Wow Bill, that's looking really great!
The only thing missing in this pic is some very soft hair on the skin to go with the contratsed light ;)

Yup, a bit of peach fuzz and you are good to go :)

Used the hair room. I had trouble getting them to lay flat. The "pull down" effect doesn't start until about a 10th of an inch. So I had to manuall select all the hairs and "style" them by dragging them down. I seem to have missed some of them.

Test renders with ray-traced shadows were really slow, so this is without shadows. Some of the hairs in front are being lit by the rim light. This will not happen with shadows enabled, but I'll save that for the final render. It will probably be an all-nighter.

Unfortunately you can only add fuzz one body group at a time. Sigh. Well once I get this group worked out (styling,, length, width, and shader) I'll apply to the other body parts. I only have a couple groups done here.

I seem unable to find a way to save the hair settings. I can save the hair group as a whole, but I want to copy all the hair settings from one group to another, and I can't find a way to do that. Of course I save the material and load it on all the others using VSS. :)

Bill - Damn you're good!

Quote - Some troll opined recently that he'd returned after a long absence and found we're all still doing the same old thing with Poser - soft porn.

He made me realize I wasn't doing enough of that

What? No boobs holding a sword in a temple? Shame on you BB :) Nice render. The bump effect with that lighting actually appeared to have a little peach fuzz hair in the small thumbnail on that image. I thought hmm..how did he do that then I looked at the big version and saw it was just the bump effect. Illusions I tell you!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2569449

See linked thread.

Is it just me or are the script files missing from your post?

Quote - Is it just me or are the script files missing from your post?

The scripts are there, they just look like broken images (due to a sloppy data transfer process when the forums were converted from EZ to PHP).
Right clicking and saving the file with a PY extension is all you need to do.

Oops...... thanks for this Noel.

Quick question: What can I do about the eyes going all white when I run the Synchronize function? I checked to make sure the Diffuse_Color was hooked to the Color_Map node for the figure's irises, and it was, and my forum searches haven't turned up anything but that advice. For reference, this was on the Millenium Kids Preschool Boy figure if someone can verify this or knows a workaround.

Quote - > Quote - Is it just me or are the script files missing from your post?

The scripts are there, they just look like broken images (due to a sloppy data transfer process when the forums were converted from EZ to PHP).
Right clicking and saving the file with a PY extension is all you need to do.

Thanks these will come in so handy.

@JWFokker: We are assume you applied a texture to the eyes, correct?

Yes, the Daz model comes with a full texture set.

 Now I have finally arrived at the creation of a few female characters for my (ever lasting) game project. And I need some advice.

 I am trying to accomplish a Scandinavian skn, pale like in the first image below (small part of "Lavender moth" by jollyself). But what I get is what you see in the second picture with 3 examples.

Any suggestions appreciated. :)

Part of "Lavender moth" by jollyself

You didn't say which of my skin shaders you're using. I did 3 preview releases. PR3 is the best and I'd rather deal with the configuration on that one, since it is organized nicely.

 Ok, I see.
It says "Preview release 1" in the main btn script in Py dir.
Is the #3 somewhere in this thread then? Page hint please. 
:b_overwhelmed:

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/random-shaders

In that folder on my website, I uploaded the newest skin shader I have. It's in the file VSS_Template_Skin_PR3_WIP.mt5 44k - on Oct 14, 2008

Download that file into your runtime materials folder somewhere.

Open your VSS control prop in poser material room.
Select the Template Skin material.
Load this new material into that.
Save the new control prop for your use later as PR3.

Then synchronize with this new skin shader in place and see what you get.

It has many nodes on the left side of the shader organized nicely.

Tint, specular controls, diffuse reflections, gamma - all are easy to find.

 Perfect! Thanks a million!
Will work with it tomorrow. Getting late here now.

just to say,  you also want to control your  lighting and make sure you've got a texture that's working with you.   i'm almost exclusively using Maelwenn's Vanessa because it transforms so well.  not every texture does.  it depends on how much variation it has, how saturated it is, how much burned in SSS it has, how much burned in specular, and other factors.

BB, a lot of the new M4 displacement maps are gray instead of the usual black.

I kind of remember this being talked about once (Gray Displacement maps) but can not remember the exact details.

Would you please cover how I use they gray maps again?

JD

Most apps use mid-gray for the neutral value. Negative displacements are darker and positive displacements are lighter.

