Anistrophic shader on eyeball, iris, and pupil. That's all there is except for the eye texture attached to the bump. This happens if I put a "glossy" shader as well. Have no idea what it is or how to get rid of it.

I'm making a character for Sydney and this is a big block!

The anisotropic node is not for making shiny highlights on wet things, although people keep doing that. It's for simulating the highlights you get on a surface with fine parallel grooves, such as a CD, nylon stockings, or brushed aluminum. It will do those things if you correctly set the parameters to get it to spread the highlight out along the U or V dimension. In its default state, the total energy that is supposed to be spread out in a large long area is concentrated on a tiny spot, making it seem extremely bright. Also, traditionally people have used it on a cornea, and the cornea is usually "transparent" because people don't know how to use refraction and raytracing. One artifact of transparency is that it dims specular effects a lot. Most specular nodes seem to disappear on a transparent cornea. But the anisotropic specular, in its default state, is so hot that it overwhelms the dimming associated with transparency. Putting all this together has created the myth that it is for eye glint. The point I'm making is that the anisotropic node does funky stuff with funky geometry and UV mapping.

You probably are getting this because you have it on the iris and pupil. You should not - you should have it on the cornea. (I'm not at Poser right now - I'm assuming Sydney has a cornea.) The pupil doesn't reflect light at all, and the iris only reflects diffusely. It is the cornea and the sclera (eyewhite) that should have specular effects. The cornea should not have bump, the sclera should.

If you really want good eyes, you should be configuring the cornea to use refraction and reflection and glossy, not transparency and anisotropic.

But if you must use transparency because you don't want to force people to raytrace...
Transparency actually sort of means "nothing here", although it does let some specular show. If you use glossy instead, but crank the glossy Ks (brightness) to 10, I assure you, you will see it. The Glossy node is the correct model for glossy wetness - that's why it is called Glossy.

Alternatively, set Transparency to 1, but also plug your Glossy node >into< the Transparency channel. This will make it not transparent if a glossy highlight is needed.

On the Glossy node, reduce the Roughness to .01 or .02 and increase the Sharpness to .4 or .5.

Out of curiosity, BB... what would you use for a good cornea/eye shader? It would be interesting to see your material room setup for these things, since the traditional (though apparently incorrect) recommendation has always been to use the anisotropic for the specular.

JonTheCelt

Jon,

Do you have Apollo? Do you have my shader system for him AMUCFS?

If so, apply it and look in there. I won't blow my own horn, but a lot of people seem to think I got perfect eyes and perfect teeth there.

If you don't have those, I'll post eye shader mats for you, but it will have to wait a couple days. On Wed and Thur of every week, I'm out of town doing consulting. I don't have Poser with me.

Looks to me like you found the perfect way to make a character who wears contacts.

Yeah, I have AM and your shader, BB... I'll take a look in there. Mind if I post some screenshots of the eye shaders for others to use as reference, or would you prefer them to get the source themselves?

JonTheCelt

It would be nice if you did, because I don't have apollo installed (and don't want to install him either since I don't use him)

Replying to bookmark as this might help me with a similar contact lens problem when I get home from work.

Quote - Yeah, I have AM and your shader, BB... I'll take a look in there. Mind if I post some screenshots of the eye shaders for others to use as reference, or would you prefer them to get the source themselves?

JonTheCelt

Post it! As I said, I'm away from my Poser machine - so I can't do it.

Consider this official permission: Any shader nodes or configurations thereof produced by AMUCFS are free for any use for any other character. You may copy the shaders it produces, or any subset thereof, and put it in any posting, any freebie, any commercial product.

I don't care about the nodes or how I use them. I always want people to be able to connect the nodes just as I've done. That's math, and math is free, in my opinion.

What I don't want is for somebody to, in general, resell/re-originate my scripts, or to resell any image map resources I may associate with those, such as freckle masks. This is not for personal gain, but rather my belief that if I give something away, I don't want some a**hole to make you think you need to buy it. They should tell you where the freebie or thread is, and let you get it for free.

I took everything off and left just the bump on the eyeball and put glossy on the eyetrans. The example is with the glossy attached just to the alternate specular. I tried it with the glossy  also attached to the transparency and got a much sharper highlight. I like the softer one so just attached to alternate spec.

This is the first time I've ever understood what Anistrophic is for. That's the best explanation I've seen for how to do the eyes. I was so stuck and now I can go try to figure out how to get my lip mask to work. (It doesn't).

Now I'm wondering if using Ambient Occlusion will give me a shadow underneath the eyelashes. I've seen a fake shadow on eyemaps and don't know if that's the way to go for people who want to still use P4 renderer.

