mathman opened this issue on Jun 05, 2004 ยท 41 posts
ronstuff posted Sat, 05 June 2004 at 10:45 PM
Yes - sharpen the hair texture in a Paint program (a little "Sharpen" plus a little "unsharp mask" in this case) - until the hair detail is crisp instead of blurry. Some textures may not need this, but you have to look at the map itself to see, since you can't tell if Poser is softening it or if it is soft to begin with, and you want hair textures to begin as crisp as they can. Then for the bump map take that sharpened image and remove the chroma (desaturate) until you have a grayscale - this is not absolutely necessary but it helps you see the contrast range that the bump map will actually use - you want it to have clear definition of the hair grain with as much contrast as possible. So, without loosing the fine detail - use a combination of brightness, contrast and sometimes lowering gamma a bit until you have as much contrast as you can get (and still have fine detail). Use that as the bump map, which is ESSENTIAL if you want to get realistic highlights when it is rendered. For the highlights, set highlight size to a medium value, and a color of dark gray. Do NOT apply the texture to the highlight as this will make the hair look metallic instead of like hair. If your scene has primary lights that are colored instead of white, you might tint the highlight color very slightly with the same color as your main lighting - but only slightly. Try it, and you will see that most hair can be made to look 100% better than the original. But this works best on hair that does not already have strong highlights already painted in (as some of Koz's hair does). What bugs me is, why arent things like this done by the vendor? Don't they care how their product looks?