Quote - Hi. Sorry I wasn't around. Vargas #1 is already much less of the color map. You're using #2, which keeps a lot more color.

But I see you found a way to mess with it.

I honestly don't completely understand that shader any longer. I was very in the zone on the day I wrote it. Some of the techniques I used were rather roundabout, and I'd do it maybe a bit more simply today.

The link above will take you to the original Vargas thread at RuntimeDNA. I posted renders, and then we had a long discussion about "simpler" ways to get the same render. Actually, there are few simpler ways to get the same. Hehehehe. The key thing is how to get "Vargas" to draw your color map - nipples included!

The devil is always in the details... lol I have been playing with this for only maybe a few hours since you showed me how to get VargasVSS loaded.  As I understand VSS's purpose is to simplfy applying a shader to several figure parts/figures with a simple click. Once the shader is written presumably by the user. Your provided shaders are supplied so users can test VSS and as such are NOT a part of VSS.

That being said I'm starting to feel like a dog chasing his tail... lol  Here's my dilemma.  Following in the spirit of VSS I have been trying to create a shader to give me a style of render for my art. Granted I started with VargasVSS but have made many changes to it already. I want the effect sans the red and some specular added that makes the skin look pretty good and with some tweaks I'm getting it.  I removed the copy rules from the teeth,eyes,  lips, inner mouth and all nails. Now come the problems. When the skin is what I want the available light is insufficiant to illuminate the eyes, teeth etc. If I increase the light I blow out the skin. So I have been increasing the diffuse value of the non effected items to in essense self illuminate them. That is helping but not perfect yet. Now I have the issues of nipples and make-up. Can .png or .tiff files be used in the material room? If so I should be able to apply those with a trans map to get the image to overlay the shader in thoseareas. I could perhaps use blend nodes to control this so that it's soft and in keeping with the skin.

Or maybe I'm just not getting this and have lost my mind... LOL

Thanks,  Don

edit: Hearing that you were in the zone when you created the Vargas shaders and can't figure them out now just scares the HELL out of me... LOL If you don't know then were dummed. hehehe

Quote - > Quote - ...How do I get either of those into the Template Skin on the VSS prop?

Very simple. You load it like any other material.

Go into the material room.
Select the VSS prop (usually VSS_1).
Using the material room material selector pulldown, choose Template Skin.
Navigate your Library to where you have the VargasVSS materials.
Double click one of them to load into Template Skin.
Synchronize to copy to all zones on the figure.
Render.

This simple instruction is the most eye-opening thing I've read so far.  I mean, "duh!"  I thought I understood everything until I read this.  I feel so stupid!

Thanks for this!

i am still stuying the skin shader and i never noticed that you did something to the material AO. how did you make it red?

Bagginsbill, I need some help with adapting your VSS to a hair prop. I have some poser toon shaders that I rarely used because they were a bit of a pain to apply -- well today I created a VSS prop to apply the shader to a v4 figure, and it works great. The shaders have a hair version also, but I cannot get a VSS prop to synchronize as it doesn't seem to recognize the hair prop no matter how I call it. The internal name is figureHair and the external name is A4AnimeLongHair. So figures and regular props are fine, but prop hair is not. Any ideas on how to get this working? Is it something in your script that needs updated to work?

fivecat:

Whoops! I assumed any prop parented to a figure is part of the figure. Turns out the script is being fooled because of this, I think.

Try unparenting, or perhaps just work with the hair alone. Once you have it shaded, you can then re-connect it to the figure.

I'll add this to my list of bugfixes.

ice-boy:

There is a circuit (upper left) that is making subsurface scattering. It is unaffected by the AO, so the cavities are reddish. Hehehe.

I have made some progress on the new UI. Not ready to use at all yet, but I've learned a lot about how I want the experience to be, now that I know what is possible with flex.

Today I was building extensions to matmatic to work with VSS. You can pick the different shader modules and just tick-tick-tick to enable each feature. You can mix and match these features to make a simple or a complex shader, with only a few clicks. No need to learn my scripting language - it's all visual.

