Ugh, I managed to fresnel myself into a corner of loooong render times. Very looooooong render times. Back to the drawing board!

wait, the fresnel shouldn't affect your render time at all.  reflection might, but the fresnel as bagginsbill suggests just uses an edge blend node to control your reflection and refraction, and possibly your specular (i forget right now).   i'd think in testing at least, you could keep your reflection and refraction quality/samples low.

Yeah, when I plug in the edge blend node, the render times seem unaffected.
I was experimenting with fresnel node itself. That one kills things.

Edge blend node does give a nice voluminous effect :)
I'll post what's rendering in a little bit, when it's done.

what's the settings on your nodes?  the fresnel should have a sampling/quality component just like the reflection and refraction nodes.  also, check the number of bounces on your raytrace.  then again, since your posts are 15 minutes apart, we may just have different ideas of "forever." 

It went from 15-20 minutes with one shader, to almost two hours after tweaking a shader.
I added reflection node and a fine bump.
Soo... back to the drawing board...

zooo... I dared to download and install P7, Sr3 which just came out, and it appears to have fixed the gridding issue on shaders.
It introduced some silly artifact on my skydome though.  LOL, so it goes!

My, you are a brave one Connie. I'll have to download Sr3 before I forget to, but I don't know if I'll bother installing it anytime soon.

I haven't downloaded SR3 yet either. Poser runs fine for me so I don't want to tinker with it at the moment with important projects coming up.

Connie - I've got some free time over the next couple of weeks. Is there anything new you'd like to send me to test on in Vue?

There are some files to play with over at the OKCRandy Beta forum to download, but I haven't had a chance to even unzip them.

Yeah, they're static unrigged ungrouped OBJ's for people whom may want to do some texturing :)

Nothing else to test at the moment, till we get closer to finished with rigging.

Yea, ok, I had to get shiny liquidy latex out of my system.

Oh, that one's sexy indeed! Looks like it's made of honey poured over her body! 

Hahaha! Hey Connie, feel like adding in the new "Elite morphs?  :scared: :lol:

Quote - Hahaha! Hey Connie, feel like adding in the new "Elite morphs?  :scared: :lol:

Ah, Joe-B, that's just cruel, you couldn't do that to Connie now! :ohmy: :lol:

I'll say this though, I would love to see an update for the outfit sometime with the Utopian morphs, sexy!! :thumbupboth:

Love the shiny texture Connie. I'm sure I could see my reflection on her backside!!

That's OK, Lyrra Madrill has a magnet fit set for all the new shapes. I have her GND4 mag set, but I haven't tried to use them yet. I'd love to see GND4 in the Shadow Dancer outfit!

I guess someone could do the new fits for the outfit then, interesting indeed.
Yeah, I have to agree about the GND4 shape for the SD outfit, very good!

Quote - Got Latex?

Yea, ok, I had to get shiny liquidy latex out of my system.

:woot: OH, Come on already... your killin me :)

I've already got a complete set of poses ready for this ;)

Seriously, This Looks GREAT!

Hi people. Cool stuff here. I happened to see my name regarding Fresnel, so I popped in.

Don't use the Fresnel node for this - it does refraction as well as reflection, resulting in a cool effect for water or clear glass, but not what you want for shiny clothing.

Reflections alone will cause an increase in render time, but pretty mild. Refractions are terribly slow, but necessary for certain materials.

My thread on Fresnel reflections from way back is actually just an approximation of the Fresnel effect, and a rather poor one at that. Even the Fresnel node is not accurate. I recently constructed, from first principles (by using the actual Fresnel equations) a shader tree that accurately performs Fresnel reflection. I used it in my free Orb shaders.

http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2743322
http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/orbs

The first shader in that set, Orb001_Opaque would actually make a pretty good shader for any glossy material such as latex. Just change the color in the Simple_Color node at the top of the shader. Or, set it to white and attach a color map.

Of course you don't have to use real reflection. You could use a reflection map with the sphere_map node instead. You'd still want the Fresnel effect with that, though. Go into the shader and find the Reflect node. Replace it with a Sphere_Map + Image_Map combination.

The amount of shininess is based on the Index of Refraction (IOR) of the material. I know, that sounds strange for materials that don't refract, but it still applies. I used an IOR of 1.54 for glass. There are four math nodes in the shader that have this value in them. You can change the IOR to any value you want. The IOR of metals is really high, like over 50. If you put 50 in there, you will get a really shiny material, with nearly uniform reflection across any angle. Values closer to 1 will produce less reflection, but still appear to have very strong reflection at the edges. It's all in the Fresnel equations - you only need to adjust that IOR for any realistic effect. The Edge_Blend trick I used to do just doesn't cut it any more.

Also - that shader implements Gamma correction, so the reflections blend correctly no matter what color the material is. Try white and black. Compare the results to other, more naive, reflection shaders that don't use gamma correction - resulting in non-linear math in your shader. You'll be surprised at the difference in realism.

