Thanks, Boni. I tried that and it seems to not like both at once. If I add a ray-traced reflection (which is what I want, to reflect the background), it overrides the transparency map. I need the transparency map to override everything else for the edges. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what yet. I'm looking at other things that use transparency maps (like hair) to see if I can figure out where I'm going wrong.

Looks like I can have a nice reflective floor with hard edges or a tapered edge floor but not both at the moment. One seems to cancel the other out.

Excuse the DOF on that. I forgot I had it on when I sent it to the render queue. It rendered fast over there while I did other things. Nice (except, couldn't see the mistake, LOL) Learning!

Hmm, it looks like I do have the concept correct, just have to find the right way to do it, LOL.

Thanks for mentioning the render queue. I hadn't tried that before, and didn't realize the recent updates allow you to use Superfly in there (the Poser 11 user manual says Firefly only.) What a wonderful surprise to render a decent quality Superfly image in 33 minutes and still be able to use my computer (and not fry it!) It wasn't a small one either. Very excited about using this method going forward.

I'm sold on that red dress! Even more so now that I know it works on other figures. The tutorial and moprhs sound great too. Thank you!

@xocxoc Thanks for your updated instructions. Was messing with that the other day, but never got through the instructions, too much else going on. Will try again soon with yours and see how it goes. Your results look pretty good.

Ooh, just got to watch the video. That came out great, Deecey! Thanks for using all our renders. So neat to see them together!

I was playing with that prefitter before I got sick. Looks very interesting! Lord knows I have plenty of V4 content to use it on. Hopefully will have a few test renders soon. Heading to the La Femme webinar at the moment.

Blackhearted posted at 4:31PM Wed, 13 February 2019 - #4345811

llynara posted at 6:13AM Mon, 11 February 2019 - #4345805

Haven't had a chance to catch up on this thread, but here's a test I did, with postwork. Still struggling with grain in Superfly. La Femme is gorgeous and worth the effort!

Very nice.

You can get around the grain/slow rendertime by reducing the amount of unnecessary samples in your render.

Keep in mind I am not a technical person, so if anyone wants to correct me or add info by all means, I'm all ears. I achieve results through sheer stubbornness and patience, so my way may not be the best way but this is how I rendered all of my promos. This has no transparency, transmission, etc. SSS and emissives seem to be controlled by the diffuse samples so you will get those. Eyelashes and refract shader eyes will render black. I render my scene like that then bump up settings and re-render the eyes/lashes with high transparent/transmission bounces and caustics turned on using Area Render to draw a small box around the eyes and the immediately adjacent area they will affect with bounced light/shadow.

This brings me to the hair. Even a midrange PC has a lot of cores/processing power available these days - not to mention modern GPUs. However people have been spoiled by making hair for biased (ie: toy) render engines like Firefly and we've reached a point where any sort of optimization has gone out the window. We're stripping figures down to ~20k poly base meshes and then loading ~300k poly transmapped hair with a half dozen 4k maps and thousands of individual transparent strips stacked 20+ layers deep. This is not ideal. After 20 years of development there ideally should be a working strand-based hair engine in Poser, but failing that there should be some attention paid to optimizing hair for a good balance of realism and rendering speed.

In the meantime you can get around this by rendering the scene with the settings above and then going back and Area-Rendering hair with about 6 max transparency bounces (if necessary going back and spot re-rendering any spots that may still remain dark). This is still much much faster than simply turning up all render settings and taking 10 hours to render your entire scene.

But people have been spoiled by using biased rendering engines for years. Remember the mass protests when Poser added Firefly and D|S added Iray, while people were still learning to use them. The Poser 4 rendering engine was an absolute POS, and the only reason it was fast was because it was wildly inaccurate, and both the P4 renderer and Firefly further sped up by 'cheating' due to Poser's small scale: items in the scene were so microscopically tiny that the renderers were discarding a lot of scene information and thus rendering faster. For years I used to squeeze better renders out of them by scaling everything in my scene up to 1000%, with a significant boost in shadow quality but also in rendertime. But quality renders take time -- a high quality ~2000x1500-ish render always took me between 2-10 hours whether it was in Firefly, Iray or Superfly. Good results take time, there is no instant gratification when it comes to indirect lighting.

I'll typically do a few dozen small, grainy preview renders while I tweak lights and pose, use area render to check areas like the eye focus/highlights, feet/hands properly in contact, etc, and then just leave the final render going while I go do something else, watch a movie or sleep. In the final render if something is amiss like a tiny spot of pokethrough I didn't notice in the preview I can fix it and spot-render that little area in a minute.

Thank you for your suggestions, Blackhearted! I hadn't thought of spot rendering problem areas. Lots of good info. Will put it to good use!

Haven't had a chance to catch up on this thread, but here's a test I did, with postwork. Still struggling with grain in Superfly. La Femme is gorgeous and worth the effort!

Well, the grain is driving me nuts and I need to tweak the hand, but loving the Femme Fatale HD morphs. Also used Deecey's Asian Flower Head Morph here. Pose is from Ensary Portals for V4, tweaked a little. OOT Cailin Hair and Paulina Camisole & Panties.

The high heel foot scrunches her toes together to fit into a typical pair of heels so you dont have to make heels with a hugeass bulbous nose that look like clown shoes, like most V4 shoes do. What exactly did you expect it to do, morph her feet into rollerskates? ?

Blackhearted, she is very lovely. I think her feet are great too. So many of the 3D figures have blocky ones. I'm headed over to your store to buy the FMPs. I will play with fitting clothes to her, but fitting shoes is often a nightmare.

Besides, every girl needs a good pair of shoes that fit! La Femme is going shoe shopping!

PS. @operaguy- I've been saying "la fem rhymes with la dem"

Pauline test. La Femme comes with fits for the Pauine hairs, wish she came with fits for the clothes. Did the cami and panties in Fitting Room. Pose is also a base Pauline pose with a little adjusting.

Test with Dawn hair, clothes, poses. I used Fitting Room for first time and don't know what the heck I'm doing in there, so the fit isn't great. Hands are going to need adjusting, and some extreme Dawn poses don't work well, but this Express Your Dawn2 set by Ilona looks pretty good.

Hair- Parent instead of fit/conform. Render is in Superfly, but used the Firefly Construct materials (are there any for SuperFly?), so background is a bit flat.

Quick, grainy test render in Superfly (still learning Poser.) I like La Femme a lot. Here she is with just her defaults, some GhostShip lights (Studio 1), the V4 Dryad outfit, the RDNA flower swing and one of Ensary's V4 poses. Only minor adjustments needed to everything. Could tweak a bit more. Biscuits hairs fit very well on her.

La Femme's skin looks great and I'm thrilled that she seems to take V4 stuff so well as I have a ton of it. I'll experiment some more tomorrow. Freezing here near Chicago!