Micropolygon displacement is one of the main reasons I'm currently sticking with Firefly.

(See my Don (veins) and Fokker (grass) renders in my Gallery)

BUT...

Just as the P5 Don mesh has currently BUILT IN musculature topology that makes (overkill) subdivision unnecessary, one could easily design a similar figure with BUILT IN vein detail. (Or even skeleton detail, for that matter)

He now has just 25.000 polys, btw. Double that, and you could have pretty much all the realistic detail you want without the need for additional displacement.

Grass OTOH could be substituted with hair:

(True Instancing or improved transparency handling also could substitute displacement grass)

*

My point is: Microdisplacement is cool to have. VERY cool to have.

But instancing, an improved hair-room, faster transparency handling and especially better figure (and prop) design could make up for its lack in Superfly.

Thank you for that clarification! Whatever it is that Blender has, they need to put in. It's just such a glaring hole in Superfly functionality.

Thank you!!

Thanks. And yeah, I know I have to subdivide the hell out of it to get even a small effect, but sometimes that works enough to just get rid of the flat effect on edges. I'm so disappointed that they did not bother to prioritize something so important and I hope they realize that we need that for future releases to even be worth upgrading to. I'm tempted to skip P12 entirely.

I only have the one infinite light as BB mentions above, 1600% intensity, 10% size, .5 shadow blur radius. I figured out how to make the caustics show up, by resetting my shadow blur radius to 0. Too sharp on that, but if I bring it up past .005 it's too fuzzy to see at all. Not sure why. I am using your volume box and gobo as loaded straight from my prop library. It can't be a scale difference thing, I'm using poser native units as well.

Thank you so much! When you are rendering these, do the caustic patterns sort of slowly fade in over time or should they be apparent at the beginning of a test render? I don't have GPU rendering so this is gonna take me a while and I don't know whether my failure to see the caustics is a problem with my own sea floor or my lighting.

HartyBart posted at 1:01PM Fri, 29 January 2021 - #4411348

For Poser 11 you need to be using the right version and the right rendering method. For SuperFly, the Smith Micro Poser 11 SR5....

"Enabled volumetric effects for GPU rendering (Pro only). Quality is limited compared to CPU rendering."

That explains a lot. I knew we couldn't use volumetric atmosphere at all, did not know it was affected otherwise!

If appears you're still using SR2. I've never heard that some later SR'd versions of Poser 11 won't run on Windows 7. I've seen 11.1.1 (Jan 2019) running happily on Windows 7. The Poser 11 SR6 patch was back in January 2017, so the 2019 11.1.1 must surely incorporate it.

When I went to download SR3, there was no link for anything other than Windows 10. I asked tech support about that and they told me I need to upgrade my OS. I've never seen a complete lack of backwards compatibility in a service release before this.

I'm an idiot. I had the inversion node plugged into the bottom value of the Add node. facepalm After a few more false starts, like reverting my scene to make that fix after going way offroad with other experiments and typing "97" in instead of .97, I've finally got it working. Caustics still look weird but I'm pretty sure the height and width of my gobo have something to do with that. An easy fix is changing the shadow blur radius but I don't want to do that since .5 is accurate for sunlight. This seems to be such fiddly, variable stuff.

I've been working on an underwater scene in Superfly, P11, and using this method for caustics and godrays, but I'm having trouble fine-tuning the caustic ratio. For a while I couldn't get it to work at all and then just on a whim I plugged the math node used to invert the image directly into the transparency and suddenly I could see the caustics. For some reason, that Add box messes me up, and I've tried every adjustment from .097 (very blown out, ouch) to .99999 (nearly black). All it does is adjust my overall light level but the moment I plug that box in, caustics go away entirely. I even tried changing my measurement interface and that did not seem to make much difference. I'm wondering if the scale of the scene isn't what's affecting things somehow. I have no environment sphere in place, since it didn't look like one was used in the example above. Infinite light at 1500%, 1% size, shadow blur at .5 which produces a rather fuzzy caustic--.2 produces a much sharper one but then I'm back to square one with trying to modulate the caustic ratio. I have my gobo plane just above the frame of my render, as low as I could put it, practically on top of my shadow box. What am I missing?

Thank you very much. This is what I get for not checking the forums regularly. xD

Maybe that bug is extended to Poser 11. I cannot get the gobo to work at all. Set it up exactly as in that thread with the water box and the plane, shaders copied exactly for both, light set to 1500%, shadow blur radius at .5, and all it does is dim the light coming through. Have even tried it without the water box, nada. I have messed with size and height of both water box and plane, I've messed with the caustic ratio value, I'm just not seeing any cautic pattern whatsoever. I suspect it might be a scale issue since I keep mine set on Poser Native Units which seems to be not popular, but honestly I'm just lost right now. Is there a known issue with shadows in P11 SP2? (I can't update to SP3 due to having Win7.)

THANK you. I don't know if I just hit all the wrong keywords or what but neither Google nor the forum's advanced search engine pointed me to that one!!

I'm using 11, I was just trying to go about it as if we had actual physical based rendering. xD

Basically I'm working with a hi-res ground plane as water. I have a flower floating on the water, and I want to have circular ripples coming from the flower. It's a closeup, but I still want the ripples to become shallower and farther apart as they move out from the center, as in this photograph of a water ripple. The more images of rippling water I look at, the more I see that it's not so much that they are steadily farther apart as they move away from the center as that there is a big variation around the object itself with some very wide rings and some narrower, and then they even out and get smaller the farther they are from the center. So it would seem I would have to introduce some sort of distortion to allow me to put some variability there, somehow? But they all graduate to shallower height as they move from the center, and fade out, so that you don't see them at all after a distance from the center.

If I use the wave texture node, I get a center circle with surrounding circles that all get smaller until they reach a uniform size as they move away from the center, like so:

I just want to make that look more natural by giving it some variability (not the distortion that's in the node, that just makes it wiggly but does nothing to change the frequency) and making it fade out the farther from the center it moves.

I wonder if I am putting too much confidence in math's ability to do stuff like that, I know there are some things that you just can't do really well with procedural nodes, like super realistic wood grain. If there's a way to do it with nodes I want to learn, but I can accept if I'm better off just painting a height map.

Yay! I like updates. :)

EClark1894 posted at 5:48PM Sun, 13 December 2020 - #4407399

This should be really easy.

That there is a child hair tangler. I have it on good authority. Sadly. xD