Hi folks

Well, Poser7 is here (with still lots  of bugs) and  it comes with  HDRI support. So... what  skill of realism  can we get now?

The question is because a friend gave me this link:

http://fox.cgsociety.org/gallery/

and asked me:  'can you render portraits like this?'. Of course, I think still not.

... or yes?

Attached Link: http://fox.cgsociety.org/gallery/

Oh and i put the url in the message so it workes :}

Chris

i think there are people here that CAN do it in poser without postwork...
Im not one of then dohh... :}

Chris

I'd say looking at this www.runtimedna.com/mod/ophoto/index.php a great big yes, at least it was possible 2 yrs ago anyway.

You mean like this or this?

Nevertheless, the determining question is how much Renderengine is involved and how much photoshop postwork.

same is true for the cgportfolio one.

caption:
"The Artist himself
Maya, mental ray, Photoshop, ZBrush
March 2007

i've seen more realistic in poser 6 from maxxxmodelz, olivier, carodan and others.
olivier @ rdna : Damion

Quote -
Well, Poser7 is here (with still lots  of bugs) and  it comes with  HDRI support. So... what  skill of realism  can we get now?

No big differences between P6 and P7 because the renderengine is still the same.

The quality of a picture depends mostly on the skills who made it - not the software alone. It is something like a high-end camera: A friend of mine made some pictures with my camera. The result wasn't different to what he did with his $300 cam. So why spend round about $1500 just for a camera body?

By the way: In the link you've posted we can read:

"I spend like one and half month on it, working by nights."

I'm able to do the same picture quality without a computer or camera in shorter time :)

Quote -
i've seen more realistic in poser 6 from maxxxmodelz, olivier, carodan and others.
olivier @ rdna : Damion

Nice picture, but far away from realistic. Please compare with a PHOTO, not another Poser render...

My standards aren't nearly so high.  I did this with Dork, the P4 Girl, a cheap webcam photo of my face and a lo-rez photo of my granddaughter for making a texture, and Poser 5: www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php
David P. Hoadley

Quote - Nice picture, but far away from realistic. Please compare with a PHOTO, not another Poser render...

Just this. I'm not looking for nice renders but renders where you can't know if you're looking at a photo or at a CGI (like the one I linked)

The problem is that those portrait renders are all using fastskin, mentalray's amazing skin shader. It's real hard to get that kind of results without it, even in other high end renderers.

Poser doesn't even have a real SSS node, so i don't think you should expect too much here. Even in the otherwise great images posted by people, note that areas of the skin where SSS is very prominent, like the ears or the nose look very plastic and waxy in the poser renders. HDRI alone just wont cut it, maybe when poser 8 or 9 gets SSS then we can do more.

Well Casette I can't hold my hand up & say I've ever seen a cgi render that looks so lifelike I couldn't tell it wasn't rendered.

As you can see its a real beast to work with, so its not like a push button, get cool skin thing at all. You have to create hand painted maps for a lot of these settings to get those kind of results

Well, this one I linked is very close to reality... only if you see to the sideburns you can find broken zones, the rest is pretty smooth, almost a photo. I was stunned when my friend sent me it

Attached Link: http://maxedwin.cgsociety.org/gallery/

No words :woot:

(Just to show that Poser isn't so useless)

This is a picture I did with P6. It's a heavy modified V3 ("Unique Faces") and Kozaburos Hair (modified by Photoshop and my left hand)

Realism is in the eye of the beholder obviously. The Poser renders in this thread  don't look realistic to me at all.
http://maxedwin.cgsociety.org/gallery/ however, apart from the hair, to me, is incredibly realistic.

I think Poser kicks butt for 250$. Yeah,,, Mental Ray or Brazil with 8 gigs of Ram over 3 pcs and all the plugins,,, 12,500$ to start. Maya,,, add a bit more over 3DS It's all relative (you need rich relatives). If it's a hobby, anyway... Poser is amazing, relatively speaking. To answer your question,,, no, imho. You can get "lucky with the lights" once in a while in Poser but,,, consistantly real? No. And the other apps are getting better just as fast as Poser...

I wonder what eFrontiers direction for the future of Poser is? Will the emphasis be on realisitic rendering? Animation? Cloth dynamics? After the 7 reasons to buy Poser 7 ad campaign, and i bought Poser 7 I had to go back and see what the differences where from 6, wondering just what exactly I had paid for...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1392952

the thing is, when you spend ages on a render in Poser (or any app) you loose sight of what's real and what just looks good. I created the above character from 2 photo refs in about half an hour yesterday and rendered it in Poser 7 (using the poser 4 engine) - if I'd have spent 4 days on it it would have looked a lot different, but not necessarily better. Spec is just as important (if not more so) as diffuse, and using the fastscatter node in P7 is a nice way to fake subsurface scattering and avoid lots of postwork (there's almost none in the image above - just blurring dodgy polygon edges). Finally, no matter how good you are with photoshop, you CAN'T create textures from scratch - you've got to use photo references.

www.runtimedna.com/mod/ophoto/index.php
 - this link quoted earlier just doesn't look even slightly real because the user, talented though they are, has got carried away in photoshop putting the texture together. Then the bump map is set ridiculously high, etc etc.

My image above doesn't look real either - but I put it there to show what Poser 7 can do in 8 minutes of setup (I spent the rest of the 1/2 hour modelling and sorting the photo refs) - my conclusion being that if we haven't achieved realism in Poser, it's certainly not Poser's fault.

This also relates to the HDRI thread in this forum. Poser 7 can now deal with HDR information - but rather than theoretically eject photons and calculate HDR renderings like Mental Ray or Brazil or Lightwave, it uses an unusual algorithm approach and uses multipliers instead. This gives it the too-bright look without the over-exposure you'd expect from properly used HDRI. So you need to fiddle with the exposure/intensity and add normal lights when the hdr info fails.

-hdr lighting, IBL (ie LDR) lighting, combination (with LDR IBL and standard lights)