Hey peeps. So I've been very busy cranking out comic renders in Poser using my preferred engine: Firefly. I encountered a few issues that I thought I really need to share with ya'll.

Firstly, let me show you what I am making. I am making a comic series about my main character Lali that travels per 737 through Africa up to the UK (as a kind of symbolic representation of me moving from Africa to the UK back in 2017). On the way they stop over in Tanzania on an airstrip to visit some friends and all kinds of naughtiness ensues.

I made all the vegetation, grass, trees in 3dsmax, and used landsat images and DEMs to make the terrain surrounding the airstrip. The landscape is a tiled system of over 150 materials that interlock nicely with each other. Many of the assets are kitbashed internet freebies and some stuff from Unreal's model database. The 737 is an adapted version of 2nd_world's 737. And all the girls in the aircraft are erogirl, all loaded to the nines with their standard morphs. The clothes are mostly self-made BONANZA clothing for Evolution adapted for Erogirl, as well as a hybrid M4.

(landy in progress)

In short, the scene is a beast. And its not even the biggest I've ever rendered. Rendering in Firefly, the RAM loaded up to about 27Gb. I have 32Gb RAM available. The renders did not take very long, thankfully.

I've been using Firefly since 2011. I like firefly because all renders by default are sharp, despite the quality. Its the perfect comic renderer, it does a little bit of everything, but everything is sharp... as long as its well lit. And that's Firefly's only drawback IMO: the moment you lack proper lighting, the IDL fails and it blotches. But that is easily remedied by just adding a fake light... and I rarely encounter this issue. Firefly's renders are barebones, but they do the trick... but it can be so much better.

When Poser 11 came out with Superfly, I was extremely excited because I really craved moving on from firefly. I wanted that sweet handling of shadows and reflections. I immediately started rendering in SF the instant it came out. But after rendering about 100 images of a series, I decided I better wait until they improved it... or until I learned more about Superfly. Unfortunately, nothing really changed, aside from a very informative webinar from Nerd and some tutorials from BB.

SF just didn't work well for me. Firefly mats just didn't really work, it was clear this was a very new renderer. I use displacement a lot, all my stuff was set up for firefly, Superfly/cycles SSS looks like cardboard, even with the cycles nodes (and I feel i can tell an SF render from a mile away by now because of it), and the ever-persistent battle for that stupid sweet spot, avoiding grain. It felt like every scene needed a new setting, and GPU renders were totally out of the question with the size of the scenes I was making. Even with a GTX1080 at 11Gb, I would be forced to do texture economy and bloat my HD reserves with lower res versions of all my textures. Just a lot of inefficient work, and I couldn't afford 4 new monster graphix cards. I just wanna get on with it and tell stories.

I have had ONE setting for firefly since 2014, with some minor adjustments for special occasions. I've put all my efforts into advancing my materials, learning from trail and error and the odd BB lesson. Firefly just jumps out at you with bright colors, sharp SSS and sharp edges too. Perhaps a little too sharp on occasion, but it worked... and most importantly, it didn't make a fuss about the size of the scene!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was until Poser 11, when suddenly self-shadowing was a thing... or at least I think it is self-shadowing. Anomalies and 'blotches' occur in Poser 11's Firefly, and I think I might have isolated it to geometry that is too close to either itself or another geometry. Because of this I needed to render a large part of my Machingo Airstrip scene in Poser Pro 2014. The P11 renders were so ugly I don't dare to show them.

Firefly is a great practical renderer. Superfly is a great and necessary addition, but please do not give up on Firefly.

You definitely proof that magic can be done with Firefly!

thanks bis :)

just for the record I have experimented with shadow min bias and other settings, and the bias seemed to respond the most, and it usually had to do with either geometry too close to itself or another/or transparencies, all involving infinite light, and I use infinite light a LOT (hint: the SUN. aka: Ra, the sun god...). But I couldn't eliminate the problem at all, until I went back to pp2014 and it was entirely gone.

