Have a new character for V4 in the works, would be interested in any comments/suggestions.   It's just in the preliminary stages at the moment, but here is a quick render of the face.

That's a pretty nice one.  Might make the head texture a tad darker to match the body better, otherwise looks really very nice to me.

This is getting annoying....  this has not been the first time people post supposedly images I can see nor  find links to..    where is the image please...

Tom-

Check your forum settings and see if you have forum attachments (or whatever they call 'em) switched off.  
The picture should appear right below the text in the original post.

Great looking character, BTW! Can't wait to see how she progresses. Is this a custom morph or simple dial-twiddling?

Quote - Tom-

Check your forum settings and see if you have forum attachments (or whatever they call 'em) switched off.  
The picture should appear right below the text in the original post.

Great looking character, BTW! Can't wait to see how she progresses. Is this a custom morph or simple dial-twiddling?

A bit of both actually, but the morphs are quite small and mostly used just to smooth out a few rough edges.  The next big hurdle I'm working on is the textures, I haven't quite decided what sort of detail I need to add just yet to get the right overall effect.  I've got the basic textures done but there just not quite right, a bit too bland for lack of a better term.  Boy, this art stuff is hard work.. lol..

Anyway, thanks for the words of encouragement, nice to know I'm not completely off base with this one.  This is only my second attempt at full blown character design, the first was a project done for a friend who wanted a digital clone of a character called Dawn X from a comic book of some sort, I'd never seen the comic myself but she provided me with some pictures and we went from there.

She was pretty happy with it and told me I should be doing this professionally, and while personally I still think she is off her rocker I thought I just might give it a try and see what I could come up with for V4.  If I can get it to the point where I think it's worthy of marketing (i.e. worth other people spending there hard earned money on) I'll put it up in the marketplace.

Quote - This is getting annoying....  this has not been the first time people post supposedly images I can see nor  find links to..    where is the image please...

Tom, sorry to hear about the trouble you seem to be having, if you still can't access the image after changing your settings here you can pull it up directly from the following URL:

http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r167/trobbins2/Render4.jpg

If I may suggest - add a MAT pose with freckles mixed in with a Blender node.  I wish more people would do that.  In fact I'd kill for a variety of freckle maps mixed in with Blender nodes (currently painting freckles onto a texture and I'm not very good at it).

There IS a node that does freckles!  I can't check until tomorrow  (middle of a render, XP )  I found it on one of the rdna stone materials.  I'll look later for it.

btw--Cool character, so far!

Quote - If I may suggest - add a MAT pose with freckles mixed in with a Blender node.  I wish more people would do that.  In fact I'd kill for a variety of freckle maps mixed in with Blender nodes (currently painting freckles onto a texture and I'm not very good at it).

Hmm... freckles... well, I once dated a red head who had lots of freckles, and a pretty serious temper.. lol.. but that's another story.

Let me see what I can come up with in the freckle dept, I spent the last 4-5 hours working on the bump map for the head texture but it's coming along nicely.

Quote - If I may suggest - add a MAT pose with freckles mixed in with a Blender node.  I wish more people would do that.  In fact I'd kill for a variety of freckle maps mixed in with Blender nodes (currently painting freckles onto a texture and I'm not very good at it).

Ok, I think I just might have the freckles maps ironed out now, the first render is with the blender for the face set to zero:

And the second with a blender setting of 0.6

Still have quite a bit of work to do on specular maps, bump maps and of course I haven't even started on the lips yet, but so far I think it's coming along nicely.

Nice looking character. 

Thanks,

With any luck it should be available in the marketplace soon :)

Freckles are too small and evenly-distributed imo (but I realize tastes vary).

Easy enough to fix really, just need to do a bit of map editing.  I hadn't worked with the blender nodes before so I was rather curious to see what the overall effect would be, truth be told I spent more time playing with the settings on those than I did concentrating on the map files themselves.. lol..

I wish more merchants would do something like that, because it adds great flexibility to a materials set - e.g. I like this character's base texture but I like that other character's freckle map.  Maybe it's some heinous sin to do freckles that way but it makes sense to me.  Logically I would think the Physicalc Realism Kits work this way (I don't own them and can't use them until there's a 64-bit python interpreter to run them with).

I take it you got it working pretty well?  Results look pretty nice imo.

The blender is working great, just need to jazz up the freckles map a bit is all.   I've been doing some experimenting to see what sort of freckle effects I can get without altering the base skin tone too much - takes a bit of tweaking but I'm confident it will be worth it.