Once the shader is built, you can then load it into VSS. From there you have all the various parameters to tune the shader.  You never have to go into the material room again.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Quote - fivecat:

Whoops! I assumed any prop parented to a figure is part of the figure. Turns out the script is being fooled because of this, I think.

Try unparenting, or perhaps just work with the hair alone. Once you have it shaded, you can then re-connect it to the figure.

Thanks, I'll try that! Add: yup, that worked. Thanks!

I'm slowly reading my way through the forum to find answers but I was wondering if there was a way to seperate the lips and have it as its own template. The reason i ask is because it looks cracked/dry after applying synchronizing. I can go in and add a phong node and it looks much better then. But can I save that as a prop?

Add another template - Template Lips

Assign the Rule lip to Copy Template Lips.

Put whatever shader you want in the lips - probably a copy of the skin shader plus gloss (not phong).

However, in a closeup you're going to see the edges are sharp. The proper way to do lip gloss for high realism is to use a lip mask. I made one for V4, and that is how I apply lipstick. It actually extends into the face zone a little bit. I'll be selling that version I hope.

Quote - Add another template - Template Lips

Assign the Rule lip to Copy Template Lips.

Put whatever shader you want in the lips - probably a copy of the skin shader plus gloss (not phong).

However, in a closeup you're going to see the edges are sharp. The proper way to do lip gloss for high realism is to use a lip mask. I made one for V4, and that is how I apply lipstick. It actually extends into the face zone a little bit. I'll be selling that version I hope.

Yup a good lip mask is needed Bill.

I thought I'd show you the results and get opinions since I've been staring at it so long I can't see anything anymore.

First the VSS Preview Release 2 skin shader (PR2).

Depending on what features you add or remove, you have more or less settings on the left. This is just one configuration.

It is my intention that these settings are presented to you in the VSS user interface, not the material room. But you can still mess with them in the mat room to see the preview change.

Here is Pickle=.15

At Pickle=1, the diffuse color is fully desaturated, but there is still going to be some color from sub-surface scattering, and also if your lights are colored.

Your AO set-up in PR3 shader looks much better (cleaner) than PR2. :D
The girl with the Pickle .7 setup look like the dead girl in Twin Peaks Movie. hrhrhrhr ;-)

Mazak

Very nice Bill.  I think your hitting on something now.  VSS is great but I for 1 need the shaders and a simple stupid method for applying them.  I really like the look Rgus gets where the skin is soft and smooth but makeup and other details are kept. ex. http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1741518&member 

Thanks,  Don

I agree, the AO looks a lot better in the new version, but it also could be the render. I think it's a bit much specularity, skin usually isn't that shiny.

bagginsbill. very interesting.
the biggest difference i notice is AO and the specular.
i would have to see more renders. but i notice that the specular is to much for the skin.

i am now reading a lot about specular map. its a nice think you did in VSS that you made a greyscale image and connected it to bllin.
but i think for the best results we would have to make custom maps.

so has anyone any links where i can see where is the biggest specular on the human body?

i think that would depend on the person, their age, and a lot of other factors.   go look up skin products for women.  lots deal with the fact that some skin needs more moisturizing than others, and they aren't the same areas on different people.  though the T zone is generally the most oily (brow, nose, chin).  still, it all depends.

and so the cosmetics industry makes lots of money selling permutations of the same product.

its hard to top this. this is VSS 2 , this is really a perfect skin shader. i did some photoshop changes on the apollo texture. and i changed a little bllin.  but other then that this is it.

any news on the skin shader? 

did you use your technique to lower the AO strength?

Hi ice-boy,

I was working on the skin shader at home last week and I stupidly left all the code for it there. I usually upload my work-in-progress to my google site, but I forgot.  I'm working out of town and don't have access to it at the moment.

