Quote - - but let's not ignore the boundries ;).

I agree... Plus even if you manage to come up with something really innovative, I wonder how well it will work with existing props/clothes. If there are too many issues, then your mesh is gonna be just one more that is ignored and left to rot. There's a long line of such meshes that failed because of this dependence on legacy content.

I would say if interesting and realistic rigs are the goal, then stay with your native modeller and import pre-posed stuff into poser if you have to.

Quote - Attached Link: http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-JATON-GEFORCE4-MX-440-PCI-64MB-DDR-2PORT-VGA-VIDEO_W0QQitemZ320060578258QQcmdZViewItem

Something like this is what I had in mind. (follow link to e-bay)

64 MB DDR (thats what I mean by LOW RAM)

That card model you are getting is more then 4 years old, and even then it was the bottom end of the pack. Having 64 MB or 256 MB RAM on it wont do you any good if the card cant even handle a single Vicky 3 class mesh (and it cant, i had one of those clunkers a long time back)
For at least half decent results you want to get something like a Geforce 6600 or something. Or the ATI equivalent.

Quote - If you think about it this makes more sense and could be what the poser manual is referring to when it says 1200DPI = extreme detail.

The poser manual is written by a bunch of brain dead monkeys, or so i would state if i didnt like monkeys. If the dpi is making any change (and you should verify this in PS with a difference comparison) it is likely modifying other settings not because of dpi itself.

To a renderer, dpi is meaningless, Firefly (and every other render engine out there) only deal with pixels. They dont understand any real world unit of measurement like inches or anything. All they do is take one pixel in a file, render it out and then move to the next. What printers do with each pixel is where dpi is used.

Well we could discuss semantics all day but anyway :)

Anyone wanting more complete info should try this (how did we ever get anything done before wiki):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch

Quote - What's the difference between a picture that's 1200x1200 pixels, 24bit, 72dpi or a picture 1200x1200 pixels, 24bit, 300dpi? Is there more information in the picture or is it just a switch?

There is absolutely no difference. Many people don't understand what dpi even means in CG so they start thinking a higher dpi means higher quality. This is just not true. 72 dpi means that when printed (on paper) the printer will use 72 dots per inch to print the image. 300 means it will use 300. In both cases the size of the image printed will change, but always at the same quality of 1200x1200 points.

ie a 1200x1200, 300 dpi pic will print at 1200/300 or 4 inches by 4 inches. A 72 dpi one at 1200/72 or 16 x 16.

The only way to get higher detail is to increase the rez itself, dpi does nothing.

Great work so far... I love how he actually looks like a male and not androgynous.

Quote -
How the source affects the illumination depend on only the illumination model that you use and not if you use ray tracing or not. You can have surface scattering with or without ray tracing.

Then show us an example of scattering without raytracing. You can get the buddha model i used here:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/

Or use whichever model you feel is appropriate.

Quote -

• IBL is also a fake method, the reason is that the illuminantion in a point not only depend on the intensity, it depend also of the angle of incidence. The image used mapped on the sphere or other shape only contains the intensity information with no angle information, that would be impossible to be stored.
  The equivalent of IBL in games are the light maps.

Light maps have nothing to do with IBL. They are just stored maps for any kind of lighting. You could store IBL in them or direct lighting or occlusion or whatever. IBL is calculated on the fly each frame by casting a hemisphere of rays around each surface normal and averaging the result. I thought you already knew about this as it is clearly explained on debevac's page.

Quote -
-  Ray tracing is unable to do a correct ambient or global illumination, in theory it would be able to do it, but the required computations would last forever.
The only way to do a correct global illumination is with radiosity, then you can use if you want, the radiosity generated maps with or without raytracing.

You dont know what you are talking about. No one uses radiosity in its primitive form, that is the most inefficient and limited way to do GI. It is slow as hell, doesnt handle point lights properly and cant do optical effects at all. Most apps use other better approaches like monte carlo GI or photon mapping. Or they use a combination of IBL and photon mapping. About the only commercial app that ever tried the primitive approach was Lightscape for MAX, and even they folded up due to competition from superior systems in VRay and Maxwell.

Quote -

• Raytracing is unable to handle particles, smoke, clouds, fire, etc must be done by other means.

The technical term is ray marching, it is a modified (more complex) form of raytracing:

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/courses/rendering/2004/gmromer/index.html

Quote - But the method without ray tracing can be very fast and done in real time.

There is some very interesting research in progress on doing raytracing in realtime:

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html

http://www.openrt.de/

Things to note:

1. In the shadows scene, note how the shadows properly blur with angle and distance. And how the color from the surrounding seeps into them. Both are things you can't easily do without raytraced shadows and they add greatly to the look of a scene.

2. The subtle color variations in the cubes come directly from the IBL. This is also very important as it makes your scene look vibrant and rich. It also gives it nice lighting.

3. In the AO scene, notice how 'solid' the scene looks, even though it is just a bunch of blank white cubes. That's how important contact shadows are.

4. In the SSS one, note how it respects the thickness of the object. and casts internal shadows (like on the base) Both are not easy to fake.

EDIT : Just thought I'd add that this is XSI, not poser in case anyone was wondering. Poser as yet doesn't support some of this stuff, mores the pity. You can do AO and IBL. of course.

I think you are mostly correct...

About SSS, you can fake it but it doesnt look nearly as nice as real SSS. Mainly cause SSS is a complex phenomenon which you cant easily duplicate with fakes. A great example is something as common as milk. There is no fake method that can successfully give you the look of real milk. Not even mentalray's SSS shaders are able to do it easily.

Also you cant do proper caustics with refraction alone. Take a look at this:

http://www.motiondesign.biz/vol_start.html

There is no way to simulate those scenes with refraction alone, and they are all very common situations in real life.

@OP

No problems here either with 97.02, on a 6800. Which card do you have ?

Also if you have a dual core system you may wanna experiment with different drivers cause some of them don't like OGL with dual cores.

1. Raytraced shadows
2. Occlusion
3. Photon mapping
4. Monte carlo style GI.
5. IBL
6. SSS
7. Caustics and volumetric caustics.
8. Path tracing for volumetric effects like smoke, clouds etc

Some render systems like mentalray and VRay are pure raytracers, ie they do everything through rays, from casting eye rays to lighting to shading. Which is also why they are so fast in rendering the stuff mentioned above.

Firefly chugs in these things because it is a hybrid renderer. It normally renders using a non raytracing approach but has to switch to a slow raytracing engine when you use these features. Which of course is gonna cause a render hit.

Note that usually people will post only when they find a problem, not when they are satisfied with a feature. So these threads you read here are not exactly a representation of P7's quality (or lack thereof) If anything the fact that since the release and thousands of people getting P7, there have only been a few threads about bugs (not all of which turned out to be actual bugs,) should be an encouraging sign for you.

If there were lots of major issues the board would be in flames by now.

Also, new versions of anything always have bugs, that can't be helped. As long as they fix them in service releases, it's all  good.

With those breasts, i think any crookedness is perfectly understandable. In fact I'm amazed she can even stay upright !

(Nice work BTW, great pose and lighting)