When I render M4 with the lights fairly dim he comes out very red. Other characters rendered with him do not have the overly red tone. Is there a way to correct this? I like the DAZ hi-res skin for M4 when rendered under fairly bright lighting but he turns red in dim light. Making the dim lights blue or any other color does not help. Any suggestions? Can you suggest another skin texture for M4 that does not create this problem?

If it's the same as V4, then it happens because there is a dark red colour in the ambient channel in the material room. The problem is that the ambient channel is not influenced by any lighting in the scene - it just glows no matter what. To solve it, you just need to change the ambient colour to a black instead.

Thanks. When I looked at the ambient channel it looked black but when I went with a "darker black" it took out the excessive red. However, I had to do this for each of the separate body parts, I could not figure out how to apply this to the entire body at once. How do I do that? Using P7 firefly render engine.

Unfortunately, this is not possible without affect all unrelated body parts.  BTW, to apply setting changes to all body parts in the Material Room, right click in an open area to bring up the menu, select all, and then apply to all.  As mentioned, this will apply changes to everything and it is not very practical for whole body skin textures.  The only system, at present, which can accomplish a one click settings change, has been developed by Bill Baggins and can be found elsewhere in this forum.  Look for VSS Skin Test.

Edit:  This is the link:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2737823

Thats a situation where a python script comes in really useful. :) 

There was something similar in another thread and the answer had something to do with gamma correction.

Thanks again. I'll check out  VSS Skin Test. That would be very helpful.
lance

You could also try using more blue in your light setups to counter the red.

you mean green.  blue won't do anything to red but make it purple.  though a cyan will make everything cool and bluish.

 I've noticed this annoying "feature" as well but hadn't tried to go about fixing it. Without looking, changing the reddish ambient sounds like the culprit, as mentioned.

Shader Spider by PoseWorks is what I use to change materials on a few or little materials at once.
I like it.

Great for making custom materials as well, naming nodes for better clarity etc.

.... and here I thought it was because I left Poser open for too long, and M4 got a sunburn from the scene lights. O.o

 Digging into this a little more yesterday I discovered that; yes, the ambient is 100% saturated red at a very low brightness level. Changing it to zero seemed a bit too drastic (to me). He shouldn't glow in the dark but the worst part is the red saturation which you can take out  separately with an HSB color picker.

Alternately:
In the alternate diffuse of at least three different M4 texture pkgs. there is a color ramp node that also uses a dark saturated red in the second color chip. Changing that can also help.

The problem, as I see it, with using lights to counteract the glowing red skin is:

1. The problem is worse when there is no lighting.
2. Coloring the lights with complements will contaminate surrounding objects that don't need color correction. 

Best to make the correction in the material room and save it to the library, imo. Or get SM to develop exclusion lists for lights in Poser. ; )

pure red is just plain wrong.  it's based on the notion that the only SSS is subdermal.  don't let the ambient value be too bright, but also add some yellow to the red for the dermal SSS. 

Hi CD:

Why didn't you tell me that years ago. See, this is all my fault.

A long while back, I posted a "new" technique for doing the SSS. It involved a Color_Ramp driven by the Diffuse node. In that ramp, there was some red.

First mistake - should have been some green in there.

Then face_off used that technique in the DAZ V4 default shaders. Now it's shown up in M4.

I don't know if the lowest value in the ramp is non-black but it should be. I can't remember if I did that, or somebody else misunderstood it and added it. Either way, when the light goes to zero, if there's anything in that first color other than black, your figure glows.

Nowadays I have a new way to do the SSS that never glows. Unless you tell it to, for whatever reason.

And I don't use pure red.

Shameless plug.

Just because DAZ sells you that shader with that texture, doesn't mean that's the best shader for it. They've been copying my shaders from several years ago.

I've moved on.

If you want your M4 to sizzle and have way more options, you should be using my free VSS shader.

When the new "elite" textures came out for V4, a few people applied VSS to it and it blew away the DAZ shader, according to a few observers who are not me.

[EDIT]

I don't mean it blew away the shaders for DAZ studio - those are awesome. I mean what they give you for Poser.

 Very interesting history lesson, BB. 
First off, I'm not here to judge. ; )

I do find it interesting that three different tex pkgs for M4 use, what I am now assuming is, your SSS color ramp. And I'm not saying they are wrong to do so. Thats between you and them.

But I have since learned that the color ramp is very subtle at adding not only red but blue and purple as well. Tweaking the values to ludicrous levels I could start to see where they come into play. 

Again the main colored ambient reduced down to a lower level seemed to make it all better.

Thanks for the info.

Quote -

Nowadays I have a new way to do the SSS that never glows. Unless you tell it to, for whatever reason.

And I don't use pure red.

never glows? but when i sometimes watch some photos with dramatic lighting the red on the skin glows ....a little. or it looks like its glowing?
can you show a render? it sounds interesting.

ice-boy you know that SSS makes the skin lighter and you've been using it in VSS. And indeed you've seen the glow coming from the tip of the nose before. But that's not in the dark.

Emitting more light than would happen by direct reflection alone is not glowing - that's SSS and we are trying to do that.

What I mean by glow, here, is that if you turn off all your lights, a VSS shader will be black, unlike the V4/M4 shader discussed here.

aha i see.
i noticed that you dont have any new renders in the gallery? come on....give us something. your renders look very good and artistic.