as you can see in the attached images I have these odd jagged shadows and I don't know why, can anyone perhaps give me a head up on a solution? This is rendered in Poser pro 11 in superfly, and has the same issue no matter if I use my graphics card or my cpu to render, and these jagged shadows appear all over V4.

Does this happen if you render only Victoria 4, meaning no other objects in the scene using default Poser lights?

Not sure what is wrong, but my initial guess based on your images is that its a mesh smoothing issue or maybe something is wrong with the light ray tracing. I doubt the issue is with Superfly, but might be wrong. Do you experience this when using other characters?

Disclaimer - I know nothing about Superfly.

Taking the above into account... That's a render? Looks like a preview to me; the eyebrows and hair (what I can see of it) look as rough as a bear's arse.

SamTherapy posted at 6:34PM Thu, 14 December 2017 - #4320210

Disclaimer - I know nothing about Superfly.

Taking the above into account... That's a render? Looks like a preview to me; the eyebrows and hair (what I can see of it) look as rough as a bear's arse.

Don't forget the noise,snow ...

superfly isn't a realtime render engine.

is preview openGL ? have the latest n bestest version.

Just out of curiosity, why do you have Branched Path Tracing unchecked? I know it can slow down a superfly render but it could put out a different render. Worth a try...

Try increasing the subdiv of the mesh, that part of the neck can get distorted particularly if mixing morphs.

After looking at a few suggested render settings for skin, I see why you left that box unchecked. Maybe try small area light settings?

Kazam561 posted at 1:04AM Fri, 15 December 2017 - #4320226

Just out of curiosity, why do you have Branched Path Tracing unchecked? I know it can slow down a superfly render but it could put out a different render. Worth a try...

GPU render, the graphics card is selected. Can't do BPT on a GPU render. Poser will warn you if you try.

At the bottom of the render tab:

Set Filter Glossy to 1. Set Clamp direct samples to 10. Set Clamp indirect samples to 10.

On the right side, since the left should be greyed out: Diffuse bounces and glossy bounces don't need to be set that high. Set them to 1 and 2 respectively. Set your volume and transmission bounces to 0. You don't textures on those Christmas ornament earrings she is wearing so you don't need these passes.

You don't need to blow out the render settings to achieve a great render. Lower everything and see what happens.

Thank you Rockket :)

Thank you Rokket I will give that a try. And to those confused by the images, the bit you are supposed to be looking it is the rendered rectangle on the neck, not the rest of the preview image around it. As far as I can see in the full render V4 Is the only thing effected by these jagged shadows, will post some more pics later.

If you could run poser from a phone then that's a really powerful phone :) I could see a future where various OS'es could be chained together in a render farm like que to share the work on the render.

Kazam561 posted at 4:59PM Fri, 15 December 2017 - #4320268

If you could run poser from a phone then that's a really powerful phone :) I could see a future where various OS'es could be chained together in a render farm like que to share the work on the render.

Seachnasaigh is doing something like that with his setup. He has a pretty remarkable system set up a render farm. Great for animation, but for those of us who only do still images, it wouldn't work, except maybe to use the que to render the image and keep working on the scene...

Right did several more tests, no matter my render settings, low or high I still get these shadow faults, and they seam to coincide with the polygon mesh, but are not at the seam boarders. I'm pretty much stumped on this one. I have included a full face render on low settings and a test rectangle render of the arm ignore the white triangle that's just light through a triangle.

Think I may have solved it, by selecting V4 then selecting "Figures/Skinning method/Poser Unimesh" and in V4's body properties changing the now enabled "Subdivision levels/Render" to 2. This has cleaned the shadows up, why on earth it takes note of the mesh considering it has no sharp edges at those points is beyond me. perhaps there is another reason.

Maybe some setting in your graphic card, if you have changed some of the settings there, maybe set it to performance rather than quality, try to update the drivers as well if you haven't already. Anyway just a guess.

shedofjoy posted at 11:41AM Sat, 16 December 2017 - #4320296

Think I may have solved it, by selecting V4 then selecting "Figures/Skinning method/Poser Unimesh" and in V4's body properties changing the now enabled "Subdivision levels/Render" to 2. This has cleaned the shadows up, why on earth it takes note of the mesh considering it has no sharp edges at those points is beyond me. perhaps there is another reason.

I believe is down to the way subdiv works. IIRC Firefly has subdiv automatically at render time whilst Superfly does not by default.

I am glad you found the answer. I never even thought about sub division. I do it almost automatically now when I am setting up a render. Since I got the new laptop, I don't worry about choking the life out of my machine. I did a render with 8 different females, 3 walls, a bathtub, sink with chrome and brass, a floor and a brass towel rack and my laptop handled it without a hitch. And every last one of the figures was sub divided. They were Poser 7 figures on up to Poser 11.

I'd post it, but this is your thread.

I know you've solved your problem using subdiv, but I am just curious if you could have solved the problem by changing the shadow min bias of the lights to 0.00001 and the shadow map size to 1024, instead of subdividing the figure.

infinity10 posted at 11:48PM Tue, 19 December 2017 - #4320312

I know you've solved your problem using subdiv, but I am just curious if you could have solved the problem by changing the shadow min bias of the lights to 0.00001 and the shadow map size to 1024, instead of subdividing the figure.

i tried that and it did not change the issue, Also I discovered that displacement will not correctly display in superfly unless you subdivide the object with displacement attached to it, as I tried a noise displacement to get a fur type of look and it looks lumpy without subdividing. shall be doing this with all my renders from now on.

shedofjoy posted at 9:09AM Wed, 20 December 2017 - #4320625

infinity10 posted at 11:48PM Tue, 19 December 2017 - #4320312

I know you've solved your problem using subdiv, but I am just curious if you could have solved the problem by changing the shadow min bias of the lights to 0.00001 and the shadow map size to 1024, instead of subdividing the figure.

i tried that and it did not change the issue, Also I discovered that displacement will not correctly display in superfly unless you subdivide the object with displacement attached to it, as I tried a noise displacement to get a fur type of look and it looks lumpy without subdividing. shall be doing this with all my renders from now on.

Superfly does not have an equivalent to Firefly's micropolygon displacement, it was introduced into Cycles last year so maybe on its way to Superfly at somepoint. That said using displacement mapping is fairly memory intensive so even if introduced may be restricted to CPU renders only.