Opera...wow - a film. I've recently been doing a bit of animation in P5 - tried unsuccessfully to use an old version of Motionbuilder I had from a magazine to create bhv's. Anyway, for animations using this script - if your character is walking around the place, the main light direction will change relative to the character, so might give some odd looks. As a very effective workaround, I created a new point light - directly UP (ie. overhead), switched it off, ran the RealSkinShader script, specified the new above light as the main light. Then as the character moves around, the fake sss will come from above, which still looks very good. Anyway....

The reason for the bump map, is because it feeds into the specular node. So divots in the bump won't show any spec, and bumps will shine. Gives an awesome result when you get it right. So no bumpmap, no special sheen. You could probably just convert the colour map into B&W, make sure her lips are white, and that might do. I noticed on the V3 hi-res bumpmaps, the base colour varies between the head and body, which explains why sometimes there is a slight variance in specularity between these two materials.

Posermatic....I've been using the V3 hi-res maps, which have bumpmaps at 4000x3000. I've tried a number of other bump-maps and they all seem to be ok - although give slightly different looks (not better, or worse, just different). If you find you need more specularity, then go into the mat room and tweek the Blinn node for the materials you want to change (rather than changing the bump map). Where I've gone to the (my!) limits on diffuse and ambient, I think there is room for improvement in the way specular works in this system, so experiment and try different things. I don't think I'm allowed to post a 256x256 portion of the V3 hi-res maps due to copyright. As far as the ratio between B&W - you'll notice that the auto-generated noise node (if there is no bumpmap) uses light grey to dark grey, so bump-maps should be the same. Only use pure-black for creases and lines, and pure white for spots, bumps and lips.

Enough rambling from me. Hope I've answered your questions. Feel free to fire any issues my way.

Message edited on: 12/09/2004 02:02

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