Hi fellows, I just tested something inside the material room and tried to use the LaFemme textures. They render just fine, but they are not showing up in the preview. The whole figure is gray. I checked the preview mode, used Poser 12 LaFemme textures who get recognize by the preview. This might be a bug, because it only happens to the materials in the new Included Folder of Poser 13.

The shaders aren't broken. They use the Cycles root node, which previews in gray (even in Poser 12). Hoping the preview issue will be fixed in a future P13 release. 8-)

Ah, okay! A warning sign seems to be in order, don't you think? I wasn't aware of this fact. Thanks for helping me out!

DCArt posted at 7:47 AM Fri, 7 April 2023 - #4461095

They use the Cycles root node, which previews in gray (even in Poser 12).

Apparently, this is not the case with all hardware. On my HP convertible with the relatively simple graphics chip Mesa Intel UHD Graphics (CML GT2), materials based on Cycles Surface are displayed. On my workstation with Radeon graphics card with 8Gig memory, however, they do not (on the exact same PP2). Here is what I see on the HP:

What comes out as a render, however, does not have much to do with the preview in terms of lighting (HDRI without any other light source):

Yes it has something to do with hardware shading and OpenGL.  I have an RTX-3070 and if I uncheck the "Enable Hardware Shading" option in the Preview tab of render settings, I see the textures. But it seems what that does is show whatever previews in FireFly, so that may also be a bug.

The dev team is aware of this and hopefully will address it in an upcoming release.

DCArt posted at 11:39 AM Fri, 7 April 2023 - #4461134

Yes it has something to do with hardware shading and OpenGL.  I have an RTX-3070 and if I uncheck the "Enable Hardware Shading" option in the Preview tab of render settings, I see the textures. But it seems what that does is show whatever previews in FireFly, so that may also be a bug.

The dev team is aware of this and hopefully will address it in an upcoming release.

An upcoming release, but not today's... 

Disabling hardware shading does cause the preview to fall back on the Firefly root. That's been acknowledged as a bug. Frankly, I think it is better to keep it that way until Cycles gets proper previews. At least it gives you something to work with. It's hard to point eyeballs when they are all white.

Pretty much why most of my materials have both setups: PoserSurface (even a basic one) and Cycles-based, plus a Python script I've added to my toolbox to switch the figure/prop I'm posing back and forth Firefly <-> Superfly

Well, well, it seems I stumbled into something interesting. I got an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU and as far as I know open gl is available with it. And I have to say a working preview for any form of shader regardless would make working with Poser much easier.

I don't think it has anything to do with what GPU you have. Cycles shaders are white if you enable hardware shading in the previews, and it will display whatever you've got for Firefly if you disable it (which might lead you to think you're seeing Cycles previews, but you aren't). I treated myself to a 4090 so it's not like my GPU is not up to par.

I know I could just toggle between firefly and superfly to get different previews, but 90% of the time when I do anything as a temporary thing (e.g. add some working lights), I forget to change back before hitting render. :)

ChromeStar, I know what you mean. I forget to turn the work lights off most of the time. It happened so often that I searched for an automatic solution and I stumbled across something that was made by BagginsBill. If you create a work light got to the material room, select the light and add a simple color node to the surface color slot. Then set both specular and diffuse color to black. To make a perfect work light, go to it's parameter tab and turn of the shadow. A light with this settings will be ignored by Firefly and Superfly render engine but will illuminate your scene during posing. This is a bit time consuming to set up, but afterwards it saves a lot of time and nerves.

Hmmm, I think you also have to set the simple color's color to black, and then it only works if "enable hardware shading" is unchecked in preview settings. Still, better than I had, thanks!