What's with the carrara lights? I brought a couple of poser people into a scene with one of the two light preset thingies, and their skin looked very wet and shiny. I then opened the wizzard thingy with the preset loungeroom, imported the pair of poser people, and the skin looked nice and normal. Love esther

I did an experiment with this recently, have a look in my gallery. The thing I found is to break up the highlight, shininess and relflection channels with a bit of noise - either a noisy texturemap or a procedural noise within Carrara. This helps break up the highlight edges. Also check if there's a bump map for the figure as well, that helps break up highlights, I think Transposer does the best job it can with importing Poser stuff, but as Poser doesn't seem to play nicely with other software you'd be better off checking everything yourself. Giving the colourmap a bit of variety by mixing two slightly different versions of the original will help give the figure a bit more life as well. Regarding the lights - different lights are going to give you different effects. If you are going to use spotlights and bulbs then you might want to experiment with soft shadow options. Most of the loungeroom presets seem geared towards soft lighting - HDRI and environment lighting will give you a similar soft lighting effect. Sun light and a realistic sky seems, IMHO, to have the best balance between hard & soft highlights/shadows.

Heh anastasis. I was just trying that effect you mention with a previous image. Cloned the skin color and made a mixer shader with fake fresnel driving it. Tinted each a little, plus some other tweaks. My opinion is that fake fres and similar are wonderful on fabrics. A little procedural bump is definately great on skin, but I haven't yet found the combination that gets those soft glowing highlights natural skin has. Agree with you on the lighting; for me (theatrical lighting designer here!) a clear key (like sun), and a soft base light (like sky dome) gives excellent results on Poser imports. A little GI fills in the cracks quick nicely.

This might be useful: some experiments from when I was working on the Miki skin texture. They are all black to white gradients in the glow channel, so I could quickly see the exact effect I would get. 1) For the Colour channel. Veloute - I know it's not accurate, but with the proper texture maps applied it's not too bad for faking veins and skin tone variation. This eventually became: - Mixer operator (colour channel) - Channel 1: texture mixed with slightly brighter texture with Veloute. - Channel 2: as above, but both textures brighter. - Main blender: Shader Ops Invert Fake Fresnel to push the brighter/paler colours back as if the colour is fading away into the distance. If you haven't got Veloute try Cellular and/or Fractal Noise - they should get the job done. I think you've got to put something extra into the colour channel of a texture as well as every where else. It gives the lights in your scene something extra to play with and adds to the final image. 2) For the Highlight channel. Shader Ops Fake Fresnel. 3) For the Highlight channel. Environment/Slope shaders 2 & 3 - might not be accurate, but if they look right in the final image then who cares. Overlay is useful here - put something like Environment in the first overlay channel and some fractal noise in the second. Then adjust the noise until you're happy with the highlight edges. For nomuse - the 'soft glowing highlights' thing, are you talking about sub surface scattering? If you aren't already playing with the Carrara 5 Beta (which has it) then try messing around with stuff in the Glow channel of a texture. Just make sure it's something with a controllable intensity - Shader Ops Brightness might be useful for that.

Yeah..any odd things like that, first thing to do is go check you shaders and textures...Usually need to adjust...If only It all did it for you:D. I would think not only the lighting differences, but the differences in the way the shader domains work may cause some adjustments to be made in C5.

is there some way i can adjust the skin all in one hit without affecting the hair? love esther

Hi, well soft shadows didn't change the shinyness, and none of the pics in your gallery anastasis had the same amount of shinyness as in my pic. I tried sky light, GI at high intensity, but my poser people's skin is still very shiny. Well I have another silly texuring question. I note there isn't an okay button like in vue for after I make changes. How do i get the changes to take effect, or do they take effect as soon as I make any texture changes, without me clicking okay or enter. Love esther ps If I select some objects in my scene and click copy and then click paste, are the objects then duplicated in my scene? Or do I need to hit duplicate?

I've had the best luck using the Bump map in the Shininess channel and then adjusting the brightness of the map. Actually pushing the bump map to be strong enough to affect the shininess makes the figures to rough. However, when the maps are applied directly in the shininess channel, the do a great job. This can then be combined (added, mulitplied mixed etc.) with the other techniques you've been experimenting with for some very realistic results.

