This is stock M4 and a couple of primitive props. I didn't touch anything on M4 - this is with his out-of-the-box materials.

The right side is looking through a new prop I have devised. I call it the Artistic "Lens".

The pattern doesn't look right reduced, so click for full size.

That's pretty neat :) 

Somewhat of a news print quality.

Cool. Please tell more.  Can it do a "hand drawn" look? I wonder if it can do stuff like over or under saturate?

Here is monochrome - precisely (mathematically) the way old TV's did black and white. Not the same as desaturated, but better. (I can do desat as well, but it's not as good.)

 so how does it work?

Dangit, I meant to do a tutorial on this stuff a long time ago and forgot. Fortunately, BB is much better at tutorials than I am :)

Awesome effects! Might be interested in the B&W one. How'd you do it?

I want one. :-) 

Quote - No name. Deconstructed? Color Dissolve?

Looks more "Matrix" like

looks like filters from the Gimp or probably Photoshop. Interesting effect.

That's really cool stuff. How are you doing it?

The basic setup is very simple.

Load a one-sided square. Scale it up so it is like a screen hanging in front of your whole scene, between the camera and the subject. This is your "lens". You cannot see the scene directly anymore, only through the lens.

Set the square properties to no shadow, and not visible in raytracing.

Go into the material room for the lens (the square).

Set Diffuse_Value=0, Specular_Value = 0.

Add a Refract node and plug it into Alternate_Diffuse. (Or if you prefer, use one of the two-knob channels such as Ambient or Refraction. With such channels, you can have separate controls (and potentially nodes) on the color and the brightness.)

Set the Refract IOR = 1.0.

At this point you can render and your original scene should appear unchanged. You have a neutral lens. Save this in your library for future use as a starter.

Then you go from there playing with the effects.

For example, put an HSV node between the Refract and the root node. Now you can adjust hue, saturation, and brightness for the entire scene. Not only does this simple setup give you many artistic options, but you can also adjust your LIGHT LEVELS all from this one place: HSV.Level.

After you get the hang of that you can start doing more tricky stuff between the Refract node and the root node.

i think this is fantastic and can make very artistic renders.

but photoshop is more handy. of course if we dont have photoshop then this is the way to go.

Wow! Very nice. The black and white w/contrast boost looks great. I linke the TV and Fiber and the rest too. Very curious.

Here's the setup.

Of course, you really should anti-gamma correct all your incoming colors to get this to work really well. Otherwise, it may look washed out.

If you're not going to anti-gamma correct all your incoming material, you can try decreasing the amount of gamma correction. I used 2.2 here in the Math:Div node - try lower numbers like 1.5.

I inserted an HSV node between the Refract and the gamma correction. Using that I pre-saturate the image and then gamma correct using 1.5 instead of 2.2.

This brings back a lot of the tones that get lost from using bad incoming material with GC.

And, yes, you can do these same effects in post-work. However, I like this better, because:

1) I don't like the extra step of postwork
2) I can see the true final outcome immediately, and can make adjustments in place without having to guess how that will look after I post-work.
3) If I am making an animation, the effects are already done for every frame. Postworking a movie is a lot harder than postworking a still image.

Here's a render with just a single infinite light at 55%.

Most people would immediately start adding more lights or increase this light's intensity. That's not the problem. There is plenty of light.

The realism is much better than you'd get if you just blasted more light at it.

this gamma correction setup is very interesting. this is better then in photoshop. because there you lose a lot of detail.

Quote - Check this out. Many Poser users say they just don't know how to get good lighting. It's not the lighting, folks, it's your monitor. You must tone-map the image for your monitor.

Here's a render with just a single infinite light at 55%.

Most people would immediately start adding more lights or increase this light's intensity. That's not the problem. There is plenty of light.

they dont listen. htey just dont read.

i sitll see the classic poser renders with the 3 times over bright lighting.

The Gamma stuff is PoserPro? I'll check my P7.

Do you have advise for setting up the LCD on a laptop without calibration hardware or is expecting a descent display on a laptop unrealistic. I tried pulling out my old c.2002 color monitor and plugging the laptop into it but the color seemed really off, it was much darker and warmer than my laptop and fuzzy and blinky, so I gave up on that idea.

I am not the brightest... would you show a screen capture of the set-up for the fiber effect?

Quote - The Gamma stuff is PoserPro? I'll check my P7.
... would you show a screen capture of the set-up for the fiber effect?

PoserPro is not needed for this lens. The GC lens I showed will work all the way back to Poser 5.

I'll post the fiber effect in a minute.

Oh I forgot the question about calibration.

Laptops displays (both the video card and the actual screen) are usually crap, I think. I've tried calibrating both my laptops to produce consistent looks with my desktop and I can't.

Since I'm on the road almost all the time now, most of my thread posted renders are from my laptop. Quite often I get home and look at my own posts and I'm shocked at what I posted.

My laptop is dark and muddy, so I overexpose a lot of my renders lately.

Play with the numbers to see how you can alter the outcome.

The green color is RGB 77, 149, 28. These add up to 255. Those represent the RGB ratios originally used to map real-life color onto a monochrome tv image.

The Math:Cosine node is doing the lines. Then I have to adjust them to make them positive and produce the correct contour.

