucks. I've got to try it. How long was the render?

My biggest gripe about Poser is the lighting setup more than the rendering engine. I have gotten good results with Poser's engine, but always have to do some post work in Photoshop. Hopefully the new Firefly engine in Poser 5 will produce more consistant results. I also like to render scenes with Poser characters in Vue 4.1. Check my posting on the Vue forum from Tuesday to see a side by side comparison of the exact same scene rendered in Vue and Poser. I imported everything into Vue from Poser in one file. I liked the lighting setup better for this scene in Vue, if you need point lights Vue does a great job. It also does outside scenes better than Poser can.

I sometimes use the rendered in Cararra 1.1 because it does cel shading which is something I haven't been able to get Poser 4 to do. It is a pain to have to export from Poser into a static model and import that into Cararra but I've been happy with the rendering results. And, based on trading some emails with sales and tech support at Curious Labs, it looks like Poser 5 won't do cel shading either. I'd really like to see something like the Toon! rendering features from Cararra in Poser. Poser seems to be a perfect application to create comic book art with except for the lack of a cel shading renderer.

The first image above took about 15 minutes to render, the second was 13 minutes. This is on a 900 MHz Athlon. Render speed is affected by the number of lights, of course. Here there are about seven radials and two spots.

Here is a series of renders I did in Cararra with and without the Toon renderer. The middle images are midpoints between the two extremes. Anything beyond about 50% Toon render would feel natural in a comic book. I'd like to do a comic book using Poser but it is too much work to have to set things up in Poser and then export and import into another program to get a comic book style render. I'm disappointed that cel shading doesn't seem to be included in Poser 5 nor do there seem to be any plans to do that functionality in a plug-in. I suspect that there would be a lot more comic books with Poser generated art if it could do cel shading. As it is, aside from Hedg (which I've only seen issue 1 of) I can't thing of any Poser generated comic books. I can't help but think that part of that is computer generated and photo realistic art in comic books usually doesn't sell well. (Alex Ross being the notable exception to this.) Poser 5 looks to be an amazing product with tons of cool new features and I've already pre-ordered my copy. I just wish it had the one new feature I particularly wanted.

One other point about Poser vs Bryce and others - Poser has a very "soft" renderer (I don't know the technical term), which lends itself to the sort of air-brushed look that seems to be particularly popular for close-ups in the Poser gallery here. Ray-tracing programs like Bryce tend to be much less forgiving of any kink in the polygon mesh. What you have is what you get. This picture gives some idea of what a facial close-up in Bryce can look like.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=shadownet

Heya, I use Poser 4 as a final render and only rarely do any postwork. If I do it is generally to soften the image, since Poser renders tend to have that hard 3D look. Now, whether or not my straight Poser renders are any good or not, you will have to decide. Cheers, Rob

Since we were in the middle doing some product renders of our new Dragon I thought it would be fun to show a comparison between Poser and Lightwave renders. I think that there are some strengths in both renders. The lighting setup in each are close but not quite exact. Anyway, for what it is worth here they are.

Dan Farr

danfarr: I used a BVH motion capture file to animate Sabrina, with some tweaking, of course. I could have keyframed the animation entirely by hand, but it would have taken longer, and wouldn't have looked as natural. That Millennium dragon is shaping up to be a fine-looking fellow. The Godzilla-'98 eyes were a nice touch. My compliments to the texture-painter. jkm: While absorbing the Poser 5 manual, I noticed a reference to Toon shader materials. There weren't any illustrations, so I don't know how it'll look, but perhaps P5 will come closer to cel shading than you thought. I've also gotten some interesting results out of Poser by rendering a scene twice (once normally with textures, and a second time in Cartoon w/Lines mode), then layering the two images together in post.

NO Offense Dan, but the problem with Your lightwave render is that none of lightwaves advanced lighting features are implemented in that render while the poser4 render is basically the best poser4 has to offer. so its really not a valid comparison the render engines try emulating the Lightwave render pictured above,with poser, and you wiil see why myself and others Do NOT produce final renders or animations in poser and poser5 while quite an improvement still does not even come close to the realism of Cinema4DXl or Lightwave3D. may someday in the future but not yet

Wolf, I agree with you in that we really did do a simple renderings and did not push either package to their limit. I mainly put it up for a quick reference. I am sure that with more time both renders could be improved, but I would expect that the more advanced renders from Lightwave and Cinema will ultimately have the best results. Cool image by the way. Dan Farr

I posted this pic on the Vue forum, but I though it was worth posting here too. On the right is a Vue 4.1 render, the left Poser. I couldn't even get the lighting close to what I wanted, but I could in Vue. I feel the render quality with Vue better too. Many fear compatibility issues between Vue and Poser 5, that remains to be seen. I still have high hopes for the Firefly render engine.

Little_Dragon, When I skimmed the Poser 5 manual I didn't see reference to any kind of cel shading or Toon rendering but I easily could have missed such a reference. If you happen to find it in the manual, I'd appreciate knowing where to look for it. If I have a chance before leaving for DragonCon, I'll skim through the Poser 5 manual and see if I can find it myself.

Little_Dragon, I forgot to mention that your dance studio animation is amazing. Great job. The test renders were cool to watch too. Given how much some people have been able to push Poser 4 well beyond any reasonable expectations of what the software could do, I'm really looking forward to seeing how far Poser 5 is going to be able to be pushed.

Thank you, jkm. I was mostly pleased with the results, myself, although it still had room for improvement. As for Poser 5, I fully intend to push it until it "breaks." The bit about toon shaders in the P5 manual is on page 321 (335 of 396).

Found it. Page 321: "The Toon node gives your material a cartoon-like look." Hopefully I'll be able to get someone at DragonCon to demo this for me this weekend.

It does sound promising, especially the part about ink colour and line width. If we can combine shaders the way I suspect, we should have the best of both worlds: textures and cel shading. Let me know if you get a sneak peek. I'll probably be playing around with the shaders myself in a few weeks, assuming P5 ships on time, but it's nice to have advance knowledge.

Tomsde, are you sure you haven't got left and right mixed up?

Perhaps it's Michael's left and right.