Yesterday there was a discussion about possible new features coming in P6 from the interview with the guy from CL. One of the things mentioned was IBL, or Image-Based Lighting. This is already possible to some degree in P5, so I decided to make a short test animation using some techniques to simulate global illumination and HDRI in P5. Here's the result of this short test animation:

Diane Quicktime Version (223kb)
Diane Windows Media Version (229 kb)

This is a sample screencap of the animation for those of you with VERY slow dialup (the actual videos are reduced in size from this):

Some credits due:

Stewer's great HDRI python script with HDRShop and the lightgen plugin; Face_Off's real skin shader script (to which I adjusted some nodes for this test, etc.); V3 low resolution figure, and Sassy Hair 2.

Rendertime in P5 Firefly was about 7 or 8 hours I believe for 120 frames (ack!) with 40 lights and an environment-mapped sphere. Some postwork and color correction done in Combustion 3. Just a very simple animation meant primarily to test rendertimes in simulating HDRI in Poser. I think the result came out OK.

Wow! this is inspiring (and extremely frustrating, since none of the HDRI utils or Python scripts can run on a Mac)!

Holy (insert expletive here) That is seriously impressive (a short clip I'll grant you but still seriously impressive) Did you keyframe that by hand? (Goes off to look for this HDRI python script)

"Wow! this is inspiring (and extremely frustrating, since none of the HDRI utils or Python scripts can run on a Mac)!" Thanks. I wasn't aware Python couldn't be run on a Mac. I feel for you, because I'd be out of my mind without it.

"Did you keyframe that by hand?" Yeah, that's all hand animated. I wish I'd used dynamic hair for this, because I'm not fond of the movement I got with the "sassy hair" prop, but this was just a test, so I didn't want to invest the time on running a simulation. ;-) Thanks for the compliment!

maxxxmodelz, I should clarify - Poser 5 Python on Mac does not support Tkinter which is invariably used by the PC creators of Python scripts to implement their GUI. If all the user interface of a script needs to do is select a file or enter a bit of text or answer a yes/no type question, all of those can be done in Mac Python without resorting to Tkinter, it just takes more effort than most PC Python creators without access to a Mac for testing are willing/able to expend (absolutely no offence or flame war ignition intended). I've spent a fair bit of time recently, poking under the hood of Poser 5 Python on the Mac, trying to find GUI workarounds for some of the most popular commercial, PC only Python scripts. I have not given up hope that some external link to another Mac Tkinter enabled Python can be made to interface Poser with some of the scripts that Mac users are hanging out for. I don't think I can hold my breath until P6 comes out...

Max, This must have been a blast! If her hand was on her hip or thigh...and you had mags on that thigh...could you get the mags to follow the hand indents... I think I answered my own q. You can shift the magzone, right? Suffering in my near future...lol Hair looks fine. If only collision ever got up to snuff...and it didn't require so much tweaking. I'm sure this little clip was a lot of work. Have you tried it with just a few lights? The shader should give you an alt specular...for free. For rendertime sanity. I realize it's IBL but, I'm hoping you can get close with a few globals and one pristine low bias spot/FFly render

"This must have been a blast! If her hand was on her hip or thigh...and you had mags on that thigh...could you get the mags to follow the hand indents..."

Sure, that's possible with a little "hair pulling" effort. ;-) Actually, everything on mags can be animated, so it shouldn't be too much trouble. I really didn't pay much attention to the way her left hand was animated, since it was not going to be seen by the camera. There's an old saying in 3d: "Don't model what you won't see". I use that same philosophy when animating. ;-)

Here's the wire of her hand positions in frame 1:

And here's frame 120:

"Have you tried it with just a few lights? The shader should give you an alt specular...for free. For rendertime sanity."

I'm not used to rendering within Poser, so when I saw how long the first frame took to roll out of Firefly, I near soiled my pants, but I had the "look" I wanted, so I didn't bother with any tweaking after that. I initially tested this scene using 20 lights generated by lightgen, but I had problems getting the soft shadow effect to behave the way I wanted (I didn't try scaling this scene up, which may have helped the shadows), so I generated a new file using double the generated lights, and with some shader tweaking, it worked out. :-)

Oh, also... for some reason, I had trouble selecting the primary light with face_off's great script. It only displayed the first 4 or 5 lights in the scene from the script set-up panel. I had to customize the nodes in the material room quite a bit to work properly with this "global light" setup. Maybe there's just something I fogot to do. ;-(

Ah...Last click before running script, hit your light. Or drag your mouse down from inside script window...they do scroll. Figures too. You wrecked my day, max. I'm in animation hell. lol. Snowing here anyway...

I must confess to an urge to vent at Curious Labs for their Mac python support but i did want to mention that I have had a fair amount of success with doing real HDRI with Carrara, Poser, and Transposer though for rendering animation, it makes Bryce feel speedy.

On older versions of Windows, the Quicktime version works, no trouble. The .wmv needs a codec which doesn't seem to be signed, and so i#the install fails. As an animation, what lets it down is the mouth movement through the last third. It looks strange. It looks better when the animation runs full-screen, but there's still something not quite right about those lips. But apart from that, it look very real. The lighting and the rest of the animation seem spot-on. Speculation: the texturemap pixels bleed over the material boundary -- the polygon edges which define the lips. The way UV mapping works, just one pixel could have a noticable effect.

