Having been inspired to create a "fluffy chick" version of the Phoenix it has been suggested that I post a tutorial on how I managed it. Personally I think it'd be a pretty boring tutorial but I haven't done much for the community in a while so I'm game if anyone wants me to re-create the attached image step-by-step starting from the DAZ phoenix hatchling. Though of course I might make minor changes. If there's interest I'll try and get to it sooner rather than later. Cheers, Cliff Bowman

Where is the oft-requested EDIT button? Image contains: Background sky from www.lemog.fr.st textures Police Box by Chris Sutor Ruined house by George279 Phoenix Hatchling by Daz3D (Anton I suspect)

Wow! The phoenix really looks great this way. Pity I only have Poser 4 (I'm on a Mac and waiting for P5).

Hey! I always love to see a Doctor Who reference slipped into a composition. If the bird wern't there, I'd almost expect some Daleks to be patrolling the ruins. Sincerely, Bill

I would have interest if I owned the phenoex! That's the best one I've seen!

The "Phoenix" really looks cool here. I have but don't use P5, but.......I would say.......go ahead and do the tutorial, I am sure there are a lot of folks out there who would love to know how you did this. (: Genny

Yes please do the tut, it will be great thanks...

Right - well, I'll hopefully do the tut here today (son willing). Be warned that I'll do step-by-step, hopefully missing out nothing (except some repeated steps). That's because I prefer tutorials which I can follow exactly, without requiring "intuitive steps"... but it does make for some long, boring posts!

First off I have a bizzarre preference for ray-tracing - partly because I don't have to sit there while shadow maps are created, and I don't have to fiddle with shadow cams for any of my scenes... so I set the render settings to something like this on most scenes...

Of course, that means I also have to change a light setting (for each light) in order for them to use Ray Tracing instead of shadow maps...

When rendered, default camera positions etc., we now have my "default start position" for the Hatchling Phoenix from DAZ3D.

Reposition the main camera so you can see the Hatchling Phoenix decently and go to the hair room (click the "Hair" tab immediately under the Poser 5 menus).

Adding full-body fur is much more work than usual for adding Poser 5 strand-based hair to a model, because while humans typically have ahir applied to "head" or "scullcap", here we have to select each and every body part and create a hair group for it. So we start by selecting the head of the creature. Press the "New Growth Group" button. Change the default name for a growth group (Hair_1) to somehting meaningful - always bear in mind that you might want to edit it later, and it CAN be advantageous sometimes to have more than 1 group per head (for styling reasons). So "Hair_1","Hair_2" etc. can be a problem. I called my head hair, erm, Hair_head. Once you've clicked "OK" for your chosen hair growth group name a number of previously disabled buttons become available. Within the "Hair Growth Groups" section, click "Edit Growth Group" so that we can specify which areas of the current body section should grow hairs. Up pops the "Group Editor"...

Click "Add Material" and in the drop-down list that pops up select "skin" - this will add all instances of the material "skin" (on the currently selected body part) to the hair group. The Hatchling Phoenix is quite conveniently designed such that the "skin" material is applied to all areas of the body which need fur applied. Click "OK" to close the pop-up selector.

Exactly how the hair group is displayed depends on the display mode you're using - here I'm using my most commonly chosen mode, "Texture Shaded". All areas of the head mesh which are (now) part of the current hair group are shown in a neatly obvious red.

Now let's get on with adding hairs. Close the group editor and press the "Grow Guide Hairs" button. This not only "grows" some sparse hairs to give you an idea of what the hairstyle will look like, but also enabled more of the hair-adjusting controls. As can be seen in this snapshot, unless we're going for a hippy character we should probably trim the hairs a bit...

Here's how "Hippy" looks at this stage when rendered quickly. Something of a "Bonnie Tyler" look...

