I saw an absolutely stunning texture for V4 in the Marketplace a couple of days ago and was planning to buy it on the spot- until I realized the highlights in the promo images were on the texture itself, on the forehead, between the eyes and above the upper lip. Useless. Highlights should come from the light source in your image, not the texture map. I was also looking for some eye textures for V4, but every one I've looked at has reflections on the eye map itself. I don't want reflections on the eye map, I want to use the lighting in whatever program I'm rendering in to create my own. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I won't be buying any textures or eye maps with the highlights or reflections built in. Coldrake

Those are both pet peeves of mine and they drive me nuts. There is a current eye set at another store that has really messed up highlights since they are mirrors of each other with one eye with highlights from th right and one with highlights from the left. Shudder

100% agree!

Painted shadows and highlights are really out of date! Ok, P4 user may love it.
Time to remove all outdated tuts (99.9%?)

I've never really noticed reflections on skin textures. 

I do notice them on the eyes and personally I like that because I'm not all that great with making my own lights and to get reflections in eyes in Poser it involves more than just lights. So if there weren't reflections in the eye textures my figures would have dead looking eyes beyond a problem of positioning.

The only problem I have with reflections is when they are on hair. However, it depends on my figure's pose. Sometimes the reflections look ok, and sometimes they look very obviously out of place.

I have seen some texture packages where there is an option to turn reflections on and off.  I don't know how compicated that is to create in a package, but it's a viable option that gives everyone what they want without penalizing the other side.

Maybe finding some eye textures and not use the transmaps.  :biggrin:  Hey it might work :biggrin:

You are not alone. This painted on reflections are driving me crazy too. If they are on the skin I take the textures into Photoshop and remove them. A lot of work because one has to to all the Make-Up files as well. If it is a free texture I delete it most of the time. Only a few were worth the trouble to repaint them. The eyes are really hopless. It is impossible to repair them.
Maybe we have to scream really, really loud to be heard. Leave the highlights to the lights pointing at the eyes and the skin. We can manage that. Can't we?
Regards,
Helga

My eye reflection maps are all done as transmaps and applied via MAT pose files so the eyes can have reflections or not, per user desire.  I don't include reflections on my skin textures because these can vary by lights used.

Got a new package coming up soon.  One will be for V3 and a companion pkg for V4.  Same base textures, just redone for the V4 maps.

just a curiosity question here. I paint textures too. what about the photo textures. The higlights from the photo is on the texture. Do you want them or "us" to find a way to make it more "matte" looking.   

Just a question in case there are more decent texture makers out there.  Mine are no where near "pro"  lol   :biggrin:

just a curiosity question here. I paint textures too. what about the photo textures. The higlights from the photo is on the texture. Do you want them or "us" to find a way to make it more "matte" looking.

Maybe you shouldn't use badly taken photos as reference. Look for pictures made with professional equipement  (studio, lights, cameras) and some knowledge.

Well hopefully they do read and take notice of  the wishlist here.  Maybe stating it in "The Marketplace Wishing Well"   might help too.  

Not to bash anyone but wouldn't you consider this old technology? I could understand painted on reflections and highlights on textures for use in poser 4 because P4 doesn't use raytracing. But why should this be done to textures being used in P5-P7? Just wondering.

Hyria wrote; "Maybe finding some eye textures and not use the transmaps. Hey it might work" That's what I'm looking for, eye textures that use transmaps for reflections. The ones I've seen have the reflections right on the textures. Victoria_Lee wrote; "My eye reflection maps are all done as transmaps and applied via MAT pose files so the eyes can have reflections or not, per user desire. I don't include reflections on my skin textures because these can vary by lights used. Got a new package coming up soon. One will be for V3 and a companion pkg for V4. Same base textures, just redone for the V4 maps." Great! I'll be keeping an eye out for them! :) Hyria, that's a good idea, thanks. :) Coldrake

Quote - just a curiosity question here. I paint textures too. what about the photo textures. The higlights from the photo is on the texture. Do you want them or "us" to find a way to make it more "matte" looking.

Maybe you shouldn't use badly taken photos as reference. Look for pictures made with professional equipement  (studio, lights, cameras) and some knowledge.

Unless you can take your own photos, the best ones out there are from Peter Levius' site.  He's a professional photographer and knows all about lighting, angles, equipment.  I've had a membership at his site for 3 years now, ever since I started learning how to do photo-realistic textures.

