bloodsong, soulhuntre Just to clarify this, Firefly is based (supposedly) primarily on the REYES scanline rendering algorithm, which is noted for its high quality, speed and low resource usage. Ray tracing is a secondary function and should only be active when the renderer encounters a surface with raytracing materials. The specification for REYES renderers have been in the public domain for 15 years and it has been used as the primary rendering technique in most feature films since then. There are many REYES renderers available, including freeware implementations available and the technology is now extremely mature. The problem I and some others have with Firefly is that despite its alleged pedigree, it patently falls a long way short of REYES in terms of speed, quality and resource usage and far behind the quality of even relatively simple to implement (but slow) 'brute-force' ray tracing solutions. In short it seems to represent the worst of all worlds. This and the fact that that are some very clear 'quirks' (see my earlier post) as well as a lot unexpected aspects such as the use of polygon shading and smoothing, which are redundant in a renderer that implements micropolygon splitting and the extreme increase in memory usage relating to bucket size, raises genuine concerns that CL seriously dropped the ball on this one. Bill

heyas; well, i don't know anything about reyes. i guess i didn't expect the full-blown ray tracer (or the reyes thing) to be an instant improvement on the old poser renders. in fact, i don't see what's so all bad about the poser renders at all. yeah, okay, no real reflections or refractions. if it gets the look you want.... well, i dunno. i guess i just think that trying to make out that the firefly rendering engine is going to instantly make your poser scenes look better is a silly notion, and i don't know where people got it from. but, you know, that's just my opinion ;)

"Additionally, the point I am trying to make is that CL can not claim to be ignorant of Victoria. I don't know of many of us that use posette in p4 as a standard model." considering the politics between daz & cl right now they probably couldn't consider vicky and her mil pals. Though I think Judy is 1000 times better than posette. posette really disappointed me when I got p4. Judy may not have as many morphs but she is fully articulate and very pretty to me. I bought bryce 5 after getting this system I have now. So it ran much faster than Bryce 4 :) (note here: I was running b4 on a p2 350, it froze, I got a new puter) However I would like to point out the work it takes to get poser characters to look good in bryce, a lot. Ever seen vicky put straight in to bryce? talk about alien, it can take hours to fix a texture(thank you castironflamingo for saving us time) and if you want to see a bad upgrade(not too bad I was still in school when b5 came out so I got it very cheap) Corel literally painted a new color on the interface, slapped on a little tree maker and called it good. Otherwise...it really is not much different than b4. Poser5 is loads above p4 in my opinion. She takes a little more work to learn and use, shrug, people have very little paitents. Dave-so is comendible, he may gripe, everyone is allowed to, but he is trying, many just gripe and gripe with out trying to help themselves. System vs application debate: I think this got miscontrude(sp) In the tech support biz, when you start out you always start with the system, then to known problems(depending on provided info), then to what the user is doing, then to messing around in the application. May drive people crazy but you have to check off the foundation before moving upstairs. So the first thing you ask with ANY type of computer problem with ANY one is what kind of computer do you have?

SnowSultan - "I'll admit that I'm surprised that there appears to be so little difference in quality between the P4 renderer and Firefly in your everyday "normal" Poser render"

The classic poser usage is a fairly tight image of a model with a either a fairly non-demanding texture or one that is photo based; those textures usually look good under a fairly narrow range of lighting conditions.

In other words... Poser renders as we commonly see them are simply not very complicated. 99% of the "render" quality is built directly into the texture... and that is why those textures can look so good with fairly little calculation and fail so miserably under any circumstance outside their designed for settings.

For instance, many Poser4 textures have highlights and shine built directly into the texture itself to compensate for the shortfalls of the render engine; as soon as you take those textures into another lighting condition it looks horrible. It is this trick that has allowed Poser to rival much more expensive systems, if you're careful and stay inside the limitations. it also pretty much guarantees that a much more powerful render engine won't help too much with those images.

The improvements we see in Poser5 will come in two specific forms:

• We will see a dramatic increase in the quality of the renders for full "scenes". Though I myself would never dream of building a scene in Poser under most circumstances I know a lot of people do - and the quality has always suffered anytime the renderer was left on it's own to make things look real as opposed to just rendering a photographic texture.
• The textures designed for Poser5 will look better under a wider variety of lighting and camera settings. The highlights no longer have to be built in. Many smaller shadows no longer have to be faked onto the texture (a displacement map will allow them to actually render) and multiple layers of enhancements are possible.

BTW - you have a folder on my machine too... so it's pretty common :)

williamsheil  - "The problem I and some others have with Firefly is that despite its alleged pedigree, it patently falls a long way short of REYES in terms of speed, quality and resource usage and far behind the quality of even relatively simple to implement (but slow) 'brute-force' ray tracing solutions."

While I agree that FF is not the top rendering system around, i have yet to see any objective comparison of it's supposed lack of quality. Can you point me at a comparison of the engine and another REYES like engine with substantially similar scenes and shaders so I can see what the problem is for myself?