Quote - Try Vue, instead ;)
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/wildspace/characters1realism.jpg

Well, I'd love to, but my budget won't allow it for the moment. Kerkythea 's price is quite appealing, and its capabilities even more so. It's just a question of getting a few answers sorted...

I am saving up for Vue... it's my next major software investment. Which renderer does it use?

Getting close to publishing - just working on a mainsheet that will sorta act like it should. The modeling is just about done - just gotta get the behaviour done in Poser. I'll keep you posted.

Hi BagginsBill,
Thanks so much for your patience with me on this!

I've actually posted to the Kerkythea forum as well, and Fletch from the KT team indicated that I needed to put the clip map (transmap) in the refraction box instead of the clip box. He didn't indicate any other settings, so I'm having a bit of a play to see how I can get it to work. I'm rendering on my desktop whilst answering you on the laptop, so there'll be no processor interruptions. At this point, I've got the following settings in the Material Editor for the hair material:
Reflectance:
..Diffuse--hair texture bitmap
..Specular Attentuation--Frsnel
..Shininess--0.100

Transmittance:
..Refraction--clip (transmap) bitmap
..Index of--0.200
..Transmitted Attentuation--Cosine
..Transmitted shininess--128.00

All other settings in the material editor were left at default.

For render settings, I used:
..06. Photon Map - Medium + AA 0.3
The image I got is:

I'll keep you posted how I go...

Sheesh, I have learned so much about the whole rendering process these past few days! Thank you, all of you for your brilliant input! Copied and read and re-read and studied and researched...

The question begs asking: am I the only Poser / Daz Studio user that might be looking at an alternative renderer beside POVRay/Poseray? When I see what is available for Kerkythea in terms of settings and like that, the idea of placing my figures into these settings is incredibly enticing. There is no question most of the figure renders beautifully - the lights are as good (if not better) as what I'm able to in Poser, so the skin is quite on par with what I've done in Firefly.

About the only issue is with transmapped objects requiring some sort of anti-aliasing to look right, like hair. Whilst there are a fair few clothing props that use this too, the level of detail is no-where near that of hair.

So, is it more reasonable to go with a different hair construct, as in particles? Or is there a technique that I've missed in Kerkythea that will give me the results I want? IOW, when one sets antialiasing in Kerkythea, is it for every object in the scene, or can it be set for just a specific material?

Quote - That's not too different from what I went through with trying to get Cinema 4D imported content materials to act in the ballpark of Poser's native shading.  I didn't take it all that far, basically to the point of "OK".

Docs on the Kerkythea material editor (in case you had not found these already):
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=fileinfo&id=49

I think you may find that there aren't all that many 1:1 correlations between Firefly and Kerkythea.

Accurately put. I've only just got my head around some of the material room concepts in Poser, and none of this appears to apply in Kerkythea. Coming as I am from Blender as well (and the material [F5] editing and assigning methods there are as different to Poser as Kerkythea), you can colour me totally confused...

This has all served to give me a better understanding of Poser's way of generating an image. I didn't realize until just today, for instance, that when you tick "Smooth Polygons", it actually changes the geometry. I've had to untick that option on props I created in Blender and imported into Poser, as it gave the prop a strange bulbous shape - and ticked is on by default when you import obj files.

Might go post over on the Kerkythea forum and ask the experts if the developers of this renderer had any solutions for organic modelers with regard to SSS and polygon smoothing... I'll have a good read of the material editor guide first, tho....

Wow, what a great explanation of the whole process of rendering and anti-aliasing. I'm a self-confessed newbie, so a lot of these concepts are still a bit nebulous - hence the unnecessarily long render times

Quote - It is a very capable renderer. It supports global illumination, caustics, soft shadows, IES lights, lots of neat stuff in the lighting model. It has a pretty sophisticated material model, too.

I've only played with it a tiny bit. I don't yet know how to import Poser figures and such. I've only played with the built-in primitive shapes. RobynsVeil is way ahead of me on this.

"Way ahead" may be a bit of an overstatement. Actually, what I have done is what all of us probably do with new software: try it before reading the instructions. So, importing Poser figures was a bit of an issue, because the orientation is different.
Really Quite easy to use - simply export your model as a Wavefront .obj, making sure all your texture files (including bump and transmaps) are in the same folder as the obj file, and then just open the file in Kerkythea - it reads it natively. You actually have to turn your object 90 degrees on the x-axis for it to import properly. You can turn it once you get it into your scene, but it's easier to turn it in Poser first before you do the export to .obj, since Vicky has so many body parts.
Skin is rendered beautifully - as is any other texture. The only dramas I've run across is transmapped stuff, but only because I've never understood the magic. (I believe eyelashes also work on the same principle...)

Quote -
One thing I'm not clear on is how/if it does polygon smoothing. For example, when you load the built-in library sphere, it is very low poly. You can see this on the edges. I'm not sure that it has micro-polygon smoothing built in. Something to think about.

But what is very exciting is how it handles light! This is the number one reason to consider using it instead of Poser's renderer. Check out some of the gallery images on the site. The interiors really show off the sophisticated lighting model.