This is a link to my WIP for V4.  My own textures and the only reflections come from the lights and the shader nodes.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1361905

I am on board for all vendors getting reflections and highlighs off of all hair, skin and eyes. I too have had to open textures in 2D and work out highlights on foreheads.

And vendors? When you sell a texture set with various makeup options (i never use those) OFFER AT LEAST ONE WITH NO MAKEUP!  I have seen that situation several times, all variants having makeup.

Vendors should proudly and proctively state that their product is reflection and highlight free.

What made me REALLY laugh in digust recently was a texture resource product -- intended for use in making commercial products -- full of highlights! Unbelievable.

Vendors, Ii you go to make a texture and your source/reference photos have highlights, don't use them, or feather them out. For refrerence, the photopgrapher is supposed to know that his lighting has to be flat and sufficiently diffuse so the detail is clear but no highlights. 

Attached Link: Through Her Eyes for V4

**You could try these. No reflections painted on the iris.

If you're looking for some like that for V3 or any unimesh character, let me know and I'll see how fast I can get them done.**

This is a link to my WIP for V4.  My own textures and the only reflections come from the lights and the shader nodes.

This is a sample of my free headtexture (64MB PSD file).
The eyes are done using a prop covering the whole eyes.

A lot of people still seem to be thinking in P4 terms with tecturing and materials. And I think P5 is out of print now: no downloads, just old physical stock. P4 is ancient. Which means, apart from painted on highlights and shadows, you don't use the Gradient Bump input -- that's for P4-style .bum files using the P4 shader. Don't bother with greyscales of the texturemap as bump maps. If you want to greyscale the texturemap, you can do it with the shaders with no need for a seperate bitmap. Displacement maps. I don't like two or three distinct garments sharing the same texturemap. But if you use the Scale and Offset settings on an image_map node you can give each garment its own texture without wasted bitmap-space. You can do the same with lips. And, while I remember, I dislike textures where the line between the lips on the texture (it's called the mouth by us technical types) doesn't match the boundary line in the UV map. I had high hopes when I heard V4 was going to drop P4 support. I forgot how little difference there is between DAZ Studio and P4 -- the textures are still essentially P4 texturesets with a few shader tweaks added. Some time I'm going to have to try to produce a textureset that really shows off this stuff. Have you noticed that V4 doesn't have spandex morphs?

Here is a scaled down and softly blured cutoff from a photo I'm using for textures.

Texture highlights are fake highlights and only in few cases they look good.

Quote - what about the photo textures. The higlights from the photo is on the texture. Do you want them or "us" to find a way to make it more "matte" looking.

Human skin has very few highlights and the few existent highlights depend on the illumination and camera angle. If the texture itself has highlights, the highlights are always in the same position not depending on the illumination and camera. The result can look good  and can look very bad and unreal depending on the scene.
On the other side if the texture has no highlights at all it becomes dull, boring and with unreal look unless your geometry and rendering algorithm is able to create real highlights that are not really highlights.
Skin has no lighlights, if it has is a plastic skin. What skin has is diffuse areas that can be more illuminated than other areas, it's more working in the diffuse color and not in the specular color, as Poser is unable to do much with diffuse color, you can play a little with the specular color for improving realism.
The only case when skin has specular color is with parts that has water, sweat or oil on the skin, but this follows the gravity law and are variable by the pose and never fixed as using in a texture mapping..

A good skin texture is not a texture that looks very good in the texture map, a good skin texture is one that looks good in average under different illumination conditions, pose and camera angles.
In some cases you can have a texture that makes excellent renders, but if you look at the texture itself, you find that is a bad texture and with low resolution, but it render fabulous!!!.....
Well..., in other cases a bad texture once rendered the result continue to be bad and worst.......

Is it just me, or does the iris on the right side of V4's face always look smaller than the one on the left?

Unicornst wrote; "You could try these. No reflections painted on the iris." Thank you! You just made a sale. :) "If you're looking for some like that for V3 or any unimesh character, let me know and I'll see how fast I can get them done." I have lots of eye textures for V3 and the other unimesh characters, but thank you for the generous offer. :) Interestingly some one just posted a thread about seeing an image of a photographer in a reflection on an eye map in one of the eye map sets for sale here. There's so much reflection on the maps in that set that you can barely see the iris, or the pupil for that matter. I just noticed the reflections are also mirrored. ccotwist3D wrote; "Is it just me, or does the iris on the right side of V4's face always look smaller than the one on the left?" They look fine to me. Coldrake

**adp001

**that is a fine, highly detailed texture. very generous of you to offer it for free.

Especially in this thread, however, can you speak to the lips? She has lipstick on, right? If you say she doesn't, then her lips are so red that it appears she does. In either case, to obtain a baseline 'bare face' we'd have to open the texture in PSD and work on the lips.