Awesome!!! Truly wonderful animation. cheerio lululee

"It looks better when the animation runs full-screen, but there's still something not quite right about those lips." Yeah, you're right about the lips. I think if I shorten the keyframe duration of the smiling action at the end it would help. Also, the hair needs to be linear interpolated for a more "crisp" movement. I think it flows too slowly and overshoots a little too much. To be honest, I really didn't put much effort into the animation portion here (not as much as I probably should have). Basically, I just keyframed some morphs with linear interpolation on most of them in a matter of about 10 to 15 minutes for the entire thing. This is actually only the second time I've rendered an animation using global lights directly in Poser. I think I feared the rendering phase most of all. hehe. ;-P

Max, fantastic stuff. I played with HDRShop and stewers excellent script about 6 months back - but only used 10 lights - didn't get the look I wanted. What you've done is way better. I originally only used 10 lights figuring - less lights - faster rendertime - but it's at the expense of quality.

(and extremely frustrating, since none of the HDRI utils or Python scripts can run on a Mac) My script needs only very minor changes to run on the Mac (replacing the single Tkinter dialog with poser.Dialog) - but without a Mac equivalent to Lightgen, it's basically useless.

"I originally only used 10 lights figuring - less lights - faster rendertime - but it's at the expense of quality." Hi, face_off! Yeah, I experienced the same thing with the lights. I desperately wanted to use less of them, but I just couldn't get the results. I'm used to working with light domes in other apps that consist of 100+ spots, but that just isn't efficient in Poser currently, unless you use VERY low shadow map values (which can in turn lead to some different problems as well). Your real-skin shader system is excellent though. I'd like to personally congratulate you on that. I can now use a basic 3-point light setup on most scenes in Poser, and the skin still looks great. It definitely encourages me to utilize P5's renderer more frequently for smaller animations. ;-) I'll be doing more stuff with it soon I'm sure.

Teriffic Max, it feels like real day in real light. (Now when will you be uploading the real girl and how much bandwidth to download her?) Well maxx this has me interested because at 4 mintues per frame it is inside my daylight animation budget. Throw a second character in there, maybe 5 minutes, but I don't use Mil/Daz so back down to 4 min, I bet. Hope you will walk me through this, slowly, a little... I believe I need. HDRShop (free 1.0 for non-commercial) lightgen plugin (what is it and how much?) stewar's script (free, thanks stewar) Anything else? ::::: Opera :::::

Thanks for the nice words on RSS. I agree with you on the 3 point lighting thing. As for lots of lights.....if you turn shadows off completely - does it significantly impact quality? You could maybe just assign shadows to a single light - would save masses of rendertime.

WAIT......is Diane rendered agaisnt a set and you are producing the light streaming in the window, plus out of focus with depth of field effects, or are you rendering agaisnt a background photo? ::::: Opera :::::

Maxx, what was your frame size for the original? looks like a single-seat 2-year commercial license for HDRShop is $600 and Johathan Cohen does not actually say what his conditions for commercial use would be. How 'bout you stewar? I hope you make some cash off things like this if they go commercial! ::::: Opera :::::

"As for lots of lights.....if you turn shadows off completely - does it significantly impact quality? You could maybe just assign shadows to a single light - would save masses of rendertime."

Well, you don't always need all the lights to cast shadows, but certainly the more lights with soft shadows you have in the light dome, the closer it will look to true GI-like output in the end. Obviously, in most scenes, there will still be a key light with a higher intensity shadow value than the other ones.

Let's say you have 40 lights in your dome, but only 20 cast shadows. You'd spend a while playing with intensity and shadow bias/blur to get the same look, and then it still might show some shadow "banding" on your objects. If only the key light has shadows, but all your dome lights do not, then some parts of the scene might look "fake" because there are no 'area' shadows cast by the objects where you would expect to see them. You could get away with stuff like that in some cases though. Depends on the scene, and how close you want it to look to actual GI. Message edited on: 01/19/2005 18:04

"WAIT......is Diane rendered agaisnt a set and you are producing the light streaming in the window, plus out of focus with depth of field effects, or are you rendering agaisnt a background photo?"

Oh god. If I had rendered all that geometry with DOF, I'd still be waiting for Firefly to finish. LOL. No, that's actually an inverse sphere around the scene, mapped with an environment map (the same image used to capture the HDR data for Poser from HDRShop) with "cast shadows" disabled. I blurred the map in Photoshop before adding it to the sphere to fake DOF. It's basically a composite. Alternatively, you could have also dropped a portion of the image that corresponds with your lighting setup into the background to save further on rendertime or even simply saved the animation as TIFF output, with NO background at all, and composited the image in post but in this case, I wasn't sure if I would be animating the camera. I chose not to, since it's only a test, so I did the old map-to-sphere trick, which basically makes the image a 360 degree environment.
Message edited on: 01/19/2005 18:19