The frequency of the lines is that number 1500. Bigger numbers produce more lines. Be careful - you can get interference patterns if the lines start to approach the size of your actual pixels. To make really fine lines, you'll have to increase your render quality quite a bit. You'll want to use smaller Min Shading Rate, and larger Pixel Samples.

I also added some small amount of blue tint to the results - this is in the color setting of the Alternate_Diffuse channel.

Very helpful. Thank you. Esp, re. RGB 77, 149, 28.

I'm so glad I came to Rosity today and browsed around....this will greatly help a render I've been working on and just can't get to look "right" with the lighting adjustments I've done a million times.

Many thanks BB!

bill, it's very ingenious IMVHO.  I haven't seen this before.

one question - if the figure has got a poser 7.x toon shader applied to its body,
can your lens be adjusted so that it has the effect of adding an edge-blend node
over the toon shader? 

the reason I ask is that this might allow one to combine an edge blend (fall-off shader)
layer over the toon shader (sans lines) to get better-looking line work in poser, without
having to export the raw toon shader render and edge-blend renders to photoshop and
combining them there , with the edge-blend render as multiplying layer over said toon layer.

Nope, can't be done.

The lens is like a screen within a screen. You're viewing a picture of what is on that screen. The only information it has to work with is what color is on the screen, and then it gets to modify what that color is.

Any thing like edge detection, blurring, etc. requires that you be able to examine more than one point in the scene. But the lens shader only gets data from one point at a time.

Worse, I have no access to anything but the color of the scene element behind the screen. I can't ask how far away it is, or what direction it is facing, or anything like that. If I could, there are many interesting effects I could do, not just with this lens but with translucent/transparent materials in general. Even better, if I could launch multiple rays of my own, in any direction I wnat, I could implement true subsurface scattering.

The issue of toon lines has come up many times. Even if I could access the edge-blend information of what is behind the screen, it wouldn't help much. I can put a shader directly on the prop and still not do a good job with toon lines. If you could, you'd see better toon shaders already.

Though I'm wondering if I need to make any adjustments to my normal render settings? I have one infinite light (white) set to raytraced shadows, and my simple color-based IBL. (can post those too if needed)

neato i am trying it now

hey baggins...can you work with single color channels this way?...say for a faked chromatic aberration effect(by scaling up one of the channels a couple pixels),maybe some vignetting and fish eye lens also

..calling it "Lens" has me thinking of camera stuff :)

Quote - This worked wonders! You can actually see the features on the face now (I fiddled with lighting for a full day trying to get it to look right...and was about ready to give up on this image) I think I'll be using this for all my renders now...more addicting than chocolate. ^_~

Though I'm wondering if I need to make any adjustments to my normal render settings? I have one infinite light (white) set to raytraced shadows, and my simple color-based IBL. (can post those too if needed)

Hey that really helped, eh? The face is more clearly defined and the hair is just wow in the after picture. That black skin with only some specular is exactly why you need GC. If you added enough light to bring that out, you'd blow out the hair.

I don't think you need to change any settings. Those are good everyday settings. for 90% of all images they work great. You're using RT shadows and simple lighting, one infinite and one IBL.

Quote - hey baggins...can you work with single color channels this way?...say for a faked chromatic aberration effect(by scaling up one of the channels a couple pixels),maybe some vignetting and fish eye lens also

..calling it "Lens" has me thinking of camera stuff :)

Hmmm. Chromatic aberration, not with one lens because it only gets to look at one point at a time. CA is a kind of blur and that means integrating data from multiple points in space. I'll have to think about whether or not there is some trick I can do with multiple lenses.

Vignetting and fish eye could be done quite easily.

Remind me over the weekend. I'll look into it. I'll be travelling all day tomorrow (actually sailing) and I'll forget.

Question - how can you use the lens and still keep more of a "shiny" specular look on certain things? Something added to the alt specular channel on various materials for the figures and such?

The look I got for the full render of the face I posted earlier (Gallery link - there's nakedness too..so don't say I didn't warn ya) was great, and I personally liked how it turned out....just had a thought on like hair highlights and similar such items for future renders.

Don't mind experimenting on my own...just sometimes it's nice to have a jumping off point.

So many great and innovative ideas... THANKS!

-- Jeff

Tried it out earlier.  Looks nice, but it has some problems with colored lights and you need to do a bit of tweaking and fine tuning if you want to use a background picture...  you have to put it in the refraction node to see it and then you've got to tweak the lens and the node to get it lined up right.

I prefer to put background images on a one-sided square. That way they're real and can be seen by reflections and refractions. When you use the Poser "Background" for the background image, it's like that's what is printed on your "paper" before the render is drawn on it, which has many drawbacks.

What's the issue with colored lights?

I had a few blue lights and the shadows became redish.  So I'd almost need to make them white and then colorize things with the HSV filter you were talking about.  I haven't had too much time to go back and tweak things yet as I only did a quick render.  I also noticed what you said about a scene having too muc lights; when adding the filter to the last image I put in my gallery and not doing anything else, the difference was huge.

My champion workflow for B&W right now is to render out of PoserPro openEXR format. Create an Action in Photoshop to adjust the Exposure/Offset/Gamma and Channel Mixer Red/Green/Blue->Monochrome and then set the mode back to 8-bit.

Apply Action to the image sequence folder through PS Automation.

The power of adjusting an openEXR image in 32-bit mode is wonderful.

::::: Opera :::::