Okay I have been reading alot and noticed only one or two thread mentioning "Minimum Shading Rate" in the P6 render sittings. Now I know most mau know this already but to the few who are curious.. The Lower the stting, better things get. I didn't find anything other than zero to be more than draft quality for full body shots. Just my take. In this picture, you can see that as you get further away from the object, the noise and spots get blotchy. All this and seams will appear the further away the camera is. Setting the Minimum Shading Rate to zero will prevent seams from appearing, and keep procedural effect in scale with what you expect. High Min Shading Rate settings are great for drafts though

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

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Have you tried increasing the texture size to match the size of the maps? Sometimes that can help with the resolution problems. I agree that the lowest you can go with minimum shading is the best. It just takes a lot longer to render if you go all the way down. Are your noise and spots from the texture or by bump mapping?

You can have the max texture setting but it won't adress these issues if your Min SHade Rate is high.

Noise and spots are node procedurals. Maps wouldn't behave quite the same way as that they are image maps.

Message edited on: 04/29/2005 22:05

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

The annoying thing between converting from P5 to P6 is that I can't get the spot and noise nodes right. For some odd reason, settings that gave a good effect in P5 are too strong in P6 :(

Oh that would suck. :) Sorry to hear that.

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

The annoying thing between converting from P5 to P6 is that I can't get the spot and noise nodes right. For some odd reason, settings that gave a good effect in P5 are too strong in P6 :( Maybe it's because P6 uses "real world scale"? Have you tried changing Poser's default dimensions to inches?

What window do you do that in?

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

It's under general preferences. The same as in previous versions of Poser.

Only in previous versions of Poser, your scale didn't affect materials. Whether you were you using feet or inches or meters or whatever, bumps were the same. Now, bumps are real-world scale, and maybe that's true of other material room settings, too. (Setting the Poser 6 scale to inches makes the bump settings from P4/5 about right, FWIW.)

Thanks! Does that have any affect on p4 Translation poses from working the same in P5/P6?

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

I'm not sure. Haven't tried it. P6 does try to convert units. But sometimes, that can be more annoying than helpful. Like when P6 "helpfully" converts your bump strength to 0.12 when you go from feet to inches.

I was using poser units... I'll try it your way :)

PBM - also the P6 noise node has 2 nodes - the "original" and the "improved" - so if you use improved - it will be different from the P5 noise node. byAnton - from what I can tell (based on lots of renders using node based skin noise), a full body render at 900x900 needs a Min Shading rate at about 0.5 (any less give no noticeable improvement). For a head portrait at the same dimensions, 0.2 seems to be the right mark. 0.0 Min Shading Rate is required if you do larger renders (2000x2000).

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Of topic, but Anton, someone over at Poser Pros was looking for a borg queen you did way back when...

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=921068&Start=1&Artist=PapaBlueMarlin&ByArtist=Yes

Paul, I'm aware of the different settings on the nodes. It hasn't made much of a difference. Attached is a P5 render using spot bump mapping. When I rendered in P6, the spots were too strong. I tried to reduce the strength of the effect, but it still didn't look the same. Incidently, this is a technique I learned from Cath while trying to understand translucence in P5. I'll have to render it again using inches instead of PNU. I'm just so use to using PNU that I can't see a reason for using for future work though...

I don't have that BorgQueen anymore. I unistalled everything prior to V2 years ago. I just woke up am will come back and read more when I wake up and have coffee)yawnnnnn!stretch!!!!) Everything is still fuzzy. Brain is still booting.

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

Attached Link: http://fnproductions.net/graphics/tutorials/poser6/

Anton - are you aware that (according to the information in Tirjasdyn's linked FAQ) if the shading rate setting (which every Poser actor has in it's parameters window) is higher than whatever minimum that you might have set in Firefly, then it will override your Firefly setting? Firefly will use the highest of the two values.

that is interesting. thanks

-Anton, creator of Apollo Maximus
"Conviction without truth is denial; Denial in the face of truth is concealment."

Over 100,000 Downloads....

I've been studying Renderman lately. According to Stewer (in a post from RDNA I believe) says there's several similarities with P5/P6 material room and Renderman's shader systems. In my own research so far, the Firefly renderer APPEARS to mimic Renderman's capabilities in an, albeit "budget" interpretation. An interesting tidbit in the book I'm reading (Renderman For Beginners, published 2005) says that it's faster when: (a) texture maps are square (the Daz maps I have are rectangular; you can "square" them in Photoshop with no apparent effect since upper left corner is 0,0 and lower right corner is 1,1 and the UV values are adjusted to fit properly - don't forget to use pixel values that are powers of 2 - 256x256, 512x512, etc.) (b) Minimum Shading Rate is a higher value (for drafts). I would tend to agree with face_off, in that you may notice little difference when using a shading rate less than 0.5, but I am in the early phases of running the Firefly renderer through its paces. I imagine that setting Min Shade Rate to zero would take forever, especially if you're using reflection / refraction et al. (c) Using stochastic sampling, which of course Poser does not offer. I have learned a great deal about post filters to soften / sharpen images. I particularly like using Gaussian blur at 2x2 pixel samples - looks more like film. Now what does this have to do with your spot node problem? Absolutely nothing. I just love the sound of my own voice and the fact that Poser is so deep that there is always something new to learn.

A shading rate less than 0.5 may make little difference with skin, but it can make a HUGE difference with hair. Several of Koz's styles, and many DAZ hair textures, look very noisy/staticky with the shading rate at 0.5. Lower it to 0.02-0.05, and they look fantastic. Like completely different textures.