Hi Estherau, I see what you mean with your image, very shiny. You are going to need to work on the textures and thats going to take a bit of time, unfortunately there's no easy options for skin shaders that I've ever seen (I wouldn't say no if one turned up). Have you looked at which textures have made it from Poser into Carrara? The most obvious thing I can think of is to check the Shininess channel in the texture room - if its set to Value(0-100) then the higher the value is the smaller and more obvious the the highlights will be. As I understand Carrara's shaders Highlight controls the intensity of the highlights, Shininess controls the size of the highlights. I could be wrong though, if anyone else knows anything different please let me know too.

Mark beat me to it, so - what he said. I also take the bump map into Photoshop and use the dodge and burn tools to make the specular map above.

• Put the character's bump map in the Highlight channel as a Texturemap (in Carrara).
• Set Shininess to a low value: either Value(1-5) or adjust the texture map's brightness.
• Back in Highlight try experimenting with the invert option (if the image is a pale grey) or adjusting the Brightness slider.
  This should give you a different result from you have so far. From here you can start experimenting with the Operators (add, overlay, curve filter, mixer, multiply and subtract). Like what I suggested earlier mixing texturemaps and procedural functions. Basically lots of trial and error experimenting to see what breaks up the highlights, but as Mark says - not too rough. There's a bit more mixing stuff up in my final texture, but this should give you a rough idea of what I did. You can see from my image that I make my specualr map quite dark to start with - this was to tone the highlights down from before even opening Carrara.

Poser hair: from what I've seen hair comes into Carrara either as part of the character or as a separate object (check the Instances list in Carrara). Either way whatever you do to the face and body textures shouldn't have any impact on the hair, until you select the object or it's shading domain.

Copy & Paste vs Duplicate: whenever you use copy&paste Carrara creates a new master object which probably uses more memory. Duplicate doesn't, it simply takes an instance of the object (check the Instances, Objects & Shaders tabs on the right of Carrara's screen). If you are going to edit one of your objects then you'll need to use copy&paste. If the objects aren't going to be changed then Duplicate is your best bet.

Hopefully more people will join in 'cos I'd love to know how everyone else does skin shaders in Carrara.

Message edited on: 11/07/2005 08:29

Heh...on esther's image above, I kinda like the idea of shinyness. Makes it look like some nasty sweltering jail in an Alabama summer or something. I'd say the procedural tricks we are talking about could punch up this effect; get the right noise into the highlight or bump or displacement channel and you may be able to bead up those highlights, sweat-like.

Look at your obj tree are things grouped/ Are they in individual pieces etc. Skin and hair are usually seperate unless you choose a specific option on import. Like if I import a poser character as a daz obj. I combine or group by name etc... You may very well have to alter diff parts of skin.From DAZ that shininess would most likely be due to plastic light model. But the key is more in the texture and shaders than lighting.

Hi, well I'm not sure it isn't the lighting causing this, because my very first render was a similar poser figure imported into one of the daylight rooms that came with carrara and the skin looked great and very normal. It was an imported Pz3. The V3 including hair in the object section seems to be all one thing although the clothing figures are separate, however in the texture room I can see various parts. Well adjusting the textures looks like it will take forever. In vue there is a command to collapse identical textures. Is there anyway to change a group of those textures all at once in carrara eg forearm, hand, leg, without changing hair? Love esther

If the different body parts are using "identical" textures it is very easy to adjust them. In the assembly room you will see properties section on the right side of the screen. Directly above the list of items in the scene there is a tab for "Object" and one for "Instances". Look in the Instances tab. The shaders are listed there. If you double click on the texture there it will ask you if you want to edit the master or create a new master. If you want the changes to affect all objects that use that texture just hit edit the master. That dialogue should come up, unless at some point in the past you have clicked a button that says something like "same for all masters" or something like that. I am at work so I cant say for sure. I hope that helps Esther. Good luck.

