First, I can't seem to find a setting that will give a soft AO shadow instead of the hard line between the lips as shown here.

AO settings are: Samples-3, Max Dist-12, RayBias-0.4 in Inches. High Quality render settings .

The second thing is the light reflection on the eyelid instead of on the eyeball. I'm using just a basic portrait light setting with fill, key, spec and a hair light. I've never had this happen and don't know what to do...

If anyone has any hints, I would really appreciate it.

Which Poser version?

Light-based AO or material-based AO? I have trouble with LBAO. P6 - don't use it. P7 or Pro, maybe if you installed the latest SR. Even then, I get too-deep shadows in crevices just as you noted. If I'm lazy and doing a quicky render, I'll maybe use LBAO, but for total control and best quality I use MBAO.

You didn't mention AO strength. LBAO strength decrease may help. MBAO strength doesn't work at all. You have to manage the strength (deepest shadow intensity) with a Blender node.

Increasing samples may help. You only get moderate results with 3. Much better is 6 or 7. After that only nominal improvement occurs and at quite a render-time cost.

Re the eyelid reflection ... that's a stumper. You mean specular, right? Not reflection like a reflect node, right? Your render here is tiny and I can't make out details - is that really the eyelid, or are we seeing the specular on the cornea through the lashes?

Oh one other thing. Too-dark shadows is often one of the symptoms of not doing gamma correction. :)

I don't see this sort of thing too often any more now that I always use GC in materials, particularly skin. Without GC, all things that should be moderately dark look very dark.

circular dot might be specular off cornea or pupil.  irreg shiny spot to its right might be specular off eyelash.

1. All material-based AO. None on the lights at all.

2. I'm posting two renders. The first shows both Samples-3 and Samples-6. I think the lip with Samples-6 is worse.

3. Second render is almost good...well for now. But this has me stumped. I've angled the head way off center and the shadow on the lip is soft. Why would that be? And that's with Samples-3.

4. Re: Eye reflection. I have a specular light and a gloss node on the Eye Trans. Turning the head up moves the reflection down to the eye. I may have the light in the wrong position. The first render I posted was definitely on the eyelid itself. I'll try moving the light for a head down position.

My usual method of fixing the ugly shadows is to render separately and do a little blur on the shadow render. It's a whole lot easier and less time consuming than trying to get it right in the actual render. I think AO is necessary but not so good if it's hard and ugly.

I could be wrong, but I think that lip shadow is not from AO - I think you're using a directional shadow with not enough blur on your main light.

If you have the figure 90% lit by a single directional light, (i.e. very little or no IBL) then the upper lip will cast a totally black shadow on the lower lip if the light is coming even slightly from above.

To be sure, why not disconnect the AO node on the lips and render again. I bet you still see black in there.

You're absolutely right! I had no idea. Thank you!
I'll go work on the lights and see if I can get rid of it.  

You did a great job on the eyes - really nice.

I gamma corrected your render - before <> after.

I've now spent two days trying to get a render that I can live with. That's about 50 renders. I have to stop. This is actually a product and I have to do all my promo renders so no more playing around.

I have no idea how to use a blender to control the strength of the shadows. So without knowing that and being in a hurry, I resorted to my usual trickery and deception. I was so hoping to be able to do just a straight render but that's not going to happen. I learned a lot from this though and that's the point.

I realized how much better MBAO is when you can set different values for each material that you have it on. I didn't know that.

With no AO on the lights I couldn't do a separate AO pass so that I would be able to manipulate that. At least I couldn't figure a way. Don't think it works that way.

But I realized how much better MBAO is when you can set different values for each material that you have it on. I didn't know that.

So what I'm posting is OK for what I was trying to do. There are absolutely no shaders on the skin, I need to do that and I'm not crazy about the lighting because of the hard shadow on the side of the face. But, I finally got soft AO. Not dark, ugly and dirty looking. The figure is the same but with a different texture and hair and I just stuck the background in there.

Now I'm tired and need something mind altering...

So I would love to be able to do Gamma Correction in Poser but didn't go for the special on Poser Pro and am now kicking myself. But along with that would have to come a 64 bit system, new motherboard, video card, etc. You see how that goes...

I do know want a blender is. It's just hard for me to wrap my brain around it outside of Photoshop. If I have to deal with more than one element, I get confused. And I'm totally math challenged. So when I look at shaders and how they work together and the values, it just becomes a big muddle.

But I finally loaded up an IBl, Spec, and Key light and got what I've never been able to get before. A one pass render with acceptable AO. At least to my eye. And I got what I wanted. A soft portrait with no postwork. That's not to say it doesn't need it. But I've never gotten anything this close to a render that didn't have to have major correction.

