//With all due respect, and even conceding some of your observations, let's not forget a couple of points. Poser was never meant to be a character driven program. It just kind of evolved that way. DAZ, in fact, was a spin-off of the company that first supplied Poser with it's original figures. And trust me, I have NOT been shy about criticisizing SM's lack of response to the growing threat of Studio. But in Poser's defense, Poser is just a small part of the SM machine. To be frank, I'm honestly starting to believe that SM is holding Poser back.//

But does it matter what it used to be or who copied who? Thats a lot of years ago now, Poser today is character driven as I see it and is its strongest feature. Everything evolve around the ability to use characters and figures. Whether they are humans or varies objects. The ability to import and work with these in order to create art is crucial for Poser I think. If Poser were only able to work with primitives supplied with Poser, there would be no use for it. I don't want to sound like im criticizing Poser as these discussion often gets misunderstood. I see nothing wrong in this, it might help SM to see what users want and don't want. And personally I don't see a problem between the varies program, I use those that will get the job done, doesn't matter if that envolve both Daz and Poser etc. What annoys me is that they cant find common ground so things made in one program would work equally well in the other.

//Poser figures are designed to show off the new technology in the Poser application; they aren't designed to do pin-up art (Although they certainly can do that). That is why we see the Poser figures in things like TV production, airline safety cards, and scanners at the local grocery store.//

I agree with you to some point, but nothing prevent them from supplying high quality characters with Poser for each release, and it would make sense since a huge amount of their users are hobbyist, last release they did add 2 characters, which had some new features and so on. But it makes little sense to show off new features on characters that are bugged and not even close to the same quality of figures already on the market. If I remember right one of the new features were the facial controls, but this as far as I know, have not been adopted or used in any other character, so these features seems to be stuck in Paul and Pauline, which is sad. Because had these characters been good quality people would have used them. So its good to add all these things within the program but if they ain't used, its of little use and these features are aimed towards the hobbyist and not those using Poser for fliers, tv adds etc. In my country whenever a Poser character turns up on TV its one of the very old one and its clear that these people are not in need of these features.

Your last comment about waiting for Project E, i think is shared by a lot of Poser users, but to me this would be a most welcome character for Poser, but it shouldn't or didn't have to be necessary, had Poser released with decent characters. Project E in my opinion should be something that people should look at as a very nice addition to a library already filled with good quality figures released with Poser.

This is a comparison if both render engines are using the physical surface root.

Setting up nodes can be time consuming, but for most materials the only root you need is the Physical surface root which you can plug your textures into. At least as a starting point its very powerful. Metal, glass and water are very good in PBR but isn't that just good? Its hard to render anything without there being some sort of metal or glass at some point.

This is two images of a basic bowl from poser on a plane, one using standard Firefly material and the other a standard physical surface node. I think the difference between them is huge when it comes to quality, especially when the only difference is the render engine and the root node.

The Firefly render is rendered at very high render settings with indirect lighting. The biggest issue as I see it with PBR renders are the amount of time it can take to render if you are using wrong settings.

RobZhena posted at 9:12PM Mon, 06 November 2017 - #4317436

I never use Superfly because it is just way too complex to produce good results, and I buy product frequently. You can make PBR textures that work fine in Firefly/3Delight. Deacon215, for example, sells clothes for DS with iRay textures that render fine outside of iRay and in Firefly when I re-rig them to work with Poser figures. Here is a G3 hair piece that I rigged for V4, here parented to my Heroine Paulette freebie for Pauline. This is an iRay texture on the hair. This is a quickie render.

Was wondering what you mean with it being to complex to produce good results with Superfly?

That you can use PBR textures with Firefly is correct, but there is no difference, meaning they are just texture maps so a diffuse map for PBR is the same as one for Firefly, and you could probably adjust the rest of the maps and use them in firefly as well. The difference is in the engine and shader and how it use the information in the texture maps. In PBR you work with metal/roughness and you can use a grey scale map to tell the engine how metallic a surface is simply by using a single texture map and add a greyscale roughness map to tell how rough the surface is. In Firefly you would have to setup reflections etc. And even if you do that its not physical accurate as with PBR, because it handles light correctly. And Firefly will die at some point simply due to that, there are not really any way around it. Even if you were to do some cartoon render, there are no reason why you wouldn't want light to be correct as i see it, and as far as I know there is nothing in PBR that would prevent a cartoon shader.

