Well mine was supposed to be an actual serial killer so I guess I am excused... ;)

Anyone interested in starting a separate thread about lighting setups for SuperFly? At least for me, this is something I need to get correct before I even start on the materials.

Ok, so here comes my first Superfly render.

No guarantee at all of having done everything correctly!

For the lighting, I used this technique: RDNA Forum Post. I am using the Reality dome as suggested (it is huge).

I used this free HDRI image (Creative Commons license, they like you to spread the link): HDRI Field

I had loaded one of the HDRVFX lighting sets that come with Poser. Later on, tests showed that the IBL light actually does nothing in Superfly. But the specular only (spotlight) seems to have some effect. I think most of the light in the scene comes from the HDRI background on the Emissive node though. So far, I have only managed to get spotlights and Area lights to show up in Superfly at all.

For the ground, I used the Construct (new P11 Ground/Sky object). I set the sky part to transparent, and scaled down the whole thing to meet the HDRI background around horizon level. The ground is Surface of the Woods by ShaaraMuse3D here at Renderosity. I placed a rock and a couple of ferns (also by ShaaraMuse3D) to mask the transition. I also lowered the Diffuse value on them to make them blend in. So just using Firefly shaders.

The female figure is Pauline. I created a quick V4-morph (so that she can start wearing my dynamic clothing) and put her in my Dynamic Slip Dress. Created a couple of new dynamic cloth groups on the fly to transition the skirt into a more flowy drape while keeping the top part more solid. The gun is from Powerage's Weapon Collection and the hair is BO Pixie Cut. I haven't created new hair shaders yet so it was best to go with something short. M4 in the background is wearing an upcoming product. No particular cloth shaders, just old Firefly ones.

I would like to add more windy hair and wind on the dress for the next render. Perhaps some blood on the dress. And M4 should be carrying her shoes by the straps - looks like they left the party early for some reason... ;)

You should be able to see the back face also of a mesh by (in Poser) going to Render Settings >> Preview, unclick "Remove Backfacing Polys'. Alternatively you can change this setting per object in the Parameter window, Properties tab. If the issue is that the normals are reversed, those polygons should now be visible. That information should help you decide what to do next.

If you need to use a single mesh which will also show the reverse side (common with Dynamic clothing), a tip is to test your FireFly materials with 'Normals Forward' turned on (in the root shader). Many materials will look better with this enabled when the back side is visible.

Thanks BB! (I started using Poser with Poser 8 myself).

Yeah, we are going to see a lot of renders based on FireFly materials to start with. That could give the wrong impression of what SuperFly is capable of.

I am going to have fun learning PBR, that's for sure. Something very good about that is it means gaining transferable skills, not only for Blender Cycles, but learning to texture for PBR in general. I am a lucky owner of 3D Coat also and they recently implemented PBR. I can see myself spending plenty of time in both 3DCoat and Blender in the near future. Quixel and Substance Painter also look promising (and reasonably priced), but I won't have time for everything at once. Now, if someone could just invent a time stretching device, which is the software I actually need most of all... :P

Thank you!

By the way, FireFly was apparently introduced in Poser 5. Way before my time as a Poser user. Does anyone know what was used for rendering before then? Or was there no render engine in Poser before Poser 5?

Thank you seachnasaigh! That looks very simple and elegant. I like that. So that is what I will go with to start with at least. :D

Sorry to hear that, bagginsbill. I'll be sure to check the forums over at RDNA also.

Nice work btw, seachnasaigh!

Any tips on converting the EZ skin shader? I haven't gone through my library of SSS shaders from commercial figures and tested those in SuperFly yet - but I have been using EZ Skin in PP 2014 to convert Poser 8 style skin shaders to SSS. So now I need to figure out how to adapt skin shaders to SuperFly and keep or add SSS.

My main direction here is that I would like to eventually create 'rendered in SuperFly' promos to go with the SuperFly adapted clothing materials I would like to include in upcoming products. So I am looking to convert skin, hair, clothing and shoe materials (and textures if necessary) mostly.

