The more realistic a texture is for V3, the more difficult it is to render, the character at full body. But at close ups (Facial), they are easier to do.

Here I made a render full body, well at a distance. This is a clip from a image I did. Actual size of character from the image. Blurry, or pic is not clear enough. I save my renders at 100% quality and this is how it looks like.

Message edited on: 12/01/2004 18:45

Next is this Pic of a Facial. More easier to do. Also I find lighting is essential for doing this technique, which I find easier now. Lighting hasn't changed from previous post with Pic. This is an actual size of a clip from a Render. And this is how it looks like from a 100% quality.

This is Devi Character with the texture used from Silent Smile by compossmentiss. I made wet lip in Material Room.

I dunno if anyone has this problem, but if not. I sure could use advice and pics to show. To conquer this full realistic body render. Post is suppose to be "Realistic Rendering"...not "Realistic Readering"...my apology. Type to fast.

Message edited on: 12/01/2004 18:46

It's a long painful road full of wrong turns to realism...sure you want it? Cannot tell what's wrong here. What's the texture size?

I found an excellent way to make realistic pictures. I dress my girlfriend up in funny outfits and make her stand in strange places and take photos of her. mmmmmmm...... Don't think that is going to help you much though, that outfit doesn't look like it will fit her. PS This is an attempt at humour and not meant to be taken seriously.

lmao!..@Helgard Yeah...my render size it 1024x768. If you look at the full body Render pic, they eyes are blurry, and the face texture gets dotty. Pixally, with jagged edges.

Anymore, I'll render at twice the size of the final and reduce it. The details come across better plus any little problems in postwork aren't as noticable.

Actually that did help alot. Struggling with lighting effects, I did a 4x Render size from 1024x768 to 4096x3072. The render took alot longer of course, and it will due to size. After the render, I took the image, into PSP8 and resized to 1024x768. Took out this image from it to show here, actual size from 1024x768 image. And I noticed a big difference. No pixals on face (Dotty) and jagged edges are reduced. Did lighting adjustments in PSP8 to get this close enough realistic pic. My next project I have now after my prop scene is Realism with lighting, full body. Thanks Bushi... :-)

Message edited on: 12/01/2004 23:12

One way to speed up the render time is to render your background and foreground separately in two images. For the background render just hide the foreground figure(s). For the foreground, render over black and export as a .tif or .psd file so you have an alpha channel. You can then composite the images in PSP or PS. The alpha channel will make the black background in the foreground image transparent so the rendered background shows. Any changes you may need to make in the foreground will render quicker since your using a smaller area. I do most of my backgrounds in PS then use this process to overlay the Poser figures.

I work just as bushi does (backgrounds done in PS or Painter with the forground Poser composite...). But even if you choose to render the whole image at once,you should still save in either the Tiff or Psd format. Even using the 100% setting, saving in the Jpg format you still lose quality (especially with Poser, as it still has older Jpg compression coding). And each time you open and resave back to Jpg you lose even more. Wait until all your postwork is done and you are ready to post on the net before you save as a Jpg. If you are using Photoshop, the least of what you should use is the "save for web" settings.....but the best thing would be to use ImageReady (even PS isn't the best at Jpg compression all by itself). Another thing to try for full body renders is to render at a much larger size, as you have done...but with "antialias" turned OFF. Then resizing back down will give you a very sharp image (with no noticeable jaggies). The reason behind this is, Poser over does the "antialias" which softens everything, and you lose the detail seen from a distance. This doesnt work as well for close-up face shots, as you will see a small amount of jaggies in very fine detail (like hair and lashes).... plus the over-antialias softening actually works for you here. Have fun, SWAMP

Yeah never render as a jpg if you want to retain quality. Rendering as a TGA(targa) image will also be just as good as TIFF or PSD. Pete

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=692390&Artist=Robo2010&Start=1&ByArtist=Yes

The very top Pic example is how the render looks like right after a render and before it is saved as a Jpg 100%. Their was hardly quality lost, although Jpgs formats are good for loss quality. I struggle with this when rendering full body rendering. Then the pic in Post #7 was rendered 4x larger than 1024x768. Then saved in Jpg format. Normally I do not like to do postwork at all. Sometimes have no choice "Lighting, color". Been fortunate once in a Render.