Adjust the hair parameters to suit - here's the settings I have used and the reasons for the changes: Hair Length: I want shorter hair! I'm aiming for "hatchling fluff" and, basically, I guessed and rendered. Fortunately I happened upon the right setting for me first time - this won't always be the case. Length Variance: I prefer my hairs to be slightly different. Even jsut a little adds, IMHO, to the look of the hair. Number of Hairs: As a general rule the more hairs the merrier, but this affects memory usage and render times drastically. As I originally produced "Fluffy" (or "Duck" as my son mostly calls him) on my notebook in the dead of night, I had to try and balance the quality of the look against the memory available. NOTE: For still images one wonderful memory-saving trick is to create hair-groups which leave bald patches on any part of the model which won't be seen by the camera. As I was creating the character first (with, to be honest, an eye to animating him later) I didn't do this, but it's a great way to save memory. Root Width: I Increased the size of the root of the hairs to try and reduce the amount of skin material showing through. As I've had a hairline which for some years has not been receeding so much as it's been running for it's life, thinning or male-pattern baldness is a sensitive topic with me . Verts per hair: Once again I've reduced this number in order to save on memory and render time - but be aware that (especially with animations) that hairs which are too simple (too few verts) can look and/or behave in unexpected ways. to realistically represent human hair (for example) we'd REALLY want to allow Poser as many vertices as memory allows - but for Fluffy 10 per hair should be ample (you might even try fewer and see how well it does).

A "quick" render later and you should notice 2 things. 1. Strand-based hair seriously slows down rendering. 2. The result is surprisingly good with minimal effort on our part - we've really only tweaked a couple of settings yet the "Fluffy" character is really starting to appear. It was at this stage that I started to think of Godzilla, the Red Dwarf episode "Waxworks" (IIRC), Doctor Who and too many B-Movies to be able to recall their names.

Attached Link: http://trekkiegrrrl.dk

A quick side-step here to perform a step which I didn't perform originally... TrekkieGrrrl a.k.a. Ern Yoka (http://trekkiegrrrl.dk) has produced a wonderful alternative texture map and MAT file for the Hatchling Phoenix. I'll just go to the Materials room and seelct the texture "SkinLeg". Clicking on the "connector" to the right of the "Displacement" setting, I select "New Node...2D Textures...image_map". I set the "Image Source" on this new node to TrekkieGrrrl's "HatchlingPTEX1.jpg".

Then I change the "Displacement" value to 0.1 and set the Render Options to use displacement... and voila! Much better looking legs IMHO (note - I have retained the original leg colouring provided by the DAZ texture, and "just" used the new texture as a form of "super bump map"). Attached is a quick render of the result. Right - back to the original "Fluffy" tutorial in the next panel...

Ooops - I'm late getting lunch prepared for James. Back later (not much left to do for the character).

We need to repeat these basic steps: 1. Select a body part. 2. Create a hair group for that body part which is all of the part which is "skin". 3. Grow hairs and edit the hair design slightly. 4. Go back to step 1 until all desired body parts have fluff. The following settings apply to all the "skin" body parts: Hair Length: 0.05 Length Variance: 0.001 Root Width: 2 Verts per hair: 10 While the "Number of Hairs" for each body part are as follows: upperNeck: 1000 Neck: 1000 Chest: 3000 Left Collar & Right Collar: 500 lWing1 & rWing1: 500 lWing2 & rWing2: 100 Hip: 2000 Left Thigh & Right Thigh: 1000 lLeg & rLeg: 1000 After setting up all of the parameters for each group of hair, click the "Grow Guide Hairs" button so that the guide hairs reflect the latest version fo the hairs. NOTE: Above is the order that I did the hair groups in, and as such it is WRONG. When we come to calculating the hair flow later, it will become apparent that the hair is calculated in order of the hair groups... if we were to reverse the order of creation we MIGHT get hair which "lies down" slightly better. However, since we're aiming for "chick fluff" we don't want the hair to lie down too well, so it suits us to do the groups the "wrong way around".

This a nice tutorial. Thank you! Lots of good information.

There is a further "trick" we can use to minimise the effect of skin being visible through the hair (and therefore allow us to keep the hair count to a minimum) - make tha skin the same colour as the fur! Poser 5 hair typically has 2 colours, each strand changing from 2root" to "tip" colour along it's length. Here I've selected the head hair in the Materials room so that we can see the root colour (RGB 165,151,110).

Detaching the "Diffuse_Color" node from the DAZ texture and changing the colour to the same as the hair root (RGB 165,151,110) will help hide any thinning our chick is suffering from.

