Why do Poser folk have glowing nostrils? I know it's an old question but I can't remember what to do about it.

There's a freebie over at RDNA that helps with the "glowing" nostrils. You'll have to scroll through lots of pages of their freebies to find it.

With PosetteV3, there is a seperate Nostral material zone to rectify this problem, with her at least.  The Diffuse color can be set to a medium shade of grey, and this tends to offset any tendancy to glow.
DPH

It's annoying, true.  But it's nothing that a few seconds in Photoshop can't fix.  Although it would definitely be better if that wasn't necessary.

One possible solution is to pose her with a finger pushed up into one or both nostrils, thus blocking the glow.

Quote - One possible solution is to pose her with a finger pushed up into one or both nostrils, thus blocking the glow.

OR, one can do this:

1. Load the V3 object file into UV Mapper, and hide everything. 
2. Then select by material, the head. 
3. Using the facet tool, one can then start selecting the nostal facets and assigning them to a NEW material (i.e. Nostrals). 
4. When done, save model (Possibly under a different name so as ascertain whether the new material zone is OK, before using it to replace the Default V3 object).
   DPH

That seems a lot harder than my solution.

I usually take care of it in post work. Magnify the image and add a little "darken" or "burn" and no more nostril glow. 

A few seconds in Photoshop..........

dp, V3 (and I'm guessing V4) does have a separate Nostril material setting. I set it to black, and it helps some with the glow, but not complelely. I just fix it in post as others have noted.

I think bagginsbill developed a very elaborate render process to get rid of the glow, but I think postwork is far easier.

Postwork is easier for a lot of things.  But -- for whatever reason -- some equate being 'easy' with being 'lazy'.  I suppose that's why they'd rather mow their grass with an old-fashioned scythe rather than with a power lawn mower.  They wouldn't want anyone to accuse them of being "lazy".

Personally, I'll stick with my power lawn mower.  And I'll continue to regard a Poser-rendered image as mere raw material -- ready to go into Photoshop for finishing.

I do what linkdink does...it's about as easy as yer gonna get..;) Sometimes I'll do the same thing with the mouth, if it's open (the model, not mine..;)

Just fix it in Photoshop. That's what I do. It's called  'nostril glow".

Quote - That seems a lot harder than my solution.

**dphoadley@pjz99
**Initially yes, but my solution is much more permanent.
DPH

Quote - dp, V3 (and I'm guessing V4) does have a separate Nostril material setting. I set it to black, and it helps some with the glow, but not complelely. I just fix it in post as others have noted. I think bagginsbill developed a very elaborate render process to get rid of the glow, but I think postwork is far easier.

**dphoadley@linkdink
**That may be so, but if haveing set their diffuse to dark grey or black and they STILL glow, that so facet material zone adjustment is definitely called for.  It sounds to me that some facets in the area of the septum need to be added to the nostrals MAT.
DPH

Attached Link: Minitut - Dramatic light and shadows for portraits - NO NOSTRIL GLOW

Nostril glow is because your configuration of lights is (by default) set up for super fastest possible low-detail renders. This means that shadows resulting from very small things, like nostriles, or eyelashes, or the upper eye-lid - you're just not including them in your render. If you like to do that stuff in post work - then go ahead.

If you like to hack with dark nostril material zones, or nose plugs, you can do that too. But you're still not doing a good job with shadows. All you're doing then is hiding the problem on the nose - but your eyes still suck, and I know it but you don't, because you don't know what to look for. But have you ever seen a really good render out of some other package, like Modo? Ever read how the render took 8 hours or similar? It isn't just that Modo is a better Renderer, it's that the non-Poser community seeks high quality renders and this community seeks to fix in post work or not even notice there's an issue.

My solution to this (and other shadow issues) seemed complicated to some, and that's fine. Here's the solution matrix:

1. Simple and bad, fast render. Everybody knows this - do nothing with your settings.
2. Simple and great results, slow render. Go ahead with this on your own - just crank everything to really high values - shadow map size = 2048, shadow min bias = .01, min shading rate = .2, pixel  samples = 5
3. Simple and great results, fast render. This one you have to follow my tutorial. Yes it will take you a few minutes (or more) to understand and use. But if you're looking at results that aren't acceptable AND you need results in less than half an hour - read it.

It really isn't complicated. It just involves optimizing your use of the shadow map through manipulation of the shadow camera. If that doesn't suit you, and spending a couple minutes on that is overwhelming, then by all means just increase the shadow map size and don't worry about the fact that you're only using about 8% of it, and your render is 45 minutes instead of my 90 seconds. It will look the same.

Oh one more - if you're using IBL you must use ambient occlusion (AO) or you'll be missing shadows again. 

Once more, there is a quick way that results in slow renders - just turn on AO on your IBL light. It will apply to your whole scene, and slow the render down terribly.

The "more work" way that results in very fast renders is to apply AO in the material room, only where needed. You also get better results this way as you can control the parameters for different parts of your scene.

I refer to your tut a lot bagginsbill and appreciate your time for posting it.

The picture shows a glowing armpit crease. Very faint IBL/AO and no shadows, and the only other light is a faint spot casting the legitimate shadows. (Man, those Poser guys are Soooo arch! 100% Jpg "compression" means "none"!)