Oh yes, that will help enormously. Ah, that annoying little message. Now I know why it is there. wonderful. But as for shinyness, guess what? IT was the lighting. I put the jail with people into one of those preset lit rooms and the shinyness is gone. NOw I'm not sure if it's the lights or the render settings or both. Probably sky light as someone suggested. But it wasn't actually a problem with the textures. Pity though as I liked the darkness of the previous pic. Love esther

see

Esther, one more thing from me on the texturing theme. I've just noticed that you are using V3 as your figure. This got me thinking about how she is set up based on what you were saying earlier about adjusting everything in one go: - the Daz figures that I've got: Aiko3, Koshini & Ichiro (they started at Daz) have a really long winded texture map system. The whole skin...hip/torso/neck/thigh/shin/etc. thing for what amounts to the same texture. - Miki, Koji, Terai Yuki, Jessi & Anime/MayaDoll have all the eye socket, tongue, eyelashes extra bits, but the main textures are Head & Body. That makes life a lot easier. You can see the in the Environment/Slope shader image in post 4 the join between the neck and the body - that's all I have to deal with. I'm looking at Aiko3's textures in Carrara at the moment and the following textures are the same (they use the same texturemaps anyway): - SkinHead and SkinScalp - SkinArm, SkinFeet, SkinForearm, SkinHand, SkinHip, SkinKnee, SkinNeck, SkinShin, SkinThigh and SkinTorso Is this what what you get with V3? If anyone knows a quick and reliable way to apply one of those textures to the others in it's list and then save and re-use it in different scenes that might be what you need. Maybe some longtime Poser to Carrara users might be able to shed some light on this process or however they set up their Poser figures in Carrara. Or perhaps they don't and just focus on the lighting? Another thing to consider with this system - if you are going to adjust any skin textures you only really need to focus on the parts of Vicki that are visible. In the images you've posted Vicki's hip, leg and feet textures are irrelevant in the clothing you are using. A bit obvious, but I thought I'd mention it. No need to make the process any harder or slower than it needs to be.

I simply drag an "adjusted" layer list texture to the browser for use later with different scenes and Poser imports. Of course this only works if you are importing the same figure (V3 for example) later on. To apply to a new figure, I simply drag the texture from the Browser to the Shader tab in the assembly room. Then I select the figure, the shader and Apply to Children. I've done that with a set of ethnic textures - works great. Just make sure that Clothes are not part of the Child subsets. :)

estherau,
I actually meant to comment later that it may be that light issue w/ poser that I have heard mentioned.I don't use poser...hopefully won't have to altho w/ dynamic hair and clothing...who knows. I kinda missed the part where you imported the lights with the figure :D Glad you got it. Yeah changing textures can get tedious even w/ masters. Like someone implied earlier...not enough hours. I was having to change way too many from daz(all trans or alpha was a mess, then you couldn't pose) so I hope c5 is much better...sounds like it is. Was tired when I posted earlier so wasn't too clear. Was really talking about 2 things...light model which does effect appearance and texture not being setup right or applied properly. The skin still looks kinda plastic so I also meant that.

Message edited on: 11/08/2005 16:42

HI anastasis20, sounds like that edit master thing will make all textures that are the same change if I want, so it wouldn't take long to change a V3 if I needed to do it, but maybe all I have to do is work on the lighting more. can I ask while you're all here. If I want to just rotate poser figures, can I do that without moving their feet through the floor. I mean if I hold down the shift key will it just rotate in one plane, and which camera view should I do that in? Love esther

Hi, I've been experimenting with the toon! Pro pluggin from digital carvers, but I can't get the people's mouths to look okay. Any ideas? Love esther PS is that a camera or a light or something showing up in the cell behind the cop? Guess it's hard for you tell from the pic, but it's a big bobbly white thing.

I'm not sure what you mean by "moving their feet through the floor" - a rotation shouldn't do that should it? I tend to use the manipulators on the object itself anyway, all the axes are there for axis specific movement/rotation/scaling. Or else I'll type the values that I want (you were talking about Carrara weren't you?) For toon pro try the backfaces optimization option. Although I wonder if V3's lips are a separate shading domain from the rest of the face. I remember reading something about all-in-one face textures vs. separate eyebrow and lip textures over in the Poser forum some time ago - that might not have anything to do with this though.