Thank you so much for helping. I'm not new to the material room but just dumb about it. Maybe someday I can get to the point where complicated setups don't totally confuse me. (g)

Oh this is *interesting and I could use some node help too. Bagginsbill do you have your tutorials in one place or are your pearls of wisdom just scattered around the forums. I have so many of them bookmarked now and they are an invaluable source of learning....thank you for you generosity.

I'm particularly interested in your eye information in relation to reflection/refraction and the ability to create a really nice glossy wet eye which goes into the tear area and I'm so confused LOL.

I'm sure it's because I don't fully understand but can you explain why I can't put a reflection map on the eye surface since that covers the entire eye including the tear and I want that whole area to appear to be damp. I'm sure there's a really good reason I'm not getting the result I want and putting reflection maps on the cornea is not doing it for me  either. I've tried just about every combination of things I can think of and I'm getting nowhere fast LOL.

I've been futzing around with this for I don't know how long now and instead of really getting a handle on it I seem to be confusing myself more and more LOL ...

I would sure appreciate your advice.

Kym

Best place to go to bask in BB's wisdom is the node cult forum, over at runtimedna.com. And scarily enough, there are actually several others over there who can delve into the arcane workings of the material room, as well... we call them the 'node elves' :)

JonTheCelt

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

Cool - looks good. You should definitely look into using AO, at least as one option. I offered that as one of the choices on Apollo and it is very convincing.

However, you may be missing out on regular shadows. Perhaps you have not used a sufficiently large shadow map size? Or decreased shadow min bias? Or manipulated your shadow cameras for maximum effect in a portrait? Have a look at the attached thread.

Regarding the lip mask - are you trying to do lipstick and such? I've done that - it can work pretty nicely to let you have lots of different looks without changing the color map image at all.

Check this out - all renders use the same V4 color texture:

I don't know what you're trying to do or what problem you've encountered. Perhaps you want to show me your shader and mask?

@KymJ:

No, I have not centralized links for my postings. They are all over the place. Maybe I'll start assembling them in a google page.

However, I post a lot at RDNA the node cult. Lots of goodies there, some really complex, some simple. Unfortunately, that forum has started moving older stuff into "archives" and doesn't show that content unless you use the search engine. And ... the search engine sucks. Yet another reason I should make a list of links somewhere that is preserved.

One particularly good Node Cult thread to read about reflection and refraction is here:

The Fresnel Effect - Glass, Paint, Plastic, and Metal 

The technique I show for glass will work perfectly for cornea. The technique I show for clear-coat paint will work perfectly for eye white, although for that part you should add a bit of turbulence to the bump channel. You'd also apply the same shader to the lacrimal.

As for reflection maps, that's no problem. Use them instead of, or in addition to, the Reflect node. Just be sure you plug the reflection image into a Sphere_Map node first. If you plug it straight into the Reflection channel or Reflection node, it will not map correctly.

LOL John oh yes, I have about worn out my mouse traversing through the stuff over on RDNA. I posted in the Node Cult forum asking for help and Olivier was very helpful but I think I need a brick upside the head so I thought I would stick my nose in here :)

As Bagginsbill pointed out the search engine over there sucks and I even went through that darned archive area post  by post by post until I was crosseyed but I will take myself over to the link that BB has just mentioned and read and hopefully absorb :)

Well tomorrow is another day and I shall arise hopefully brighteyed and bushy tailed and get to work on BB's suggestions  here :)

Thank you

Kym

Attached Link: "How to make a surface a light" thread (swiftly derailed by me)

Another one I'd recommend looking for here is about lighting in Poser. I can't remember quite how the thread started, but if you look for the terms fall-off, and my name, then you should find it. I (semi) hijacked another thread about accurate lighting in Poser, and asked BB if he knew how to create a proper lightset that would behave accurately, regarding the inverse square law of falloff. To his credit, BB duly came up with a cracking solution which I still use in most of my renders. In fact, to save you the bother of trying to track it down, just follow the lin at the top of this post. :)

JonTheCelt

bagginsbill, thanks so much for the shadow info. I'm cramming as much as possible into this wee brain as fast as possible.

Note: I just discovered Matmatic and the list of resources posted here. It's in the second sticky on first page of Poser Forum. Now I just need time to wade through it all.

Also, is your AMUCFS available? Is it commercial? I have Apollo and would love to see your shader system for him.

My problem with the lips is Me. I'm having trouble getting the blur right on the mask. Yep, I discovered that you don't have to make separate textures at all for the lips if you want to add makeup. Makes a texture package a lot lighter. And there "glow" works just fine.