In my opinion and as Drafter, said one of the huge let downs have been the characters that is supplied with Poser and if I were Smith micro I think I would change business strategy a little. Stop making so many different releases of Poser, like a Pro version etc. Make one version and sell it cheaper than it is now. Make sure that it releases with up to date characters, stop adding all those old Poser characters, but rather a few top characters/animals etc. They need to fix the face room again, the idea behind it was very cool. Add cameras that you can control in the viewpoint and same with lights (know you can do it already, but its not working very smooth i think). Make it possible to customize viewport navigation, so you can use the same controls as in other software for navigating the viewport, like 3ds max, maya etc. Improve the cloth rooms (wont go into details, but basically more options.) Update the material library with more Superfly shaders. Make the character pivot point easier to work with, so you faster can pose and move stuff around the viewport. Particle effect system is needed as well. Obviously they dont have to do all the stuff at once, but they should aim towards it.

Assuming they reduced the cost of Poser, what they should do instead, is selling high quality characters and animals that works well in Poser and are designed to work with the face room and so forth. I don't think its extremely bad that Poser is not on the front with all the newest features etc. Because as new features or more features are added it also requires a lot more from the users, which again might scare some people away that are using Poser because its fairly easy to use compared to other applications.

And as the OP mentioned about ManuelbastionIlab for blender, it looks cool, but at least from what I have seen its not mind blowing and looking at the workspace for setting it up, I doubt its anywhere as easy as in Poser. And not to have a bash at Blender as I really like the idea behind it being free. But after trying it and having to restart it 10-15 times in 20 minutes due to the user interface being the most weird user interface I have ever tried in a program. Im fairly sure that using Manuelbas.Ilab is not a walk in the park, if you dont already know blender :D (But have to say that I havent tried it so, Its just a guess and I might very well be wrong.)

moogal posted at 11:16PM Wed, 01 November 2017 - #4317153

Ha ha... I was thinking it would just be any program capable of generating the original base mesh. I worked with a couple modelers before sub-division was ubiquitous, Modeler 3D (which evolved into Lightwave's Modeler) was especially basic. You selected your work "plane" in one of the three windows and added individual points in another window. Technically you could make anything this way (if you had the time and patience of course).
Here's how I look at it... Basic modeling functions are things like: Load/create primitive.. lathe/extrude.. boolean cutting/joining.. point/edge/face tools.. While bone creation, skinning, weighting... All of that is specific to rigging animated characters. Most programs of Poser's complexity have basic modeling tools. But if you simply want to know what constitutes a modeling program (vs. a sculpting program or general purpose program) take a look at one of the number of programs which only focus on modeling: http://www.wings3d.com/ https://www.inivis.com/ http://www.metaseq.net/en/

As said I think its hard to define, but I don't think what defines a modelling software is whether it can boolean or not for instance, those are extra features, but nothing that define it. Because even without those functionalities you would still be able to model very complex models. If a software is capable of creating and manipulate a 3d shape in 3d space it at least to me is a modelling software. However if you are unable to divide your mesh, like in poser you can use the morph brush to manipulate vertices but you cant add or remove them, which makes modelling extremely limited, to the point where I wouldn't call it a modelling software.

Yeah as you change fps it will "use" more frames during a second so the lag should change. So its most likely a key frame issues I think, But if you dont see the lag in the final animation then it might just be lag during the preview playback or did I misunderstand you?

Not sure what it is obviously :D Its difficult to say without seeing the animation. But things you can try:

1. Make sure that skip frames is not turned on.
2. Try to render out the animation (Image sequence) and combine it in a software that can do that to be sure that its actually lagging.
3. Check that its not a key frame issue, some wrong keys etc.

Changing the FPS from 24 to 30 shouldnt make a difference as far as I know, as its simply just how many frames a sec it uses. If its set to very low like 8 frames per second, the whole animation should look like stop motion, but since you say that its only at a given frame range it seems unlikely to me that it would be the problem. (But might be wrong) but you can easily test this if you render out the sequence and set the frame rate to 24 or 30 when combining them.