Yeah, to get professional looking results could take a while. I was reading up a bit on PBR yesterday, trying to find out what it actually means. It turns out that texturing is treated a bit differently. It all seems very scientific and a bit daunting to beginners. But at the same time very powerful and a way to get good results long term. Specifically it is a standard that if implemented correctly is supposed to give consistent results across platforms and render engines using PBR. Also, it seems that even Blender Cycles is not exclusively PBR, but 'supports' PBR. I am guessing it depends on what nodes you use.

So no wonder many skin material setups created for FireFly are not working correctly in SuperFly. I tried EZ Skin and it seems to give that whiteout effect with the basic P11 lighting where some simple clothing textures on the other hand, turned out ok. Correct me if I am wrong. So one thing we definitely need is a good skin shader for SuperFly, one that we can plug all our old skin textures into. That should take us a long way actually!

Got some interesting links though (none of these are specifically for SuperFly if course, but should prove an interesting read nevertheless):

5 Tips for Better Materials | Blender Guru

Realistic shaders tutorial in Blender and Cycles

Readings on physically based rendering

PBR In Practice | Marmoset

PBR Texture Conversion | Marmoset

Art Is A Verb - "Physically Based Next-gen Texturing for Artists" by Andrew Maximov

Some of this is highly technical and I anticipate that it will take some time before I produce decent renders and/or SuperFly materials for my products. It depends a bit on what supporting tools and assets will come out from either other vendors or from SM. So we will see.

I do believe that Dimension3D has released a tutorial here at Renderosity though (I hope it is ok that I post a marketplace link);

Introduction to SuperFly

Definitely getting that one soon, thanks D3D! Edit: Make that NOW lol.

Yeah, he is not out yet, is he? Hopefully soon! But I'd rather SM not rush it and finish him properly to be honest. That is worth the wait.

Poser 11 has only been out for a few days. But not only that, there was something like a week or less between the annoucement of the launch date and the actual launch. Add to that the fact that it will take people time to upgrade and then time to learn the new stuff (most Poser users and content creators were not in the beta). So people need to be patient. Superfly is a whole new era with new skillls to be learned. I am sure we will start to see a lot of renders soon!

I personally am excited about it, because I am learning Blender anyway. That means that if I learn to use Cycles better, I should be able to transfer some of that knowledge over to SuperFly, and vice versa. Nifty!

@moriador:

A tip: I just attended the Poser new features webinar. They explained how to get your library to behave similarly to the external one. Undock it, disable drag-docking - and then there is an icon on the top right that looks like a stack of books (next to the log icon) that lets you hide and unhide the library. :)

Downloading!

@3dcheapskate: I will have to go back and test this a bit more to provide an accurate answer. Good thing that you guys are bringing this up! :)

@moriador: Thank you for your custom so far! I have a few in the Grab Bag today that you might not own so if you do shop today you might get lucky. ;)

My apologies to 'lucky' DS users concerning Poser only Grab Bag items... not much to do about that. But then I am sure there are DS only items in the draw as well.

Hi!

I have one or two commercial products in the marketplace with dynamic headpieces, and I have been running into this problem on both V4 and M4 while creating. Not only right next to the eybrows, but further up on the forehead.

Unchecking eyebrow collision doesn't always fix the problem for me. But simulating, and then putting the stray vertices back into the default dynamic group always seems to fix the problem without any visible loss of quality. I find resaving it like this to be the best way for a commercial product, because that way the end user hopefully doesn't have to do anything on their end.

I have done some extensive testing on M4, and there I found that the problem appears when the Hip actor is rotated in certain directions in the end pose. Weird, isn't it?

I have never had this problem with Dawn, V5 or V6 so it has something to do with how the earlier figures are made.

My own products have all been tested and fixed of course, but you never know, things can turn upp with odd poses that wold not happen otherwise, So it is good for everyone to know about the fixes!