I know PBR is a thing these days, but its very much based on gaming tech from what I understand. Games are based on real-time performance. I'm more about photography style art. I have frequently considered Octane, tried it several times, but that's like a MILLION dollars per license I might as well dust off my Canon EOS... I might still do it if I have the money. Its just that Octane is not integrated into Poser like FF or SF, and it will all just slow my workflow down.

Also, Firefly turns out to be faster than SF believe it or not... regarding CPU. If you want to get the same sharpness ad FF in SF using a CPU render, SF takes way longer. SF does handle the light more realistically, but for the amount of adapting needed to achieve this, its hardly worth that little extra detail. Remember that we managed to entertain people with lined hand-drawn comics for decades, if Firefly in its acceptable mediocrity achieves an acceptable level of suspension of disbelief, its a renderer well worth working on.

I don't see why both cannot be kept.

I see the same thing on the DS side - iRay is awesome for photoreal renders, Octane (what little I've played with it) is even more awesome, but 3Delight is still hella useful in a lot of situations. More importantly, it is far more merciful on system resources.

Now here's a query for you - does Firefly have an external stand-alone render engine? What I mean is, can you export a scene to, say, .rib or suchlike, and let 'er rip?

Seems at least somewhat possible at first blush ...

Self shadowing polys have been around since - IIRC - Poser 5, Ero. Total pain in the arse but you can get round it by faffing with the Shadow Min Bias.

Pinging because I'm firefly sycophant.

@Erogenesis The club scenes are superb! How many figures are in the scene or is this an example of layering at it's best?

I, too, still use Firefly a lot. It's fine for an illustrative/comic style; not everyone wants hyper-realism all the time.

And it's so much faster. I have a pretty good machine, but even so...Superfly renders take about twice as long as Firefly. Especially if you want to avoid grain.

I'm big fan of Firefly. I was able to do some really good renders. I had good skin shader. I got my render settings working great. But. I haven't used Firefly in over half of year because of the [censored] self shadowing polygon issue. After three scenes that had to be rendered multiple times that problem, I switch to Octane Render.

Superfly is just too slow and very noisy. Also, it doesn't handle HDRI files well. Superfly crashes when uses an HDRI file as the light source and rendering with the video card.

I can confirm that Poser 11 has a bigger Self-Shadowing problem than previous versions. Here is a scene that was created in Poser Pro 2014. There is a single infinite light and Ezdome for the sky.

Now here is the same scene (same file) rendered in Poser Pro 11.

That darker region right in the front is a self-shadowing polygon.

@Penguinisto:

Yes I hope they either just keep FF or even improve FF. I really think its worth having FF continue. I just fear with how super susceptible 3D CGI software is to trends rather than independent innovation and design, Firefly will be ditched in favor of the more trendy PBR render system, with as excuse that it will be 'too much maintenance'.

That said SF has a lot of potential but damn does it need work. Starting with simply recognising what is invisible in Poser... Even the external Octane can do that. But there are too many damn settings, more than a professional camera. However, if they get it to work as efficient as octane, that would be really good.

I don't think FF has an external variant but I think it could easily be made into one since FFRender.exe is separate from Poser.exe and it also works using RenderQueue. Not sure if there's any point though.

@SamTherapy: I honestly haven't noticed such heavy self-shadowing issues before as with P11. The first time I saw it was with one of my first renders with Evolution in p11. Reported it back then but nothing has changed since (unless they fixed it in P11.1 I wouldn't know. I still use SR8). But yeah I did go up and down with the shadow min bias from 10 to 0.001 and there was almost no difference. The simple fact that rendering the same scene in PP2014 fixed it gives me the feeling that there was some change in the workings of FF that was not tested properly (probably simply because SF received more focus, much like other lesser understood features in Poser never got tested professionally, I suspect).

@randym77: Yes, the tradeoff sharpness, SSS effect and time in FF is superior to SF IMO. FF's handling of IDL, transparencies, and caustics needs work though. Superfly is absolutely not fast if you want a razor sharp render, if you use CPU that is.

