Modo is mainly a polygon modeller and renderer. For everything else you can get by if you're only doing simple projects but for anything complex you will need additional tools. Sculpting for example is not something you can do beyond a certain level of quality in Modo and you need ZB or 3DCoat or something similar. The same applies to things like character animation, dynamics, texturing etc.

For free, the highest rez images you can get are to be found at the sIBL site:

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

Dosch has a bunch of high quality sets but they aren't cheap:

http://www.doschdesign.com/products/hdri

You can also try searching for 'hdri' in google image search.

Razer Deathadder or Logitech G7. Former if you like light mice you can flick around, latter if you like a heavy mouse you can control with your whole hand. Both are excellent quality and great for long hours of use.

Personally I like Topaz Simplify eg:

To be fair a GPU based system + Octane/Redshift would be considerably more cost effective then any CPU solution you could use. 1 single 780TI 6GB ($800) could easily replace that entire farm and use much less power, cooling and money.

Nah, just curious.

Quote - Poser converts all textures to tiled mip mapped OpenEXR files

Half or Full float ?

Nice farm ! Personally I would just throw 1 GPU at that render but even I gotta admit that this is a beastly setup :)

Oh and the above renders are done with Redshift, clocking in at around 15 sec each.

Yeah sIBL is great, this is with one of my fav sets Tokyo Big Sight:

Anyone considering upgrading should take a look at this thread first:

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=40385

Quote - - raytrace bounces is too low, in your render settings rays are cut off after 5 bounces. Nature uses infinite bounces. Pump up the volume. Use the D3D Render Firefly script to discriminate between reflection bounces and IDL bounces.

* - irradiance caching is too low, only 30% of the area is re-emitting light from calculations, the rest is guessed. Decent values for high end quality renders should be no less than 80, lower values are for testing purposes. Values over 90 are overkill and add more to the render time than to the quality. So does switching off the cashing completely.*

* - IDL quality is too low. This parameter is to be used to limit the artifacts when you want decent results with relatively low irradiance caching settings. Having them both at a low value is asking for reduced quality results. It's in the manual.*

 
If high render settings is the 'solution' you may as well use lux. The idea here is to see how far you can get with fast renders under ordinary settings. It's in the first post: "Yes they aren't particularly high or optimized but they render fast (about 30-40s) We could pump them up to get rid of some of these artifacts (but not all) or disable IC altogether and do a really long render... but is there a better way ?"

Quote - - and in addition: do not put direct lights which an (inverse) quadratic falloff too close to any surface, or you will face scattering artifacts (since the falloff formula will make the lighting levels too high close to the lights, and IDL makes the surfaces reflect that.)

'Scattering artifacts' are a direct result of people trying to push more light into dark scenes with super bright sources (500%, 700% etc) The problem is CG lighting doesn't always work like real world lighting, not in Poser anyway, so all you get is blown out areas near the light and dark areas everywhere else. There are better ways to do the same thing.

Quote - Hope I didn't spoil the fun of this thread too much. Sorry for that.

Not at all :)

Quote - Re glowing couch back against wall - IDL reflection is wrong in Poser. Use D3D dialog to decrease IDL intensity to .65.

I didn't know that. Could you elaborate on what the problem is ?

Yes, that was the plan :) I'll post more examples in the next few days (more complex, 'real world' ones) and try to answer any questions. After that i'll bundle it all into a PDF and make it available for download.

So what can we do to fix all this ? Well one interesting thing to note here is that direct light (the kind you get from traditional spot, point and infinite lights) is essentially artifact free. If you point one of these at a mesh and render you will mostly get a nice clean result. It's when light starts bouncing around that you run into problems. Is there any way we can use this to our advantage ? Well we can certainly try :)

Here is the original scene (without the envsphere) with a 'helper' light placed facing the opening in the scene. The light has low intensity (30%) a slight blue color and raytraced shadows with max blurriness. As can be seen most of the artifacts have vanished ! The reason for this is that in the original render, most of the light was bounced from IDL (which is artifact prone) but now most of the light is from direct lights (the Sun and the Helper)

And the same scene with the helper and the envsphere (with the saturation/value turned down a bit) :

The first thing that comes to mind here is, "hey maybe the problem is that we are rendering our scene in the middle of nowhere. If we had a proper environment, the lighting would be much better..." So, here is the same render but with an envsphere (from BB.) The lighting is now better although very blue. BTW that's another common problem that arises because most 360 pics like this have huge skies and that turns everything blue-ish. But this is fixable by editing the pic or finding different ones. A bigger problem is that while the artifacts are less, they haven't gone entirely. There are also some new artifacts in a few places like those bright splotches at the small bump in the floor.

What else can we try ? Read on...