... that detailed textures do not render properly - that they seem "out-of-focus" or low-resolution?

I guess with all the excitement over the new features in Poser 5, maybe nobody has noticed - or maybe this is not happening to everybody. I sure would like to know what others are experiencing, because if Firefly can't render textures, then all the other frills are pretty meaningless to me.

Before making this post, I did a LOT of experimenting with the render controls, just to make sure that it was not the result of some setting. The sample images I am using here represent the BEST of all the various settings I tried for pixel samples, max shading rate, and texture filtering (which mostly all had very minimal or no effect on the final render.

I would appreciate anybody else who would like to do side-by-side comparisons of the Firefly and P4 renders on detailed textures and post them here. So far I have not seen ANY post with a firefly image that had sharply focused texture details, and would like to know if it is even possible.
Thanks

Here is a similar comparison of the "Don" texture shipped with P5. Although skin textures seem to be more forgiving of the poor texture rendering in Firefly, they still show some loss and are definitely inferior to renders with the P4 engine.

yes, i noticed that too, it was so bad that steffy's breathgen textures looked as if they were only one-third of the size and resolution. in fact i'm so disappointed in p5 that i'm back to my p4 & ppp. i just haven't got a clue what does p5 do with all this resources it needs...

What did you set the shadow mode on your lights? If you use raytrace in firefly then you get better results when you set the lights to raytrace shadows.

Perhaps its me or my monitor, but I can't see a difference....

Tirjasdyn if you look carefully the P5 ones are slightly more blurry and lack definition. Whether thats a bug or due to some odd settings in P5?? Still gotta install P5, always dread installing new stuff case the whole system goes kaboom and also having to learn more stuff ;)

Has anyone tried lowering the shading rate?

bookmark :-)

the3Dwizard: Tried BOTH shadow map options - no difference as there are few CAST shadows in this fairly flat section of the model - shadow mapping should not affect textures anyway, but I tried it just to see. Nosfiratu: tried shading rate as low as 0.05 (one tenth the setting for "production) and as high as 4 (the default for "draft") - very minor difference (see my above example - the "draft" shading rate is 4 while the "production" shading rate is .5 - and you can see very little difference. Lowering the shading rate belos .5 made no difference. Neither did increasing the pixel samples. Tirjasdyn: Perhaps glasses AND a new monitor are in order. ;-) - look in particular at the shirt textures and compare the renders to the original sample. To ALL: thanks for comments - would love to see any actual renders you may have. Also I made another test to see if adding a BUMP map helped, but in the case of the Firefly it actually made things worse. why not try some side-by-side tests yourself and lets see if this is universal or isolated.

If I have time tomorrow I will try a few. Would be nice to see what settings you are using. Ron

Ronstuff, did you tried to lower the shading rate? Maybe to .05 or .025. Also it might help firefly if instead of using the bump map in the bump entry you use displacement with a low value in materials and when you render in Firefly production using radiosity you give it a minimum displacement value of 1. Something i learned today. see my thread a couple of threads below yours. Ronmolina is right, this is a brand new software. I found out today I can get better results than I could get with Poser 4, at least using bump maps.

Might be some useful information here. http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=899746 I think the controls under Pixel Samples may help your P5 renders as they control anti-aliasing.

"STONED-SLOTH" FUMBLES AGAIN ...

The player on the left is a P4 render, the one on the right is a STONED-SLOTH render.

Notice how the "Blind Prophets" logo on the helmet is very blurry in the Firefly render. Also look at the numbers and letters on the jersey ... especially the "5".

Anyone have an answer? I've tried adjusting the shading rate ... to no effect. Is there another shading rate setting somewhere? I've read here that the manual has it backwards, is this true?

-Tim

Regarding my SETTINGS: As described above - these renders are made with the default Poser 5 settings. I label them "draft" and "production" to indicate the render settings that I used (draft OR production). If you want to know the numbers, just launch Poser5 and in render options use the "restore defaults" button for the Draft or Production mode and all will be revealed to you. As far as material settings - just a simple UV texture shader - all values in their default state. Bump maps were set VERY low (.02 to .1). Lighting sets to depth map shadows (but tried ray traced also - with no effect) - Siomple lighting with WHITE (gray) lights only. Even though these samples are done with the default settings, please do NOT assume that I didn't try other settings. I DID, and nothing in the render options made ANY difference in the way textures were rendered. They did make a difference in CAST shadows and MESH detail, but NOT TEXTURE DETAIL. If anyone has a combination of settings that allows Firefly to render textures at least as faithfully as Poser 4, then I really would like to know what THOSE settings are.

maybe, it could be a good idea to set all up in poser, and then render in something else. i looked through the "other apps" gallery, tonight, and was waaay impressed with pov-ray rendering. pov ray is free...btw. and, it is a raytracer.

