A personal View about V4 Skin Textures

Currently there are a lot of textures available for V4. In my opinion many of these textures are not natural looking but instead have a "plastic look" like a toy doll and are just bland.
Many of the figures and face combinations for these offerings are usually very good and quite impressive and some come with many options and makeups but the textures are always the biggest let down as far as I am concerned.

But there is another catagory of V4 skin textures that is altogether different take for example Danae's Milan for V4. In my view this is a truly photo realistic natural looking texture and is one of the most realistic available for V4. How Danae makes such amazing skin textures is beyond me but she does it and all that I can say is that I wish there were more textures like it.

Have you taken a look at textures created by Dalinise, Morris and Cantros, Exprssnimg or Fenrissa (ApoGraphix)?  These are some very good texture artists as well and do quality work.

@ PaganArtist

Yes indeed these artists are also great. Dalinise, Morris etc are also amongst my top choices and they have made a lot of tremendous V3 textures too as well as some V4's, there is no question about the high standard of these artists they are all well known.
I just selected Danae's work not because I think that she is the absolute best, there are others of course, but her textures are so photo realistic its quite amazing just look at her reviews to see what others think I'm not alone in this. I wish she would explain how she does it :)

Danae is awsome and a very sweet person as well she is very quick to help you out. But I also see you point as well and it has be mentioned before in other threads. Actually my pet peeve is the fact that Daz characters have all these wonderful body morphs but clothing vendors seem to leave the bulk of them out. What's the use to have body morphs for characters if they are no supported in the clothing? It's like see one pair of high heels seen them all but I guess in the poser world it is the norm to have little clothing and high heels on! LOL!

I don't always want super-realism in my images, often for an illustration you want a more high style look, so I would also add Liquid Rust to the list of artists that have done some amazing V4 textures, his textures are not so much realistic in the you can see every pore realism but a more stylized realism that looks really amazing in illustrations.

> Quote - Have you taken a look at textures created by Dalinise, Morris and Cantros, Exprssnimg or _Fenrissa_ (ApoGraphix)?  These are some very good texture artists as well and do quality work.

Like this?
DPH

Or like this? DPH

All renders done with Freckle Pack for V3. DPH

Looking good, hoadley.

Click for full size and resolution

I agree that Danae is a sweet person and puts real style into her work, I have no argument with that.

However, she (and many other vendors) do NOT offer a version of their textures without eyeliner/makeup and/or highlights on the skin. For me, this is a deal killer.

For me, I always start with the default Hi-Res maps provided by Daz, which were designed to work with the V4 skin shader system and even with those three default lights in Poser....Ya got something real real good right there. Then, you can open the texture maps in PS or (insert 2D app of your choice) and change the color tone, add birthmarks or other imperfections, change the eyebrows, etc etc etc.Also, by changing the lights, going with HDRI or IBL, by manipulating the shaders either with face_off's skin shader script or by hand....well....you get a lot of control, a lot of creativity....a lot of variety.

The only other maps I've purchased are those from MaskEdit. They are excellent. Image above is a MaskEdit map on V4.

::::: Opera :::::

Regarding "plastic" looking materials, be aware that it's less a function of the texture and much more to do with the materials settings.  You can take just about any set of texture maps and adapt common shader techniques to use them,  As long as the color and detail are there, and there's a good bump map, and as little specular highlights baked into the texture as possible, you can generally just hook texture/bump maps into whatever shader settings you prefer.  Take a look at BagginsBill's "Apollo Maximus" shader thread for example:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2702979

Note that these shader settings are not specific to any figure!  So you could adapt those shader settings to work with any set of texture maps.  The same is true for any combination of shader settings, although you may find that some tweaking is desirable.

i am using mask's v4 pureskins lately.  i bought the whole set.  i like them, they are pretty clean.  they are less than 2 megs for each texture though, but they look good.