Strangely, there doesn't seem to be a single human figure rendered in their gallery. Maybe we can correct that? :)

They do recommend Daz and Poser figures on their forums. Since most of the Kerkythea users seem to come from Sketchup (architectural) and Blender (some Silo as well), the objects of render are more scenes with inorganic matter. Subsurface scattering and IBL as well as polygon smoothing seem more an organic model thing, perhaps... I don't know. 

All that input deserves an update - modeling furiously away, and YOU will be the first to see the fruits of my labour. No, svdl, my little sloop won't ever be of the quality you've shown. I'd have to start from scratch to do that. And, as you suggest, perhaps Blender doesn't offer an environment where I can be as accurate in my design as you were. It's all I can afford, though. I'm poor. I do like what's out there for free, and I want to take full advantage of it.

Whilst my little sailboat may not be an engineering marvel, it is full of whimsy and it'll all work in Poser and Daz Studio and who knows, someone might find it worth-while.

Les... thanks again for the well-documented .cr2 - very easy to follow what you did, and what I need to do. Just trying to get the block and tackle looking right and we're laughin'....

Quote - I've run into a similar problem when doing my freebie sailing boat.
And I've solved it. It takes quite a few bones, "illegitimate" welds and Point-At behaviors.
You're welcome to download my boat from freestuff and inspect the .CR2 file to see how it's done.

Aww, jeez, svdl... just had a look at your .obj in Blender: your modeling is superb! Nothing like looking at a master's work to point out I've still a long way to go. Your mesh is so tight, so clean: incredibly nice. I'll get there, but it'll be a while yet.

Looking at the .cr2 and jeez, you guys are fast! You've solved it, looks like, and thanks heaps for that! Going to do a bit more modeling tonight and have my trusty tester make sure there are no show-stoppers and another little sailboats sails into the freebie harbour...

Thanks again, svdl and lesbentley! You're legends....

Thanks IsaoShi and pakled for your input. Yes, the challenge is there, no question. I've been looking at props to see if any have elastic properties - which I could then apply to those sheets, but "not found" has been the outcome of that research.
Bones, eh? Never thought of barking up that tree. I suppose it would give me the ability to give the sheet an origin point and an insertion point, just like what bones do... that might be the answer. I'll have a look at some of the tutorials and get back to ya.... thanks for the pointer, pakled. Had no idea where to look!

Hi Haloedrain - thanks so much for considering my little problem. The only reason I know about all this nautical stuff is I used to sail with friends a lot and became quite the enthusiast, and they got tired of hearing: "Oh, you you please just throw me the thingie..."

Quote - ... is there a way to link a morph to another morph?  I.e., you have a morph for the boom

I've actually imported the hull obj into Poser 7 as a separate entity to the boom/sail obj group. The main reason I did that is because I want to be able to set Smooth Polygons on for the hull but not for the boom and rigging, because it renders weird. However, this allowed me to set how I want the boom to behave (swing back and forth) using the joint editor and even set limits and removed xtrans, ytrans, ztrans and xrotate, zrotate by opening the .pp2 and editing out those features.
I had to parent the boom/sail assembly first to the hull so that when the vessel heeled over (tipped to one side) - as they do when the sails fill and draw - the boom/sail group would tip in the same direction.
So, this is the background against which I'm going to be doing those morph thingies with the mainsheet. The boom swings as the user twiddles the yrotate (renamed "Swing", since that's kinda what it does - it swings out, right?)

Quote - ... one for the lengthening rope, and changing the boom morph also changes the rope morph...

Since the boom just swings on the y-axis - limits set to -30 - I suppose the morphs would have to somehow be associated to some defined point on the boom, perhaps? I guess I need to get a grasp on how to create prop morphs for Poser - the modeling in Blender would be the easy part! (Geez, I do like Blender... it's alway so hard to go from Blender when everything is so intuitive and quick - to Poser, where just moving around the workspace is so awkward... :S...)

Thanks again, Haloedrain... :)

Quote - ... Also I want to purchase Vue 6.5 Infinite and Poser 7. Does Blender support this two or better yet does these two support Blender?

I create content (3D models) in Blender 3D, export them to Wavefront obj files, which import nicely into Poser 7, no dramas. Here's a sailboat model I put together in Blender - it's not done yet, but I kinda wanted to check the size and all:

...had no problem bringing it into Poser 7.

Poser 7 does not read .blend files, nor does Blender read .pz3 files, but both handle .obj files fine.
Don't have Vue 6.5 so I can't say anything about that....

Quote - what you might try  is asign a polygon form to the hair in blender , i think it will then export that too.

I did export it - the base from which the particles emitted, you mean? I made it visible by selecting mesh in the Particles dialog, so it is visible, but in Poser it just shows up as a green mass, no detail.

Thanks, tho....

That's what I was afraid of...
Buggah.

Thanks for that, nRuddock... guess it's back to the drawing board, hey?

...do you think I should be posting this to the Poser forums, maybe? I hate cross-posting, but now that I've kinda reviewed the problem, it seems that Blender exported my particles just fine - otherwise I wouldn't be able to see them in the preview, would I? - but it won't render.Anyone have any idea up which tree I should be barking?

Cheers,
Robyn

Quote - I think it's a great idea :) I'll add it to the list, and see what we can do. If there are enough people who would use the forum, we could do it. ;)

FantASTIC... thanks for considering it. If there is a poll or voting thingie, please let me know so that I can put my vote in - thanks again!