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Ron, great render, and great news! looks like we tracked down the culprit. this is the kind of info that CL can really use to get the info patched quickly. cheers! -J

I've not upgraded to p5 yet, but this power of 2 thing with the textures doesn't supprise me. Think about where poser spent it's last few incarnations. Anyone who has used BRYCE a lot knows about this texture thing. It really shows up in the deep terrain editor, where if you use a 1000x1000 map to create a terrain you get 'pixelation' of the terrain surface, no matter what mesh resoloution you use, but use 1024x1024 for your map and all is well. Hmmmm.....

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Thanks everybody. You have, indeed uncovered a real -- and easy to fix bug here! This has nothing to do with Bryce, but with some shared code with the preview display that shouldn't have been processing the render textures. It has nothing to do with the renderer itself. Until we release Service Release 2(coming very soon!) you should create power of 2 textures and set your maximum texture resolution in the render options high enough. This will be set right in SR2. Thanks for the detailed detective work -- and sorry about the bug. Larry

So what the hell is the deal?Does ANYONE know what one does in Poser5 to make it render as good or better than Poser4,WITHOUT 50 damn tweeks?This is Bull.

I should have thought of it earlier myself - it is a common limitation in a many rendering systems built on older foundations, as well as some systems designed for real-time animation such as many game engines. (sticking to power of 2 texture sizes does symplify the mathematics considerably and speeds things up). Anyway, after examining all the textures shipped with Poser 5, I find that very few comply with the "power of 2" limitation, so clearly someone at CL didn't know or didn't bother to tell the content creators. Larry - thanks for the comment, but should I start resampling all the current P5 textures to make them conform or do you think this limitation can be overcome with a patch? It sure would be nice because 3000x3000 is the ideal size for figure textures - forcing them to be either 2048x2048 or 4096x4096 would be a real compromise for many.

heya ron, Firefly was built as advertised, the power of 2 thing is something to do to optimize speed, and memory, it just came into play in the wrong spot. I recognized the problem because it's at the core of a lot of advanced renderers. if it was an old renderer, this would have already been fixed... so that's the best proof that it's new tech :) Also, you probably don't need to re-size all your textures. It's giong to be fixed in the quickly-coming patch!

What the heck is power of 2?All I am asking is what do we do to make Poser5 render faster,better,cleaner than Poser4.Isn't that ONE of the reasons to UPGRADE a product?I still have faith in CL.Thanks.

"Larry - thanks for the comment, but should I start resampling all the current P5 textures to make them conform or do you think this limitation can be overcome with a patch?" Larry just wrote: "This will be set right in SR2." SR2 is the next patch which is coming quickly from CL cool that the fix is getting in so quick.

Good work everyone. I'm glad you people have so much talent. Thanks to you this software will be improved! Now that that's solved what toppings are you having with your pizza?

This will be fixed (now) in the Service Release 2 patch that should be available in some form this coming week. It wasn't an issue of telling the content creators. It was a bug in the code that we weren't aware of until revealed in this thread. It was never intended to be a limitation of the textures. One comment on the 3000x3000 texture size. This is a pretty large texture, and if you don't need this for a large render, you should make textures smaller than this. A 3000x3000 texture (without texture filtering) will require more than 100 megabytes of memory to hold it. And there may need to be two copies temporarily. With summed area texture filtering, this may double again. So if you have many textures, and all are 3000x3000, you will be getting very large renders. This was why we added the maximum texture size tweak in the render options. This way you can lower them all down in one shot while doing draft renders.

Now I see what Power of 2 meant.Just that with all the Massive amounts of postings your eyes hurt.LOL.Can anything be done to fix this and the other bugs,like the limit of texture resolution in the face/head room and compatabilty with Mike2 and Vicky2?I want to add say my head to Mike2s body and make a character or sometihng like that(just an example,I am sure I can find a better looking guy to make a head of,LOL).Thanks.

Higher texture res would be a major asset as well as some way of easily matching tone/texture of the exported, finished head to the body in waiting. What do you think Larry, can this be done or is this a major overhaul.

Josh, what the heck are you doing up so early?

"Now that that's solved what toppings are you having with your pizza?" Pepperoni! and extra cheese (and if I'm really splurging... mushrooms!) :D

early? har. no way in heck I'd be up early, I'm pulling a late-night here 8) it's 2:52 am in my part o' the world, and bad-late-night TV is in full swing

I believe there will be some improvements in the face room regarding textures in the SR2 patch, but I think some of the texture variations capabilities are based around 512 textures. I need to get more information from the people who are responsible for that part of the code before I can answer well. As for better blending of the body, I'm not sure what the real solution can be. There could be any texture applied to the body. We do a blending to whatever texture is there, but we don't change anything below the neck intentionally. That was left for people to tweak once a new head texture got generated. This could be something to look to improve on in the future and add as an option (to attempt to auto adjust the body texture).

cool idea, maybe do a sample of the the color at the top of the body's neck and figure out a multiply node which could compensate the whole body texture? becomes an interesting issue since you only want to modify the skin textures of the character, not the shaders that affect clothing.

