Regarding simulated umbrella lights - I don't think it is really necessary to simulate the 3d shape of the umbrella and bounce light around in it. You could use a simple glowbox but feed an intensity mask into the Ambient Color slot of the glowbox's surface node. For example, something that blackens the corners of the box would give you a proper imitation of the shape of the light and, if you really wanted to, a radial gradient centered on the mask would give you the effects of any non-uniform illumination of the umbrella. This would, of course, only work for the diffuse component of the illumination of the subject and then only with IDL turned on, but umbrellas are for making soft, i.e. diffuse, lighting anyway and the IDL algorithm will then calculate the falloff in a statistically correct manner. Mostly, I don't think you'll see significant differences.

Whichway

Not anymore, I can't, at least not without a struggle. But I think you're pressing way too hard for precision here where it is not justified. Poser couldn't do it anyway.

Poor me - I did.

I finally stumbled onto this thread and am still catching up.

I have Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 beta, so could try some simple comparisons. I've lately been using 2010 exclusively; its 64-bit in-the-background renderer finally let me produce I picture I've wanted for a long time.
 
I need to mull things over a little more before posting anything as I don't want to divert this thread.

Whichway
 P.S. - Anybody have a back pointer to the Artistic Lens stuff? It seems familiar but I think it popped up out of the blue on this thread. Thanks.

I've not done a whole lot with 2010 yet, but I did post this in my Gallery.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1996340

It's a redo using a single quadratic source light with IDL off of some grey cards. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit (4 GB memory) and used the 64-bit background render option. The biggest improvement is that my computer finally actually rendered it; it's too big for 32-bits. It took a few hours on my laptop, which is a vast improvement over even the failed 32-bit render attempts. There are still a few artifacts around the neck jewels that I haven't chased down, but they are much less than the 32-bit, non-IDL Poser 7 render.

Sorry aboiut the typo. It is only in that posting, not the actual test. Thanks for spotting it.

Whichway

I use Poser 8 regularly. I just limit my use of IDL for now as Bagginsbill has demonstrated that it is much improved in SP1.

Whichway

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo soooooooooooooooooooooooooooon?

Whichway

If there is nothing connected to them, then they don't contribute, but if they are connected, yes, you have to work out what the nodes compute. Have fun!

Whichway

What about the Alternate_Diffuse, Alternate_Specular, Reflection and Refraction? All of them contribute to the light coming from the surface.

Whichway

BB - Do you think it likely that SP1 will be out by Sunday? I have a contest entry I'd prefer to use it on, but if SP1 is going to be later than that, I'll give up waiting. Thanks.

Whichway

Arrgh! BagginsBill, please stop finding major new bugs at this point, I really want the IDL improvements.

Whichway

BB - What happens in the B&W setup if you make the ball reflective and visible to raytracing? (My renderer is occupied for the time being.) This is confusing me a little since the image in the mirror says that at least the first ray shot from the camera does see the mirror in raytracing mode, or something like it, I think.

Whichway
 

ice-boy - If you use  the Dimension 3D panel, the "Only" checkbox by the "Enable IDL" checkbox will give you a render of just the IDL influence in one step.

Whichway

BagginsBill - From the results you've posted so far, my vote would go to SP1 sooner rather than later. The current improvements in the rendering seem to take Poser 8 IDL from a struggle to a usable feature. That's probably the biggest sinlge step you'll get out of the fixes..

Whichway