I actually see little pixilization in the images you have here. The tips give above are all excellent ones. I've been saving in tiff format for three years now after discovering that jpg is a 'lossy' format, and I reserve that for the posted image only. There are some other tricks to improve the initial image, to get the most out of the Poser program to begin with. One is rendering at a higher dpi (dots per inch) than the default 72 dpi found in both P4 and P5. This does make a difference in smoother figure outlines and preserving texture appearance. In P4, I typically rendered at 300 dpi. With P5 and Firefly, I use 150 dpi. Also the settings on your shadows in your lights section can make a vast difference in quality of the final product. Most lights you'll find will be set with the shadow map being 256. I typically use 1024, 2000, or 3000 for the shadow map. These sizes, particularly with Firefire will take quite a while to render. I suggest checking out the lighting tutorials by geep. Liz

Attached Link: http://www.enmeshed.com/shadermagic/

You MUST check out this tutorial if you want a decent looking skin effect. I've used it once and its simply amazing. It takes a lot of time connecting nodes but its definitely worth it.

Thanks, I've bookmarked that tutorial for further reading. Liz

I used to be somewhat impressed with how I perceived some images in the forum gallery to be photo realistic like. But after veiwing DiscoveryHD and other HD channels with a Sony 55 on a 10' dish I can now really notice flaws in computer generated images. For some reason watching HDTV has spoiled my perception of photoreal. Now I expect everything to look that sharp and detailed. It has spoiled me.

@SWAMP

"Another thing to try for full body renders is to render at a much larger size, as you have done...but with "antialias" turned OFF."

Interesting! I hadn't thought of rendering this way but it does make sense. I'll give that a try on some that I'm currently working. Thanks for the tip!

@Robo2010

It occured to me that you may want to look into some of the work being done here with HDRI. It's a technique for increasing the dynamic range of the lighting. The results can be stunning if done right. Here's a link to a thread that gives some background. And yes, you can do a fair appoximation of HDRI in Poser. There's a PoserPython script floating around that will tale HDR-type files and create light sets to simulate it. If your interested, I'll look into finding the location of the script. Oops! Forgot the link! http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1959395

Message edited on: 12/02/2004 12:49

I used RDNA's lights, some do the job. But I sure can sure use info on HDRI. Thanks for the links. :-)

Ummm..from reading and seeing the pics of HDRI, wonder, has anyone did a render using HDRI? All I see is houses, rooms any thing from Poser or Poser 5?

Robo2010, check on some of the most renders by jdwell, he's experimenting with HDRI. Liz

Attached Link: Stewer's Website

Here's the location of the script I was talking about earlier. The info is 3/4 of the way down the page. There are a couple of examples iamges there too.

This link:

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1436427

will take you to a discussion of Cinema 4D and Poser renders. Down the thread starting at message 53 are some other examples that Stewer posted.

I'm not totally sure of which Poser render engine you're using. Poser 5 Firefly or Poser 4? One thing I discovered is that the Firefly engine in Poser 5 has many more options, and rather different ways of doing things such as anti-aliasing. The explanation in the manual is a little confusing. In Poser 5, open the Render Options window (Ctrl-Y) and select the Firefly renderer. There are two sliders in the middle of the window, "Pixels samples" and "Post filter size", which are used to set the anti-aliasing. The first tends to have more effect on jagged edges. The second seems to be a controlled blur. As for the original image, there's little point in enlarging an original texture map, unless you have fancy trickery available. But modern characters have multiple maps, insetad of cramming everything into one, and faces will be textured with far more pixels than the resr of the body. If you can make a reasonably good enlargement of the body map, it can help balance the extra pixels on the face.

It makes zero sense to save your final renders as a lossy format unless they are not serious renders or you want to save disk space. For web you would simply save a copy as a jpg

I have 320GB of HD Space (2 X 160 GB HD). Although if the render doesn't look good, I would discard it. Also Webs do require jpg formats, and a certain size, which can be fustrating and also to give respect to website owners.

Certainly. Like I said a lossy format is suitable for websites. But say for example you were creating some fantastic surreal image that you hoped to sell as prints. You would never save it as a jpeg or other lossy format. But you would make a smaller jpeg copy for posting to the web. The fact that Nearly all textures available for Poser are jpegs is generally to keep the download size small. But I would prefer them to be Tiff's or TGA's. Especially since I have DSL. I couldn't careless about the download size of the item.

Lossless compression: has everyone forgotten PNG format?