@pjz99

You know, I am still trying to understand why it is that many textures I have used look so different when they are setup in a scene in the Poser 7 preview window and then rendered afterwards in firefly? I have tried changing lights ect but it makes little difference some textures just look absolutely different when rendered from the scene your setting. Yet with Danae's Milan for V4, and some other textures, the results look virtually the same in the firefly render window as they do in the preview window and thats without too many setting changes why is that?

I am sure that you are absolutely right that using material settings will improve texture results. My lighting setups are usually good and often very dramatic but I have to confess that the material room and the material settings is still a mystery to me and is quite difficult to get my head around. So I guess that I am one of the "Out of the box and use it" brigade but I would love to master the material room yes sir I would.

Quote - the results look virtually the same in the firefly render window as they do in the preview window and thats without too many setting changes why is that?

It just happens to be that the shader settings used in Danae's texture/shader combination represents pretty accurately in the OpenGL preview.  It can be frustrating, especially when you get into some other materials that don't represent at all (e.g. use of the Color_Math node to adjust color), but there is little you can do about it other than do test renders.

You are better off than you might think though; as much as people might pick on Poser for this aspect or that, and say program X or Y is much better, honestly the presentation of the Materials Room advanced view is very elegant and much easier to get your head around than it is in the bigger applications like 3ds Max or Cinema 4D.  Your best bet is to force yourself to start learning it, at least to the point where you can modify some very nice skin material setup that you like, or to customize some aspects that you want to change.  For example as much as I like Danae's Milan textures I would never use the included sclera as they are, they're way too blue in color.

The Poser manual is actually pretty solid in getting you started, although it takes some time to really get a grip on the more complex shader setups, and you may never really fully understand what is going on with some of them - I don't pretend to either.  However even if you don't understand every single feature, you can appreciate the result, and you can learn to pick out the things that need to be modified (mainly texture map, bump map, and sometimes transparency map or specular map).

@pjz99

Well! if anyone in the world encourages people to try and have a go then you are that person.

Ok I will get stuck in with the material room but don't scream at me if I come back at you with questions for help - well in moderation that is :)

Thanks pjz99 I'm glad your around.

Good luck :) If you have questions about this kind of thing there are lots of people here who can help, and these days it is pretty easy to save a materials collection as you make progress and once you're finished, so you only really have to solve it once.

one way to learn the material room nodes is to study what's already there for V4!

After searching in the market for V4 characters, I think Diva V4 is the best because it includes natural face options (without make-up). I allways prefer realistic natural faces and Diva V4 is perfect for that.

Diva V4
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=58094

I agree with click.   So far, Diva V4 is the absolute best V4 texture I have seen.

wait....you think Diva is a better texture -- texture -- than the hi-res texture provided with V4?

The texture maps of Diva might be interesting...there are now closeups of the face without makeup so how can you tell...

But what really makes Diva best in your eyes? Is it the actual skin itself, or the character looking out at you.

::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1387652&member

Danae stayed true to the photorefs she used. This gives you the amazing preview in Poser. I discovered this right away. Milan is one of my favorites but, I had to modify it a bit as baked on highlights and shadows were still there. This was easy to do with a clone tool and soft stroke.  In contrast, removing all those "baked" on details eventually turn the skin into another "floodfilled" looking copy we see so many of. Perfect skin is nice but, cgi can make it look plastic too easilly. Only a few texturemakers out there are on top of this and take their own reference photos to get the extra angles needed for good detail and avoid the "flash" and specular skin problems. Imo, highlights should be made with specular and displacement maps. Especially with dark skin when it really takes on reflection of its environ. White skin does as well but in a lesser way. The hair(in a head  texture) adds quite a lot, too, if it starts/stops at the right place . Unlike transmapped wigs that lack a "downy" edge/start layer (at temples for ex.), painted caps can add a lot. Reality is in the details, sometimes.

Attached: Milan in preview

once again i wish to say i have no harsh attitude toward Danae. But everything Richarson says is correct. The milan "texture" has been spectacularly successful, in my opinion, because of two factors: 1) the created character is very beautiful of face; 2) the promo images, layout and package is very well put together.

I'll add that this is one character that looks good with eyes encircled by black eyeliner. Most characters do NOT look good this way.

