i got poser 5 about a month or so ago, mainly to export figures into bryce. for some reason, the skin textures lose most of their detail in bryce. i started out using the material lab settings from a tutorial at curiography, and i've tried adjusting just about everything, and nothing works. the pic on the left is rendered in poser, and the one on the right is the same figure in bryce. (i realize that the lighing is different, but this doesn't seem to be a lighting issue.) there's a huge difference in the texture. it looks great in poser, and just absolutely sucks in bryce. i've been fighting this for a month, so any advise would be greatly appreciated. thanx.

What is the ambient color set to? It looks like it's white. Is there a dot in the ambient channel that matches the texture color (should be the same as diffuse color). Maybe a screen shot of the material lab settings would help.

Perhaps a screenshot of your Materials Lab settings would help in figuring out what the trouble is. I'm tempted to say that the ambiance looks too high, but that is just a guess.

And I've just re-iterated what Aldaron said (gotta learn to type faster...)

here's the material lab settings.

Ack he glows in the Dark!!! Must...Turn...Off...Ambience...Before...Going...Blind!

Yeah, I'd say take ambience down to 0 and see what he looks like

If you have your diffusion and ambience set to anything that adds up to more than 100 it's gonna give off more light than it absorbs, creating problems.

And with your specularity color being black it's not going to show up at all especially with the spec halo color so dark as well. To get the skin tones that are in poser you probably will have to have an orangish light in the scene in Bryce.

Also, your bump map is not actually turned on, you need a marble in the A channel. I wouldn't turn the ambient channel to zero (18 is a bit high, though), this should be on so that your texture shows up in shadows on the figure. Just turn down the diffuse until the texture starts looking normal. The lighting can play a large role. I find when I have my textures the way I want them and change the lighting, I have to alter the textures again. Key: Experiment, experiment, experiment.

I second what Aldaron said first... and what tjohn said second... though not necessarily in that order. :D not much help, I know, but, hey, you get what you pay for. ;)

thanks for the suggestions. going to go back and tackle it again.

there's already a huge difference in the look of the texture. thanks again for all of your help.

Well in that case, tempest, i wants me a refund.

sure thing... just send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, along with a check or money order for $63.89 for processing and handling fees, and I'll get that refund check right out to you. :)

It looks like the lighting is too bright in the Bryce render and it doesn't even look like the same model. Give us a wireframe to see what you've done in Bryce. Also there shouldn't be such a difference in the textures unless you somehow used different textures in Bryce.

I always put a faint orange/yellow colour to my main spot when working with figures. Poser's lighting is usually several coloured sources whereas bryces basic is white sunlight. I never set the ambience above 8 myself. If you don't have a bump map to use in the bump channel then slimsand at 1 or 2 slider setting and 600 scale will give a similar effect. (only apply it to the skin though -looks wierd on the eye balls!)

"then slimsand at 1 or 2 slider setting and 600 scale" you completely lost me there :-( what is slimsand? anyway, i have a bump map, and once it was actually enabled (as tjohn pointed out) and i turned own the diffusion and ambience, things looked a lot better. the diffusion looked best at 79 and the ambience at 6. i also moved the diffusion marble over into the A channel and that helped a lot, although i have no idea what's actually happening there when you do that. (just got my real world bryce book about a week ago. i really need to sit down and read it cover to cover before trying any more art. i waste a lot of time stumbling around in the dark)

The top 6 setting in the material determine color. If you have a marble in channel a diffusion it will get it's color from the texture in channel a and so forth. The rest of the settings are values or how much of that setting to use. If there is a marble it will use the alpha channel of that texture (the middle window) and white will be like a value of 100 while black will be zero.

One thing no one mentioned that has worked for me is to use the alpha of the texture, or the bump, to drive the diffusion. Doesn't work in every case, but you should see the mil dragon done that way...8^) Aye, it is best not to have ambiance and diffusion total over 100. For an outdoor type, sunlit image, I like diffuse at 85 and ambiance at 15, but for indoor artificially lit images I lower the ambiance to near zero. Outer space scenes get no ambiance at all. It can be difficult to get the effect you had in poser because of the differences in the way each program handles textures. The texture map itself is not the problem, but the underlying tint you can assign to objects in poser is not easily duplicated in bryce. The only way I know to do it is to modify the texture image in an image editor (photoshop, painter, the gimp). Something else to try...load one image texture in the 'A' channel, another in the 'B' channel, and a plain 50% gray image in the 'C'...you end up with a 50/50 mix of the two. That's something poser can't touch...

i've gotten pretty good results by adjusting the diffusion and ambience. but as an experiment, i tried what you suggested, modifying the texture in photopaint and using my original settings in bryce just to see what happens. i found that if a adjust the gamma of the texture jpeg until the flesh tones are a dark reddish orange, then it looks almost normal in bryce.