Can you speak to this?

::::: Opera :::::

@operaguy: The photo has no lipstick. If the lips apear to red, the whole image should be to red.

The texture is announced as a base for own textures. This is the reason why it comes in a big PSD file with high dynamics and not as a common JPG with artefacts and lost information.

adp, after an attempt to simply load this file as a texture for V4 face, obviously it is not meant for that, right? this is a file to use to MAKE a properly mapped texture, right?

You MAY use it as is. But for this you better make a (mutch smaller) JPG file out of it.
Except for true closeups you don't need really high dynamics (and details).

Speaking of vendors having no clue (not all vendors, of course).  I purchased a texture set from Daz and the Sclera was set up with some crazy transparency mask and reflection and the EyeSurface has a texture attached and a mask set up so it only allowed two tiny holes (that were supposed to be the premade gloss?) too see through to the textures underneath.

AntoniaTiger is absolultey right, I'm sick of having to go through and change all the gradient bumps to regular bump.

I understand that maybe, for some reason, some people like the built in reflections and such, (I would argue they are people who are still using the P4 rendering engine, or who don't know what they are doing), but offer an alternative!

The first thing I do to all  my eyes is add my own gloss and reflection set up.  Not one vendor I have found sets these things up right.  (I will admit I haven't gone a purchased any of the eye sets by people like Blackheart... yet.)

Two OT questions:

Does anyone know of ar is able to write a python script that could automatically go through and move shaders from Gradient Bump to the Bump node?

Does anyone know if the eyes sets like Blackheart's will work easily enough with V4?

i did make a smaller jpg, applied it to V4 on the 1_skinface group, did not map correctly (eyes were on the forehead, etc) What dumb thing am I doing wrong.

The file when opened was 2719x3999 pixels. When I saved it out as a jpg at 100% the file size was 3704K.

I also actually attempted to load the full 64MB file and it loaded! still not mapped correctly.

Did you notice that this texture is made for V3? :))
See orginal announcements subject line...

I was going by this:

This is a link to my WIP for V4.  My own textures and the only reflections come from the lights and the shader nodes.

in the post above

Eyes look blue to me.  The only thing I see that's black is the pupils, and pupils are always black.
DPH

just for everyone my latest char for David three has the eyes without the reflections and such added in.. they can be applied separately with another mat file.. its not really that hard to do
Jaguarcat
http://jaguarcatarts.jaguarcat.us/DevynnAd.html

Whoops, I should have made a better label for this render...

This is V4 with the normal V4 eyes made invisible and "Black Eyes" by Blackhearted put in place. It was in response to a question about his eye set posted by ThrommArcadia above in this thread.

I've always liked these eyes, use them all the time. Blackeyes have no reflections painted on. You get a set of colors with it.

::::: Opera :::::

Oh, thanks Opera!

Do they take much work to get into place (not that I'm opposed to work).  Really, my biggest curiosity is how they rotate and move about.  I'm looking at a pretty big animation project and I want to use a number of different meshes, but I want some consistancy in the eyes, so I'm thinking of going with Blackheart's.

Anyway, looks great in the post!

a couple of things. Easy to locate...because i've done it so many times. You make the Leye and Reye of V4 or whatever not visible. The BlackEyes are full objects, you just click them into the scene, then move one of the axes until you see it, then grab it and move it near the eye socket or use x/y/z until settled in place. Note: you might have to increase or decrease the overall scale, or even 'flatten' the eye by scalling z, to make it 'sit' against the opening properly. Yes, you have to fiddle with fine adjstments of z/y/z to get it just right.

The dials.... you have to move the eyes separately. There's an up/down and left/right, of course. Also, iris size, pupil dialate and 'slit pupil' (for wierd effects). 

I find it easy to select the eye by clicking right one it, seems to always find the orb and switch focus to it. Watch out for AO, it can sink into the 'not quite perfect' touching of the eye model to the character and you get AO buildup.

NOTE: addon product is "Actual Eyes" which I have, also. Beautiful texures for this mesh. There is a cool lacrimal shader that comes with actual eyes. Also, reflections textures that get attched in nodes, sure does put reflection in the eyes (See above), but you might not want that for animation.

::::: Opera :::::