In Poser, the neutral value is 0. Negative displacements are actually negative numbers.

Mathematically, I prefer 0 displacement to be represented by the number 0, so I like what Poser does. However, negative displacements cannot be encoded in an image, because they are only positive numbers. So they are shifted by .5, thus resulting in mid-gray.

So no problem. Use a math node to subtract .5 from the image. Plug that into your displacement channel.

In the PR3 version of my skin shader template, I actually do this for bump. Many bump maps are mid-gray for "no change here".

Hi Baggins Bill

I finally tried your latest version of VSS ( the material you posted on your site ). and I have to say
it looks much improved. I don't know if you remember me posting about AO artifacts I was getting with P6 but it looks like this is improved as well even though it's a P6 problem. I still get some but not nearly as much and thier not big black spots like before I only get a few that are colored and blend better with the skin. Before I had to turn AO completely off Now it seems I can just lower it really low and get some AO without much artifacts And the PM dials make things ohh soo easy. I like the names for the PM dials makes it easier to tweak things instead of guessing which nodes do what. The SSS effects are amazing. Did you expand on this on this version? I noticed thier are a lot more nodes. If you don't mind could you post a quick overview of what you improved upon.

Hm - I no longer take the time to test things on P6, so I'm glad to hear I made things better not worse. The new AO settings are supposed to be more realistic - getting it to work better in P6 is a nice bonus.

I did expand on the handling of SSS in this version, as well as ordinary diffuse and specular and other effects. Everything here is based on the principles of layered interactions. I start with a certain percentage of incoming energy available for specular interactions. As the energy is consumed by those in some areas, there is less to reach deeper for diffuse reactions, or SSS reactions. So by building the material response in layers, instead of just adding a bunch of independent effects together, I get a lot more realism. This is to be expected, since it is what happens in real life.

Quote -
I did expand on the handling of SSS in this version, as well as ordinary diffuse and specular and other effects. Everything here is based on the principles of layered interactions. I start with a certain percentage of incoming energy available for specular interactions. As the energy is consumed by those in some areas, there is less to reach deeper for diffuse reactions, or SSS reactions. So by building the material response in layers, instead of just adding a bunch of independent effects together, I get a lot more realism. This is to be expected, since it is what happens in real life.

And this bit of simple logic or otherwise put genius, is why I am now addicted to these shaders. I can't imagine not using this on any render now. Heck I even tend to add parts of  this to stuff that is not even human skin just because it looks so much more realistic. I wish I could follow your logic better, I'd have it on every surface wood, stone, water etc. 

Patience, patience. :)

I have layered materials coming for every conceivable everyday material. I have smooth metal, brushed metal, hammered metal, rusting metal, pitted metal, plastic, various types of paint, stucco, plaster, ceramic, clear glass, frosted glass, stained glass, marble, granite, natural wood, stained wood, painted wood, weathered wood, many kinds of cloth, water, milk, soda, beer, rubber, jelly, blood, blah blah - a huge collection of materials all using the techniques of layered effects for maximum realism.

The tricky part on a lot of the patterend ones is how to deal with scaling and various coordinate systems. I'm working out how to generate these on demand, using building blocks, so you can just order what you want from my application and it will design the material for you using the principles I've assembled over the last couple years.

I am pondering how to package all this, and how I want to distribute and with whom if anybody, i.e. CP, Rendo, RDNA, Daz - or go solo. Having some conversations around that right now.

Sub surface scattering in plant leaves? That would be excellent. Is realistic (diffuse) translucency possible? Like the plant on the left this image:

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2006/127/931665_20060508_screen008.jpg

I realize this thread is not about a shader. Perhaps one should introduce that topic in a separate thread. However, my main objective for learning how to use VSS is for the ability to manage the skin shader of my choosing (I say that deliberately) via this elegant tool.

VSS hasn't worked too well for me, I'll have to say, probably because I fiddle around too much with the shaders on the character and not making changes in the template and refreshing as you designed it to do, but that refreshing doesn't seem to happen consistently anyway (mostly because of node-names), but that's really a whole 'nuther topic.

What I'd like to discuss is the shader. I am absolutely rapt with it, Bill! And no, not the VSS_Template_Skin_PR3_WIP.mt5... that one is amazing, but unsuitable for what I'm try to do, at least, from what I've been able to discern. That unsuitability most certainly hinges on the fact that I can't get my head around it, so it's not the fault of the shader, but my comprehension limitations.