@willdial: Yes octane has been on my list for a long time. The tradeoff is the speed and quality, perhaps sacrificing the workflow a little with the extra settings and new materials. But its the pricetag that is stopping me, especially since I use Poser on 6 computers sometimes.

And yes, I hope they fix the self-shadowing thing. Please rendo, get Bondware to fix FF!

Love your work, Erogenesis.

I also love Firefly. Use PP 2012 and 2014.

The problems mentioned above are representative of the things that always make me stay one version behind on Poser. Though, now that the software is in Rendo's domain, I may strongly consider jumping to their next version whenever they have it ready and hopefully fixed.

I consider Firefly's results to be more painting-like, which is perfect for graphic novels.

But, with careful lighting, I have often come very close to photorealistic as well.

A while back, I purchased Bytefactory's PBR Emulator for Firefly but haven't had the time to utilize it yet. Looking forward to finally giving it a go. Anyone else use it?

Here's a red-cyan stereoscopic-3D render I did in Firefly -- (red over left eye)...

When you write "Superfly is a great and necessary addition, but please do not give up on Firefly." I'd not only second that, but I'd add "please stop breaking Firefly and put it back the way it was". I started a thread at the Smith Micro forum where I demonstrated that the same scene can render worse in P11 than it does in P10, and prior to that there was a similar thread at RDNA. I and others have submitted bug reports to SM, along with a reproducible and distributable scene, but that was three years ago so you can draw your own conclusions.

I'm often frustrated by scenes which display the artifacts you've illustrated, which seem only to occur when IDL or IBL is in use. The curvature of the affected surfaces, and their illumination, are also a factor. I eventually bought a copy of Poser 10 purely for rendering these troublesome scenes in. (I would have liked PP2014 to get a 64 bit renderer, but so far have had no success.) Until this is fixed I'm unlikely to have any interest in subsequent versions of Poser.

FF has it's uses. I suppose if I spent a few months messing with SSS skin shaders and lighting I might get something like I do with SF. I just don't have the time for that right now so I'll stick with Superfly. Superfly has better shadows and focus blur and everything just looks more real without a whole lot of effort.

It looks like a battle between CPU and GPU rendering. By your stats, FF takes half as long to render the scene with the graininess. Yes, I can see it. I wonder if some tweaking to the lighting would get you the same shading. Did these both have the same lighting? If not, you know what I'm going to say.

I do wish I had the muscles to run SF but all things in time.

quietrob posted at 10:51AM Sat, 24 August 2019 - #4360347

It looks like a battle between CPU and GPU rendering. By your stats, FF takes half as long to render the scene with the graininess. Yes, I can see it. I wonder if some tweaking to the lighting would get you the same shading. Did these both have the same lighting? If not, you know what I'm going to say.

I do wish I had the muscles to run SF but all things in time. Same light source. Envirosphere with HDRI.

I think it's also worth noting that there are those of us who don't render for photo-realism. I have a library of art shaders for Firefly that can be handy but by and large, it is just faster and provides me with the output I need to post-work the hell out of for a faux painting.

Many of us are still looking for shaders to eliminate the noise when producing toon renders. What shaders are you using and are they still available? Thanks!!

quietrob posted at 7:13AM Mon, 26 August 2019 - #4360347

It looks like a battle between CPU and GPU rendering. By your stats, FF takes half as long to render the scene with the graininess.

That is my experience as well. I have a decent machine. 12 core processor, 64 Gb of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. And Superfly takes twice as long as Firefly (I timed it), and graininess is still an issue. (I shudder to think about how long it would take with CPU rendering.)

A couple of people suggested that I use an external denoiser, but I'd rather just render with low noise from the get-go.

And I am rarely interested in hyper-realism. I'm more likely to run renders through Photoshop to make them look hand-drawn than I am to try and make them look like photographs.

If they improve Superfly to the point that it works as fast and as well as Firefly, fine. But if they're not going to do that, please don't take Firefly away.