I hope this issue is addressed and improved.That is one of the reasons I bought Poser5...

EXACTLY ronstuff.AND if one wants a close up or DETAILED render,then the program SHOULD be capable of handling it,in ALL rooms.I pray it can.

Larry - I agree that 3000x3000 is large, but as a texture CREATOR, it is an ideal size to work on because it allows retouching body hair (eyebrows, beard stubble, chest hair) realistically with a single pixel brush - smaller texture sizes make a single pixel brush stroke too broad to be any good). As far as distribution goes, it is also a good size because you can deliver all that detail to the consumer without distortion (allowing for slight degradation of JPEG compression). Now as for rendering, I advise most people to buy those high res textures, but put them in a special folder outside of Poser. Within Poser create an identical folder (and contents) and batch-sample all the textures down by 50% - use this for most rendering. But when you are doing that High resolution close-up render - just swap the folders and give the renderers more to work with. (this technique eliminates the need to re-assign textures or mess with any other material settings - just swap texture folders and GO) When you pay real money for textures, its good to get the most, and sample-down for daily work. It just doesn't work the other way around - can't sample-UP a small texture and expect to add detail :-)

BTW LarryWBerg,I absolutely LOVE Poser4.Thank you for all your work making the original Poser.You are amazing.

I think the tex res in the face room needs to be adressed for the reasons that ronstuff has put forth so eloquently. The tonal matching is also necessary other wise the face room becomes a throwaway. Dark heads/ light bodies or viceversa: I don't think so! This would be a time consuming and difficult post operation. Unless ever poser figure always wears long sleeve shirts and gloves.(LOL) But as josh pointed out its fixable. Probably not by this patch but maybe the next if the interface could be implemented that soon. I'll bet this would make a lot of Poser 5 owners happy. Me included.

for the face room, here's a trick that might work (I've used it in maya, and no I havn't tried it yet, but hopefully my track record with educated guesses is getting more support, lol) one thing to try is do a render, of the face on the non-matching body. (it helps to have all ambient lighting if poser uses ambient light?) when you're done you can use photoshop or other image edit program to check the color difference between the 2 textures in the render.Since they are in the same lighting the pixel difference will be the same relative. then go into the material editor and use a color math node to add the differece the skin texture (alt-click on the color's box to bring up an editor where you can enter an exact numbers to r, g, and b for the difference between the 2 textures! could work until they can patch...

Thanks, I'll try it in the meantime. Steve...please!

Nice.Butwhat about us poor animators who don't have Photshop or any other high end thingee?Still for you to suggest a temp fix for the fortunate PS owners is very cool of you. ;o)

har, yeah that pshop can be pricy, eh!? what about the paint program that comes with windows... does that have a color picker so you can sample rgb values? I think it's called "paint" and it's in the accessories if not, there's a ton of freeware apps out there (gimp's on windows, no?) which you could probably use!

Hey Ron, Thanks for your work on all this! All that math makes me have a headache. I just want to apply a texture and hit render, Not all the work you have done. In the mean time, I'm playing safe and sticking with Poser 4 as 5 sits next to the computer. You are really doing the CL's job with testing these textures. I've been following your posts. So when I see a post from you that says Poser 5 is as easy to render and work with as 4, I load mind back on and apply the patches. :O) You walk the talk. Leah

Thanks all for the work. I have another app. just out, that has the same power of 2 issue. I should have seen it. Since we're talking future versions here and ideas... I was wondering if anyone would like an image report system, something like an EXIF file with our renders. This file could record the different values the renderer was given at the time of the render and contain other pertinent and useful information. Like the EXIF info. it could be available in Photoshop. Is that a good idea. Anybody else think that this could be useful for a future version? Thanks Ron, Josh, Herr and Larry. Q

Wow Problem and solution in a single thread. I'm going to test it with one of my favorite Mike detailed textures. You guys rock!

Nice teamwork everybody - just goes to show what we can accomplish when we put the egos aside and focus on the problem. Turtle -I think it is safe to say that SR2 will handle this situation, so when it comes out, the default settings for the Firefly "draft" and "production" modes should behave as intended and suffice for 95% of most rendering needs. In other respects it really is a nice renderer and handles lighting and shadows beautifully (even without ray tracing) - the tradeoff is TIME. Firefly renders will always be slower than p4 renders, but Firefly can do so much more and with greater precision (after SR2). I'm still glad that they included the P4 renderer because that will be MY "DRAFT" renderer because it is so fast. Then I will use Firefly's "draft" setting as MY "low-res production" setting, and Firefly's "production" setting as my "High-res production" setting. Having 3 different presets will really speed things up for a content creator or artist. As for ray tracing, I'll probably only use that if my scene has elements that actually would benefit from it (like reflections, caustics, lacy shadow details, etc). Now if we could solve the problem of duplicated magnets...

"Now if we could solve the problem of duplicated magnets..." I'm game >:-D what's the duplicated magnet issue?

Bookmark! :-)

About SR2 patch.... any chance to see the issue of the "too small head coming out of the face room" resolved? Please?