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