http://www.appleyard.flagonsrealm.com/rogue_trooper_scenario/39frames/nort_acg4_00a.jpg

I have Poser 11. I rendered the image at this link, using Firefly, set in a factory model that I bought in Renderosity. Light from the outside is leaking in between the far wall and the floor, which should not happen. This is a persistent fault in in-shadow parts of Firefly-rendered images. Please how, within Firefly, can I stop this happening?

If I use Superfly, that fault does not happen. But in Superfly I get 2 nuisances:-
(1) The edges of the shadows are too sharp.
(2) Shadowed areas are rendered with a sandy texture.
I have tried various Superfly rendering options, but these faults still happen. Please how can I avoid them?

Are the mesh (Wall and floor) one object? maybe the floor is lower than the walls just slightly. Also you can try to add a plane or box as a test floor and let it overlap the walls just slightly and see if that stops it, just to see if its the model or Poser. Its a bit difficult to see what is going on. Maybe if you make a close up render of the door and wall in the background and do a wireframe view as well. Just do so you show the wireframe view (Ctrl+3, or third option in document display style) in the viewport and take a screenshot using printscreen.

[0] Light leakage - If modeling, you can overlap, flange, or weld joints. Since you're using an existing model, I would load a primitive cube and stretch it like a long piece of moulding, set outside the wall to block the light.

[1] Shadow sharpness - Select the relevant light, refer to the parameters panel, properties tab, and set the shadow blur radius a little bit higher than zero. It will soften the shadow edges, but expect that it will cost some extra render time.

[2] Try render settings with 3 or 4 raytrace bounces and set irradiance caching =>70. If patience permits, engage indirect light, and set indirect light quality =>70.

[3] "P4 texture blur" on the floor - Use an asymmetrical seamless tile image and tile it multiple times in both U and V.

This zip has the image maps and the MT5 for the diamondplate material; increase the value 2 (highlighted) to set the number of times the diamondplate is tiled. The diamondplate MT5 will be in runtime\libraries\materials\0 build materials.

diamondplate MT5

Are the mesh (Wall and floor) one object?
Yes.

... a plane or box as a test floor and let it overlap the walls just slightly
I tried that and it did not work.

This fault happens in Firefly but not in Superfly.

.. Try render settings with 3 or 4 raytrace bounces and set irradiance caching =>70....

Thanks; but I can find those rendering setting options in Firefly but not in Superfly. The "sandy-textured shadows" nuisance happens in Superfly but not in Firefly.

Here is my current Superfly render settings.

Are the mesh (Wall and floor) one object?

The wall and the floor touch along their common edge, but (as 3D modellers often do) the polygons are un-welded along the join, to keep the wall and the floor both rendering flat without unwanted smoothing.

Did you place the box above the floor in the model? You don't have to be very precise just make sure it above the floor in the model and so it covers the area where the light poke through?

For your Superfly settings, I would suggest the following changes, not that i think it will solve anything, but just as general settings:

Pixel samples: 8 (Will be ok for quick preview renders)

Progressive refinement: Turn that on (Not sure why you would ever render without it on, maybe someone with better knowledge of Superfly can explain why? :))

Max Bounces: 4 (You need that to render glass correctly from what i can see)

You might or might not be able to increase render speeds by enable or disable "Seperate process" in the settings under render. But you will have to test out what works best for you.

Leave the rest of the options to whatever you want, seem to have no impact on render speed or quality from what i can see, tried to put 512 in them which made absolutely no different. If you want to increase quality just increase pixel sample (23 should give you rather good quality).

Always use render region when testing, no need to render the whole image, just mark the area that you are interested in, will be a lot faster.

But then again im not an expert in Superfly so someone will most likely correct me and maybe it have something to do with materials or something, the information about Superfly is really lacking unfortunately. So these settings are just what i found to be working well. :)

Anthony Appleyard posted at 10:39AM Wed, 22 March 2017 - #4299963

.. Try render settings with 3 or 4 raytrace bounces and set irradiance caching =>70....

Thanks; but I can find those rendering setting options in Firefly but not in Superfly. The "sandy-textured shadows" nuisance happens in Superfly but not in Firefly.

Oh, I missed that; OK, in Superfly increase the pixel samples; if Mobster's suggested 8 isn't enough to clean it up, try 16. In the right-hand column, increase diffuse bounces to 3, which will help scatter light evenly.

