Attached Link: Fire Fry's Idea of Animation...

I tried to watch it, but it says the file cannot be found. 7 hours to render?! It had better be pretty darn amazing... ;) SnowS

Checked the link, it's there... http://www.nerd3d.com/Gallery/Flip.mov

That is really odd. It almost seems like you are backlighting the figure only.

Hang on though Nerd, remember the hair animation over on RDNA. It is possible, Neftis managed it, perhaps you need some more time to play with the settings. Ignoring the missing picture, you can see that the hair is doing what it should do...

Those FireFlies need to pedal faster in you system. Or maybe you need a few more to get it moving. =P I was playing with a not-too-complex scene that I had done in P4. It was a dungeon with 4 lights and a torch and an untextured Mike and Vick. It would render in about 1 1/2 minutes in P4 and about the same in P5's P4 engine. I tried it in FF to see what it would do. It did ok in draft mode, but switch to production mode and it never finishes the render. I waited 30 minutes and had a full bar on the render and a black, blank box for the picture. So far it looks like FireFly was made only to make the P5 characters look good because they look like crap with the P4 renderer. I am not at all pleased. =(

THAT WAS TOO COOL :-) Sharen

Sharen, umm are you blond?

when i ordered the upgrade, i was upset about all the new possibilities. Now Im upset ,if its really so buggy if it will finally arrive here in germany. And the firefly render seems to be as slow as the brycerender ,but the brycerender seems to be much easier to handle and with better results as any render i have seen here from p5.

It would be pretty cool if that's what you were trying to do. :) Still, 7 hours is insane IMO, and after reading another thread about a guy who can't run Poser 5 well on a 1.8 AMD with 512 RAM, I think I'm going to be sticking to 4 for a while longer. SnowS

Actually, I thought it looked pretty cool as well.

If the Firefly renderer (aka Stoned Sloth) is so bad, why not just go back to old method of rendering the finished scenes in Vue or Lightwave. Both Vue and Lightwave (and even Bryce) product far better renders in far less time. Oh, wait, P5 scenes can't be imported into these programs. Then, are we stuck with this "great" rendering engine? Should we have waited until SP1, when CL decides to include import/ export tools for the P5 figures? --John

Want a provocative reply? This is way more creative than if it was lit normally! :-b)

It's not lighting, it actually balcked out the subject before saving the image. If you watch it, it looks deliberate too. Just before the save it scans down the picture painting background color over the subject.

One thing CL really must do is find a way of exporting the hair so it looks like hair in other programs. This oculd be as simple as generating a hair texture with transparency map to go with the hair mesh. The hair doesn't need to be dynamic outside of Poser, but it really should be as renderable outside Poser as the figure and clothing are. Lammoth

CL has contact me about this bug. So, yes they are listening. This really cheers me up. I'll keep y'all posted! In the mean time I've isolated the trouble, hopefully I can spare you from a wasted animation render. Dont't use the 2d motion Blur option in the "Make Movie" options in conjunction with Fire Fry. I'm currently testing the 3D blur tool in the render options pallet and Fire Fry is not doing well there either. Stay Tuned...

Attached Link: Vicky speaks out on poser5

I just made a 5 frame animation using FF and 2D motion blur - couldn't repeat the effect.

Tried it again with 3D motion blur - couldn't repeat.

What am I doing wrong? :-)

My guess is it's a video/graphics driver conflict.

Were you rendering to sequenced image files? I used AVI Divx. Guess I'll try sequenced images.

-Jeff

Yep, sequenced images + 2D motion blur = bug. Regular video formats work fine.

-J.

On a good note, 3D motion blur works as it should with sequenced images.

What about the video formats?

I don't use the video formats, Fire Flake is file 13'd as far as I'm concerned, Toatlly useless. Any body got a bug zapper the size of the Astro Dome? Maybe a couple hunded gallons of DDT? If I need reflections I'll go to MAX. That menas the Dynamic Hair thing is useless too.

oookay.

Oh no.Is it that bad?Can it be fixed?

It would seem they are not interested in fixing it since this bug has been floating around since ProPack.

That is not right

Wow, the more I use P5 and discover OLD interface issues, and read here on the boards, the more disgusted I'm getting. Don't get me wrong, I love a LOT of the new features in P5 ... but it sounds and feels more and more like they just slapped some bells and whistles on the same crappy programming, without regard for overhauling the aging and frustrating interface. And compounded problems by slapping on a buggy and lackluster "new" renderer. Ugggh.

Nerd, I was wondering if you could share your dynamics settings for the hair. When I try to use the Hair with collision on, it wants to jump around and bunch up and end up looking like a rat's nest. From your animation, it looks like it's behaving.

Do you HAVE TO use Fire Fly renderer for the dynamic hair to show?? I've just started experimenting with the Hair Room but this thread has me worried. I rendered my first effort with the Poser 4 renderer this morning but only the guide hairs show. Fire fly takes hours on my low-low-end PII 400MHZ with 386 MB of RAM. I rendered one frame with Fire Fly last night, left it overnight but forgot to check "show populated" so I got the same results I got this morning with the P4 renderer--only guide hairs.

I have rendered dynamic hair with both the P4 and Firefly renderers. They both work with dynamic hair. My experience has been quite different though. I get fully rendered hair whether the show populated is checked or not. In fact, I can't seem to render only guide hairs.

Actualy volfin, I have the same problem. The "Do Collosions" just causes the hair to freak out. If it touches any thing it just turns into a giant frizz ball. This should probably be in a new thead... That was supposed to be smooth flowing hair, not a fro-in-a-hurricane I've tried dozens, maybe hundreds of combinations on settings for the dynamic hair. All produce the same result completely out of control collisions. It looks like the hair rebounds about 6 inches when it touches something. It also sems that the hair is only doing vertex-vertex collisions bescaue sometimes it will fall right through an object. Sorry folks the same guy wrote the code for the hair dynamics as the Fire Flaw renderer. Fortunately the Cloth Room was written by somebody else. While a bit confusing and slightly flakey you can actually produce usable effects. I see this leading to the continused use of transmapped hair. Some of you have probably already noticed the included hair props are built as hybrids part dyn hair part transmap. A hair prop converted to a dynamic cloth may be the solution. Oh, I suppose you could throw a few strans in there for fly hairs, but you'll have to pose them manually. This is fine for stills, but not practical for animations.

Yeah, I actually just came to the same conclusion as you, the collision has problems with hair. At least in the cloth room, you were given collision options (collision depth and collision offset are essential). Part of the problem seems to be that the hairs collide with each other. This is unnecessary and a waste of calculations. If a hair goes through another hair, can you really tell?