a light with IBL will not cast shadows, as there is actually no point from which the light is coming from within 3d space, you will not get shadows, turning on AO on a lightsource will create shadows in areas where the rays cast from the light bounce of surfaces close together, the close the surfaces, the darker it becomes.

I was not saying postwork sucks at all, thats half the problem with poeple nowadays, they dont READ what you write. I said that images with large amounts of postwork in another program should be posted in the MIXED MEDIUM gallery, as thats what these images are, poser bases with photoshop art on top.

I never knew that this was something discussed all the time, not been a frequent forum visitor (or not frequent enough) I've never seen a thread on this before. oh well. the reason I got so peeved about it was not actually the hot 20 itself, but more the comments thing, I search through the poser gallery nearly everyday, until I've seen the thumb of every new image since the last time I visited. now I comment on 3 type of images, those that are fantastic (and give them a vote), those by new people to poser, and images that are having trouble getting comments. comments do a huge thing for someone struggling with getting to grips with poser. and also, all these people who comment and say "this is the best image ever!" etc etc, if its so cool, VOTE FOR IT!! its not that hard, you click the vote button, and a little window pops up. if I think an image is great, I click the vote button, then write a comment.. oh well.. blah blah blah!

easy as pie! just like when you use any special effect with firefly, it uses a blender method of creating the effect, or splatter method (whichever explains it better for you!) what you need to do is tell firefly that you would like it to look at all the pixels around the area, and change the colour appropriately! how is this done you say? easy and sloooooooowly! under your ADVANCED render settings you will notice a nice slider bar called Pixel Samples. the number set within this slider determines how many pixels AROUND the pixel that is currently being rendered firefly will look at before deciding the end colour of the pixel it is working on! WHAT THE??? simply put, if you want less grainy effects (gather, DOF, ray-trace sharp shadows) you need to increase the pixel samples so that the pixels that have not had the effect placed on them (due to the grain method) will be effected by enough of the pixels that HAVE had the effect on them. ok that wasnt too simple.... poser sets it to 3 as default and ups it to 5 on production quality. For effects such as these, set it to 8-12 or higher if your computer can handle it. the higher you set it, the smoother the image will appear, but set it too high, and you will lose detail! hope this is not only understandable, but most importantly helpful LOL

were you using IBL or AO? ambient occlusion is a big culprit of this "effect" easy way to fix it is to up the pixel samples to above 10 (grreatly reducing rendering time though)

excellent, I see where your going with this! the only thing I can see with the general preferences idea is that poser will have loaded James when you create the preffered state, and therefore his textures will be stored into memory, and I assume that the loaded textures will be stored with the prefered state. I think this, plus the temporarily removing James from the geometry folder will work! thanks alot everyone, alot of help! how about the other thing? can you remove textures from Poser Memory when they are no longer needed? sometimes I go through the entire uzilite collection, plus a fair few other clothing options when deciding on a look for an image, each one loads there textures into memory, and they stay there even when you delete the object using them (in my opinion this is a big oversight by Curious Labs, it SHOULD look at the associated textures the object uses, check to ensure that no other object is using them, and clear them from memory if there not). theres also that stupid thing about it loading two of the same texture into memory from the same path. I have done some tests on memory use of this problem, and it does indeed load the texture into memory twice before rendering. just like it loads unused textures into memory!! HOW STUPID IS THAT!

oh no, poser 5 also creates many tmp files (it will only remove them if you dont save, it will keep the tmp files if you save the scene with the same dynamics, otherwise if it didnt, when you re-loaded the scene you would have to re-run the dynamics. Hope that clears things up!

the "diamonds" also happen with reflections, just standard raytraced ones on extremely reflective surfaces! smoothed or not. bloody annoying, and stopping me from using reflective surfaces!