Yes, the AO strength is easily implemented with a Blender node. In matmatic syntax, it is simply this:

d = Diffuse(...) # my diffuse node
aoStrength = PM(.8, "AO Strength") # make a user-configurable parameter for AO strength
d.Diffuse_Value = Blend(1, AmbientOcclusion(7, 40, .2), aoStrength)

in my opinion, i'm getting results are pretty close to the limit in terms of what i want from skin realism.  that is, i think you don't have to do any more tweaking to the skin shader unless it's just fun.  as an engineering friend of mine says, the last 1% of errors takes 99% of the effort.  not discouraging you at all, but letting you know i think you've already done an incredible job.  i've finally got my default light and dark scenes, and i'm (personally) very happy with them. i'm now hitting the limits of Poser and the content available for it.  and it's about 10 times as hard to deal with them because the level of realism is so much higher.  i want an effective picture more than i want realism, but i also want something consistent.

you've taken skin far past where everyone else has.   and other materials, of course.  i mean, the only gaps for skin i can see is that unrealistic almost mollusk-like extreme translucency popular to CG (like Golem from LOTR) and the realistic translucency to older skin due to a thicker epidermis.  one usually isn't your thing (since you're into realism), and the other is only rarely needed and needs special conditions to observe.  and i'm just not sure those are possible without non-buggy translucence, though if they are they're probably already in your new shader. 

so thanks a lot. 

Wow, just wow. Thanks for that. The figure looks totally photographic to me. The hair is ruining it now, even though by traditional Poser standards that is great hair.

And, yes, I'll keep going because it is fun.

what are the biggest changes in the skin shader if i can ask?
SSS,specular.....

thanks so much!  that means a lot coming from you.  cool!  i'm glad you're having fun.   yeah, i know about the hair.  i think unless i can learn to make hair that's specific to an image i'm working on, i might be able to make it with short hair some point in the future, but definitely not long hair.  i'm still not quite up to painting hair that realistic, but it is possible. 

just to say, i'm finding that specularity maps make a big difference.  the light one uses the Vanessa texture, which comes with a bump and specularity map.  Vanessa by Maelwenn and Alice by Aery Soul have become two my "go to" texture sets because they're so comprehensive.  the dark one uses Irina 2.0's texture, for which i tried to make a bump and specularity map from the texture.  the interesting thing about Irina's texture is that it's has extreme differentials in  tone and hue.  certain places are really pale and have almost no red, and others are very tanned and red.  which is actually realistic if you're thinking about your average person who doesn't use tanning beds or other methods to get an even skin tone.  sort of like Ian by GRFK DSGN.  maybe i've just lived in texas too long now, but as much as it seems unusual to my eye, i think it's because i look at media too much and reality tool little.

i guess what i'm saying is the texture makes a big difference.   that said, i've been able to make all sorts of different skin tones for Vanessa and Alice.  i might try something otherworldly soon...

yeah textures are very important.
its very important that the texture doesnt have any specularity

i have one qustion about skin texture.
why is a bigger HD pic better for texture? for more details? for close ups? 
is it better even for a full body shot? or only for close ups?

pardon, bigger HD pic?  i'm not sure what you mean by that?

should i use a bigger texture for skin? or smaller? is a bigger texture only good for close ups?

i use P6, so i manually adjust my max texture size to match my render.  P7+, my understanding is Firefly handles it and gives you only what you need. 

if you're making textures, the trick is to plan for what you'll probably need with some leeway for what you might need.  my final renders are at about 2700 x 3600 right now.  so if i want, for instance, to submit them to a book contest, the image is high enough resolution to print.  i'm not high enough res for a poster.  that would be about quadruple the area at just 200 dpi.  so if i could get Poser to render that large, i'd definitely need to max out the textures.  and what if i wanted a close-up portrait that size?  i'd need the face texture to be about as big as the poster itself. 

i've had the most trouble with scenery, actually.  very few scenery artists make textures efficient enough to render at a high resolution.  even without doing a close up, i've hit some serious limits.  i've had to switch to procedural textures at times.  which has made me even more thankful for bagginsbill's teachings and freebies.  they've enabled me to use content i  paid for.

