So far the Beta update for Mac is saying there's support for Nividia GPUs - but is support for the Mac M1 GPU in the pipeline??

Uh-oh, looking at this though: - it does look like GPU support is only for Nividia Geforce RTX GPUs, in which case I'm not going to bother making the jump to Poser 12 just yet ...

Tbh I find IBL in Superfly much better than firefly - you have to deal with it differently: put the emission value up higher (if you're not using HDR maps you might need a value of +24, for example), but the lighting system seems to work much more realistically [especially with a few area lights in the mix] so it's worth the effort.

If you have objects in the way then yeah you'll have shadowing, but as long as you have enough bounces in the raytrace, the light will get round and the overall scene will be infinitely more realistic, because that's what happens with real light in the real world: put objects in the way and it affects the light....! IBL in firefly was always a bit of a fudge.

Raven - no way, I'd never spotted that before! Haha funny what your eyes don't see :)

However, despite you being exactly right, in this case that box wasn't ticked anyway, so I can't turn it off. Here's my current sort-of-works equivalent (ie. mostly default):

I say fixed it. It hasn't, but the artefacts are now faint enough that I think I can hide them with brightness/contrast in post, so I'm going to do that as I don't have time to start again with this scene.

Thanks so much for the help everyone.

This is PP2012 so there's no IDL options, but your hint did lead me towards the IBL light which I've turned off, another light had depth map shadows, and between those two changes it does seem to be fixed. Was excited by the 'threads' suggestion too, but that had no effect in this case. It must be a change I made in the scene which triggered it, because the first thousand frames rendered with zero artefacts.

Thanks again, nightmare having that kind of thing happen near the deadline for a video project! I need to get my work to buy the latest PP really, perhaps if this video goes well, they will :)

This should just be a simple pan past little yellow house models, so strobing shadows shouldn't happen. I haven't changed subsurface or IBL or shading rate or anything, can't figure out what would cause these shadow issues.

The only thing I changed between when the pans rendered fine and now, is I added 3D figures (about 3 full cartoon figures, animated poses), and a few props but nothing major. There's about 10 characters and 200 props in the scene, but that isn't unusual. I've cleared shadow maps, restarted the laptop (I know that's irrelevant but you know...), everything

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. It's not a bad model, it just has hundreds of nodes because it's architectural and they're NURBS modelled as separate entities originally; not your average Poser prop.

I found the very simple solution was to apply the desired material to one node, then right-click in the materials window, select all, then right-click again and apply to all. Works a treat without having to remap the UVs (a relief because UVMapper won't go on Mac and I didn't want to bother hunting for a free alternative! Any Mac UVMapper suggestions welcome though. Aside from rebuilding it in Wine Bottler if possible).

Thanks for the suggestions again.

It's the sort of operation that you can do in Excel - duplicating then using the black crosshairs to drag clones into new cells. However, as each instance is 530 lines of code (!), dragging that many clones to 371,000 lines of code is kinda ... not gonna happen!

Any other ideas?

Thanks Steve, I've just emailed.

Sam.

Quote - Yes, quite right spent nearly a year working on it! The desolate feel comes from Wiltshire. Well, not so much desolate as reclusive perhaps.

Next the Tiger Hunter.

I've got a lot of time for reclusive. One of the great things about doing this video for the Diocese was that I was allowed to put my out-of-office alert on my email so I wouldn't get disturbed for two solid weeks! Bliss.

Tiger Hunter; intriguing. Are we talking tanks or safari? Keep us posted.

@wolf359 - yeah like I said I produced all the props (maps, the train, houses, churches etc etc) in Rhino3D, then animated in Poser by hand by keyframing and splitting the movie into 7 scenes. The render is also Poser (Firefly), with occasional use of depth of field; the thing that gives it the 'clay' feel is the use of subsurface scattering, which I faked using material node wizardry. The only thing I didn't model were the humanoid characters.

@flibbits - I agree about the audio. I tried filtering, but the noise is low-range rather than high frequency so filters didn't touch it. I didn't have time to play around getting it right unfortunately; this was a quick project!

@saibabmeuk - small world! Did you produce the whole 11 minutes yourself? It has a  desolate feel to it which I guess is due to the audio. I found producing my movie that I learnt loads as I went along; your 11 minutes seems to have different styles at different stages too.

It's not pointless - that's how software starts. You prove the theory, then someone who wants to make money out of it takes it on and makes a marketable version.

So far everyone's gone 'wow' and haven't offered the theorists money to make it. The theorists are happy because they've proven concept - an achievement in itself. What's now required is some investment by someone who wants to become a billionaire. Any takers?

thanks! I was aiming for woderful.

This also relates to the HDRI thread in this forum. Poser 7 can now deal with HDR information - but rather than theoretically eject photons and calculate HDR renderings like Mental Ray or Brazil or Lightwave, it uses an unusual algorithm approach and uses multipliers instead. This gives it the too-bright look without the over-exposure you'd expect from properly used HDRI. So you need to fiddle with the exposure/intensity and add normal lights when the hdr info fails.

-hdr lighting, IBL (ie LDR) lighting, combination (with LDR IBL and standard lights)