But, I've been playing with the original shader you sent with the first VSS, and my-oh-my, how nice is this! It adds subtle texture and colour to my underlying textureMap.

Oh dear, did I say textureMap? As in, Make-Up? You may recall in another thread I was asking about the 3Delight render thingie and Daz Studio and all that. We Poser content developers try to cater to the Daz user as well as the Poser user. So, one of my objectives is to get my pointy-little head around one of your more basic shaders in order to try to recreate an analogous shader in Eilir for the Daz users.

So, I fiddled and arranged your shader so it kinda started to make sense, kinda:

Changed one or two settings... like the simple color node: took it from RGB 189.219.219 to 233.243.243.

A lot of blah-blah to ask a simple question, Bill: in that shader, the Blender node controls how much of the shader vs how much of the underlying textureMap has precedence, right? As you can see, I set the Belnding value from 1.0000 to .50000 and went from:

to

Um, no, this may not have been in your original idea, but I feel I'm getting a superior image to what I was getting without that shader without blowing my textureMap completely out of the water.

Opinions? Be as harsh as you want.

I feel in this way, i can satisfy my Poser customers and (IF - massive *IF) I can emulate your shader in Eilir then also Daz users will have a better image to render.

Ready to duck and hide....

Oh and, just to add a bit of a weird wrinkle to all this, it was quite evident that I'd put the bumpMap image into the SpecularMap node, so I fixed that:

...and got this result:

Anyone have a clue what that is, and why this happened? Is this one of those "If-You-Understood-My-Shader-You-Wouldn't-Be-Asking" moments, Bill?
BTW, I do have Poser 7 SP3 installed... there's a school of thought that entertains the notion that weird things happen with this service pack.

It gets better: when I return things to the way they were and do a render, I get this!

Hang on, I'm reading "Lisa's Botanicals" etched on Heather's forehead! The texture map from the tree in the background is somehow transferring itself onto Heather's face! Time to break out Poser File Editor and have a long, exhaustive sticky-beak at the pz3....

i think i already asked this but i can nto find the answer. can i have a SSS map?

will VSS apply it? 

Quote - Hm - I no longer take the time to test things on P6, so I'm glad to hear I made things better not worse. The new AO settings are supposed to be more realistic - getting it to work better in P6 is a nice bonus.

I did expand on the handling of SSS in this version, as well as ordinary diffuse and specular and other effects. Everything here is based on the principles of layered interactions. I start with a certain percentage of incoming energy available for specular interactions. As the energy is consumed by those in some areas, there is less to reach deeper for diffuse reactions, or SSS reactions. So by building the material response in layers, instead of just adding a bunch of independent effects together, I get a lot more realism. This is to be expected, since it is what happens in real life.

interesting. 
i was watching a video for a tutorial and the guy said that a lot of times people make the mistake that the diffuse color is 100% and then they add a little of SS: he said that the SSS should be 100% since it is the color under the skin and that the skin is translusent( is this even a word) ? 

translucent is the word and yes, everything has some level of translucency.Skin included. As for the rest, I'm a modeler and I don't pretend to know a whole lot about anything else.

Not that it matters to anyone, but I've been carefully working my way through the second flavour of Bagginsbill's Ultra Basic Skin Shader (1-10) on the RuntimeDNA Node Cult thread, with the objective to elucidate the function of that above-mentioned shader - the one that came free with the first VSS. So, yeah, I'm like way behind everyone else in this thread, but plugging gamely along. What has worked for me is doing that tutorial and reading up on the nodes whilst doing the tutorial. And writing down notes for myself as I find out more on some of the more esoteric functions of, say, a math_function Add.

Somewhere in all this is going to be the secret to layering (not blending) textures using transmaps.

Just waiting for the "AHA!"

Quote - interesting. 
i was watching a video for a tutorial and the guy said that a lot of times people make the mistake that the diffuse color is 100% and then they add a little of SS: he said that the SSS should be 100% since it is the color under the skin and that the skin is translusent( is this even a word) ? 

by definition, translucent means that you can't entirely see through it.  what most shaders for Poser don't account for is the yellow of dermal scattering,  and that's not dealing with how much opacity the skin has.   so no, not all of how skin looks is SSS.  if it was, we'd all just look red, and you wouldn't be able to see skin surface at all.   besides, what does "100% SSS" translate to physically?  it doesn't make sense to decide that 100% of your light rays will enter the skin, not be reflected by the skin, not get scattered within the skin, scatter in the subdermal layer, not be absorbed or scatter in a direction not captured by your eyes, and be scattered back  out to be seen by the viewer.