M

@pjz99

"*One possible solution is to pose her with a finger pushed up into one or both nostrils, thus blocking the glow"
*Hilarious! You are definitely a man/woman after my own heart!!!!

  Awww, c'mon, guys.... a penlight in each nostril would explain everything!  :lol:  Lou.

it's just sad when folks suggest using nostril-props (or changing nostril colour) in a deluded attempt to cover up a failure to read the manual and do proper lighting/shadows. fer god's sake, it's been possible to render nostril shadows properly since P4 and pro-pak. it's failures like this that have made poser the laffing stock of the 3D community. that and the giant nude boobs :lol: p.s. notefinger - keep studying the shadowcams. they're yer friends, and they'll soon be as easy as falling off a log

What are shadow cams????????? Give me the page no.

I just had a severe fiddle round with a render following Bagginsbills tutorial and the difference it makes is astounding.  It's a right faff though if you use a few lights but it's certainly worth it in the end

V3 has a seperate Nostrils Material Zone.  I had this happen to me once, when I checked the zone it was different than the other Head Zones.  When I set it to the same as the SkinHead Material Zone, everything was fine.

@ bagginsbill -- that is an excellent tutorial.  Superb work.  Thanks for posting it.  I'll give it a try.

(But I'll still be postworking )

Oh, and by the way........8 hour renders?  That might work for special projects or for one-off images.  But it'd be out of the question for comics.  I can just see trying to do a 300-frame comic -- with each individual render requiring 8 hours.  Sure -- you might really have something once you were done.  But I, for one, just don't have that kind of time.

Shadowcams are at the bottom of the camera list, and each one is positioned at a light. Unfortunately they are named by some bizarre convention that defies logic, but once you figure out which one is which, you can rename them to match them to the light.

When you look through a shadowcam, you see what the light is "seeing." It's fascinating at worst, and extremely helpful when positioning lights at best. They deserve a tutorial, but I've never seen one. If I remember correctly, they weren't even documented until P5. Kind of like the incomprehensible "flaps" that appear at the bottom of the light parameters.

Open "ShaderNodes" ( "Shadernodes"?) on a spotlight.  I've never been able to find anything related to shaders for them, or any reason one would want RGB controls for "Flaps." And changing their colors is a baaaad idea. Try changing the PreviewLight to 0, but save first. They "do things," but what they do is pure madness. Not only are they still undocumented, but I couldn't even get an explanation of them from a egisys (pre-eFrontier) engineer. Ah, the mysteries of Poser....

M

I've often wondered what that shadernode does on a light - guess it's just a miracle of nature :)

I am deeply in love with that tutorial. I looked at it often enough that I now have it memorized -- or at least the approach. It is massively helpful. If I need different lighting for a scene, postwork works if the glow is the only problem and the adjustments required to kill the glow would also ruin other aspects of the image, of course, but I've found that paying attention to the shadow map sizes and the min bias makes a huge difference even then.

I've added the tutorial to my favorites.  And I rarely do that for anything.

Attached is Miki with the same lights as my other test shots and the tut's changes. Say what? I finally changed the color on the bottom IBL image (I'm using a color-free version of Olivier's IBL setup) to 0,0,0, and I'm still getting nostril glow.

M

"My shadow cams move by orbiting, not panning"

Apparently in P7 they change "Scale" to Zoom and XTran, YTran became PanX, PanY. Whatever they're called, I believe those dials work the same as P6. Are you using the parameter dials, or are you spinning the camera controls on top of the pose preview window? They work differently. The camera controls on the pose preview don't work right for shadow cams - they seem disoriented to the actual camera. If you stop and think about it, that makes sense as the camera is not actually free to move or rotate. That would involve moving or rotating the light, which if you try it, you'll see the camera moves with it.

What the parameter dials do is translate the origin and scale of the shadow map itself, in other words imagine a plane suspended in front of the shadow cam with perpendicular alignment.  Now imagine a sheet of paper in this plane. You could change the scale of the paper, or slide it around the plane. This "sheet of paper" is your shadow map! You're not actually moving the camera at all with the PanX and PanY - you're moving the paper.

And regarding the shadow problem - I believe P7 is broken. This is one of the reasons I won't use it. At RDNA we've had discussions of several other bizarre new shadow problems that P6 just does not have. Perhaps you, like me, should stick to P6.

Yeah I just noticed a really bizarre shadow bug in this recent P7 render (incidentally concerns a solution for nostril glow)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1438944

How the heck did that shadow fall on the right side of the image, from the girl and dress but not the box? 

Hmm, I figured out how it happened but not why - a light on the right side of the image, off-camera, was placed poorly, and was a little bit occluded by the backdrop figure.  Somehow this ate part of the shadow, the part cast by the box, thrown by a light on the left. 

I just hate it when the shadow cams stop working and don't show anything ...

Bagginsbill --
Thanks for the bad news about P7... Just what I needed: more. Sigh.

The cameras in P7 are all orbiting. If they are "original" cameras (Lights 1-3), they get Pan dials but the dials make trans adjustments. If you create a camera, it gets trans dials. The camera movement (which I am doing on the Parameters palette) is on a "globe" not a plane. I think anyone testing your method will discover that this makes the solution almost unworkable.

And there is definitely a difference between the way Daz figures respond to your method and the way G2 figures respond (i.e., they don't). Very disheartening. Maybe it's finally time for me to pull the plug on P7. What a waste of money.

M