There were some amazing talks about translucent skin at SIGGRAPH this year. It got me to think about ways to do this with Vue. It turns out, there is an easy way to dramatically improve rendering of characters using Vue's own workaround for translucent materials. Simply open your skin material and check 'one sided' at the top. Then go under the 'effects' tab and check 'backlight'. All you have to do after that is to place a reddish light source behind your character and 'voila'. Check the results by yourself...

This is the result with translucent materials.

And this is the result with a regular material. All other settings are identical to the previous scene. This is of course pure Vue, no postwork.

Excellent to know. Seems I learn something new here everyday. Thanks

that is definitely cool, Agiel; I'll have to give that a try. Thanks!

WOW! Many thanks for the hint. That'll spare some time with lightning. :) Phil

This is a great tip....had to bookmark it....got a bad memory. Sharen

Thanks Very Much For This Tip!

Well, well, well... I can't wait to give it a go! Thank you very much for sharing this info, agiel!

Wow! That makes a big difference. Thanks for the tip. :)

Holy Italian Pasta!! I gotta bookmark this. Thanks Agiel

agiel's great tip got me to experimenting with this further. I guess it will depend upon what you are trying to achieve in your Vue images, but I have been on a "turning off all shadows (or maybe just %15) on my Lights kick" and liking the effect much better. Vue STILL makes shadows, its just that they are much softer. So with agiel's tip in mind, in the Material Editor I unchecked CASTE SHADOWS and RECEIVE SHADOWS also. This effect allowed me to use a nice sunny day atmosphere AND gives my Vicky model a nice, soft skin tone, much like the effect professional photographers get when they have a reflective umbrella or flat white panels to reflect light back at the model. No more HARSH shadows and ugly skintones, yet other objects can still have "ugly" shadows, if you wish. I also tried increasing global highlights to "shiney" which also seems to help the skintone look more natural. I think agiel's idea can be "tweaked" even further to achieve a soft "moist" skintone as well. I accidently stumbled upon that effect before. Now I'm trying to remember how I did it, and hopefully combine all these effects to achieve some really beautiful, natural skintone.

Using all the other settings mentioned above, I found that if you go into Material Editor, highlights, you will find that the highlight color is most likely BLACK. Change the highlight color to: Red 232 Green 212 Blue 197 These colors produce a Light Tan color with a slightly reddish tone. Obviously it doesn't have to be these EXACT values, but it seems to approximate nice skin tone highlights on a normal sunny day. The other settings in highlights are: Highlights: 35% Highlight Global Size: 100% Obviously you can play with these values too, but what they all do is give my Vicky model nice Moist natural looking skin (like a TV commercial) By playing with the highlight values you can give her a more "sweaty" look, or even a "just out of the shower" look. The best part, for me is that I am using Clear Blue, a daytime atmosphere that would normally produce HARSH shadows and dull, flat skin tones, the kinds of things everyone gripes about in VUE and BRYCE. NOW- I have skintones that look much more like those "pro" skintones you see in Lightwave renders. SO- Vue can be like Lightwave folks, its all in the settings. Thanks very much to agiel for getting me going on this. (A few more tweaks could even make it better...)

Wowww. The effects are tremedous. Thanks for sharing.

Glad to see this inspired some experimentations :) I would be curious to see what you came up with. I have been trying this effect on older Vue scenes I made with characters and it does add a lot to the way characters look.

I hope other people try this on their older scenes and see what a difference this whole effect can make. I hope they post some "before" and "after" scenes too, so people can see the difference. I have also gone one step further and turned off shadows on the primary light source- the sun. This creates even softer shadows and a very "natural", I think, lighting effect. But this is still only the beginning, as I only adjusted the primary BODY skin tones. If you did this with LIPS, FINGERNAILS, etc. the effect would be even better. Plus, this effect could be applied to HAIR, giving it a much more "natural" look. Further effects could include subtle "fill" spotlights (with shadows off) that could make soft highlights on the hair, lips, etc. I hope everyone experiments with these effects and maybe come up with your own ideas. I certainly thank agiel for being a "catalyst" and advancing our VUE renders further.

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Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1281461

At the link, is a little example I did of adjusting lighting and highlights on a Poser character I brought into Vue. If you haven't seen it before, you might find it handy!

It all helps to show that Vue can be made to render Poser characters much better than previously realized. It is amazing to think how far Poser has come in the past 2-3 years in the way people render scenes. They have become tremendously better, not because any code was changed in the Poser software, but because various people figured out techniques that the high-end programs were using and basically said "why can't we do this in Poser"- and they COULD! VUE is the same, I think. Vue scenes can be tremendously better as we all begin to understand better what ALL THOSE CONTROLS in Vue settings actually DO. My own arrival at the method in this thread was not from studying tutorials or the manual, but simply by suddenly realizing that agiel had hit upon a really interesting idea that REALLY got me thinking. So also, thanks to you Djeser and everyone else out there who are always working on making VUE renders look better. I'm always open to seeing other people's ideas and giving them a try.

Gorgeous, i'm counting the minutes until my copy of Vue get here. this is just beautiful.

Very impressive results - and a clever trick. Thanks for sharing.

In some cases using agiel's Backlight on, you will find that it creates an "under-glow" under your character's chin and under the nose. Unfortunately there is no slider to adjust the Backlight. It's either ON or OFF. BUT- I found that lowering the sun ANGLE seems to take care of it. A higher sun (or light) angle cause the light to bounce off the Backlit Skin, and a lower angle directs the reflection away. The skin then becomes a little bit Flatter in tone, but you can correct this with a SHADOWS OFF spotlight directed at the face from a lower angle (which acts as a "FILL" light) The other thing I've noticed is that if you DO direct the SUN to a lower angle, it ALSO seems to reduce the "moist" or "wet skin" effect. So it seems this effect also works best with a higher sun angle. So again, you can choose to turn OFF the backlight effect to get better "sweat", or maybe also use a spotlight. Its obviously an area where you need to play with the settings and lights to get whatever effect you most desire. I have an older Vue 3 render where I had originally stumbled upon the wet-look effect and the P4 character looks as "WET" as you can get. I'm still studying that scene to see if it was a combination of high sun angle AND a very nice Brown-Tone skin map that created this effect so well. I think the right Skin Maps also may be a big factor.