Now - are you thirsty? In "Render Options" set the Frame Count to 1. Then select "Aniamtion...Recalculate Dynamics...All Hair". It doesn't matetr that we're only working on a still image, this command will make the hair react to our given pose and gravity and so on and so forth to "lie" correctly. We cut the number of frames to prevent it working on all the frames in an animation (as we're not actually animating at this point) though I can barely hold back from making "Fluffy" walk and talk for my son :) Now go make that drink - you've got time for the kettle to boil. In case I forget to mention it, redo this step as the end of any scene so that the hair behaves corrctly for your pose before rendering (itself no longer the quick job it was when we started on this guy).

Voila - a SLOOOOOW render later and we have the basic "Fluffy" version of the character (James no longer insists on calling him "DUCK! DUCK!" whenever he sees him, but will sometimes call him "Burr" [bird] or even "Fwuffy" at times, though "DUCK!" is still his preferred name).

This is awesome! Thanks for the tut!

Time to place him in a set! Add the Runined Building by George279 (from the Renderosity freebies - George does some WONDERFUL looking buildings, and this is no exception). Be careful to avoid the stupid error I made... with the "RUIN" body-part of the model selected, turn off smoothing for the building. Whether Poser 5 "smoothing" (this is mesh smoothing above and beyond Poser 4's method of trying to make models look "roundy" or "biological" rather than artificial) depends very much on the way it was built. Mostly technological models (such as a building) will behave rather strangely unless designed with smoothing in mind. Animals however tend to benefit somewhat more - so as most of my renders include creatures (including humans) of one sort or another I tend to turn smoothing on "globally" and turn it off for models which don't work properly...when I remember, anyway.

Thanks for the kind comments people - and the surprise recognition of the Doctor Who reference (I'm constantly surprised how many people recognise that blue box's origins ). I'm honestly surprised how popular this seems to be - good timing that DAZ released such a cute critter! (I had to buy the cat and dog while I was gettign the bird, naturally).

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1285227

Scale down and position the building to suit the image we're going for (Doctor Who and the Chick of Doom). I haven't included instructions for setting up a Poser 5 sky-sphere with clouds because, frankly, I'm not able to do them well yet myself (as you can see). TIP: I haven't tried scaling the chick instead of the building, but it seems to me pretty likely that doing so would mess up the hair terribly, and require all sorts of tweaks if we were even to hope it would look good. Of particular concern would be the hair diameter at root and tip, but also length etc... so wherever possible put hair on a model at it's "final" scale... and if you need to change scale consider what item or items will likely scale best/easiest. Sometimes it's easier to scale up/down everything but the character instead of scaling the character down/up! Oh - and here's a link to the original thread, where you'll also see some more imaginative work on the Hatchling Phoenix.

Attached Link: http://www.lemog.fr.st

Having set up a basic camera position that I'm happy with (not shown here) I added in a "One Sided Square" prop. Having found a sky texture from www.lemog.fr.st which suited my needs (I thought it'd add some appropriate atmosphere) I scaled the square prop up and to the same proportions as the bitmap... Scale:500% xScale: 2014% yScale:512% ...and applied the texture to the square in the material room.

Having got rid of my abortive attempt at an all-encompasing Poser 5 sky sphere, I've placed the One Sided Square with sky image "behind" the scene, and adjusted position using the correct camera position (still not shown becaus eI'm trying to show "what is" rather than the impression the image is supposed to convey). NOTE: This chick is denuded to speed up the rendering process.

The TARDIS (police box) prop is placed, and care is even taken to place it on top of the rubble rather than flat on the "ground" layer (the TARDIS materialised after the damage began). While (as with the Phoenix) this prop isn't freely available, there has been a TARDIS freebie in Renderosity (so I suspect it's still there - I just prefer Chris's work).

Attached Link: http://www.who3d.com

This time I've remembered to turn off "Smooth polygons" for the TARDIS prop too, and I've tweaked the pose of Fluffy in a variety of ways to produce the look I'm going for. These include: CloseEyes: 0.33 Open Mouth: 2 BeakHook: 1 but also limb posing and - today - some adjustments to the tail feathers to make them more obvious (and more obviously feathers rather than "some odd colour behind the bird"). ...and that's it - from start to finish, the fluffy character and the scene I set him in. Well - I did SAY that all the hard work had been done by others :) Cheers, Cliff Bowman www.who3d.com PS you may notice a number of ".dyn" files which pop up in the same folder as the scene file - as far as I've been able to determine these are temp files which Poser fails to delete (at least on my machine) and can be deleted freely. Indeed, they SHOULD be deleted. Sigh.