If anybody wants to know more about accurate Fresnel, speak up.

Quote - Hahaha! Hey Connie, feel like adding in the new "Elite morphs?  :scared: :lol:

I can always make them as an injectable add on ;)

You know, to keep the initial OBJ load smaller, some of the morph groups in the outfit are going to be injectable anyway. :)

Oooh, Bagginsbill, thank you so much for popping in :)
I'm going to run out to get my morning cofee, and sit down and carefully read through the advice you're offering.

For those of you whom may not know Bagginsbill, he's like the Demi-God of procedural shaders!!!! I feel blessed by having him stop by and offer input!

faint   
[open one eye... I better go get my coffeee...]

:blink:          :blink: :blink:

Where'd everyone go?

I know, there's a party and I didn't get invited!   :crying:

I like these colors, it gives a 'sporty' look that suits very well ^^

I agree, vince.
As I found when playing around with different shader set-ups in C6, this outfit is very versatile in the looks you can give it just by using different color and texture schemes.

Oh boy, love the reflection & shine in the latest one Connie, really dynamic!
If I wave, can you see me in the reflection?

If you look at the reflection really hard, you see that face from your sig popping in and out of view ;)   Spoookey!
Hey stormy, I haven't seen you in beta forums in a little while, you may be interested in poppin in over there :)

Brilliant! Nothing else to say!! OO

It's the reflections, huh?
You're blinded by them :tt2:

Indeed the reflections are perfect! I can see you licking your tail in them, trapped you are! ^^

pretty kick butt outfit there connie! wtg!

Just popping by to say i WANT THIS! also ive read thru the thread and its very interesting to se how and what is involved in making this.
Dont know much abouyt modelling but im hoping to some day get the patience and motivation to learn enough to make some stuff of my own, things like this really helps in increasing motivation, even if its years out of my reach :)

Ooh, Thank you Izy and Zhack, so nice of you to pop in :)

Zhack, I can't believe you actually read through the thread - What patience!!!  If you can make it through the thread here, you can definately get good with modeling.

I'm glad to hear there are people whom find the thread motivating and informative too. Usually I worry that people will get mad at me about it being self serving.

Making theese threads helps me stay motivated. LOL once I announce to the whole world I'm making something, I can't quit when it gets too hard.

Work update - I managed to get couple of the custom JCM's work - in the experimental attempt. Now I have to load them all, see where they need touching up, then do them again 'for real'.
I think after that the suit wil be rigged and ready for beta testers to take it apart.
I think if I do that first, the rigging of vest, holster and boots will go much smoother.

Quote -
Work update - I managed to get couple of the custom JCM's work - in the experimental attempt. Now I have to load them all, see where they need touching up, then do them again 'for real'.
I think after that the suit wil be rigged and ready for beta testers to take it apart.
I think if I do that first, the rigging of vest, holster and boots will go much smoother.

WooHoo!!!!!! now your getting me excited, and right before I gotta go to work and be brought down by real life! :lol:

Looking forward to the official beta version!

The big day's getting closer.
There will be fights for who gets first go, lol!!

LOL, of course, today I can't seem to concentrate on it, so I'm meandering around all kinds of distractions.
I think I'm afraid of getting so tangled up in the JCM's and ERC, that it'll take me a month to get untangled.    nervous laugh

Nice Kitty, it's just a little thunder... :lol:

I may have to post a pre-JCM  render of the same thing so people can see the before and after.

WOOT! You did it Connie! Nothing can stop you! :D

Thats okay Connie, with an outfit like this, I would turn the legs and what not off anyways! :D  maybe I am the only one that does that?

Top work there Connie, great example!! :thumbupboth:

Quote - Thats okay Connie, with an outfit like this, I would turn the legs and what not off anyways! :D  maybe I am the only one that does that?

Turning off body parts is actually more of a norm. It still may need doing, especially with other body morphs and shapes.

I'm just patting myself on the back for making the JCM's work :)

beta beta beta beta  ..... here beta beta betta betta
http://forum.okcrandy.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=362&start=90

Here beta beta ;)

Been following along quietly.  But wanted to chime in long enough to say,  Awesome modeling!  I still am amazed at how "tight" you got the outfit and it poses oh so well!  

Thank You Shadownet :)
I dunno about it posing oh so well just yet... but maybe it'll get there.

LOL Well it looked "posed" oh so nice in the pics I looked at. :O)

Poser being Poser, its never perfect.  But I applaud you for making the effort.   I am also impressed with what you were doing in Hexagon.  I started with Wings3d after trying a few other free modeling programs, and finally learned it.  I bought Hex to learn but never could seem to make heads or tails out of it.  Seems like whatever tutorial I tried the layout was different or things did not seem to want to work the same for me as described.  Half the time, I could not even find some of the buttons they were saying go look for, because my version was different (newer) than the one used in the tutorial.  And being time limited, I just went back into Wings and modeled what I needed there.  Still, I am hoping to one day sit down and learn Hex.