Using PBR Maps with Poser

To get an overview of the various types of maps used in Poser, see Common PBR Texture Tools and Maps.

Connecting PBR Maps to the Physical Surface Root Node

The Physical Surface root allows you to create textures that can be rendered in FireFly and SuperFly, in both Poser 11 through Poser 13. The following image shows the Sanctum Arts Kitty (which you will be using in this tutorial) rendered in FireFly and SuperFly, using the Physical Surface Node as the primary root node.

While FireFly is not really a PBR renderer, the Physical Surface node does a reasonable job of creating materials that render fairly well in FireFly. The main difference is in metals, which FireFly needs a lot of reflective node tricks to render properly. The majority of the metallic effect that you see on the FireFly side of these renders is more than likely coming from the Roughness map, which controls the amount and sharpness of the shine in the metal areas. Note, however, that the results in FireFly aren't as physically accurate as the results in the SuperFly render, due to the differences in how they work.

Most PBR materials use three basic building blocks:

Color maps define the color of the object. PBR color maps are basically flat colors, with no highlights or shadows baked in.
Roughness maps control the sharpness of reflection, or the amount of glossiness in the object. Darker areas are more glossy, and lighter areas are more matted in appearance.
Normal or bump maps define raised or lowered areas in the texture. Areas facing the camera render the effect, and areas that are perpendicular to the camera appear smooth.

You will need to download the textures from the Poser 13 downloads section. Navigate to https://www.posersoftware.com/downloads/content and download the SAKitty PBR Tutorial Files.zip file. Unzip this file to your Poser 13 content runtime.

The items that are used in this tutorial are furnished with Poser as follows:

The Sanctum Arts Kitty is found in Figures > Included > Toys.
The textures can be found in the Poser 13 library at Included > Runtime > Textures > SAKitty Tutorial
Completed versions of the materials can be found in the Poser 13 library, at Included > Runtime > Materials > Toys > SAKitty Tutorial

You'll begin by assigning Color, Roughness, and Normal maps for all the materials. See the following pages for these steps:

After you are done applying all of the base (color, roughness, and normal maps), you'll continue by attaching additional maps for the Kitty2 and Kitty3 textures:

Connecting PBR Maps to the Cycles Root and Principled BSDF Node

The Cycles root node and Principled BSDF node are like the Physical Root Node on steroids. In addition to being able to connect PBR shaders to the Principled BSDF node, there are all sorts of additional inputs and connections to control refraction, reflection, subsurface scattering, anisotropics, sheen, clearcoat, and more. It is basically Poser's built in version of a do-it-all Uber shader.

The main disadvantage is that this method currently only works in Poser 12 and 13 Cycles, so it will not be compatible with FireFly, or with Poser 11 SuperFly. The other disadvantage is that, at current writing, Cycles materials preview in gray in the preview renderer. So in the following tutorials, we start with the Physical Surface Root node materials (discussed above), and add additional nodes to use the same textures for the Principled BSDF node. This way you have the best of both worlds ... you can use the Physical Surface nodes for the FireFly renderer and for preview purposes, and then when you want to create your final render, just render it with SuperFly.

See the following tutorials for how to connect PBR maps to the Cycles/Principled BSDF Nodes: