For those of you who are interested, I wrote a small tutorial on how to make a nice looking vampire skin using Photoshop. As I have more time, I will finish the tutorial and write how to attach it and use shaders in Poser.

How to Make a Pale Skin for Poser/Daz Studio

Wait, you're going to talk about shaders next? I can see the interest if you are not going to use shaders and refuse to use any nodes at all. I guess. Maybe.

But if you are going to use shaders, why would you do this outside Poser then? All you got to do is connect the texture to an HSV node, choose a couple of appropriate parameters, and it's done. You can make any texture be any color tone you want directly in Poser. Many of the things Photoshop can do are built directly into Poser shader nodes.
 
For example, to convert straight to almost gray scale, set Saturation to .1 or similar really low values.

Then to make it more blue, do a Color_Math:Multiply with any shade of blue you like.

You can even animate this stuff so the color and saturation change over time.

I'm not trying to burst your bubble here, but this is a bit like telling people how to make horses go faster, and we're all using automobiles.

First of all, this tutorial was not aimed at an expert. If you know what you're doing, you don't need my help. However, there are a lot of beginners that ask questions and I thought I'd make something for them.

The idea is that you get a beginner to think about the possibilities. You can add tattoos, scars, makeup, etc to the skin inside of Photoshop. Last time I checked, Poser didn't have anything that was comparable to BodyPaint. Also, for people who do not use Poser to render their images, they can just do what I've written and it will work the same in say, Cinema 4D.

You don't have to be snarky about it. When I was first learning things like this that you think are too simple were really a big help to me.

Sorry, that came out all wrong. I didn't make myself clear. I was not suggesting you need to change the tutorial for experts. It is because it is addressing novice shader use that I thought it was strange.

You said you were going to finish the tutorial by showing how to use shaders in Poser, right? That's when the whole thing struck me as odd. In the tutorial you showed one way of changing the entire texture's tone, using Photoshop. You also addressed the need to do the identical thing to the head file (after the body file) by "before you do anything else" open the head file and apply the adjustment, right? Because the settings might change if they do other stuff, right? And if the user didn't like the result they'd go back to photoshop, change the body a different way, change the head, and test again.

This is seems perfectly reasonable if you were NOT going to use a shader, but rather stick to the Basic P4-style material room and just attach the image. Am I making sense?

But if you're going to take the shader approach, then I would think that simply showing them how one node, the HSV node, would avoid the trip to Photoshop altogether would be very enlightening and a lot less work. Plus, if you're really talking about CG beginners, I would not expect them to have such an expensive tool as Photoshop. Something like Photoshop, because of cost and complexity, is clearly a pro tool and beginners seem less likely to have it.

Now if you were demonstrating actual features as you later mentioned, such as tattoos and so on, clearly you have to go somewhere and draw them.

I meant no offense, sorry I sounded snarky. I keep finding less and less time to post, so I post quick. Whenever I do that, without wordsmithing, whatever was in my head comes out raw. I'm an engineer not an artist.

Oh, one other thing, your tutorial ends with this:

**"What did you think of this blog article?"

**I didn't look closely or think about "voting". But the phrase definitely registered on my brain as you were seeking feedback. See?

I see what you are saying. The reason why I went directly to Photoshop the first time is because if all you wanted to do was make it white, that’s all you need to do and it works in the three programs that I have: Poser, Daz Studio, and Cinema  4D. Since each of these has different shader nodes, I want to write a tutorial for each of them.

I don’t really consider Photoshop to be a pro tool because it is so ubiquitous. There are ways for people to get student versions for much less than retail price. Also, while I don’t know GIMP, I suspect that there are lots of features that are analogous.

For what it is worth, I’m a software engineer. Since we have a bad reputation for not being able to talk to regular people, I’m also creating tutorials to improve my writing skills.

I do appreciate your feedback.

:biggrin: I'm an avid Photoshop user, it rocks! 

Honestly finally seeing bagginsbill sound off, about specifically nodes mimic particular Photoshop functions, prompted me to archive this thread.

bagginsbill - Can you think of any other nodes that would replace Photoshop functions?  I should love to think there should be a comprehensive tutorial(.../resource,) for these, around here somewhere..?

:tt1:

Oh yes - let me tell you about a few. I don't know of a comprehensive listing, but we could start one.

Suppose you're in Photoshop levels "Levels". Suppose you move the middle slider gadget - this is Poser Math_Function:Bias. Color_Math:Bias would work on 3-channel colors.

Contrast is Poser Math_Function Gain. Color_Math:Gain would work on 3-channel colors.

HSV (Hue Saturation Value) is a node in Poser and a dialog in Photoshop. Very useful for shifting colors, raising or lowering saturation, and raising or lowering brightness.

Then there are all those two-image blending modes like "screen", "multiply", "darken", 'lighten", etc. There are simple one or two node setups that do almost all of those.

One extremely useful thing we can't do well in Poser is blur or sharpen. Too bad.

Are there any specific effects you want to know about? I know how to do almost all of them with nodes.