I tried about 500 different renders with minor changes everything. Amazing how

I'm posting two separate renders. The first with a IBL from Catherina Harders from her first light package . The IBL has just a simple dark sphere with a light silouette of city shapes. All grayscale. Nothing more. I added the specular and key lights and then added a pale pink color to the key. Just to see what would happen and I like the result.

The second is Olivier's graphics from his IBL tutorial. I did this also in grayscale with the same spec and key. The pink color on the key was toned way down and I have a hard time getting hte brightness of the image to work. I had to fuss much more with this but the result is probably more real. Don't know...

Two lights showing in the eyes because the spec and key were close to each other. I couldn't figure out how to get the shadow that I wanted without doing that. I also have some strange striations showing and don't know if it's the mesh or something else going on. It's very evident on her cheek. This is a figure I've worked with so much that I can't imagine that it's the mesh and I didn't notice it. Sigh...

This is the same figure in the former renders with a different texture. I'm hoping it's just a tired machine that could use a rest and defragging.

Neither of these renders has any gamma correction or postwork of any kind. No, I did add the color background.

Bill, your advice has been invaluable. If I've absorbed a fraction of what you've given out, not only here but in all the posts I've read, I consider myself lucky.

I saved these at 800x800. Don't know if they're showing up that size.

Ah, the thrill of enlightenment. Your next-to-last render is much better than your previous posts. However, you got it that way by forcing the use of a lot of light, i.e. a pretty low-contrast IBL.

The last render cries out for gamma correction. That's why it doesn't look right. The lighting is actually more realistic there, but the visual doesn't reveal that because it isn't encoded properly to display on a computer screen.

In Poser, if you don't do GC, you have to add a lot of lights to bring up the illuminations to compensate for the darkening you get from staring at a linear-color space render.

You said

Quote - The pink color on the key was toned way down and I have a hard time getting hte brightness of the image to work.

That is the classic phenomenon when you don't gamma correct. As soon as you decrease the light, darker areas drop off in brightness faster than the brighter areas. So you fiddle endlessly. If you have GC, then that doesn't happen, and cutting your light by 20% will decrease the perceived brightness by 20% everywhere. That's a predictable effect that you can work with. Without GC, cutting the light by 20% decreases the perceived brightness of bright areas by 25 to 40% and some other areas by as much as 90%. That's why you have to fiddle. You get these surprising non-linear changes in illumination.

I'm glad you're reading my posts, because the demonstrations and the answers are all there. But I'm a little mystified how you didn't see all the posts where I show you that you can have gamma correction in Poser without Poser PRO. You can do it in Poser 5, 6, and 7, as long as you use material-based GC.

Just as you now understand that there is light-based AO and material-based AO, so to you should understand that there is render-based GC (ala Pro) and material-based GC (ala Bagginsbill).

The most important thing is to GC your figure, particularly the skin. Other props we can get away with some error of illumination, because the human eye is not so sensitive to variations in tone and shading on a chair. But the human eye and brain are incredibly sensitive and intolerant of mistakes in tone and shading on human skin, especially on the face. We're programmed to detect very subtle changes, due to facial muscle movement. These reveal emotion, and if you can't detect the tiniest shift of muscles, you're not aware that you are about to be attacked, and so you die. :)

Now it turns out that I have provided the solution for the math challenged. It is called VSS. I'm surprised you haven't asked about it. VSS is a way to manage and change materials in synchronization. What that means, for example, is if you want to make the skin a little less red, you can adjust that in one place, click Synchronize, and every skin material zone on your figure will change to less red SIMULTANEOUSLY. This is a huge time saver for the tweak-happy. Second, VSS comes with GC shaders for human skin, eyes, teeth, gums, etc. With a single click it will replace all the naive shaders on your figure with really good ones, written by me (or others). In doing so, it will not replace your textures (color maps and bump maps). It uses them as-is on the figure. So you can load up a texture set (click) then apply VSS shaders on top of that (click) and render.

You will be amazed at the results.

Search the Poser Gallery using the word VSS as the key. Be sure to not limit your search to the last 45 days - go further back as well. You will find some merely adequate stuff, but you will also find some amazing nearly perfect realism. In almost every case, there is zero postwork.

