Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/renderer.html

Looks pretty good. This should help beginners quite a bit. The one thing in there I didn't know about was raytrace bounces. What if you raised it higher? Is that just overkill? A note about minimum shading rate as well. A lower value around .2 or so also makes raytraced shadows look a bit better, and not quite as bold. And if you have a real fine texture, like a weave or lace perhaps, lower that sucker even more to make it look right. I remember trying to render this fishnet type texture, and it just wasn't looking good (all blurry) until I reduced the minimum shading rate. However, low numbers give longer renders. But overall, it's looking good! Good luck on the Material room portion of it. That's going to be a beast :)

Luckily I can copy half the material room from already available ressources for Pixels 3D ;)

Looks really good, Stewer. Please repost when you add more items to the FAQ, as I'd like to follow the progress. :) -Hanz

Really good information! If raytracing is used only for schadows, is than 1 for raytracing bounces always enough? Vielen Dank f die viele Arbeit, ich bin gespannt auf den Teil er den material room. Da liegen bestimmt noch eineige ungehobene Schze f mich

1 raytrace bounce is enough for shadows, although it should not make any difference in rendering speed. The number of raytrace bounces is an upper limit which is required if you have raytraced transparency or reflection in your scene.

Well written. One confusing point: How do you know whether the objects are using raytracing or not? Is that an intrinsic property of some objects? If so, how is it represented?

Raytracing is only being used when a) You explicity set a light to use raytraced shadows. b) A material is using either the reflection or refraction shader node. Keep the questions coming, I'll add them to the page!

So, I tried it: Raytraced shadows work just as well with 0 bounces. Anyhow, as long as you have no raytraced materials, the bounces value doesn't matter anyway. Minor update is online now, with example renders to demontrate what the raytrance bounce number does.

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html

Read through that other page now too, and I like it. Surprised to see one of the links be mine (for glowing objects). I thought, hey, I'd like to know that. And boom, there's my page lol. The second picture you have for raytrace bounces doesn't show though. Maybe you can go over 3D motion blur and depth of field a little more? I messed around with depth of field for the first time the other day, and luckily enough, got the settings right the first time. But I have no idea how I'd go about focusing on specific objects in the scene. I do like this tutorial though.

Oops. Just started looking around the rest of your site, and saw your mini DOF tutorial. Quite nice! I'll have to try out that script.

OK, that tells me that I should add a link to the DOF tutorial too. Glad you like it, and I hope finding the time to add my own tips for creating glowing materials.

Nice job, your site is officially bookmarked! :) One quickie for you ... Can you compare/contrast mapped vs. raytraced shadows a little more? Such as: Which typically yields better results? Can you adjust shadow "darkness" with raytracing? How can you eliminate "jagged" shadows when using raytracing? Again, nice site and nice work. -Tim

Thanks Tim. I'm taking a note of your wish, will add a shadows chapter to it soon.

Great. Can you answer a few of those now too? Thanks, Tim

You can adjust shadow darkness by editing the ambient channel of the material of the shadow receiving object or by adding additional light sources to brighten it up. You can reduce jagged edges with raytraced shadows by increasing the min shading rate. There is no "better" shadow algorithm. The key differences are that due to its precision, ray tracing will produce shadows for very fine structures where you need shadow maps if you want to have soft edged shadows.

Thanks. I've tried both of those suggestions. Unfortunately, sometimes that means adding a lot of lights and is often difficult to tweak. And I assume you actually meant to DECREASE the minimum shading rate, which of course drastically effects the render time unfortunately. And I think the shadows still did a "spasmodic dance" kind of thing, but I'll have to try it again at perhaphs an even lower shade rate. Thanks, Tim

Sorry, my bad. Yes, decreasing was what I meant. Alternatively, you might also want to try increasing the post filter size, and probably switching to the gaussian filter type. That can also smooth out things a little. However, be aware that ray traced shadows are sharp by design. For obtaining smooth shadows, shadow maps are the way to go.

For the sake of argument, let's say you're using one spotlight in your scene. How about adding another light, and doing a copy/paste to the new light, putting it in the same position as the first. Pull it back a little more than your first one, decrease the shadow a bit, and make it depth map. That should lay on top of the ray trace shadow, and give it a soft edge. This is all in theory though, of course. But something that could be tried.

This should be possible, but it will definitively boost render time.