As to why not use progressive refinement, Superfly renders somewhat faster without it. You'll see buckets rendering, with progress indicated by the blue borders on the buckets. And progressive refinement is a waste of render time if you sent the render off to a remote via Queue Manager, since you won't see a real time display of the render in progress. Generally, I do use progressive refinement; it quickly gives you an overall impression of whether the lighting, etc is good.

Here, I created a 6-polygon .obj cube, 2x2x2 Poser units sides, centred at (0,0,0), and imported it into Poser. Seen with the dolly camera at (0,0,0), yaw = 45deg, pitch = 35deg up, so it sees an upper corner of the cube from the inside. The cube is "inside out", i.e. the "right sides" of the faces are inside = towards the camera. Rendered with Firefly in "cast shadows" mode. The render makes this image whether or not the edges of the cube are welded.

Superfly produces a solid black image.

Hmmm... Screenshot your Firefly render settings, and screenshot the material nodework of the cube?

You can also try to share the scene, if it only contains the cube you made

http://www.appleyard.flagonsrealm.com/temp/bigcubes_00.zip

Two .pz3 jobfiles zipped at this link.

Tick Raytracing box, and set raytrace bounces to 3.

Set Min shading rate to 0.2

Tick Gamma correction and set value to 2.2

...and let's see what happens.

Not sure exactly what is wrong, I would however fix it by making solid mesh objects instead of flipped ones, like this:

Simply to avoid these kind of problems, so if you need a room always model it like its a wall with thickness or make sure that if its a plane, that the normal is always facing the camera. Whether its Poser not being able to handle flipped normals correctly or something, it at least to me is far less problems and faster to simply model the wall in form of a box rather than a flipped one and trying to figure out why it doesn't render correctly :D.

Thanks. But just now I have tried seachnasaigh's suggestions, with an ordinary cube around an inside-out cube as in a model of a windowless doorless building, with the edges welded and with the edges not welded, and I still got light leaking in along the edges. I have Poser 11.

I have Poser version 11.0.0.33735

Think it might be related to the infinite lights, try to turn them into point lights and move them outside the ordinary box and in the firefly settings turn up the render quality so ray tracing is enabled then it renders fine for me at least. But as I said its a lot of work for something you could solve simply by using boxes :)

"by using boxes": in my cube model, where should the boxes be? Any chance of a mesh-line-mode display of the setup with the boxes inserted, so that I know where the boxes should be inserted?

I have just tried the "point lights" method, using the single inside-out cube, and the result, with the edges welded and with the edges unwelded, was single-pixel-width very thin white line along the cube edges. With the cube-in-cube method, no white lines resulted.

But welding cube edges would have another unwanted effect :: making the affected walls and floors display warped because of smoothing.

The Poser jobfiles are zipped at http://www.appleyard.flagonsrealm.com/temp/bigcubes_00.zip

This is how you could do it using just Poser:

So it basically just boxes that you scale so they have the correct dimensions and you move them into position. If you use a modelling tools like blender or 3ds max you can do it even faster and weld the boxes together and so forth, but in principle its the same.

Now when you place the camera inside you have to be sure of two things:

1. All your lights use ray tracing for shadow casting, so just go through each light and change those that ain't

2. Make sure that you use a render quality that uses ray tracing in the Firefly render options. (The slider thing, need to be set so there is a check mark in the ray tracing)

My idea was to place "planks" ("Beams"?) along the exterior joints; that would allow for windows, if any.

I just looked at your unweldedPZ3; set each light to use raytraced shadows, and turn raytracing on (with 4 bounces) in the Firefly render settings. Immediate improvement. I'll update after I fossick about a bit.

Thanks :: "set each light to use raytraced shadows, and turn raytracing on (with 4 bounces) in the Firefly render settings" :: I tried it, and this resulted :-

If you want to completely avoid those edge light leaks, delete the three infinite (exterior) lights and instead use spotlights or area lights inside the model. You might even use mesh lights for fluorescent tubes or sodium vapor bulbs, but that would require engaging indirect diffuse lighting in the Firefly render settings.

Also, I notice that you had diffuse value = 1 and specular value = 1 on the cube material; generally, those should total less than one (conservation of light energy).

I killed the outside infinite lights, added one point light (25%) inside, and applied a cellular texture to the surfaces.

With a light-leak blocking frame in place, I see no leakage even with the three exterior infinite lights on.

modified scene