i have P7. will it render faster if i go from 2000x2000 to 1000x1000?

i don't know.  if P7 works ideally, then it would depend on the render's resolution.  ideally, Firefly should take only the resources it needs.  and it would internally scale down the texture to fit the render, or the portion of the render it was working on at the time.  in which case, the resolution would only matter if you needed it.   so reducing texture size would make things faster, but pixelated.  if it doesn't work ideally, and just loads the portion of the texture it needs in as its rendering, then reducing texture size would speed things up.  but you'd have to make sure you didn't need it.

did they use here HDRI for the specular on the skin? 
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=525740&page=1&pp=15
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=219323

i am trying the whole day to make this in poser. but no luck. i tryed everything. i dont know if this has to do with the shader or with the firefly render.

I went and viewed the threads that you gave URLs for. The first image became part of Poser Pro's startup imagry. These are his credits for the image:

Title: Embryo III
Name: Steve Barrett
Country: USA
Software: BodyPaint, CINEMA 4D, Modo, Photoshop, Poser

Though he does not say, I believe that the initial posing of the figure was done in Poser7 or Poser Pro. I do not believe it was actually rendered in Poser. More likely it was in Cinema 4D, and then there was extensive postwork. Its a beautiful image, I can see why it was chosen for Poser Pros start sequence. However, my main gripe has been that these images are not pure Poser renders showing what can be done in Poser alone. I don't believe that the skin shading or the lighting originated within Poser.

The second thread you sighted has these credits:

Title: The Final Battle
Name: Max Kor
Country: Israel
Software: Maya, mental ray

Cinema and Maya are professional apps that have more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at as well as having professional price tags. Are they using some sort of HDRI light set up inside those apps? It's possible, but those systems of lighting are not the same system for HDRI used by Poser7 or Poser Pro. This is not to say that Poser cannot produce some beautiful images with the tools it has built into it (despite discussions I've read here on the forums about Poser's failings, if you read tutorials and push the app until it squeals, you can get some very nice stuff out of Poser). But these examples were produced with different tools and techniques. These images are like compairing apples and oranges. Just my two cents.

i understand this. i just think that we need to push poser even more.

of course maya is the best. but we need to find a way to copy this. no matter what hehhehhe .

The 'embryo' one should be doable. It's a nice render but not what i would call very complex in lighting or shading. A good HDR with some color variation + IBL + render as HDR + tweaking in photoshop should get you pretty close.

The other one is gonna be much harder as it's using misss_fastskin, and that shader has all kinds of features that are not really possible in firefly AFAIK. Stuff like driving the SSS with GI, SSS bleeding into shadows, bumps getting softened with SSS etc. If you want to give it a go then i'd start with getting the lighting of your scene to that level first, maybe render out multiple lighting setups and blend between them. Then start on the shading, with custom maps to control SSS, specular, bump, diffuse. Maybe an edge falloff pass so you can tweak the specular and reflection in photoshop. You'll also need to find high quality textures, with well made bump maps.

Huge amounts of work in any case.

a lot of work? well thats what makes it so interesting.

new test.

Looks very-nice and real, ice-boy! Care to give any specific settings, etc.?

Thanks in advance!

VSS2

bllin : 
0,5
0,5
0,8

simple color: very very bright blue. just a hint of blue to change the victoria texture.and 3 simple lights. one IBL with AO. one infinite  light and oen backlight.
but i stil ldont like it. i am now making a custom skin texture for apollo.

Thank you again! Very helpful

still looking at the nodes of the skin shader an i noticed even more. you used the negative bump,displacement trick wit with the math node. sutract 0,5.

Well I did another test with a custom/original skin texture.

The skin texture is the original and the tattoos are custom, and I think it came out realy nice.
Considering that the original skin is quit dark in color, it all in all came out nicely in collor and brightnes.

I used the VSS prop and outdoor lights for this.