The coloured stones above use this setup:

Aha, found it.

Attempting gemstones using the Principled BSDF ...

Using the Principled BSDF is easier, if I can find my old thread I'll post examples there and link back here.

The biggest difference between Superfly and Firefly, my opinion, is in FF specular is a hack to avoid using actual raytraced reflections because they are so slow. SF is faster so specular is actual raytraced reflection. No need for a reflect node, reflection is on by default.

Based on this example I tried to duplicate the shader, and ended up with this:

The mesh is a primitive from Lightwave and scaled to about 1cm high in Poser (I set my units to meters). One infinite light and a jpg pano for a sky.

P12 uses Pixar's OpenSubDiv v3. The subD level is taken from the Preview value i.e. 0 = subD off, 1 = 1 level etc. I don't think it's possible to export body parts with different subD levels, but I've never tried ;)

I should mention that higher-res morphs can fail on occasion, mainly when passing data back and forth to Zbrush to edit the same morph (something fiendish to do with tangents). I've found it very uncommon but something to be aware of.

Another option might be to use the Fitting Room to transfer a shape from one mesh to another, though I also haven't tried that (I think vilters was experimenting with it). Not sure what level of detail/performance trade-off there would be.

The single biggest thing that made Superfly easier for me to understand was realising that Specular has a completely different meaning -

• in Firefly, Specular is a hack to provide fake reflections (to use raytraced reflections in Firefly you would have to add a Reflect node to the material)

• but in Superfly, as everything has real raytraced reflections all the time, Specular means Base Reflectance.

This is why Firefly is often claimed to be faster. It isn’t, it’s just doing a lot less work. If you add Reflect nodes to every material to compare directly with Superfly you will find that speed difference …. quite different. For kicks, try adding some strong DoF too. Like for like, Superfly is way faster.

The second thing that helped me was a basic understanding of the PBR Metal/Rough workflow. Like, the difference between metal and not-metal. Base reflectance vs fresnel. What roughness means.

And start simple. The Physical Surface is good simple root that can do a lot of materials. Use the most basic light setup there is - a single white infinite at 100% intensity. Take Andy (or any simple prop with a single mat zone), make him metal. Then colour it. Then not-metal. What is the difference between roughness at 1, at .6, at 0.05. Add some procedurals as bump, see what difference it makes; add some more to roughness. Experiment. Get the basics first then move on and apply to more complex materials. Don’t start with skin ;)

And don’t bother with normals unless you know what tangent basis is, or the difference between OpenGL and DirectX, just use bump. It’s easier.

I have a thread going specifically for examples using the Principled BSDF here - volumetric SSS, glass, foliage, PBR textures etc.

If anyone wants to read about PBR, these are great sources of info courtesy of Marmoset Toolbag -

PBR Theory

PBR in practice

PBR Conversion

(I didn’t get it when I first read them, but the pictures are good. Eventually it sunk in.)

Oh yeah. The only nodes ‘missing’ from Superfly are those that have User Interface elements that Poser doesn’t have - the ability to draw curves, for example. Back in 2015 the developers decided that, given the number of nodes affected and the amount of time it would take to write all the code needed for the UI, which was not trivial, there were more important things to do.

They did a lot of work to enable mix ’n’ match as far as possible between existing Poser nodes and new Cycles nodes, and with the three root nodes you can create a single material with one root for Firefly and a different root for Superfly, and the render engine will use the right one. They also mapped all the new nodes as close as possible to the existing Poser nodes, so that a Superfly render with old materials would have a chance of not being terrible. This has created a very flexible material system but it is not often possible to take a material someone else has made for Blender and copy it directly for Poser node for node. However, being physically-based means that it is easier to create materials for Superfly without needing highly complex shaders if you can get to grips with some of the basics.

What I want is to get a more crystal look, something with density to it. Roughness will only affect the surface highlights, so I want to activate Transmission Roughness. This setting will only work when the Distribution method is changed from the default Multiscatter to GGX. If I activate it and set it to 0.5 I now get this.

Now changing the IOR to 2 and giving it a blue-ish colour tint.

And something completely different - glass. Same prop, no maps, same lighting and render settings. I've deleted all the maps and set Transmission to 1, IOR to 1.5 and the colour to white.

Lastly, the colour map. Not a lot to say. Extremes of light and dark should be avoided. Lighting detail should be avoided, so it’s worth noting that the shader in SP makes use of AO (ambient occlusion), and that this can be baked into the exported maps - it may be advisable to disable the AO in SP before exporting maps.

However.

There is a way of adding AO and other maps for micro-occlusion in a controllable way with Cycles nodes, which could help bring out more detail and sharpness in a colour map. The Mix node in the Colour section of the Cycles nodes will allow mixing two colour inputs (the amount of mixing controlled by the Fac parameter) with blend types that anyone who has used layer blend modes in an image editor will recognise – like darken, screen, soft light, multiply, add etc. In the screen below I’ve added an AO map and am blending that with the colour map using overlay. Using a curvature map would probably be more appropriate for overlay; AO should really be blended with multiply.

Just another tool that is nice to have inside Poser to allow more control over a material - the Mix node has a lot of potential.

