"Most of the texture packs I've seen give worse results than V3 standard maps."

I agree with this. In fact, Vicki & Mike's standard Hi-res are much more effective under various lighting conditions than most of the so-called "photo realistic" textures you can purchase. The reason is that most of the photo-based textures out there have a specular effect "baked" into the skin as a result of using photographs with uneven lighting for the texture. This becomes problematic when you want to use a global lighting setup, or animated lights, where the position of the light on the character will change, and may not correspond to the "highlighted" areas of the texture at all times, and this results in less than realistic effects.

Most of DAZ's hi-res mats for their characters do not suffer from this ailment (they are more continuous tone), allowing the artist to achieve the specular and dark areas of the skin texture with the use of lighting and materials - the way it SHOULD be done.

I'd post a side-by-side comparison render of Daz's standard hi res mats vs. one of the top selling "photo" mats that can be found here under true global illumination conditions to illustrate clearly what I mean, but I wouldn't want to single out any one merchant, or indicate their products are not good... because they ARE good for some uses, but just not as usable under various lighting conditions. Message edited on: 09/08/2004 14:53

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.