My Computer AMD Athlon 2400+ (1.8ghz) 768MB dual DDR RAM Geforce 2 MX 64MB (my lordy! thats old) Windows XP sp2 I keep task manager running ever since I heard of this memory problem, and Poser 6 generally sits at 500Mb commit, and ups to over 800Mb commit while rendering, but always drops to the 500-600Mb commit mark when rendering stops. For me the only problem with P6 I have is the EXTREME interface slow down compared to Poser 5, it's never crashed on me (i've had it cancel the render by itself) My rendering settings : Shadows : yes Texture Filter : No RayTrace : yes Raytrace Bounces : 6 Min Shading Rate : 0.00 Pixel Samples : 10 Max Texture Size : 4096 Max Bucket Size : 64 Min Displacement Bounds : 0.00 Smooth Polygons : Yes Use Displacement : Yes Post Filter Size : 2 Post Filter Type : Sync I always use IBL and AO at the moment (cause there new!) the most complex scene I have worked on so far is V3, C4U clothes, over 15 pieces of furniature, a room with windows and doors modelled, 90% of stuff has textures. V3 has one of my famous overly-complex node setups on her. has anyone considered that the problem that might be occoring (and why some are not effected) is due to windows, and in particular, the updates? I have not updated my windows for over 3 months (because everything works great, and I always say, "if it aint broke, dont fix it!)

Nvidia NV43 (6600 and up) can actually do ray-tracing in realtime, as well as displacement mapping, bump mapping and depth of field. I can whip these shaders up in Nvidia FX composer in about 10 minutes for each one, so applying them to the core coding of the openGL section of code wouldnt have been too hard. that said, I dont think its needed, I just like the fact that when viewing the textures in the document window preview it actually runs smoothly! it would have been nice to be able to up the texture size that the preview uses to decrease the blockyness and why did they go for OpenGL? DirectX 9c has much cooler features, and runs much better on ATI cards, only NVIDIA holds the OpenGL crown (and is the only reason OpenGL is still around!)

what file format did you save the image in? try saving as TIF format

IBL hints and tips from my experience so far! IBL is great, but the default setup presumes too much that you want to use it with only that one light (I cant see any other reason why the settings default like this) to get more colour from the IBL, attach the image_map to the diffure node also, but make the diffuse colour a medium grey. intensity is set at 1, for 2-3 additions lights in the scene I set this to around .2 (depending on the brightness of the image I am using for IBL) next is IBL contrast, the default is 3, from my experience this is more of a personal preference option, decreasing it (ALOT) will make the light less aggressive, but less lighting detail from the IBL. Up the image resolution a little (256 is one blocky image) all other lights in your scene should be quite dark, the IBL (with AO on) will fill the scene with light, so extra lights are additions, only additions well, I know that made no sense! I will try and explain anything in my wierd wacky way, just ask!

HAHA stupid smegging poser 6 shadow catcher crap! I finally got it working, it seems that the shadow catcher only works for the first light in the scene (how totally and utterly useless! talk about ruining what could have been a fantastic option!

did you turn on the keep textures in memory option for your animation? its supposed to mean that it does re-load the textures before each frame, this should decrease animation render time by quite a bit from the painful pull-your-hair-out-slower-than-a-snail render times in P5

overall, Im glad (it was actually a gift so yeah) I think CL jumped the gun releasing this to get sales or something (I hope so, because if not, then they have no excuse for the following!) problems that should never have gotten to release : IBL default setup is 90% idioticly bright! come on now, if your going to make this "basic" material room with these special buttons, make sure that the end result is at least acceptable! Fast scatter default colours are generic, and so totally off for your average 3rd party texture, if they had thought it through, they would have made it analyse the general colour of the texture, and then modify this according to the parameter its used for (so I dont have to do it myself LOL) Shadow catcher boggles the mind! there is no actual help or documentation on this other than "this will make the object only render the shadow on the object not the object itself" WELL DUH! problem is that it doesnt tell you how to actually get it to RENDER THE BLOODY SHADOW!! i've been working with this option for nearly 4 hours now, I have 1 light casting a shadow (which is perfectly visible on the surface without shadow catcher enabled, turn it on, NO SHADOW stupid piece-o-c..... yes.. calm down other silly things so-called improved cloth and hair room : yes, both have improvements, but perhaps when they thought of what to improve, they asked someone who has never extensively used these areas! infinite hair collision is still the fundemental, lets-not-use-that-feature problem, cloth still goes absolutely haywire if caught between to collidable surfaces! (GOD, I hoped and prayed and hoped and prayed some more this was fixed in P6, I was some what dissapointed!) oh, and its more of a memory junky than ever, thank the lord for my smeg-loads of RAM! well, enough blabbering!