Think its difficult to define, but I would probably go with any software capable of manipulating a base mesh, with 3 or more vertices in 3D space and which can be manipulated even after being sub divided.

There are 3 small dots at the bottom of the library if you press those and choose the "tree" tab then you can resize them.

I have personally stopped using Firefly, making materials for it is a pain, just try to load some of Posers default materials setups, its insane to say the least. I don't think you will find any render engine out there which requires such a setup to make a material, and then it even look wrong :D, I doubt even in the movie industry they would use something like that. To me its the result of a render engine which is outdated with very little future. Even if you manage to make a decent material, in most cases it wont work correctly in different lighting which is a huge benefit with PBR materials as its physical accurate and also there are simply things in Firefly that you cant do, because its not part of the engine.

My guess is that a lot of people are very used to Firefly and therefore most of their content have Firefly materials, which doesn't always render well in Superfly, meaning you might experience noise, fireflies, color issues and also that its not as simple to convert the texture maps to Superfly. For instant you could take Superfly textures and plug them directly into blender, daz3d or any other PBR render out there and they will work. But there is no easy way to transfer a lot of math functions, reflection and refraction shaders and expect good results. No one is forced to render in Poser, blender is free and so is Daz, so even if you don't like working in those programs for whatever reason. you would only have to learn how to render in them.
PBR I think have a vey bright future ahead of it, Because computers get faster and faster, which does little for the quality of Firefly renders, except them being rendered faster, but so will PBR, but with a lot greater quality and it probably wont be to long before its almost real time rendering in the viewport (At least I hope, think :D).

"At GDC 2013, Epic Games released the Unreal Engine 4 "Infiltrator" demo, running 100% in-engine in real time, showing off UE4's high-end rendering features as well as the latest tools."

"Infiltrator" demo

I don't know how many vendors include PBR materials in their products, but I think its sad if people in the community refuse to support them due to that, because its not helping moving things forward. Most vendors work with other programs as well and are most likely somewhat up to date with what is going on besides in Poser and Daz3d. It would be a lot better if the community started moving towards PBR and demanding that, as it would make products they invest in last a hell lot longer, as it doesn't seems that the general setup of PBR materials are changing anytime soon, if ever.

But I fully understand the frustration that people might have with Superfly or Iray, because renders can take a long time, there might be varies issues like noise and so forth. My best advice is to make sure that objects used in the scene are actually PBR friendly, because wrong ones can cause problems and also a lot of issues can be fixed if you simply render your image larger (10-100%) than what you need and then resize it.

What you could do or try, if its possible in the scene you are using, is to render the image two times. First you render it normally with no lights in the windows. The second one you apply a 100% black material to all non lighting windows and turn off all lights in the scene. To the windows you apply a 100% white ambient light, that way you should be able to get a mask. Then you load both the images into PS or Gimp or whatever you prefer and use the mask to select the windows and then a apply the light here, with some glow (blur) and so on I think you can make it work. Maybe do it in several layers so you can have different intensity for the lights so it looks more like the image above.

I tried to vote, but I have to admit that I gave up after watching the first animation, having to download 21 stories and 11 animations individually in order to cast a vote is not a very user friendly way of getting people to vote, I think.

Have you considered maybe for the next contest, that people have to send in their animation in a certain format and when everyone have done that, you either combine them all into a single video with transitions between each animation showing the name of the artist and animation entry name or something and then upload it to youtube and make an inline video on your site, that way people could just play that. Otherwise you could make them as individual files but again as video you can play directly on the site and not something you have to download.

And pretty much the same for the stories, make it so they can be read online, I really think that would get more people to vote and also I guess people have spend a lot of time making these things, so its a bit of a shame to see them being presented in such a bad way I think. Just my opinion, but anyway I wish everyone good luck in winning :D

Not 100% sure, but I think you are right about the sue thing. As the company logo is a trademark and someone using it in a way that the company wouldn't like it to would probably piss them off. Imagine that someone made a commercial image for fun with the text "All criminals drive Ford" and then threw in the Ford logo and one of their cars made in 3D. Its probably not the image that Ford would like to send to people. So pretty sure that its best to keep away from that, unless you got permission. But as you say, it depends on what country you live in, for instant in China I think you can copy whatever you like to the point where there is hardly any difference. You might get sued by the company, but they will most likely loose.