So now to roughness. The roughness map describes how smooth or not the surface is in extreme close up, and this has a huge effect on the appearance of the reflected light. Using PBR Metal/Rough, a puddle of water and a dry leaf will have the exact same reflectance – the specular will be set to 0.5, or 4%. The reason they will look completely different is down to the roughness. Water is very smooth, so the grayscale roughness map will be be almost black, and the surface will render with sharp clear reflections while the dry leaf will be very rough, the values will be approaching white and the surface will render with reflected light so soft and blurred it may not seem to affect it at all.

While the values for base reflection are kept simple, the roughness map can be full of detail – scratches, fingerprints, smudges, pores, chips and blemishes of all kinds can sell the illusion of reality here. Any detail that is too small for the bump or normal map should be here.

Next up is the normal map.

A normal map will do the same thing as a bump map - give the appearance of more detail by affecting the lighting but without altering the geometry of the mesh - but is created in a very different way. This is the most important thing about normal maps: they are not texture maps, they are surface normal data that has been encoded into pixels. This matters and can make them harder to create, unlike bump maps that can be painted by hand (unless you’re using an app like SP to create normal maps). It also makes them less flexible after they have been created, in that it would be difficult alter their values by using math nodes as can be done relatively easily with bump maps.

There are different kinds of normal map, and the ones that I am concerned with here are tangent space maps as exported by SP (as opposed to object or world space maps). Within SP the default setting is to use DirectX normal maps – I always change this to OpenGL. (Poser can use either but up and down are reversed depending on which is used, and I’m used to using OpenGL).

It is also worth being aware of tangent basis. This is only relevant when a normal map is decoded (i.e. rendered) by an engine that uses a different tangent basis to the engine that encoded the data. Most applications use MikkT (also called mikkspace), but not all. SP and Superfly do, but the Poser Preview and Firefly use their own tangent basis. This means that normal maps could give unexpected or wrong results in those engines.

It’s also worth noting that Poser will not read 16 bit normal maps, so I always set the SP exporter to 8 bit PNG. It is possible to use JPG, but it is a lossy format so compression artefacts could potentially result in shading errors, so PNG is safer (though the file sizes are larger). Depends on the end use – a hard surface model would look bad with shader errors, so I’d go with PNG, but with a detailed terrain the difference might not be noticeable.

Lastly, when using a normal map with Cycles nodes like the Principled BSDF it’s essential to use a NormalMap node (found in the Cycles – Vector submenu) to tell the shader exactly what kind of map is being used, otherwise Superfly will not understand how to render the map. This is not the case with the Physical Surface root, which expects a tangent space normal, so this step isn’t needed.

TL;DR – A normal map is computer code that only happens to look like a texture map. Use normal maps in Superfly if you understand them and have a tool that can make them correctly. For maximum compatibility and flexibility consider using bump maps instead.

The PBR Metal/Rough workflow deliberately simplifies some parts of the material creation process to make it easier, faster and more consistent. It’s worth keeping in mind that it was designed for realtime engines with all their constraints, and Superfly, being an offline render engine, has the huge advantage of time. This means that it is possible to build more complex shaders without this workflow, but I think that PBR Metal/Rough is a very useful tool and the underlying principles are worth getting to grips with.

I’ll discuss the maps in order of importance. First, the metallic map tells Poser which areas are metal and which are not - white pixels are metal and black pixels are not-metal. The importance of this distinction is that all metal areas will be set to 100% reflectance, and the reflections will be coloured by the colour map. Not-metal areas will have reflectance set to the specular value and the reflected light will have no colour i.e. be white. The specular value should be set to 0.5, which is 4% reflectance.

Specular in Superfly does not mean the same thing as Firefly. In Superfly it means base reflectance (sometimes called direct reflection or F0). In Firefly specular is a hack used to simulate/fake reflected highlights as real raytraced reflections, especially blurred reflections, are extremely slow to render. As Superfly is much faster it uses raytraced reflections on everything all the time. Specular maps should only be used in Superfly if the effect they will have on reflectance values are properly understood. Simple values are all that are needed here - the detail and definition in the appearance of reflected light i.e. highlights is carried in the roughness map.

On the PBSDF node the specular value can be set from 0-2, which maps to 0-16%. Setting it to 0.5 equals 4% base reflectance, and in the Metal/Rough workflow all not-metal surfaces are set to this value as it is a good average (most surfaces range between 2-8%, with gemstones an outlier at up to 16%).

(In SP, and any other application that understands the Metal/Rough workflow, when a metal map is created this is what the shader is set to automatically - to get direct control of reflectance values a different workflow, Spec/Gloss, which creates a different set of maps, would be used.)

Here is a shader set up using PBDSF for a prop with a single material zone textured in Substance Painter (which I’ll abbreviate to SP from now on) using the Metal/Rough PBR workflow. The exported maps are: colour, metallic, roughness and normal. Render is made using a single infinite light at 100% intensity.

I was originally going to write up some quick info on the various maps, but it … expanded a bit. Apologies for the wall of text that follows ;)

Thought I recognised that earlier model. Elemental Wraith on Sacrificial Altar from the game Doom (2016). Screenshot -

Also see the Doom Wiki here and the work of ID concept artist Emerson Tung here.