Quote - > Quote - interesting. 

i was watching a video for a tutorial and the guy said that a lot of times people make the mistake that the diffuse color is 100% and then they add a little of SS: he said that the SSS should be 100% since it is the color under the skin and that the skin is translucent( is this even a word) ? 

by definition, translucent means that you can't entirely see through it.  what most shaders for Poser don't account for is the yellow of dermal scattering,  and that's not dealing with how much opacity the skin has.   so no, not all of how skin looks is SSS.  if it was, we'd all just look red, and you wouldn't be able to see skin surface at all.   besides, what does "100% SSS" translate to physically?  it doesn't make sense to decide that 100% of your light rays will enter the skin, not be reflected by the skin, not get scattered within the skin, scatter in the subdermal layer, not be absorbed or scatter in a direction not captured by your eyes, and be scattered back  out to be seen by the viewer.

With skin, there are no predictible constants. As skin turgor diminishes, translucency increases. However, having seen a sheet of skin (of an individual in her 40s) during a skin graft procedure and the amount of light that falls through it, I think saying that 100% of light rays will be absorbed doesn't quite mesh with reality. Skin does have a specular aspect, particularly young skin. One could quibble on just what proportion of light is absorbed and scattered into subdermal layers and acquiring colours from the surrounding structures like adipose and connective tissue and vasculature to be the shown to the viewer as the diffuse colour  vs reflected... not sure if I have all the terminology right, because to me light that is absorbed becomes invisible or becomes heat, whereas all other light is reflected light.

" I am pondering how to package all this, and how I want to distribute and with whom if anybody, i.e. CP, Rendo, RDNA, Daz - or go solo. Having some conversations around that right now. "

Please, please, don't distribute through daz.  Not that I have anything against them, but I don't want to have to download a 10 meg installer package for a 200 byte file... Hehe.. yah I know thats not exact, but I think you see the point. :D 

Quote - For anyone else who downloaded the VSS_Template_Skin_PR3_WIP.mt5 file and applied it to their VSS Template Skin shader....

After I synchronised with VSS, there were no skin textures displaying in Preview, although it rendered okay.

To fix this, I just added the link shown in the attached piccie in the Template Skin shader, and saved the prop. Leave the diffuse value at zero.

Also, the eyes are showing just white. Although I have not seen this before in VSS, I can't imagine it's anything to do with the new material. Looking into it...

Does anyone know what causes the all white eyes? I still have this happening with the Millennium Kids Preschooler figure.

Since we're all asking questions, I'll throw one in of my own. Does anyone know of a exhaustive, comprehensive reference resource for material-room nodes? All nicely, concisely laid out in one place? Bill went through a lot of trouble (in his Matmatic docs) to put together what I would consider the start of a reference resource: it describes the parameters and arguments of all the nodes, but I need something a bit more for dummies. Kinda like what Castle Poser is trying to do, but a bit more complete.

All reference material I've come across has been extremely rudimentary... they'll tell you you can set up a texture map for your material and how to do it. What they don't explain is: let's say it's a bump map... looking at someone else's (er, Bill's) Basic Skin Shader, and there's a Color_Math Subtract between the imageMap (bump map) and the bump channel on PoserSurface. I'm looking at this and going:
"Okay, and Value_1 is white (that's what we're going to be subtracting from) and Value_2 is about middle-of-the-road grey (127,127,127)... that's what we're subracting. So, from my image bumpMap (which is GreyScale), we're going to remove this particular shade of grey, leaving the rest of the shades of grey."

Is that right? Is that correctly interpreted? Took me ages to sort that out...and that's sorted only if I've deduced that correctly. The burning question remains - sorry, I'm a real Dummie, so please bear with me - WHY are we doing this? Does this sharpen the bump aspect? And was by happenstance that it was inserted?

In order to understand the WHY, I feel I need a comprehensive understanding of color maths. I'm terrible at maths... always have been. However, at this stage, I feel I need to learn it enough to understand WHY one would employ a color_math Subtract node. Saying "just experiment" leaves me cold: I have been doing so, writing down results, making minor changes... rendering... changing... rendering... and becoming increasingly befuddled and frustrated, because I walking blindly though this weird nebulum of colour behaviour that is not displaying any sort of predictable pattern. The more I "experiment", the less clear it gets. This is counter-productive. Case in point... here's my scary model with that color_math Subract in place:

and without:

Perhaps my textures are too strong and render the math contributions of little value.
Bill took the time - bless his heart - to exhaustively explain the interaction of bias and gain on an image (starts on page 39 of this thread). There is a graph (which I'm afraid meant little to me... remember, I'm a Dummie, so interpreting graphs is a bit beyond me) and the image, which meant a lot more. I could even see my way clear to converting those formulas - like Clamp(7 * (Bias(x, .7) - Bias(x, .6))) - into nodes. So, that entire exercise was very helpful, Bill... but thick as I am, it doesn't explain how you came up with the idea of using Clamp to modify Bias and Gain in the first place. I need to study Clamp and Bias and Math_function Pov and all of those so that:
1> I know why one would use them and
2> how one would use them and, most importantly
3> I would stop being such a pest on here that everyone has to ignore

When I first started to learn to program in VB, I spent a lot of time getting the main functions clear in my head. As time went on and I wrote more and more code, I had to refer less and less to the manual: I knew what arguments were expected to be satisfied and how that function would serve my needs. And then, of course, I'd start writing UDFs... sometimes, before realizing that VB already had an in-built function. Never-the-less, that functions and procedures manual was my constant companion in those first years (I'm slow-as, but I do get it eventually). Now, I can just sit down and start writing code and the darn thing generally just works... compile almost never picks up errors because there aren't any.

This is what I want to do with material-room nodes. I want to study them, try them out: not blindly, but with a decent grasp of what they do and where one would apply them. I'm obsessed with skin shaders. I will learn this. Just need a decent comprehensive manual or something of that sort that I can refer to.

As for subtracting a mid gray, I think it's used when the bump or displacement map was made for a program where mid gray would be level. The subtract mid gray function is just to make the map poser friendly.

Though if you ever find the complete cheat sheet for nodes, I love to read it too.

@ RobynsVeil:  I would agree with you that there is a lack of in-depth comprehensive tutorials on Material Room shaders available, it is apparent that this is a relatively new concept rapidly catching on in the Poser community.  I believe that the only true way of grasping it's full potential is to experiment with it and document your results.  As a researcher in the scientific community, I understand how tedious that could be.  And although you would like a tutorial that would simply tell you when to do this or that, there may be multiple avenues to achieve the same end result.  BB has opened our eyes to the vast potential of working with shaders, but, unfortunately, many of us will never reach the level of mathematical understanding he naturally possesses.  Again, experimentation and persistance will help in understanding this concept, as well as the need to provide documented tutorials on your hard work.

Thank you, hborre, for that straight-forward answer. How disappointing. You would have thought the developers of the nodes themselves would have taken the time to jot down their characteristics and potential application.

Oh well.

I will have no choice, then, but to set up my own little lab and do my little experiments (which I have already started) and document... which I will publish. I refuse to call it a tutorial... merely a set of observations.

When it gets a bit closer to being complete, I'd like to invite you over to have a look... most importantly to critique, to make sure I'm on the right path. Ta.

Hi - just popping in for a minute.

Your questions are valid but it's like wanting to know what each key on a calculator is for. The + key is to add, but you want to know why you would add, or in other words how do you use addition in practice. The answers are, of course, innumerable.

Case in point is your question about the subtract node. You rendered without it to see what happens - nothing. That's because I was anticipating a boundary case that you're not running into at the moment.

If, however, you were to push the bump depth up quite a bit, for whatever reason, you'd start to see artifacts around the folds of the eyelids unless you have the subtract .5 in there. When people use a bump depth of 1 millionth of an inch, it doesn't matter much that mid gray is actually the zero-point, and you're getting two millionths of an inch of bump. However, if you increase the bump 5/100ths of an inch, and then you double it because of the Poser Black=0 phenomenon, well you'd see the problem. Then you'd wonder why my shader doesn't show artifacts and yours does.

I've thought about writing a definitive Poser shader book. I keep vacillating between thinking I can best serve the community with instructions, versus I can best serve the community by just doing the work.

Frankly, I'd love to write the book. Would be cool to be an author.

Quote - Hi - just popping in for a minute.

