I was until this past September working in Poser4 on an older Mac. I finally migrated to a new box and installed poser 7 which I have had countless frustrting times trying to learn.

One of the things I have been doing is migrating some of my better renders from the older version rendered in the old weak Poser 4 to the new and supposedly more powerful Version 7 and along with all my other disappointments, find it is not as good at rendering.

I have even tried rendering it as suggested with the P4 Render Engine with all compatabilitie boxes checked but am not as satisfied. Also tried using Firefly mode but it sucked. I can't grasp all the inverted normals and all the other complex stuff i have to adjust just to get it to behave.

I can see how it handles textures but the lights should be identicle....one would think. They are not. The lights are way different even though none were changed. I opened the old Pz3 file and found all the textures from the migrated Runtime Folder, selected a render mode and kept it the same render size and hit render. Everything was different in the way the new renders looked.....both in Firefly and in P4 Render Engine.

I can't show the images here because they are adult in nature for this site and I don't want to get banned here but I can assure I was up all night messing with this and I got nothing acceptible that I can use without a frell load of post work. I would have to re-light everything within Poser 7 to get even close to what tried and true P4 gave me.

I know, I have heard it repeatedly that the P7 Firefly and more advanced render modes are better but for all the darn trouble i have gotten with pixelated backgrounds and props (something about normals forward?), and bloated props when trying to turn bump maps on and now the lighting, I think I prefer the old P4 render. But I am finding even the P4 render engine in P7 is also not up to par....in my opinion.

I am totally bummed. Needing larger renders of some of these older pieces, I was hoping to just open them in P7 and re-render larger and mantain the quality I got in P4. I have to now go back to my old box and re-render my old pieces larger sized to have a larger properly rendered version before I demommission the dying older box.

How frustrating.

Anyone else get these weird rendering/lighting anomolies when first transfering over?

Post a screengrab of your render settings in P7

One for the P4 rendering you do in P7, and one for the P7 Firefly.

Se we can see the settigns, and perhaps offer some help.<

Na, we don't wanna see the babes, just the render settigns.

Do some comparative test, with just some "old" textures props, and show those?

Normals forward is to fix some problems with reversed normals in madels imported. Dont use it if there is not a problem to fix.

There is a checkbox in the P4 settings thats something like ignore shader tree. That drops and node based textures and should give you closer to the original P4 material.

I use the P4 renderer regularly because I like the result better than firefly. 

poser 7 (final release) also had the ability to render indirect diffuse light (IDL) in FFRender using a python script.  IDL and raytracing are two reasons why poser 7/8/9 renders usually look more professional/realistic than poser 4 renders.

if there are problems with bloating of props, this can be remedied either by turning off smoothing, by adjusting the units to a smaller value, et al.  unfortunately it takes time to become familiar with the material room node set-up.  the render settings themselves are the easiest part.  the settings for the ray-traced lights are also not too difficult to learn.  the use of IBL/AO is somewhat more complex.

I still use Poser4 to create images. A scene created and renderd in Poser4 doesn't look the same in newer versions of Poser. If you created a scene in Poser4 render it in Poser4, if you want to render a scene in Poser7 create it in Poser7.

Which is better and which is worst depend on waht you want to achieve. Poser4 had many bugs, many bugs were fixed, many bugs continue to exists and many new bugs were added. Also were added new features so you can do things that were impossible to do in Poser4.

The main differences between Poser4 and other versions, assuming that you use a topologically correct mesh are:

• Normals are different. Poser4 calculates normals in the old classic way, Poser use other method for calculating the normals. A border looks smooth in Poser4, in Poser it becomes sharp, you have some control on this, but never will look the same as in Poser4. Depending on the case, it can be better or worst.

• Illumination is different. Poser4 and Poser use different illumination model and the difference of illumination in preview and rendering mode is even bigger than in Poser4.

• Poser has a bug and continue to have with ambient color. If an old Poser4 model or an obj mesh has ambient color, this ambient color is ignored in Poser and set to zero. You have to set the ambient color by hand in the material room.

• The camera of Poser is different than in Poser4, it handles much better walls obstructing the camera, Poser4 is bugy in this case.

• Always turn off "smooth polygons" in Poser to make compatible with Poser4. Smooth polygons can turn a cylinder into a barrel.

• Shadows are better in Poser, but raytraced shadows, even are better, can produce nasty artifacts.

• Of course you have no ambient occlusion, environment lighting, mirrors, dynamic cloth and hair, atmospheric effect, volumetric lights in Poser4.

• Poser4 is much faster rendering and posing a scene.

And you can have Poser4 and other Poser sharing the same library without any problem, so you can use both.

Yeah

so far sounds about right even by my limited skills with either.

It is frustrating but I guess if I have to re-render these images bigger I will have to, as you say, either render in P4 which will be difficult since the box I am using Poser 4 on is dying and not much life left to it means no more going back. Or, I re-set the scenes in Poser 7 with its nativ lights and rnder mode and try to re-set th lights so they closely match the original Poser 4 renders. The new box is more powerful so hopefully will be able to handle better the rendering of a 16 X 20 inch print at 300 ppi whereas old Poser 4 struggled and needed at times depending on complexity be rebooted between each render which was a real big hassle especially in test rendering the image before final render where sometimes I would need to test 10 or more times!

The problem is this, some images created in Poser 4 on the old box were too small (200 ppi for 8x10 inch output) and some of these images were printed on high res laser papaer as well as downsized and posted on my galleries on the net. At the time that was more than adequate.

However, recently, from some of these old images I have gotten some interest for publishing in books and offers to purchase as larger prints thus my need to re-render them to output larger and higher res..

I guess the old addage that in Life Foresigh is everything. Had I known some of these images would have a longer after Poser4 afterlife I would have done them larger then when everything was still fresh. :(

Quote - poser 7 (final release) also had the ability to render indirect diffuse light (IDL) in FFRender using a python script.  IDL and raytracing are two reasons why poser 7/8/9 renders usually look more professional/realistic than poser 4 renders.

if there are problems with bloating of props, this can be remedied either by turning off smoothing, by adjusting the units to a smaller value, et al.  unfortunately it takes time to become familiar with the material room node set-up.  the render settings themselves are the easiest part.  the settings for the ray-traced lights are also not too difficult to learn.  the use of IBL/AO is somewhat more complex.

What do you mean by:

"...adjusting units to a smaller value...." ?

Darn bot never called me back!

:(

I have it set in inches and have used that unit of measure since P4.

Where do you find to set the Bump Map options? The only place I vaguely recall that option is in the basic P4 render engine mode option.

Bump map settings are found in the Advanced Tab of the Material Room for each material zone, and should be activated in the Render Settings by clicking on Use Displacement Maps.

OK but I have been getting some props blow up like puffer fish with that setting activated. Really annoying. I thought there would be a way to use RayTrace (more advanced than P4 render engine) overall and just add a bit of a bump to give the textures a bit of a kick without using the displacement function in that render mode.  :(

Check if smoothing is on in your render settings, this has been know to cause some models to balloon right up.  If it is, then either turn it off at the render settings, or turn it off for each body part of your model or prop.  The latter is more time consuming if you have many objects in your scene.

And you are right, displacement must be handled very carefully and set to a proper value to offset the bloat problem.  I have seen it on a skin texture displacement map while setting that value too high (0.5 inches).

Why dont you render in Poser 7 but using the Poser 4 render engine ?

I have tried but the wonderful stuff in poser 7 is also the quality of the lighting and rendering of it is whay P7 use is about (among other things) and as much as i hate knowing poop about P7 I am forcing my dead head to try and wrap the stale gray around all this stuff.