You mentioned levels, what about curves? I use that more than levels.

Quote - One extremely useful thing we can't do well in Poser is blur or sharpen. Too bad.

I think you could (ab)use Texture Filtering to blur.

Levels, Hue/Saturation, and Sharpen are the tools I use most, thanks!

Could other sliders, of the Levels dialog, be performed?

Yep I can do all that, but I'm exhausted from fighting with Catherine Harders. I'm going to get drunk now.

I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Cheers, PJ! (He hoisted a beer for me already)

Enjoy :)

Any Math_Function will immediately take you to monochrome. Here are some effects.

It can be used for very subtle color shifting.

Here, I use purple and a factor of 1.5. This de-purples.

This is extremely useful. There are lots of good textures that have unfortunate specular reflections baked right in. As a result, they are hard to make look good with your actual scene lighting.

Starting with your original texture in the upper right, this finds them and decreases or eliminates them. What you're left with is a true diffuse color map coming out of the HSV node. Then you add specular nodes to make the skin really respond to your scene lighting, instead of the lighting at the time the photo texture was taken.

The parameters need to be tweaked here and there. There is no single set of values that works perfectly for all textures.

The specular remover did the work here instead of messing around endlessly with photoshop.

The left side is untreated.

Note that this doesn't just apply to skin, but also to hair and clothing textures (and really any object at all):
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2927631&ebot_calc_page#message_2927631
quite a bit less complicated than the above, because hair and clothing are simpler textures generally

Sometimes the Color_Math Bias will desaturate or even shift your hues. This network demonstrates a way to avoid that. I do the Bias in monochrome (with a Math_Node), take the ratio of that against the original monochrome, and use that resulting factor to multiply with the original color. This will preserve hue and saturation, but give you great control over brightness.

The node at the bottom is not needed. I'm just using it to show you that Color_Math:Bias alone is not the best way to brighten a texture, unless you are trying to desaturate it at the same time.

Which, coincidentally, was the original point of this thread :)

And so now I'll stop and see if anybody has questions.

Quote - Note that this doesn't just apply to skin, but also to hair and clothing textures (and really any object at all):
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2927631&ebot_calc_page#message_2927631
quite a bit less complicated than the above, because hair and clothing are simpler textures generally

Neato - nice demos. I missed that thread.

I have to ask this question. All of this seems more complicated for Poser to render. Which one is faster? Nodes or skin only?

I know it seems complicated. Here's a rough rule of thumb on my computer which is very slow by today's standards.

If you have 1 million pixels to shade, 20 nodes will add 1 second.

Of course even if you render large, you rarely fill it with skin. So even a 1600 x 1200 portrait usually has no more than a million skin pixels in it. Let's say we add 5 of these math nodes - it would take about an extra 1/4 second to render versus using the skin texture alone.

These math nodes are not slow at all. You barely notice them. However, some of the "natural pattern" generating nodes (called noise nodes) are somewhat more expensive. They run about a second each per million pixels. Adding 3 or 4 to make, for example, freckles or something will increase render time noticeably. Then of course there are the Ambient Occlusion nodes and other ray-traced effects. But you can't get something for nothing.

My most complicated shader has about 140 nodes in it when every feature is turned on (freckles, moles, veins, pores, etc.). What would otherwise be a 40 second render increases to about 80 seconds. If you turn on raytracing for AO it jumps up to 2 minutes, but that's not the math nodes doing coloring. That's just the extra work of a high quality image.

I used to write "machine code" - that means programming the computer using the lowest level instructions that were directly implemented in hardware. We didn't use high-level languages because of speed. In those days, I used to count clock cycles.

Because of that knowledge, I can tell you this. On a modern machine easily capable of 4 billion instructions per second, the fastest possible hand-written machine language implementation of these math nodes would run at a rate of about 500 million per second. The reason I only get 20 million per second is because the program is written in a high level language. Meaning a lot of stuff is written by computers instead of clever humans, resulting in wasted time.

I'm pretty certain I could actually make a node-based system that would run at around the 500 million per second rate. Still, 20 Meganodes per second isn't bad.

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bagginsbill, I found this thread because I was looking for a very light vampire-type texture for v4, something like the Aspen texture for V3, only lighter.  :)  I've never done anything with the material room besides hook up the basic texture nodes.  Where would I plug the HSV node in order to desaturate a texture?  I plugged one into a torso image_map node, in the "texture strength" socket; I could affect value and color, but nothing I entered into the hue or saturation fields had any effect.

(if anyone wants to suggest a nice v4 vampire texture - a pretty one, not a scarred or dirty one - I'm still looking)

NM about the saturation thing, I think I got it working (have to play around with color too?).

The HSV should go in front of your color map, and go where it went.

For example, most trivial shaders put a color Image_Map into Diffuse_Color. So the HSV would go between Diffuse_Color and that Image_Map. The Image_Map goes into the color input of the HSV. Then the HSV modulates the color and goes into the root node Diffuse_Color channel.