Your questions are valid but it's like wanting to know what each key on a calculator is for. The + key is to add, but you want to know why you would add, or in other words how do you use addition in practice. The answers are, of course, innumerable.

Case in point is your question about the subtract node. You rendered without it to see what happens - nothing. That's because I was anticipating a boundary case that you're not running into at the moment.

If, however, you were to push the bump depth up quite a bit, for whatever reason, you'd start to see artifacts around the folds of the eyelids unless you have the subtract .5 in there. When people use a bump depth of 1 millionth of an inch, it doesn't matter much that mid gray is actually the zero-point, and you're getting two millionths of an inch of bump. However, if you increase the bump 5/100ths of an inch, and then you double it because of the Poser Black=0 phenomenon, well you'd see the problem. Then you'd wonder why my shader doesn't show artifacts and yours does.

I've thought about writing a definitive Poser shader book. I keep vacillating between thinking I can best serve the community with instructions, versus I can best serve the community by just doing the work.

Frankly, I'd love to write the book. Would be cool to be an author.

Reminds me of the story about giving a fish or teaching someone to fish. Poser isn't nearly so important of course. Many don't have the time or inclination to learn all there is to learn. Guess that's why we have mac n cheese in a box.... lol I suspect a book would be very helpful to some but most want to push some buttons and produce an image of reasonable quailty. And you know, that’s ok because this is a hobby and supposed to be fun right?

High end renderers come with all kinds of shader networks and GI etc. to do that stuff in large part for us but are just out of reach for most financially. I guess what I'm saying is Bill, finish VSS and as many shaders as you can and if you still have time then by all means write that book.

My two cents,
Don

P.S. I really appreciate what you have done so far, thanks Bill :)

At least you would know what you're talking about, Bill - it would be one book I would be in the queue for at two in the morning in the dead of winter outside the bookstore, freezing but not even feeling the cold.

In the meantime, I'm kinda putting this (probably useless) page together for this group of which I'm a member (Poser for Dummies... I'm trying to explore each node, changing one parameter at a time just to see what it does and rendering. Probably (actually, definitely) useless to this group, but there's heaps of ooos and ahhhs as lights are kinda going on for us Dummies. Including me.

You can see this lame effort here. I repeat: this is not a tutorial, it's an exploration, with hiccups and bumps and wrong turns along the way. Why do it? Because my partners in crime see the exercise as valid and because it is inspiring them to do some exploring on their own.

Oh, and please do write the book, Bill! Much better to have someone who knows speak of a subject that someone who wishes she knew!

I just realized: I was kinda quoting you, Bill (from the posts on RuntimeDNA) and didn't even ask your permission... I would like to apologise for that, and, if you will, I will remove those quotes... just thought of that just now...

Dear-oh-dear-oh-dear....

Quote - ...if you were to push the bump depth up quite a bit, for whatever reason, you'd start to see artifacts around the folds of the eyelids unless you have the subtract .5 in there. When people use a bump depth of 1 millionth of an inch, it doesn't matter much that mid gray is actually the zero-point, and you're getting two millionths of an inch of bump. However, if you increase the bump 5/100ths of an inch, and then you double it because of the Poser Black=0 phenomenon, well you'd see the problem. Then you'd wonder why my shader doesn't show artifacts and yours does....

Adding or subtracting two numbers is a concept we are familiar with. Even adding salt or water to soup makes sense. These are paradigms that are familiar to us, and so we have a frame of reference to work from.
Colours? Sure adding red and yellow gives us orange... but I think most of us have pretty much arrested at that stage. When I say 'us', I'm not referring to this group, who obviously have at least partially your feel for things material-roomish... it's the rest of us Dummies who so want to get a feel for it, but are daunted by algebraic formulas and Poser Black phenomena. This is why I'm biting the bullet and doing this wee lab... but perhaps I'm leaving out an important component, aren't I?: understanding the maths behind it. I kinda thought seeing the physical changes would suffice. I can see, however,  that because of those aspects of the material room that can only be appreciated mathematically and that profoundly affect the final render, I'm probably wrong.

Quotes gone... and I will ask permission the next time....

Have to say that I can't wait for VSS - it looks absolutely fantastic! :)

Quote - Have to say that I can't wait for VSS - it looks absolutely fantastic! :)

Me too...

Oh, and Bill, while on writing a book, that would be great!

Happy Holidays to All,

JB