I think these characters sets fall into or out of favor not primarily because of the actual quality of the skin texturemap jpgs, but rather by the emotional 'pull' of the underlying morphed face. That's just my opinion.

::::: Opera :::::

Not for me, since I've never ever been interested in using somebody else's face morph, and I don't expect I ever will.  Face morphs are very do-able with DAZ figures, whereas textures take tremendously more work, so I generally only buy a character for the textures.  As implied above I don't even really care about included shader settings too much, because I usually end up tweaking them a lot anyway.  99% of the face morphs out there for sale are only dial spins anyway, and are proportioned pretty badly (the nose is always way too small).

Those Shahara/Plus3d skins are pretty nice, although I dislike the eyelash transmap applied to the Diva character (easy to swap that out though).  I'd hope that those specular highlights on nose and forehead are not baked into the texture though, as Richardson is talking about.  It looks to me as if the eyebrows are transmaps as well, which some people prefer, but they look very thin and flat - not a big flaw though, if you take time to customize it yourself.

Danae really got a jump on V4 when it came out. The girl has beaucoup talent and impeccable taste. I've yet to see a promo to touch Milan/Manhattan in MP.

I do not own too many V4 textures but, the (new V4)stacked textures are allowing for tons of detail. Much more than V3 did. P7's smarter memory helps too. A bump, displacement, specular, under/over skin map should be possible. Even reflection nodes, eventually. mo
Morris is the only one I've seen explore these node options.

Are you saying Morris provides you with a custom shader network with his texture/characters?

And can you explain under/over skin map? 

And the relevance of reflection to skin shader? (or are you saying P7 is strong enough to handle complex skin while reflection is in the scene?)

::::: Opera :::::

Absolutely, Danae's promo art beats the living shit out of just about everybody else's.  It's a huge turnoff when reviewing some texture package that has blazing nose glow or really terrible posing and lighting.  I mean, you want $10 or $20 bucks for your thingy, please take more than 10 minutes composing and rendering your promo. 

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1326856&member

Opera, Morris has, on several skins added a shader network including displacement and spec maps. Along with the bump you would expect. She offered one of the 1st displacement maps (I saw) for V3. I cannot yet access my Runtime to quote a name.

Over/under (creative,, I know).. I mean diffuse color / deep skin color (creases, pores, even ruddiness),,, masks. I'm reading "Essence.. The Face" and I think it (some of it)is possible in Poser. If we get 64bit later,,, it will be, no doubt.

Some light gets absorbed into skin, bounces about and exits. Some is reflected. This becomes visually apparent on dark skin with lots of specular.
Not sure if "reflect" is the "correct" node to use anyway. My tests have been less than stellar. Perhaps I'm wrong... I do think a high res texture is still "it" for the closeups so long as you can have full control of the lighting conditions. Or, tooling out all the creases, shadows and specular highlights from a store bought reference, a must.

Attached; reflection "idea" on skin.

"..you want $10 or $20 bucks for your thingy, please take more than 10 minutes composing and rendering your promo".

Aye,,, some need a little help. I remember a few before the new "no nude" rules ...LOL The good ol' days.

Richardson that is a tremendous render. Hat's off to you. I'm absorbing the rest of what you wrote.

:: og ::

To my knowledge, there are no "no nude" rules for promo images here, even today.  Some people have just started to do that on their own.

opera,

I think the thing I like most about the Diva texture are the eyes.  They look real, IMO, and many otherwise great V4 textures are ruined by the eyes.   However, I agree with pjz about the eyebrows.  Transmapped eyebrows just don't look that great, to me.   I can't make a fair comparison between Diva and the V4 Hi-Res textures, because I don't own them (the V4 ones).  I only have the standard res.

Quote - To my knowledge, there are no "no nude" rules for promo images here, even today.  Some people have just started to do that on their own.

There are a few, but I get the impression they've been around a while and are pretty basic. I think it's just 'no nudity on the front page' and 'no nudity in any promos of characters that could be considered under 18'.