Popi. Yes POVray is impressive. There is even a poser OBJ file to POVray converter in the free suff. :)

SimonWM: So show me a side-by-side comparison of the same textured object rendered with P4 and firefly. This is not a question of "experience" with poser 5 - it either renders textures faithfully or it does not!. I doubt your claim very seriously, and I don't think you have even compared the two render engines when all other factors are equal. Nice idea Poppi, but many of the really cool features of Poser 5 and especially flowing clothing, colision detection, and wind-blown effects can ONLY be rendered within Poser 5, so what good are they if textures look like crap? I have seen better texture renders in cheap, down-and-dirty realtime animation 3D game engines running 1024x768 virtual worlds at 60fps than in Firefly (taking several minutes per frame at 500x500). It isn't difficult to find a renderer that can handle detailed textures better than Firefly, but it would be hard to find one that is any worse at it!

Nice idea Poppi, but many of the really cool features of Poser 5 and especially flowing clothing, colision detection, and wind-blown effects can ONLY be rendered within Poser 5, so what good are they if textures look like crap? yeah, from what i see...p5 looks like a bit of a rip off. but, i am not for certain. i did not buy it because of the eula change. now, after seeing all the problems...i know i don't need it. sigh, that face room would have been some fun, i think.

Turn off texture filtering, and set shading rate to .2, also check the shading rate on the object you might have to set this to .2 also to make sure it's not overriding...

Just for the heck of it...what is your post filter size set to... I found that it gets blurrier the higher the number...

PS, one of the reasons that you see texture crisper in p4 with the default settings is that P4 has no texture smoothing at all. This makes stuff look better in a still, but you need the smoothing to keep the textures from jittering when you have an animation. Also the P4 renderer does 3x3 pixel samples per pixel by default. that's why you need to set the shading rate to .2 (1.0 will just do 1 sample per pixel). This can be overriden on a per-object basis, so make sure it's also set correctly on the object

timoteo1: turning off texture filtering applies to your texture issue too... Texture filtering blurs a texture so it will work with animation better, and works great on higher resolution textures, but can make a texture look blurrier

reiss-studio: Thanks for the suggestions - as I said several times above, I used the default PRODUCTION settings for most these images, but tried many others - in ALL cases the texture filter was OFF because I know that it blurs images, but it appears that the images are being unduly blurred even when the filter is OFF. Post filter size was set to 1 (the lowest setting for high detail) In addition I have tried several settings for pixel shading rate all the way down to 0.2 AND 0.1 (this image is the 0.1 setting which is indistinguishable from the 0.2 or the 0.5 settings with regard to the textures themselves. As far as I can see there is no control for "texture smoothing" - there is "polygon smoothing" but that has nothing to do with UV textures. there is "texture filter" but that is OFF by default, so Im not sure what you mean by texture smoothing other than the effect of pixel shading. Since this image was rendered with 0.1 pixel shading (which means 10 samples per pixel) that should surely be more than enough for razor sharp details - yet it has no effect. Once again, I would ask ANYONE who can show an example of sharp and crisp texture detail in a Firefly render to PLEASE do so (and explain how it was done) - anything else is just speculation and has little merit.

Check the properties in the parameter floating palette. What is the shading rate for the object set to?

by "the object" I mean pick the character's pants in the view window, and check the properties

Reiss-studio: Have YOU tried any of your suggestions? You really should do that occasionally. I've tried them all but they do NOTHING for the textures. Why don't you just SHOW me one of your superior Firefly renders (side-by-side with the P4 version) if it's all that easy. In ALL cases, I set pixel shading in the "Object" (P5 casual man) properties to match the pixel shading in the Render Options. Duh, I did read the book, ya know. And hey, I only been computer modeling for 25 years so I must be a real nubie, huh?

So I see a little box that says "maximum texture map size" or something like that, in the firefly render box that always defaults to 1024. I wonder if the firefly takes the texture and resamples it to the default size. I'll bet the renderer doesn't handle big textures very well. Poser 5 in general doesn't seem to handle data as well as Poser 4.

I'll be interested to see a solution to this as well. Texture filtering was not enabled for the attached production render.

Raytracing On, Cast Shadows, and Polygon Smoothing are the only settings enabled. The texture is still blurred with texture filtering turned off. Could the polygon smoothing be causing it? Or is it another defect in the Firefly renderer?

reiss: Thanks for the info, I'll give it a try. I have not looked at the individual object setting admiteddly, but I believe they all defualt to 0.2 if I'm not mistaken. SO I'm not real hopeful. But I have to agree with Ron, and others ... can YOU (or anyone) please post a render of a non-FUBAR'd texture-map rendering using FireFly? Not just a challenge ... but I really want to know if it can even be done. Where is Curious Labs (Anthony/Nosfiratu, and the other CL tech-heads) in all this? -Tim

Poppi: Think again ... it's not! The controls are very annoying, you can not save heads and work on them later, and Face Room created textures are limited to a pathetic 512x512 resolution. (Not to mention a host of other problems.) You are not missing much. Sure, it's fun as a novelty. But the fun wears off pretty quickly, and your left with a frustrating interface that just doesn't produce satisfactory results. -Tim

Hi tim, these suggestions were passed on to me by some internals at CL as possible solutions, so I havn't tested them, but hey, all info helps, no!? :) ps, as to where the CL guys are, they're probably doing weekend stuff. it's just saturday night here... also, here's a question... (this one's just from me, not anyone at CL) a lot of renderers (especially the renderman ones that this is based on) like their textures as square maps with a size based on a power of 2. some examples of this would be 256x256 512x512 1024x1024 2048x2048, etc... for the textures that are coming out really blurry, what's the texture resolution?