Only drawback I see to this method is that you'll have to go into the material room to make precise adjustments to the freckle "level", for lack of a better term.  Each of the various body parts with skin can be adjusted up or down with a blender setting (Yes, you can even vary the amount of freckles on here feet.. lol...) - but because this is a shader node I don't know of anyway to hack this into the main CR2 file for a single dial setting on the parameter dials under the body section.

I can include a few mat poses for quick changes, but for precision work you'll still be stuck going into the material room and adjusting the blender setting on any/all appropriate body parts.

I have to go to materials room all the time anyway, for all kinds of stuff - for people who would apply MAT Pose X and never tweak it, it doesn't matter too much what settings you apply or how complex they are, look at the DAZ high-rez mats for example (default something like a dozen nodes per material zone)

I like all these freckle images.  Me want now.  :)

See!  SEE!  Freckles = global domination!

he!  face_off's real skin shader and other skin shader products make pretty great freckles with procedures.  i'd have to double check, but i think it uses the spots nodes for the generation of the basic distribution.  just a mention, you can use a lot more than a blender node to mix.  you can use math, color math, and color ramp as well.  and different combinations of nodes for greater blending options.  color ramp might actually be useful if you want differently colored freckles as in the above picture.

^^ they don't have V4 support yet, and their external-to-poser scripts won't work under Windows 64-bit according to one of their FAQs.  Aside from that I don't know that I like the results I've seen of applying freckles via shader, I think the distribution is too random - typically you get freckles on patches of skin that are exposed to light, and none or sparse/faint on parts that are not.

I read through a website on some of those techniques, I believe the freckle effect he acheives through a combination of sub-surface scatter and a color ramp.   I thought about this approach and while it does have several advantages I opted for the map file instead with a simple blender node for ease of use.

I had hoped to be able to take advantage of ERC channels to make it even easier, but sadly the shader nodes just aren't setup that way, but if folks aren't adverse to using the settings in the material room the blender node should work just fine, and I think a well written explanation in the read me file should suffice. 

I suppose I'll get around to playing with some of the math functions at some point, my calculus is a bit rusty (been about 20 years since I really used it in earnest), but the tutorial I read through did give me some interesting ideas on how to make use of some of the various nodes available in the material room.

Believe it or not the biggest challenge thus far has been getting all the textures lined up properly, I don't have a seam guide to work with so I've been having to use a trial and error method.. lol...    It's been a whole lot of render, adjust, render adjust..   But I think the final product will be worth it.

All in all I'd have to say I rather like V4, in fact I appreciated the setup dials on V4 so much I hacked my V3 CR2 file so she now has a similar drill down menu system in her body just like V4 did.  Makes it so much easier to use them both.

Quote - ^^ they don't have V4 support yet, and their external-to-poser scripts won't work under Windows 64-bit according to one of their FAQs.  Aside from that I don't know that I like the results I've seen of applying freckles via shader, I think the distribution is too random - typically you get freckles on patches of skin that are exposed to light, and none or sparse/faint on parts that are not.

The distribution is another reason I opted for the map file approach. Nothing against the real skin shader system mind you, it's a quality product I'm sure, but I wanted a bit more control over the final product.

EEK!  You don't have the seam guide?  Here!
http://www.daz3d.com/store/item_file/4783/v4SeamGuides.zip

i use his rss, and i've used that on several different new figures.  it's not hard to add materials to it.  no,  the fake sss is completely different and separate.

but rss isn't the point.  if you look at his nodes for just the freckles, it should be possible and not too much work to roll you own.  and it should be really, really easy to create groupings of freckles and adjust those groupings in the material room, just as it's pretty easy to do that with groupings/density of various elements.  cloud nodes, u and v nodes, and even a simple tile node could do that.  on the old mapping, a tile node with a blur could blend out from the torso to the limbs.  the new maps might be a bit more difficult to adjust, but probably could be handled with one or more of the above.  or, you could just make a simple greyscale density map and still use nodes to do the random freckles within those zones. 

then you wouldn't have to draw freckles on each and every map.   you could just apply different freckle settings.  if you ask bagginsbill, he might even be willing to make a freckle matmatic/parmatic script so that you could dial the number of freckles, opacity, etc. in the pose room.

in terms of your new character (i'm assuming freebie since you've posted to the poser forum), well it shouldn't get any easier than applying a material, whatever you choose.   i think of those as separate issues- one is freckles you can apply to any texture and another is a single texture/material with freckles.  you should do whatever works best for you for the latter.  i was suggesting  solutions for the former because  the  other solutions mentioned were painting freckles on a map or waiting for someone to make freckle maps with an alpha channel.  one sounds much more tedious and difficult, and the other sounds unlikely to occur.

by the way, snow sultan has free v4 seam guides posted to the freepository at daz and i think here in freestuff.