All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the next in a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months, VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to enable several render effects.

The FireFly rendering engine includes several rendering options that can improve the look and add realism to the final image and/or animation. Each of these options can be enabled in the FireFly panel of the Render Settings dialog box.

Rendering Shadows Only
The Shadow Only option will render the shadows on a white background. This lets you edit the shadows independently and composite them within an image-editing package. Figure 1 shows a rendered image with the Shadows Only option enabled. Notice how some shadows exist on the figure itself.

[Figure 1] Shadows only.

Using Displacement Maps
You can add displacement maps to materials in the Material Room, but they aren't displayed until the scene is rendered. The Render Settings dialog box includes an option that must be enabled for displacement maps to be rendered. Displacement maps are different from bump maps in that they actually change the geometry of the object they are applied to. Figure 2 shows a grid image applied to the shirt material group of a figure.

Creating a Depth of Field Effect
A depth of field effect focuses the camera on objects at the front of the scene and all objects at a distance are gradually blurred. The blurring is stronger the farther from the front of the scene an object is. The exact location where the camera is focused in controlled by the camera's Focal Length value and the strength of the blur is determined by the camera's FStop value. This effect is only visible when the scene is rendered with the Depth of Field option in the Render Settings dialog box enabled. Figure 3 shows a line of figures with this effect enabled. You can see more depth of field examples in Chapter 6, "Establishing a Scene-Cameras and Backgrounds."