Attached Link: Reiss Studio, home of the Maya Poser plugin

Hi ron, wow. 25 years is a long time. where did you get your start? No offense was meant, or implication that you were a newbie, by the setting suggestions that I posted. These suggestions were passed on to me by a CL employee who I was on the phone with when I read your message. I've also seen this as the most common cause in other renderers, so I figured it could help to pass on the suggestion. When I read your post, I had not seen these solutions suggested, so I just passed them on. As to examples of work, you can find my name in the credits for Hollow Man, Monsters Inc. and some other projects. cheers, -Josh

I noticed this, try texturing your favorite person with an UV map and render under FF and P4. Remember KISS, Keep It Simple. I turned off Shadows, Texture filtering and Raytraceing. I also noticed this with trans maps

-Josh No offense meant, - just that I'm a bit tired of people trying to be "helpful" without reading the thread. I had stated in post #9 above: that I "tried shading rate as low as 0.05 (one tenth the setting for "production) and as high as 4 (the default for "draft")" So I expect that range would include the setting of 0.2 which you suggested. P.S. I also have feature film and Broadcast credits, as well as a couple of awards in technical areas, but that is neither here nor there as we are talking about Poser 5. I'm sure your work with other tools is equal to the best, but the question here is "What is the BEST that the P5 FIREFLY can do?". Rather than debating, I'd really like to see what you come up with in a side-by-side comparison (P4 vs. Firefly) of your own - and I mean that seriously and respectfully.

Herr, that's a very cool test. is that map a single pixel per row (ie, one pink pixel/one black pixel?)

herr67: THANKS - great way to show the defect - the grid really helps identify the irregularity of the distortion which goes far beyond surface modeling. The pattern suggests that the renderer does not sample the texture evenly through the U and V coordinates, but seems to be "missing" some coordinates entirely!

ron, yeah I hear ya! There's a little too much opinions being offered about some P5 stuff without examples (even by people who don't have p5!) honestly the settings that I passed on were given to me by the people at CL, so I didn't know that in the default prod settings texture filtering/smoothing was already turned off. Although I didn't see in your posts above if you had checked the shading samples on the individual objects in the scene. Honestly, I think this thread is fantastic, especially the side-by-side renders, and herr's texture test. I don't doubt that we're seeing a problem with the P5 renderer. the nice thing is that all the guys at CL care a lot about the product, and it's threads like this (with real information!) that are going to really help them track down the items to put into upcoming patches. It's not my place to praise peoples efforts, but I got to say I'm really applauding all the work/testing being put into this thread. I think it's efforts like this that will really help to track down the problems, and make P5 all it can be. cheers, -J

Heya Herr... what was the resolution on that map that you used for your test?

Reiss, Yes one pixel per row. It was a Black and White Trans map (no pink).One white pixel (opaque), three black ones (transparent).

eya Herr... what was the resolution on that map that you used for your test? 1200x1200

herr, could you crop the texture to 1024x1024 and do the same test!? I've seen this exact same behaviour when doing some testing with scaling down photoshop files by a small amount. If this works correctly at 1024x1024 it could give a huge point in the texture prob.

forgot to add "please"! :) herr, awesome test. really shows the prob

herr, could you crop the texture to 1024x1024 and do the same test!? Loaded vicky with catsuit uv map which is 1014x1014, same results.

Herr, If I'm not mistaken I believe the point of 1024 x 1024 is to see if the "power of 2" hypothesis is correct (see post 31). I'm getting ready to hit the sack, but if you need someone to resize it for you, just give the word.

did you mean 1024? if it is the 1024 issue a 1014 map would still have the same resample issue. would you be willing to share the test map you made? I'll run a test over here if you do. I looked at the other vicky textures, and they seem to have odd pixel sizes as well (1942 or 1449)

Herr, If I'm not mistaken I believe the point of 1024 x 1024 is to see if the "power of 2" hypothesis is correct (see post 31). A 512x512 tex seemed to work, no dropped pixels!

awesome! can you post the new comparison shot? woo-hoo, I'm e-mailing the guys at CL now, maybe they can get this tracked down. At least in the meantime, we know what resolution to make our textures :)

herr... unless, one other thing to check... can you test your original texture map (resolution 1200) and see if it could be a problem with the max texture resolution? ie. when you rendered your first test, were you on production quality? and was the max texture resolution set to more than 1200?

and was the max texture resolution set to more than 1200? Yes 4096.

fantastic, then it looks like this might be the problem. I've sending some mail over to CL now.

Just from curiousity, are there any Mac users in the crowd that use Pixels 3D's Tempest renderer and ShaderMaker in Pixels 3D 4.0? Reason I ask is that that's the render engine CL leased to plug in as their "Firefly" engine and shader nodes... It would be interesting to know if this texture blurring is inherent to the native app in it's own environment, or if it's occuring only in the version as implemented by CuriousLabs in Poser 5. It's possible it's not the renderer, but the integration...