I'm also having trouble with Sydney's lip texture mapping. Maybe this happens with all characters that have a separate map for lips but I don't remember having the problem before. I make a morph and enlarge the lips and the head texture is fine but the lip map doesn't cover the entire lip. I'll post a pic as soon as I reboot. Poser went kookoo on me.

Also I'm not very far along with textures for these characters yet. Just getting started there.

And there is nothing but the texture and not refined yet. No bump or anything else. I just stuck the texture map into the bump node. And somebody else shoved flashlights up her nose.

But what I like is that all it takes is a little color change in the difuse and  a little more bump and she has on lipstick!

Attached Link: AMUCFS

It's free - follow the link.

Looks like the lip material zone extends a little past what we'd consider the edge of the lips, especially the corners. You need to make the mask come in a little bit. Then you'll be fine.

This is like Christmas and a little overwhelming. And incredibly generous! My lip mask is still not working but that's OK because now I have to figure out why Poser 7 closes when I hit Ctrl+Z.

I'm on the verge of consuming an entire giant bag of M&M's and Habeniero Chips and then going for a job at KMart. Help!

I've got this shader going and have now totally confused myself, my eyes have crossed and I still have this miserable hard line on the lip. So the simple method didn't work so I thought I would try to really complicate it to see if that would work. Right...

There's just something here that I'm not getting. My lip mask is made from the tex template and blurred. Making it larger or smaller doesn't help.

The problem here is that , while I can resort to using texture maps with lipstick on them, they still won't have any gloss because I have been so careful to eleminate any hightlights or shadows from the map. There's nothing I hate worse than seeing white junk on a rendered lip because the texture has a highlight on the lip. It looks like the character has a serious case of chapped lips or scurvy or something worse! And the hard line of the gloss is just unacceptable.

Sydney's lip material doesn't cover the entire lip of my figure. I don't remember this happening before, but it's not stretching. Maybe it's not supposed to, I just don't know.

So, the problem is, how do I blur the lip? Your's works, mine doesn't. Why?

And no, I didn't make this up. It came from looking at a bunch of shaders and trying to figure out how to get a good blur. The Blinn shader is on the other skin parts of my figure. I like it and it's going to stay. The rest is my attempt to add the lip mask and get it to work.

And why hasn't anyone come up with a book on shaders so that one can look up a Blinn node and find out what excentricity means? I know that Blinn is excentric but I thought that just applied to me. In this case is excentric literal? It's like finding someone who can really explain Photoshop blending modes in a way that's easy to understand.

And another bone to pick. Someone said that shaders are "only math". That doen't help someone who's last math class was algebra in Junior High and uses a calculator to cook. Well I do understand add, subtract and multiply. Anything beyond that is a muddle.

Please don't tell me there aren't any shadows. I know they're not there. Too long to render. This isn't final, it's just to get the lip fixed so that I can get this working. Shader posted first, figure second.

I am probably about to make a complete fool of myself (not unusual), but...

@AtelierArial : You DID apply the lip mask to both the lips and the head, didn't you?

'cos if you didn't then the masking will stop abruptly at the edge of the lips, as defined by the lip material group/zone. Which seems to be what is happening..

Cheers,
Diolma

Nope! Color me stupid!

I'm doing it right now.

Didn't work. I put exactly the same shader on the face as the lip minas the pink color and saw no difference in the outline. I've refined the top of the lip to match the edge of the lip material so that isn't bad now. But the corners of the mouth are still sharp. I have to stop for a bit. Too tired. But I'll be back...

Hi!

diolma is on the right track, but I think you made an error in

"put exactly the same shader on the face as the lip minas the pink color " (sic)

You have to mask the pink color in there too! The face shader and the lip shader have to be identical!

The pink part must be driven by your lip mask.

Start with the lip shader. Insert a Blender node between the Diffuse_Color and your color map.

So Diffuse_Color <- Blender <- YourColorMap

Connect your color map to both of the color input channels, Value_1 and Value_2, of the Blender.

Set the pink color on the Value_2 parameter of the Blender.

Connect the Blender parameter "Blending" to your lip mask.

Now copy that whole shader to the face.

I didn't study the rest of the shader, but if there are other effects that should be one way for face and another way for lips (as identified by the lip mask) then you need to blend those effects too.

In other words, pretend you do not have a unique material zone for the lips. Do your work as if the whole face was just one zone. Design your shader to isolate the lip effects, relying only on the lip mask to do it. Do not rely on the unique lip zone as a factor in your design.

I have to take a break, walk the doggie, then see if I can slog this out.

Here's the render...

Shader is next.

You're not getting the full lip color because the blending is only .5. That's why you can't make it darker. Even if you changed the lip color Value_2 from red to black, it would still be no darker than half the face color map value.

Increase the Blending value.

Funny how you can look at something and look at something and not see it. Thank you.