Hi adp001,

Many thanks once again for your kind and informative input.

Cheers,

and the link to the article is...

Interestingly enough, the AMD Radeon ProRender site says the following with regard to Blender...

*NEW* Default “Full” Radeon™ ProRender 2.0 render quality mode:

* Hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 series graphics cards.

* Improved rendering algorithm for less noise for a given amount of render samples.

* Optimized scaling across multiple devices, including CPU + GPU rendering.*

* Radeon™ ProRender 1.0 mode available when render quality mode set to “Legacy”.

Built on the OpenCL™ standard or Apple Metal® 2, Radeon™ ProRender is hardware agnostic, so it runs on virtually any hardware that supports OpenCL™ or Metal® 2, including virtually any combination of GPUs and CPUs.

Wait, there’s more – we don’t just have a new plug-in but also quite a few exciting new updates to our existing plug-ins. To start, for our Blender® users, we have updated our plug-in to support the upcoming 2.83 release of Blender.

sounds nice...

Hi, adp001,

Many thanks for taking the time and trouble to clarify that and for the link to what is supported by blender, worth a study...

What a dog's dinner...and yet Apple still sells an external GPU after dropping a couple of others from their store...

I just got a reply from PoserSoftware saying "CUDA or OPTIX" required and they have no idea about AMD...

In Snow Leopard, which is going back a few years, AMD boards showed up as an option in Poser 10, though god knows what drivers and open GL was involved.

Cheers,

Hi, Ricardo, are you saying it is down to the Blender organization to solve this?

Think the answer may be in the word Radeon, i.e., AMD as this is the same with an AMD RadeonPro XT5700 16Gb card described by Apple as being a GPU... only the CPU option shows up in FireFly with this card too. I would suggest raising a ticket with support https://support.posersoftware.com The more Macintosh users that complain the more likely it will be considered as something requiring a fix..

Here is the result using the same setup, but with a hastily cobbled window and set of blinds in Silo; also placed an HDRI image as a background using Environment Texture. Any pointers or ideas to improve are most welcome :) again, no Post FX

On an earlier post Y-Phil mentions BB's Fog Capsule. I couldn't find anything on this, but after looking at the PP12 Manual on Cycles Nodes came up with the following attempt at god-rays and atmosphere akin to what is possible with atmosphere under FireFly. This done using SuperFly and a large box at 1000% from the primitives and then cyclessurface settings and 1 spot light on a narrow end width no FX Not sure if it is the right approach, but will explore by making a small window blind model in Silo and trying it out in close up

all those years ago, but still vital info, many thanks AmbientS...

Thank you for that tip hborre, will give that a try and check the time again. Many thanks.

For reference here is the time on a Mac using BigSur iMac i9, 32GB ram, RadeonPro XT5700 16GB PoserPro 12 trial version with settings and view as it comes, 50 mins 2.29 secs while browsing the web It's interesting to see that the HDR image didn't show up through the glass - will have to check on that

Final upload this time with a render in SF with 3 lights and dynamic outfit that looks normal. There is, however, strangeness if the cloth is fitted while render settings are under SF. Switching to FF before fitting the cloth doesn't come up with any strangeness — no idea why but it has worked on two files okay. So work around seems to be fit cloth under FF and then select SF before rendering rather than the other way around. Only other downsides I've noted so far are

1. (on Macintosh BigSur) PP12 takes a long time to quit.
2. The materials room is really slow to change things when using HDRI
3. When rendering in SF and quitting after a quarter way the auto post work gives a very good quality finish
4. Dynamic cloth doesn't like working under SF selection (haven't tested this cold from start up)
5. Selecting Poser Manual from the menu doesn't seem to open it up... Other than that PP12 is a huge improvement and the team deserve a congrats on their work. Many thanks to Ghosthip2 for the HDRI primer :)

Hi Y-Phil, It's the Lizanna Hair by Out-of-Touch for La Femme, but designed to work with V4 as well. The look is seemingly improved by having an Area light working as a street light in addition to the HDRI also in the properties settings it is subdivided to 2 for render, all other settings are default apart from choice of colour

Another test in PP12 with HDRI and SuperFly. Some strangeness with the dynamic cloth, but the render quality looks really good imho

Many thanks to everyone for the advice and pointers contained in this thread, most enlightening. Just making sure PP12 works okay on my Mac and BigSur, before committing to the purchase :) and also looking at what SuperFly now does following improvements. A couple of unexpected things with eyes appearing white as the SF skin texture Eyesurface had a transparency on it (solved by uncoupling the transparency) and also some mesh lines appearing which again are simple solved by changing the skinning method for the figure from Traditional to Poser Unimesh. Include a side by side comparison of an old image with FF and SF renders, no lighting tweaks between the two. Most impressive initial result and lots of new things to learn :)