Who owns it now and what do you think of it? Not sure I'm buying into this one.

Honestly I looked it over and was not impressed. With V4 having a high quality skin texture, Skin Vue and rendering V4 in Vue6 inf I can achieve the same results. Even in Poser 7 with shade nodes hooked into the texture and using HDRI lighting with a few tweaks you can get a very good render.

I felt it was too expensive for what is in the bundle to warrant purchasing it. I also didn't see that much more in the way of morphs since there are character packages such as GND4, Alice and creating your own morph targets you can get the same thing. Of course I am old school and believe very much in putting a little hard work into a character along with post work instead of always relying on pre- created characters. But this is only my opinion.

The Poser material AO setup for the textures are ridiculous. The creator has no idea how to setup correct Poser skin shader. And only 3 full body morphs very disappointing.

Mazak

Yup that's about what I thought too, but was wondering if I had missed something that would make it worth the price, thanks. Passing on this one.

Quote - Of course I am old school and believe very much in putting a little hard work into a character along with post work instead of always relying on pre- created characters. But this is only my opinion.

Nah that's not old school, that's the 'evergreen' school :laugh:

Anyway, looking at the V4 elite thingies, the textures at least look very nice and they'v got decent bump maps for a change. Not too happy about the morphs and the rest though. Not sure it's worth buying them just for the textures.

Maybe i can convince some of my clients that they're a must have and finagle them that way haha.

If you check the Amy texure on the right shoulder in the promos over at Artzone, thats texture stretching at its best.

Also if you do not render in highest quality you will find remarkable seams, to be honest, there are better ones for less money available. I'm lucky that I only ordered 1 texture so the loss is not that big as I got the pay back and the USD 5 voucher to spend on her. :(

Wow you're right, that is really shoddy work !

I was mainly looking at  Lana cause she seems like good quality, but if one of the others is so bad, maybe she also has issues in some places. Ah well, guess i'll wait till more people try them out or something.

The package looks to be very feeble value to me. A few not very interesting extra morphs, 'advanced' skin shaders - for DazStudio only - and er, that's pretty much it.

Also, instead of forking out for updaters for certain outfits (yes, there are some they expect you to pay for), I can recommend D3Ds Morphing Clothes tool, available here, which works brilliantly for me.

VSS baby. Free.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/search.php?query=vss

I looked at it, looked at some renders others had done with it, and thought Nah! what a rip-off!

Quote - Wow you're right, that is really shoddy work !

I was mainly looking at  Lana cause she seems like good quality, but if one of the others is so bad, maybe she also has issues in some places. Ah well, guess i'll wait till more people try them out or something.

I bought Lana, fortunately onl her, and she has some probs with her backside. There are markable seams between buttocks and limbs :(

Pardon a slight drift here, but I've long believed that what gets called "photo-realism" simply isn't possible in Poser. I'm a defender of Poser's Firefly implementation for what it's worth, which is to say, a very attractive illustrative render quality in capable hands. It's my view that striving for qualities other than real-life verisimilitude are far more likely to succeed than attempts to approximate conventional photography, which was achieved par excellence* *by the Photorealist painters of the '60s and '70s, with the enhancing contextual ironies that don't generally attend 3D renders. Using the possibly misguided holy grail of photorealism in a quickie point-and-click context as a promotion for V4E seems odd to me personally, although quite intelligently shrewd from a business perspective, given the realities of the aspirations of the greater Poser user base. ("Most commonly used models" indeed!) At the risk of offending some, I've got to say, most renders that people show off in these forums or the galleries as being "photo-real" aren't even close to having photographically realistic properties. It just seems like a Sisyphisian goal to me, given Poser's limitations. Anyway, fascinating early critiques. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. At the moment the "elite" label seems like a clever gimmick to get more mileage out of the Victoria warhorse, not that there's anything wrong with that in biz. ;-)  

Quote - I bought Lana, fortunately onl her, and she has some probs with her backside. There are markable seams between buttocks and limbs :(

Bah ! So they spent all their money on the fancy 16 megapixel camera and didnt have any left over for a 3d painter ? Or was it a case of V4's UV mapping being so crappy that even DAZ can't get it to behave properly LOL.

Quote - At the risk of offending some, I've got to say, most renders that people show off in these forums or the galleries as being "photo-real" aren't even close to having photographically realistic properties. It just seems like a Sisyphisian goal to me, given Poser's limitations.

To be honest I think they're pitching the Elite line more to the high/mid end crowd then poser alone. I could do some very nifty things with those textures (suitably cleaned of course) in something like XSI or MAX. Even Vue or Carrara would do in a pinch. Poser is indeed stuck in the CG dark ages, but thankfully it's easier then ever to get it's stuff into apps that can do 'photo-real.'

But i refuse to reward lazy and crappy work, so i'm not gonna throw money at them until they actually fix the issues.

with a bit of work, I think those textures are going to look quite nice in Vue.  The specularity maps will come in quite handy I think

I have a hard time believing that they have put out these product with such obvious flaws.  I would like to get the Elite bundle, but I have a hard time justifying the cost (even as a Daz PC member) for something that is just not entirely up to par. 

