Quote - no, that's incorrect. activation of GI obviates the need for the "gather" node, which may have been added (and tested, unlike GI) in order for users to have a more fully documented means of faking radiosity.

Oh. Hmmm. Going to have to take a look at this, then . . . I appreciate the tip.

Quote - they may be able to do it. perhaps it would help them if ya told 'em why ya wanted all surfaces to have the "gather" node.

will do-- the gather node enables the Global illumination solution . . . eg a surface with a gather node "looks" to the scene for ambient light, not just to the identified light sources. Firefly doesn't have the world's fastest GI solutions but its good enough, and less work than hauling the scene into some other app.

One thing to consider is that he achieves his "ultra-realism" by simulating a low quality "snapshot". When people render at super high resolutions, they actually make the realism problem much harder for themselves. There's a grainy effect, and some fogging, plus the "in-your-face cheapo flash hard shadows" -- these artifacts read as "snapshot" to our eyes.

thanks . . . very helpful!

Something giant, something that conveys the "vastness of space and time." The Star Wars universe was very small and cozy, kinda like a Western . . . yes, there's a giant desert out there, but there's only one saloon in town.

The only film which ever really made me feel that was the original "Alien". Being a kid, seeing that in 1979 or so . . . wow. Scared the heck out of us, but the sense of mystery was even better than the scare factor.

Two books that have the "vibe" to them:

"Rendezvous with Rama" -- Strangely, Arthur C. Clarke hasn't been filmed since 2001 (though "Independance Day" did owe something to "Childhood's End")

Gregory Benford-- "Against the Sea of Suns" would be a good example, though there are many more.

Quote - Hmm,  let me see next gen games for the new xbox 360 are now supporting figures with 20k poly counts.  That's an increase of 16k from the usual 4k .  So if the gaming industry has decided to up the poly count,  where does that leave us here in the poserverse.  Are we behind the times with our 20k to 90k figures?

These poly counts are getting up there, but the textures are tiny by Poser standards. Moreover, Poser's geometries aren't static -- they've got morphs attached to them . . .  in general, it seems to be the texture handling that slows Poser to a crawl . . . this is something that the game coders are way ahead on .  ..

Ah, I see, I added "the wrong one" Thank you Dizzi!

Poser has the problem of backwards compatibility with the most primitive geometry engine one can imagine. That's what you're paying for-- for people to continue to develop for all those gigabytes of stuff you own. Poser has the unique problem of a large user base, heavily invested in massive geometries . . . sitting on an architecture which dates back to the 1980s. There's no question that newer architectures are more powerful-- but where do you find the oodles of content for them? You don't . . . Someday, someone is going to figure out how to do smart decimation of the high poly Poser characters, rendering their detail to normal and displacement maps, so that we can work with low poly, low memory impact models, and still render beautiful stuff. That's the way zBrush does it-- but how to back out all the zillions of man years of work in Poser characters? No easy way, not anytime soon

Can't blame 'Rosity for being worried. Myself, I'd be very curious to see a government prosecution on an Aiko scene--  would be fascinating, since she's arguably not any age at all-- she's a stylized human, not even an image of what a real human could be.

The problem for a business is that while Croc would find this interesting from a legal perspective, its not so "interesting" if you're the guy with the $100K legal bill.

And counting on a US Attorney to be "understanding" of expression in new media is a pretty thin reed, especially when you could be brought into Court in pretty much any jurisdiction.

Quote - I'm told that the only thing that effects the speed of your render is the processor speed... can anyone confirm this? The reason for asking is that I am going to buy a dual display video card and I have the option of getting a REALY good one. I don’t use my art computer for gaming so I don’t want to waste money with a no use up grade its just for Poser 5 and Photoshop 7.0.... any help is welcome even speculation!

It is true that the video card does not speed up the render. Its also true that only more recent versions of Poser have supported hardware acclerated OpenGL -- however, they do so quite well. The OpenGL view of SimonG2 is extremely good-- and its realtime!  As much of my work is rotoscoped (eg, using Poser to create source for "toon-type" material, the OpenGL view is often good enough for me, and its very, very fast.

Also, note that the video card is doing the drawing for Photoshop.  . . although its a 2D application, it does depend on the video card to write to the screen (this is a direct function call, not OpenGL or DirectX) Cheap cards tend to have poor 2D performance.

Long and the short of it: Good video cards are so inexpensive that it doesn't make sense to skimp here-- $75 is the difference between mediocre and pretty darn good.

Attached Link: http://www.freeverse.com/comiclife/

There's nothing to stop you doing it all in Photoshop, though. You create your document, of the appropriate size (eg for a 2 page spread, its 11 inches high by 17 inches wide). You then use Photoshop's "Place" command to bring external files into this new document.

Depends what kind of AVI it is. AVI and MOV are just "wrappers" for content, which can be compressed with different codecs. If your Mac can read it, you can transcode AVI to MOV using iMovie . . . I don't use Quicktime on the PC, but that should work as well-- you mentioned "free" and I don't know whether you have to pony up the $29 for Quicktime Pro to do the conversion . . .

you have no (or in post 6) a bad environment-- reflective surfaces have to have something to reflect in order to look right. Try giving yourself a sky dome with a mapped photo. By "bad environment" I mean that the distribution of light, shadow and color isn't very natural-- making it a less good choice as a reflection map. Unless your balls are highly polished ball bearings, they're also too reflective . . . give them a little anisotropy, something to reflect, and they'll be fine. Looking at the link to the discussion on the Maxon board, most of the points made there apply here, too. One good one is about turning down specular. Specular is really just a "fake" form of blurred reflections . . . realworld materials don't have a separate specular and reflective components, specular is more like the scattered component of reflection. . . so for realism, you want to crank specular down if you've got reflection high. simple solution: HDRI/skydome illumination reflection with Yafray makes all metals look good. Also, chrome reads better as an isolated element-- a chrome bumper on a car meets a painted surface, which is less reflective. When you fill your secen with reflective elements, it stops looking like anything other than early nineties raytracing experiments. . .mix very reflective things with other things that are not as reflective. Works better.

Its close. Hold it next to a photo of real person to see what needs improvement. I agree with earlier comments-- these are just additional observations. 1) Sclera (whites of the eyes) are too perfectly white, and too dry. Look at specularity in real photos as a reference-- very different. 2) Skin is "clay-y" 3) Geometry and pose are too perfectly symettrical. A little unilateral curl to the lip, a slightly raised eyebrow. . .anything to break up that deadly "mirror face". Skin pigmentation is a great way of doing this. . .some freckles, a little mole, even . . 4) Hair looks good, but shadow cast by the hair does not. . .too hard. 5) overall exposure has that lower contrast "clipped" look characteristic of CG. Compare with real world photos; highlights are brighter, shadows are darker, except in very low key indoor ambient light situations. What kind of a lighting rig are you using? I think you could get vast improvement with more lights, or HDR environment lighting

thank you!