Most of my sets use strong displacement maps, and my cause artifacts or errors to occur in Renders in Poser if not set up correctly. This has nothing to do with the product itself, but with the way Poser's Firefly renderer handles displacements with certain lighting situations or render settings. Below is a brief review of the most common, and how to avoid them. | Cracks and HolesIt looks as though holes are in the model, allowing the background color to show through. This has to be one of Poser's most common artifacts regarding displacements. It also happens to be one of the easier ones to fix. In your render settings, increasing Min Displacement bounds from 0 to as high as 1 will almost always correct this. Using a dark background color as oppossed to the white used in the example will also help hide it. |
Those Crazy Cris Cross LinesThis occurs as a result of a combination of texture filtering and strong displacement maps. most of my products have been set up to avoid this, but if this happens withone, or with any other item, these steps can correct it. |
Image Source Texture FilteringIn almost every case, turning off filtering under your image textures image_map box within Poser's Material Room will solve this issue. By default Poser sets this to 'Quality', simply change this to off from the pull down for the displacement maps of your product. (see image below) This is already done for you with the Protohive. |
Also, tweaking your render settings could also help this issue. Lowering your Min Shader Rate under your Manual Render Settings to or below 0.2 will eliminate the artifacts as well, but will increase rendering time greatly on older machines. |
Shadow ArtifactsThis error is a result of of Firefly's attempt to cast shadows of the model's displacement map generated features onto the model. Again this doesn't mean that there is something wrong with the Protohive, or any similar product, all you need is to tweak a few settings. |
Shadow Min BiasThe most common reason for this form of artifact in your Poser renders is the Shadow Min Bias in the properties pane of your lights. If this happens with one of my light sets, or with your own lights, increasing the Shadow Min Bias as high as 10 should eliminate this. ( see image Below) Depending on your light set, you may need to go higher than 10, or not as high as 10, you'll have to increase it a little at a time until the artifacts disappear. Increasing your overall render settings can also help remove this. |
My Render SettingsThis here is the render settings that I use of almost everything. If all else fails, this should at least get you heading in the right direction. |