I saw A thread the other day about the poor render quality of the new P5 versus P4, I was wondering as I don't own P5 as yet if you could Back render, ie... Creat in P5 and render in P4? I mean maybe it's a dumb question but I havn't heard other wise some one should check into It...

Well, first of all, I'm not convinced that P5 has poor quality. If anything, its better quality. Some folks expected more. As for creating in P5 and rendering in PP, the answer is pretty much no. The added features of P5 over the old PP are the dynamics and that's not backward compatable. I tried a pz3 made in P5 to see if it would open in P4 and unless you change the version number, forget it. I didn't try that. I think P5 is well worth the upgrade and I think CL will get sr2 going before too long.

There's a P4 render mode in P5. But yes, you can load your .pz3's into p4 and render if you wish.

praxis, you have any tips about that? I got messages that the pz3 was a newer version and P4 would try to read it anyway but ultimately couldn't.

The new material nodes don't transfer back into Poser 4 very well, either.

Well thanx Guy's, As soon as I can afford It Im Gonna get P5, If anythging for the Face room, I Am really hooked at some of the Options that It appears to have.

this Is the Thread taht I was Refering Too 1. Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 17:04 ... 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 2. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 17:07 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. 3. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by aleks on 10/12/02 17:25 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... 4. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by the3dwizard on 10/12/02 17:31 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. 5. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by Tirjasdyn on 10/12/02 17:34 Perhaps its me or my monitor, but I can't see a difference.... 6. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by silverblade33 on 10/12/02 17:43 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 ;) 7. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by Nosfiratu on 10/12/02 18:01 Has anyone tried lowering the shading rate? 8. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by PabloS on 10/12/02 18:09 bookmark :-) 9. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 18:50 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. 10. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronmolina on 10/12/02 18:53 If I have time tomorrow I will try a few. Would be nice to see what settings you are using. Ron 11. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by SimonWM on 10/12/02 19:12 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. 12. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by the3dwizard on 10/12/02 19:28 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. 13. I know exactly what you're talking about .. by timoteo1 on 10/12/02 19:33 "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 14. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 19:36 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. 15. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by Poppi on 10/12/02 19:49 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. 16. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by neurocyber on 10/12/02 20:10 Popi. Yes POVray is impressive. There is even a poser OBJ file to POVray converter in the free suff. :) 17. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 20:15 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! 18. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by Poppi on 10/12/02 20:40 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. 19. Re: Set Shading Rates to fix? by reiss-studio on 10/12/02 20:50 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... 20. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by Dave-So on 10/12/02 20:52 Just for the heck of it...what is your post filter size set to... I found that it gets blurrier the higher the number... 21. Re: Smoothing textures is for animation, can be turned off. by reiss-studio on 10/12/02 20:55 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 22. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by reiss-studio on 10/12/02 21:02 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 23. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 22:34 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. 24. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by reiss-studio on 10/12/02 22:40 Check the properties in the parameter floating palette. What is the shading rate for the object set to? 25. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by reiss-studio on 10/12/02 22:42 by "the object" I mean pick the character's pants in the view window, and check the properties 26. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by ronstuff on 10/12/02 22:58 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? 27. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by douglaslamoureaux on 10/12/02 23:31 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. 28. Re: Firefly renders - has ANYBODY noticed.... by milamber42 on 10/12/02 23:32 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?