Here are some picked sort of at random for you to look at (many have nudity - be warned)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1826644
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1816643
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1816341
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1841629
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1836262
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1838044
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1835587
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1830812
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1814327
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1814317
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1809431
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1801343
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1802707
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1795432
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1794564
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1792977
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1791637
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1763329
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1760509

Many of these artists are still posting VSS renders but no longer remember to say they used VSS, so I don't see them in my searches. I hope everybody who uses VSS can mention it so I can see them. I don't comment much but I love to see them.

Oh and to answer your older question, I gamma corrected your render by mounting it on a Poser one-sided square and then using nodes to manipulate the colors, I adjusted the overall perceived illumination and color saturation.

VSS is here.
http://poserbagginsbill.googlepages.com/vsshomepage

And for everything you ever wanted to know abut it, there is an enormous thread here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2737823&page=4

In that thread are hundreds of renders demonstrating all sorts of effects and applications.

Try this search:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/search.php?query=gamma+correction&forum_id=&sort=post_date&use_age=yes&older_age=1&older_units=day&newer_age=&newer_units=day&username=bagginsbill

It will find all the posts in which I say "gamma correction". At this moment there are 216 of them.

Quote - It will find all the posts in which I say "gamma correction". At this moment there are 216 of them.

Wait... including this one? Then you'll get back here and go back there... looks to me like you've set up a recursive loop with no bottom-out. Sloppy engineering, pal...

<grin, duck, and run...>

Sorry, back to the helpful stuff, now. :biggrin:

LOL I thought about that.

While we're at it, let's do double tail infinite recursion. That's infinity squared!

All posts in which I say VSS.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/search.php?query=VSS&forum_id=&sort=post_date&use_age=yes&older_age=1&older_units=day&newer_age=&newer_units=day&username=bagginsbill

Inifinity cubed!

All posts in which I say glass.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/search.php?query=glass&forum_id=&sort=post_date&use_age=yes&older_age=1&older_units=day&newer_age=&newer_units=day&username=bagginsbill

Oh, please don't chastise me...I'm doing the very best I can with what I've got here...I'm laughing and that's OK, better than crying. When you use language like "double tail infinite recursion", "infinity squared", "infinity cubed", etc. my brain shuts down and I have to call my brother to translate into English and he's getting annoyed with me and says, "How can you possibly understand this with only a Junior High School Algebra education?". That's the last math class I ever took, but I can use a measuring cup. I'm half joking and half serious.

Why didn't I see the mountain of posts that you've so generously written and all of the helpful gifts that you've provided? I'm a Southener which means I'm slow. I walk slow, talk slow, eat slow, sleep slow, read slow, work slow and think slow.

So it's not surprising that I've not heard of VSS. Now I understand what you mean by gamma correction and linear color space. I didn't when we started, I really had no idea. But...I'm going now to look at every single post because I Wont Be Defeated!

But it's not going to be fast and has to be slipped in between putting out a 150 mg zipped texture resource with custom head morph that you see here. It's taken me months but I'm almost finished.

One last thing...I did see your thread where you showed comparisons between Poser (without gamma correction) and Poser Pro and the difference is amazing even to my unschooled eye. To know that it can be done in P7 is very, very nice!

Thank you, Bill.

Quote - Inifinity cubed!

Cool... I always wanted to try 4D art! Looks like we're about to enter a new dimension.

:tt2::blink::tt2:

Quote - Oh, please don't chastise me...

No chastising going on here, there's just a lot of silliness mixed in with the helpfulness.

But trust BB... when it comes to shader nodes, he gets the job done and then some.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1813995

I've learned so, so much is just a few days and it's a wonderful gift. I had no idea that what I was getting out of Poser was so crappy. But now I see why it was so hard to get any control over the lighting. Not that I'm any good at lighting, but at least now I can see the difference!

And BB, you're just brilliant. That's it, just brilliant. I'm a convert. You have no idea how it is for someone as shader challenged as I am to see the incredible beauty in what you've created.

So, enough of that. Please rip apart what I'm posting and tell me what's wrong with it. I need to know what you see that I'm not seeing and what I need to be working toward. I'm not seeing the intensity of the shadows that I would have liked to have seen from AO, especially in the eyes. I love the fact that the shadows from AO on the face are a darker color of the skin tone and not just sooty gray but how to make them darker...

The one thing I noticed is that finally there are tiny, tiny shadows under the eyelashes. Wow. I'm posting 800x800 renders and they're being reduced. Don't know why that is. But because of that it's hard to see what I'm talking about.

And, LaytexLuv, that's a super render. Very provocative.

I have a spec map but can't figure out how to get more out of it. Would like to have more glow from her skin instead of the dry look I have here. It's there, I just don't know how to bring it out. Have to leave that for another day.