I'm suprised DAZ even manages to get so many people fall for these 'updates / add ons' time after time. The prizes are rising, quality is falling and yet numerous people buy. Just imagine to miss a hype....

With the prize they ask and how bad the promos look, there's not even one hair on my head considering buying this V4 elite. If this supposed to be elite these days then I don't even want to know what normal is.

Decision made.  I just got the morphs alone.  Until they improve the texture issues, I have no desire to have those.  Also, there are a couple of things in the bundle that I really don't need (poses) and can't use (the Elite shader...only for Daz Studio, which I will also never use).  So, there ya have it. 

I went to look at what the elite is all about, and instead, this set of morphs caught my eye:
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=7337&cat=421&_m=d

(I'm more interested in morphs then skin shaders at the moment)

Lana has seams? Can you post a screenshot, please because I can't see seams on the texture anywhere - no matter if rendered or not.

Can you show a hirez render please?

Of the face or body?

But needs to wait until tomorrow ... already 1.55 am over here in Germany ;-)

Both if you can.

those are not seams... they are tan lines....

not something I would want on a texture base....it introduces a limitation on usage...

I saw it first when I got my Newsletter, and checked it out on their product page, to be honest, I was not impressed, well sorta.

All they have is the Hi-Res textures, 3 Body Morphs (shapes), Shaders (as per said for D|S), and Poses. 

Whoah... that's it??? 

And at 100 a pop -- that's a lot of -- can't think of a word right now.

I think I'll pass.

Lovely hi-res textures they did, by the way! :biggrin:

JB

"With the prize they ask and how bad the promos look, there's not even one hair on my head considering buying this V4 elite. If this supposed to be elite these days then I don't even want to know what normal is."

Well now there's a cotton-pickin' ever-lovin' shock if there ever was one!    :rolls eyes:

SnowS

This was rendered in Poser Pro and wow was it slow to render.

Ed

That's the shadowing of her lips on the teeth. Try a very soft light shining directly into her face.

So far as seams, I haven't seen any issues in the renders I've done. Occasionally, depending on the software and etc, you can get seam-looking things in Preview, but 99.9999% of the time, those rectify themselves when passed through Firefly/3Delight.

On render times and lighting: Blackhearted sent out a beautiful tutorial with GND4, that I absolutely recommend to anyone. The tutorial alone is worth the price of admission.

I don't like that black box at all!!

Quote - I don't like that black box at all!!

LOL
Sheesh, surely you like the new pubic shader! It's very... yeah! That!. :)

Quote - Pardon a slight drift here, but I've long believed that what gets called "photo-realism" simply isn't possible in Poser. I'm a defender of Poser's Firefly implementation for what it's worth, which is to say, a very attractive illustrative render quality in capable hands. It's my view that striving for qualities other than real-life verisimilitude are far more likely to succeed than attempts to approximate conventional photography, which was achieved par excellence* *by the Photorealist painters of the '60s and '70s, with the enhancing contextual ironies that don't generally attend 3D renders. Using the possibly misguided holy grail of photorealism in a quickie point-and-click context as a promotion for V4E seems odd to me personally, although quite intelligently shrewd from a business perspective, given the realities of the aspirations of the greater Poser user base. ("Most commonly used models" indeed!) At the risk of offending some, I've got to say, most renders that people show off in these forums or the galleries as being "photo-real" aren't even close to having photographically realistic properties. It just seems like a Sisyphisian goal to me, given Poser's limitations. Anyway, fascinating early critiques. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. At the moment the "elite" label seems like a clever gimmick to get more mileage out of the Victoria warhorse, not that there's anything wrong with that in biz. ;-)  

I was one who fell for the "photo-realism" marketing ... and have come to realise that it was just that: clever marketing. I was wondering if you could suggest either free or affordable (not in the $500+ range) renderers that either offer true photo-realism or approach that goal to some degree for the hobbyist on a very limited budget ? Cheers...

www.kerkythea.net/joomla/

Kerkythea is a physical based render engine but you'll have to do a metric buttload of work on the textures

Maybe try Vue Esprit combined with RDNA's Vue Render Studio?

Quote - I was wondering if you could suggest either free or affordable (not in the $500+ range) renderers that either offer true photo-realism or approach that goal to some degree for the hobbyist on a very limited budget ?

There's a whole bunch of free renderers out there that kick poser in the privates. Besides the obvious blender/yafray, there's also povray, lux, sunflow, kerkythea and indigo. Even nVIDIA have one that's free for non commercial work, called Gellato.

The only problem is that most of them have only got basic support for poser, usually in the form of .obj files. And like FrankT said, you will have to rework the shaders to get nice results. Still, they're worth trying out if you want awesome lighting and rendering without spending lots of $$.

It would definitely behoove Poser to integrate some of these free renderers into their Pro product.
DPH