I've been playing with P5 now for a few weeks and the one feature that would make me very happy would be radiosity. It just makes lighting so much easier and realistic. Place on area light hit render. and see a very realistic render.. without having to manually adjust 50 lights.. ray tracing is fine..but radiosity would be best.. I know lightwave does radiosity.. but it's too expensive.. does any one know of any other prgram that handles radiosty that works well with poser. Thanks

PovRay has radiosity and other nice features you find only in highend renderers, best of all its free. Get the PoseRay converter and try it for yourself.

Thanks will give it a try

Attached Link: http://www.imdanet.com/~kai/Deathkitten2.jpg

I use trueSpace 4.3 and Poser.. I export the poser files as OBJ then bring them into tS with the Luuv TSX (freeeeeeeBiiieeeee - thanks Clint!)... works for me :) Kai some results so far...

Don't confuse radiosity and global illumination. Global illumination and arealights are nice features, but they are not radiosity. In P5, you can add (fake) ambient lighting more or less by hooking the ambient channel to the texture and turning up the ambience to a desired level. Arealights are not, apparently, implemented for Firefly, though and it's a pity. The math is not much different from that for depth of field. You can sort of fake them with a cluster of lights or by softening the shadows if you use depth-mapped shadows. True radiosity transmits light reflected from even dull objects to nearby objects. In other words, a red ball on a white tablecloth will put just a tiny tinge of pink on the cloth around it. BMRT and POV-Ray are the only two free renderers I know of that have radiosity.

Attached Link: http://www.3dvirtualight.com/

You might want to look at "Virtual Light"... while I don;t see a direct poser interface they do have a plug in for man and truespace.

I think at first I was a bit confused, ray tracing,radiosity,global illumination... anyway.. when I bought P5 I really thought firefly would have been a dramatic improvement from the P4 render engine. So now I realize that raytracing... can give you reflections, or refractions and ray traced shadows.. big deal.. sow now i can have mirrors ...wow...well I'm not that impressed... I was hoping for more.. I downloaded Povray a few minutes ago.. ran a test render with radiosity.. (seven minutes).. that's what I was hoping firefly would have done for me.. I don't want dark shadows.. I don't want to cheat with 12 lights. I want to set up my scene with one light call it the sun.. and press render. I want to see light bounce of walls.. and light up the whole room. I want realistic lighting.. something Povray does for free.. see above example.. I paid full price... and in Canadian dollars that was $570.00 just got my visa bill today... I think I deserve more. Personally I think I got ripped of... maybe I was a bit ignorant... and I should have waited longer...done more research.. actually now that i think of it... i should get radiosty for free.. for all the BS I had to put up with the first few weeks.. By the way thanks for your help... I really do appreciate it... but now that I think of it.. Ii shouldn't have to go through three programs just to render a realistic scene... (poser--> poseray----> poveray) After spending over half a thousand dollars on P5 too much.. Nick

Boy, there's a lot of us in Canada using Poser. But, having been into raytracing since DKB was a pup, perhaps I expected less of the renderer. It's the cloth dynamics primarily that make P5 work for me. I can always export a .rib file and render it in BMRT which has everything but depth of field. Vue d'Esprit has a nice renderer, too, but I've never been able to get the Demo to NOT crash on my system. Poseray and POV-ray are actually a pretty good back end for Poser and there are a couple of nice modellers out there for it too, now. I looked at Virtual Light (and just downloaded the latest). It does have Monte Carlo irradiance which is probably a better way of solving the radiosity problem than the more usual one anyway, but I'm wondering if Poser can export anything it can read. I'll have to find out.

.

Oh, give me a break. While I do like Poser, there are so many other programs out there that compose scenes and have finer lighting and raytracing in them. To import a house, for example, with all the furnishings and rooms and windows into Poser its a hassle. One block, great difficulty in texturing the hundred or so objects, etc. Its just easier to bring the house into Bryce and texture there and import a Poser figure after posing. So there's limitations by doing it that way too. Can't animate the figure, can't repose it. I'm really getting tired of using Bryce as the final scene builder or Poser as the final scene builder. Neither integrate well. Was looking at Vue. Probably will go with LW or something higher end that has the plugins. I like EI Universe very much, but no poser plugin, SoftImage is the best IMHO. Maya is in the running (kinda). Lets face it, we're all bouncing back and forth and there's no end all program out there that works well no matter how much money you have to spend. My dream program... full modeler like EIU, with full P5 dynamic animation plugin, with tree/light/texture lab similar to Bryce/Darktree and skyz/terrain like MW or Terragen with radiosity and all wrapped up in a primarily text driven interface so that I don't have to memorize the images of a bunch of icon pictures that don't make any sense.

Attached Link: http://radsite.lbl.gov/deskrad/dradHOME.html

doldridg, I'm playing with VL also. VL works fine but I'm having problems with the Poser exported 3DS files. I get the geometry but the textures, lights and camera aren't going along for the ride. May be something I'm doing wrong though there's much to the export dialog. I've had better luck exporting an obj and converting it to 3DS in another app. I still have to set up lights and camera, but at least the textures work with obj export. With the VL 3ds2vib utility, it seems to work better if I use the -b option to write binary 3ds files. PoseRay is easier and faster to do though the in few tests I've done, the images are distinctly darker than Poser renders. I haven't tried adding any extra lights though, just imported the ones from the Poser PZ3. I think that once you get it working, VL may well have more powerful lighting options than POVray. Great image alamanos. If you did that in PoseRay can you share how you set up the render? Actually, I don't know if I have the patience to really learn to take advantage of any of this high-end lighting stuff, wish it were easier. Still, it's free and fun to play with. If you're really a lighting freak, try Radiance (link) from Lawrence Berkely Labs. It's primarily for realistic architectural lighting so I don't know how Poser figures would look with it and it's a 30-70MB download! I'm actually fairly happy with the way Poser 4 does people with a good fake GI lightset. It's props, sets, etc. where it falls down and could really use some more sophisticated capabilities, but that's just my opinion. There's anothread going about PoseRay, VL, etc. Seems like a number of people are looking for free FireFly killers.

Hi Kaibach! have you said Luuv as tsx ?????? WHERE ????? Please tell me! Greetings, Webvogel

Hi lmckenzie, Yes that render was done in povray.. it was a sample script that came with the program.. Just loaded the sample and hit render.. didn't adjust anything... i looked at the script.. seemed quitw simple.. I'll try loading a poser scene today, and cut pasting the radiosty script in povray.. and see what happens.. Good luck

.

no probs there Webvogel, Luuv is found here - http://member.newsguy.com/~cgrant/tsx/luuv/index.html Bofo (Clint) also hangs out in the tS forum here ;) remember tho - to export to Obj hold down Alt and click the TSX.. if the imported Obj renders black and will not accept textures, run a fix bad geometry on it .. fixes that everytime :) Kai

Hmmm, The man from CL is bookmarking the thread, should we be interested... :) later jb