I tried the new Superfly renderer a couple of times and couldn't see any possible use for it. The result looked horrible. Finally found a situation where it's superior. This is a schematic section of part of the cerebellum, with folds and layers in color. Each part is transparent. (I haven't filled it with neurons yet.) Firefly was producing the messy blobs on the left, so just for fun I tried the new. Splendid!

Woo Hoo!! Go through some of the superfly tutorials and you will be pleasantly surprised at it's power. I've been doing tests with it for a couple years now.

I haven't rendered in Firefly since i got PP11. There was a learning curve, but once I figured it out, I took off with it. I change all non compatible materials over to SF too, and all my new modeling gets only SF mats.

Next is to try using the Cycles surface and/or the Physical surface , instead of the Poser surface. (Note: the appearnace of scene in preview window will change when renderer is changed).

I dont use superfly, my computer is old, so it renders really slow, i did check some tutorials, but i just dont get it, ill stick with firefly.

Here are some information about Superfly, which I hope is helpful for someone finding it a bit confusing. I will try to explain how I work with Superfly as easy as possible and what to look out for and not as a technical document, its purely to help people that might have problems with it.

What is PBR?

PBR stands for Physically based render and is way to render materials using a more accurate handling of light, which in the end adds more realism to a render. It does this by working with two types of materials, which are metallic and non metallic ones. For these examples I am using the Physical surface node in Poser. Which is basically a collection of Cycles nodes combined into a very easy to use solution, which can be used if you are not to much into all the cycle nodes and will work for almost all materials..

Besides a metallic value all materials have a roughness value, this indicate the amount of surface imperfections a given material have. The higher the roughness value the less clear the reflections will be, you can see this as a blur effect.

For instant Chrome as a metal will have a high metallic value with a low roughness, whereas brushed steel also being a metal have a high metallic value but with a fairly high roughness.

Depending on how metallic an object is the color of the reflection is decided by the specular color. As an object gets more metallic the specular will have less effect in Poser.

Why you can change the color of the specular, I think is purely to create a special effect as most material will reflect the color of the light rather than the color of the material. From what I could find out some metals like gold, the specular will be the color of the material rather than the light. But changing the color of the object to look like gold, will also change the specular color accordingly. And since the specular color have little to no effect on an object that is fully metallic, this setting seems to only really impact non metals or materials with very low metallic value. But maybe someone can explain how it works?

So ignoring the specular color settings, a Superfly material at its most basic form, is made up by a color, metallic and roughness value. Obviously this wont be enough for all materials and therefore you can add stuff like normal, transparency and emission map and so forth.

I think a good way of thinking about PBR materials is to just focus on these 3 base settings and then add everything else on top of that.

Setting up Superfly

These are the settings, I use for test rendering and is a good starting point. Obviously this depend on how good your computer is as I don't really have a good one. So for a low end computer these settings should work I think.

I will quickly go through the most important settings and what you should be aware of as I see them. This is what a render looks like with these settings, so its not perfect. but it gives you a fairly good indication of what it will look like and the ability to spot potential problems before rendering the final one.

Branched path tracing

I always turn this off as I see little gain in spending time fine tuning these settings as it not that easy to actually figure out what to turn up and down to solve a given issue. Instead I control the quality of the render using the Pixel sample setting, Which is easy to remember, the higher the value the better quality, but keep in mind that this will also increase render time. This is rendered using a Pixel sample of 40.

Filter settings

I very rarely touch these settings as it seems to cause more problems than they solve. So i suggest leaving these as default and adjust the lights in you scene instead and make sure that your materials are correct Superfly materials.

The right hand settings

These are the settings that are the most important in my opinion and where you need to make changes depending on your scene. However default settings in the above screenshot seems to be able to handle most things, but will go through them in more details and point out potential problems and what to look out for.

Progressive refinement

This checkbox tell Poser to render the whole image in one go, which means that it doesn't use buckets and therefore the size of the buckets are ignored, however regardless of you turning this setting on or off, it have no impact on whether the right hand settings are enabled or not. These are always enabled. One issue you might experience using Progressive refinement is that your render fails before it even gets started and you will get a memory warning. As seen in the image I have chosen my graphic card for rendering since its faster than my CPU, however the graphic card only have so much memory, so it might not be able to load all the data into the memory in which case the image will render black. The solution to this is to change from the graphic card to the CPU.

Min / Max bounces

These are somewhat confusing as you would assume that these control the overall total amount of bounces that is allowed, which the description also indicate. However this doesn't apply to transparency, which can be seen in the following image..

This image even though it might be difficult to see, is 6 thin transparent boxes standing in a row. And looking at the render settings all of them have been set to 1, except Max Transparent Bounces, But its clear that the light goes through all the boxes. So just keep in mind that min / max bounces doesn't control transparent bounces.

A good way of thinking about these settings, is how many times a ray can bounce before it dies I think. Looking at the next example its fairly clear to see what happens and how bounces works. As an example there are mirrors opposite each other so they keep reflecting each other.

Lowering the Max number of bounces to 1, the light ray bounces 1 time and then the reflection turns black. So should you run into a reflection suddenly turning black, its most likely due to having to few maximum bounces.

The same applies with transparency where max transparency bounces determine how many layers the ray can penetrate before it dies.

Caustic refraction / Reflections

These should be turned on whenever you work with water or glass.

Tips for working with Superfly

Last i just want to give some quick tips for working with Superfly.

1. Use a HDR map for lighting, it gives your scene a lot better overall lighting and your objects something to reflect. Its quick and easy to setup and can be saved as your default setup whenever you start a new scene. All the images above are rendered with no lights in the Poser scene except for a HDR map, but you can always add your own lights as well if you want to.

If you have no HDR maps there are lots of free ones available to get you started.

The one I have used for these images can be downloaded for free here:

https://www.viz-people.com/portfolio/free-hdri-maps/

1. Always turn off the Ground plane in Poser!!! I can't stress this enough. Leaving it turned on, will not only block the HDR lighting but also increase render times by a huge amount. Why SM have left this on by default is a mystery to me, as it will make Superfly unnecessary slow for no apparent reason. Superfly is quality over speed, there is no way around it, but there is no reason to make it slower than it needs to be.

2. Make sure you are using correct Superfly materials, simply putting a check mark in the Superfly for a Firefly material, doesn't make it a PBR material and can cause a lot of noise and other artifacts, that can increase render times, when trying to rid of them. In some cases you can transfer your texture maps to a Physical Surface and it will work. But always remember that Superfly as a PBR render works with Metallic/Roughness and Firefly doesn't.

3. Should you experience noise in your renders and not wanting to increase pixel samples, just render you image slightly larger than what you need and scale it down to the correct size, its a good way to reduce noise without loosing to many details.

As a final note:

The settings used in this quick guide or what to call it :D Are not meant to be the "correct" settings, adjust them according to what you need.

For pure physical based mats I believe it is intended that the specular setting is not changed at all since in nature it is fairly constant. I assume its there to allow us to create interesting and unnatural mats. For me the spec settings caused the most confusion. In Reyes type render engines like Firefly spec is handled by highlight size, intensity and reflectivity, in PBR its handled by roughness and metal parameters which then calculates the highlight and reflectivity components itself. Because the PBR calculations take into account energy conservation (light out <= light in) it makes it much easier to make realistic looking mats.