It seems to me that renders of realistic Hair models (e.g. Sassy hair) seem "grainy" when rendered in Firefly, much unlike regular Poser4 renders of the same hair. Is there some setting one can adjust to get the same render quality as the Poser4 engine provides? Thanks.

Lower the shading rate.

It would be nice if texture filtering could be turned on and off for different parts of a scene, like shadows and smooth polygons.

I had similar problems, so asked here, I was advised to try the following: Lower the shading rate of the hair item to something between 0.02 to 0.05 - select the neck of the hair item and then properties and you'll find the shading rate. Then in the render settings lower the shading rate to match that of the hair item. eg. you set the hair to 0.02, so set the shading rate to 0.02. This works for me every time, if like the Sassy Hair it's a prop item you can still set the shading rate as above. I avoid using texture filtering because Firefly just craps out on me.

Do not use Texture Filtering to fix this problem. That makes everything blurry, and you'll get ugly seams with some figures. Texture filtering is not meant for close up shots.

Use the shading rate, like Nevermore said.

Texture filtering triples memory use for texture maps - no wonder Poser craps out when rendering a scene containing a couple of hi-res textures. The shading rate route is much safer.

Does it really? LOL! Awfully ironic that CL suggests turning texture filtering on to fix memory problems, then.

Thanks guys - reducing the shading rate seemed to work.

I use texture filtering in P6 when the hair does not look good without and nothing gets blurry but looks sharp and especially the hair looks very nice.

I think you'd notice the loss of resolution if you did a side-by-side comparison in a large closeup.

And you'd definitely notice the ugly seams on the shoulder area with some textures. David with his standard textures, for example.

I've set the texture size to maximum and Pixel Sample very high too and there where no seams. I know that P5 produced seams with texture filtering on but I did not see that with P6.

I used the default render settings, except I turned texture filtering on for the render on the right. You can see the seams along his shoulder and neck, and in front of his ears.

It may not be as noticeable in this JPG, but you do lose some resolution on the skin (the pores, etc.). It's even more noticeable with high-res textures.

If you're going for a soft look, you may not mind. But it's something a Poser user should be aware of. If you want to smooth noisy textures without softening the focus of the whole image, you can - by using the shading rate, instead of texture filtering.

It may sound counterintuitive, but to get rid of the aliasing artifacs you sometimes get with hi-res hair is reducing the texture size. What happens when rendering hi-res textures on small objects is that one pixel in the rendered image equals multiple pixels in the source texture. The renderer thus skips quite a few pixels in the texture when rendering, which leads to the artifacts you see. When you lower the shading rate, it's taking more texture pixels to create one pixel in the rendered image, which obviously takes a more time. Texture filtering is using a special lookup table to lookup the color of an area of the texture without having to look at each individual pixel in the area - faster, but uses more RAM. But, the best way is to not cure the symptoms but to cure the cause: The discrepancy between texture size and (rendered) object size: A hair prop that takes 300 by 500 pixels in the final image doesn't need a 2048x2048 texture.

So you're suggesting that we resize hair textures to different sizes, depending on what size image we plan to render?

No, not that extreme. It should be sufficient to keep low-res verisons (1024x1024 or so) copies of your textures for such cases, or simply to use FireFly's "max texture size" parameter. I know how it is when you notice for the first time how a 1024 shadow map solves a problem you had with a 256 shadow map - and from then on, we're mislead to think that any problem can be solved by throwing more pixels at it, which is wrong. Sometimes, less is more.

What does "max texture size" do?

"Max texture size" automatically resizes your textures (in RAM, the files on disk are left untouched) to be not larger than a user-defined limit. Can save lots of RAM (and time).

Does it work if Texture Filtering is off?

Does it work if Texture Filtering is off? yes.

I think I still prefer using the shading rate, though. One, I'm far too lazy to actually resize all my hair textures, then create MAT files for them. Two, what I like about the shading rate is you can set it differently for each part/object in your scene. So it can be low for things that need it, and high for things that don't. You can leave your shading rate high in render settings while you're working, then lower it for the final render. The final render does take longer, but the improvement in quality is worth the wait, IMO. I suppose I might have a different opinion if I were an animator, though. :-)

The render on the left is Max Texture Size at 256. The one in the middle is Max Texture Size at 1024. The one on the end is Shading Rate 0.02. It's not as clear in this JPG as is in the TIFF originals, but the one on the right definitely looks sharper to my eye.

With hi-res textures and a shading rate of 0.02, don't be surprised when you should get an "out of memory" message - because FireFly will then demand lots of it!

I've never had a problem. Shading rate slows the final render, but so far, has never choked Poser for me, nor generated out of memory messages. Probably because I only use a shading rate of 0.05 or lower on things that need it. That's the beauty of using the shading rate. You don't have to render everything in the darn image at that rate, only what you want to.

It is kind of funny to watch it render, though. It goes really slow over the hair (or whatever), then speeds up and zooms over the rest of the image.

Stew - Sorry to be so late in thanking you for this excellent tip. I'm sure this info will be very useful! Many thanks as well to randym77 for pointing the way to this thread! ~arry

Wow glad I did some searching before asking this question! I have
seen some amazing renders with Poser yet I am still struggling with
the hair and was wondering where I was going wrong. My computer
just spent the better part of 8 hours struggling through a render
before locking up and calling it a day. I did a prehair render in
firefly and it took maybe 3 minutes. I'm going to play with the
controls and see if the textures and shading thing will get it down
to a resonable length of time on renders. Wish me luck cuz Im
getting tired of drawing my own hair and trying to get it to look
right >.