Was “Yes, more stuff is coming”….

Hmm…well, 16 hours of screwing around and the problem with AO node was something so simple that I overlooked it. All I had to do was tinker with the raytrace bounces, irradiance caching and pixel samples till I got the results I wanted >.< So, that means sometime in the next few days, I’ll be posting previews of Syleth’s new look as well as the piece that was driving me bat-shit to begin with. Speaking of Ambient Occlusion, the cel-shading nodes for Silent Shadow that I developed keep getting better and better. I’ve figured out how to AO into the overall system and the results sofar look incredible, so there will be previews of that as well.

Original Post 5.25.08 @ 14:28 CDT:

Ambient Occlusion is driving me absolutely nuts! Anyway, I’m working on some new Silent Shadow stuff. First off, Syleth is getting a new hairdo. I found an acceptable alternative to the Wild/Messy hair that I was using for Syleth. I’m working on the preview now but like I just stated: ambient occlusion is driving me crazy. There is something wacky going on with the ambient occlusion node applied to ground pane and I’m starting to wonder if this is the first bug I’ve found in Poser Pro. Back to Sy’s new hairdo. You’ll see it in the upcoming pages when they’re released, and no, I won’t go back and redo the previous pages until I’m finished with Issue 1. I’m hoping that I’m able to finish Issue 1 sometime this summer since I won’t be working full-time. I also want to update the look of the website, add some new features and maybe bring back the wallpapers section.

Pages 8 and 9 won’t be released until after June 13th, which is the end of the quarter. Also, look for the release of the comic manager sometime around July 1st. Its looking like I am going to have pu-lenty of free time after the middle of the June. The job I’ve had for seven years is becoming entirely too stressful and I’ve decided  that I want to concentrate totally on getting a job in Web Design/Development. I also took off from school for the summer. Who knows? Maybe I finish Issue 1 before the summer is over.

Well, as promised. Here is part two of my review of Poser Pro.

Lately, I’ve been testing out a few of the new features of Poser Pro. Namely, the optimized HDRI, and gamma correction options, Background Render, and Queue Manager. I am going to start with the Background Render and Queue Manager. Background Render is new to Poser Pro, and allows you to render an image in the background while still working with your open Poser document. I’ve only used this feature once and I can say that I do see a potential time saver in this feature. Now, how well it performs on machines that are less robust than my own, that I can’t say but it does have the potential to become a powerful feature for some people. That leads me to the related option: Queue Manager.

Queue Manager is actually a seperate program from Poser itself. It is meant to be installed not only on the host machine (ie: where you have Poser installed) but also on any machine on your network that you wish to use as render node. I’ve installed Queue Manager on my secondary computer (the Athlon64 3000+) to test the render node option and I have been using it to queue renders for various camera shots. Instead of having to wait for a render to finish, switch to another camera and start rendering again, I can send all of my renders to Queue Manager and allow it to run. I’ve also found that the render node option works just fine as well, though I’ll admit that the single-core Athlon64 machine isn’t the best candidate for a render-node, considering that I have a bunch of other stuff installed on it. Now my laptop (dual-core Athlon64) might be a better candidate when its hooked up to the network. At anyrate, even though Queue Manager is very useful, it still could have used some other UI enhancements. Like a progress bar or percent completed marker for each render. As it stands right now, Queue Manager just tells you that its rendering and when the render job was added, and once its been completed, the date and time it was completed.

Now, there is another option called Background Render that allows you to render an image in Poser while you continue to work on poses and camera angles in the view area. It does run a little slower than the full renderer, but that it is a background renderer. Get it?

The last two options are the options that I have heard the most ranting about on the various Poser forums. Gamma correction and HDRI-optimized output. I did four test renders using gamma correction and hdri-optimized (two with the options on and two with the options off), the most notable difference I could detect in the two that had gamma correction turned on were the quality of the trans-maps. Trans-map quality was improved with gamma correction turned on—considering that I was using an upcoming scene from Silent Shadow that featured Syleth, the improvement on the trans-maps worked too well. Something about the Wild-n-Messy Hair figure fitted to Aiko 3, but it revealed “bald-spots” that didn’t show up in the non-gamma corrected renders.

comparision renders, Poser Pro HDRI Optimized and Gamma Correction:

So, inspite of my disappointment that Poser Pro isn’t a full 64-bit app, it still has a lot to recommend it. Yes, this review is probably falling short on other things, like the new stock content but then, I never worked with the default Poser content to begin with. I’m not going to recommend that anyone buy (or not buy) Poser Pro. That will have to be a decision for the individual buyers. Whether or not some of the new features really meet your needs. In my honest opinion, I’d rate Poser Pro overall with four stars (one star taken off because of the 64-bit thing), but five stars for stability, and speed.