It looks so great! So you're using the feet from my phoenix as displacement? But not the actual texture? Or did I get you wrong Anyway they look good :o)

Re: ernyoka1 on 6/22/03 11:53

It looks so great! So you're using the feet from my phoenix as displacement? But not the actual texture? Or did I get you wrong Anyway they look good :o)

Yup, "just" using your feet as displacement - the actual texture (well, pigment) for the feet is still DAZ's. Both wifey and I feel that your texture does a pretty good job at being yanked around as a displacement map.

Re: MarianneR on 6/21/03 15:38 Wow! The phoenix really looks great this way. Pity I only have Poser 4 (I'm on a Mac and waiting for P5).

Don't worry, Poser 5 for the Mac is on its way. Or should I say "Worry, Poser 5 for the Mac is on its way" ??

1. Re: mikachan on 6/21/03 17:18 I would have interest if I owned the phenoex! That's the best one I've seen!

DAZ make some pretty good stuff - even their cheap inhouse stuff seems to be fairly good, although often some features are left out to be supplied by the community (e.g. MIMIC morphs - for Pete's sake DAZ owned and have now written the current versions of MIMIC yet they still need us to make their characters MIMIC ready?). IMHO the Platinum Club membership fee is well worth it - you get to buy a LOT more than you would normally for a fraction of "full retail" price overall - and IMHO there are comparatively few products whose prices have been inflated to take this into account (and the Hatchling Phoenix isn't one of them). Phoenix is like $1.99 to PC members - hard to beat really.

Cheers,
Cliff Bowman

Quote: Don't worry, Poser 5 for the Mac is on its way. Or should I say "Worry, Poser 5 for the Mac is on its way" ?? LOL There does seem to be a lot of interesting things in P5, and I think (hope) that it should be easier to make it stable on the Mac as there aren't as many different hardware and OS types as there are in the PC world.

Agreed, the stability should be improved (although the Mac isn't as much a single target as it used to be) - and as for Poser 5... what it can't do is, by now, legendary... what it can do I doubt we've even envisaged yet. Some of the improvements over Poser 4 belie the "Poser" name IMHO... and some of it is comparatively easy to do too (I was quite proud of this image I produced last night, yet it was so easy to do!)

WOW! That was one cool displacement map! Care to make a tut about that as well? every time I try adding a displacement map to anything it looks like someone who have rolled around in poison ivy or a beehive or something similar.... EVEN at LOW displacement settings... Or at least what I think is low settings ;o)

A tut? Well - did I warn you it was easy? Start with Millenium Dragon and the texture-pack add-on from DAZ3D. Load up the Dragon and apply the Pro-Pack version of the green texture. Head over to the materials room, and for each material except the Wing Membrane disconenct the bump map from the Gradient Bump and attach it to the Displacement node instead. Change the Displacement value to 0.5 (much higher than I usually use - but hey, I was testing!). As I say, for all materials - except the Wing Membrane which I connected to the Bump node (not Gradient Bump) instead, and I may well not have applied displacement to the eye parts eitehr (Can't easily check at the moment because, erm, I'm rendering up an example of Poser 5 atmosphere). Sorry about this - but for ages my uploads to Renderosity simply wouldn't work - images were always corrupt, so I mostly didn't even bother THINKING about posting my meagre images. Now that it's suddenly working I'm all-a-flutter and rendering up stuff so I can actually HAVE a gallery next time someone says "don't criticise if you can't produce any images of your own" . Displacement maps are pretty much just super bump-maps, although there are some slight differences. For example, 50% grey on a bump map is "at mesh level" with darker being indentations and lighter being raised bumps (or, rather, those "colours" indicate what the bump map is attempting to display, without ACTUALLY causing creases and bumps on the model geometry). With displacement maps black (0,0,0) is "mesh level" and anything brighter is a bump "up" (away from) the mesh level. So creases are harder to do, because there's no "crease" function per se... instead you have to lift everything else up. While this SOUNDS like nit-picking, it isn't really - because you often have to avoid making your displacement map displace too far "up" from the mesh in order to avoid making joints/seams look odd... and in order to retain the basic shape of your model! So the "depth" of displacement CAN, in some isntances, be sorely limited despite the improvements over bump maps. Then there are images like the above, where even a large displacement looks (IMHO) quite good :) Cheers, Cliff