i was today thinking something. if there is SSS in the new poser will it be fast? i know that it takes some time to calculate everything. but will it be a slow SSS?
i was asking myself what kind of SSS could poser even have? i guess there is more ways to make it. could poser poser use point clouds to calculate it? will it work with raytraced shadows? 
and very important: can it work with an IBL? we use almost everytime an IBL. its diffuse coming from everywhere. would this make SSS everywhere? 

i just hope that if poser 8 has SSS that it will not be some slow SSS  that will take forever to render.

I thought Poser had SSS-At least I've used what it calls SSS.  Do you mean depth map support?

poser doesnt have SSS

 Instead of just snapping at people.. couldn't you say "Poser doesn't have true SSS?

Yeah "you're crap at english". Same as me. But I try to be polite.

(and if you hadn't said so, I would never have guessed you weren't a native speaker btw)

Now.. tell us why Poser doesn't have SSS and what is the thing it calls SSS?

now who's snapping LOL

Poser does not have true SSS, it has, what it calls Fast Scatter.

Not even the Poser developers themselves seem to be able to get decent results with there own material node.

just check out the materials that come with poser pro. they are terrible (but so is practically every included example with poser)

the fast scatter node is supposed to simulate SSS without having to do all those heavy calculations. unfortunately even in a painstakingly configured scene, the node still gives no results even close to SSS. I dont know what it's doing, but if I were you, I would just forget that its there.

I have tried using it as a diffuse node, a specular node, an ambient node, a translucent node, and even a refraction node, none of them give any decent results.

What he said.

 I don't know how Fast Scatter works but "normal" SSS sort of assumes your mesh has volume, while Fast Scatter appears to treat a mesh as a surface.

In Renderman, SSS is calculated by what is best described as a "multi-level semi-transparent 3D depth map". Generating the brick map takes time depending on the density of your mesh, but can be cached and reused which is a huge plus. IMHO, the look of Renderman's SSS is not as impressive as mental ray's.  

In mental ray, non-physical SSS is raytraced and calculated based on "distance below the surface", with deeper distances having darker colors, lesser distances being very light. Strangely the docs say to color your top layer RGB 226, 255, 255 (a VERY light shade of blue) and let the middle and bottom layers provide the oranges and reds of fat, blood and muscle. It is very convincing looking and mildly fast for raytracing. Physically correct SSS is a dark art that seems to be poorly documented, takes forever to tune and render.

Yeah, Mental Ray's SSS is very good. Very powerful, and easy to set up too.

As to diffuse IBL lights and SSS, that would matter on certain things. The brighter a light is, the more likely it is you'll notice SSS on an object. And position of the light, too. A candle, for example looks a whole lot different when it's lit than when it's not and just sitting on a shelf in dim light.

Ice boy, I think you think you're going for a certain look. SSS is not a certain style or a look, it's a physical property of matter. And if a render engine has the ability built in to calculate it, it will look like "SSS" only when the light tells it to look like SSS.

If you hear Poser 8 still will have the Firefly render engine, abandon all hope for "real" SSS.
If you hear it will have Mental Ray or VRay, jump for joy. ;-)

Oh, but don't get your hopes up that it will have Mental Ray....

Quote - now who's snapping LOL

Poser does not have true SSS, it has, what it calls Fast Scatter.

Not even the Poser developers themselves seem to be able to get decent results with there own material node.

just check out the materials that come with poser pro. they are terrible (but so is practically every included example with poser)

the fast scatter node is supposed to simulate SSS without having to do all those heavy calculations. unfortunately even in a painstakingly configured scene, the node still gives no results even close to SSS. I dont know what it's doing, but if I were you, I would just forget that its there.

I have tried using it as a diffuse node, a specular node, an ambient node, a translucent node, and even a refraction node, none of them give any decent results.

fastscatter was realesed with poser 6 first right?
i think back then people always used depth mapped shadows. plus almost noone used IBL. so the fastscatter node was designed to work with specific settings. the fastscatter node doesnt blur . it looks like like that because of soft DM shadows. so since people now use more raytraced shadows it looks bad. and now people also use IBL.

i dont know why the skin node is still in poser. iit looks like noone is using it. and its so obvious that it was again designed for specific settings. for example it has ambient inside. why? BECAUSE PEOPLE DIDNT USE IBL. plus it again works with DM shadows

IMO honest opinion the skin node needs to go away. it really has no place inside anymore. you can not use a node that was designed 3 or 4 years ago.

Quote -

As to diffuse IBL lights and SSS, that would matter on certain things. The brighter a light is, the more likely it is you'll notice SSS on an object. And position of the light, too. A candle, for example looks a whole lot different when it's lit than when it's not and just sitting on a shelf in dim light.

Ice boy, I think you think you're going for a certain look. SSS is not a certain style or a look, it's a physical property of matter. And if a render engine has the ability built in to calculate it, it will look like "SSS" only when the light tells it to look like SSS.

If you hear Poser 8 still will have the Firefly render engine, abandon all hope for "real" SSS.
If you hear it will have Mental Ray or VRay, jump for joy. ;-)

Oh, but don't get your hopes up that it will have Mental Ray....

but blender also has SSS. or for example MODO. those dont use mental ray or Vray. or do they?

plus i know that SSS is not a style. i just want to know what will happen if there is SSS in poser. we all use IBL. and IBL is diffuse coming from everywhere. i dont want that my human glows because i would use IBL 25 %( for example).

i opened also this thread to talk a little about SSS in the poser forum. months or years since we last talked about SSS. now we have new and fast computers and new softwares. its interesting IMO

on the blender site they are saying that they use this
graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/fast_bssrdf/

Quote -

but blender also has SSS. or for example MODO. those dont use mental ray or Vray. or do they?

plus i know that SSS is not a style. i just want to know what will happen if there is SSS in poser. we all use IBL. and IBL is diffuse coming from everywhere. i dont want that my human glows because i would use IBL 25 %( for example).

i opened also this thread to talk a little about SSS in the poser forum. months or years since we last talked about SSS. now we have new and fast computers and new softwares. its interesting IMO

Modo has its own render engine. So does Lightwave, and they both have REALLY nice SSS. I mean, really nice, really easy to control. Well, as long as you know how to deal with it that is. Maybe I'll show you some quick examples later if you're interested.

But mentioning mental ray or vray was a "ferinstance" is all. They're both plugins, which is why you see them in other apps, as opposed to Modo or LW's render engines.

What will happen if there is SSS in Poser? That's a hypothetical question, since there ISN'T SSS in Poser.
But offhand I'd guess the first thing that would happen is the galleries would be inundated by pictures of people claiming "photoreal", and the merchants would go nuts trying to outdo each other and we'd have a bunch of Vicky's with human textures and candle skin...

You know, I've read alot of your posts regarding shaders and SSS and lights and all that. I think you'd be alot happier with a program that can render the way you want.
What I was trying to say is, don't hold your breath waiting for Poser to become what you want. If you can afford it, move on.

Go download the Maya 2009  demo and check that out for 30 days. It's Full featured, including saving, exporting, rendering with no water mark  and all that good stuff. You will be amazed at what a pleasure it is workign with a real render engine like mental ray.

i like tweaking poser. i like finding solutions .
importing a figure, setting the materials and pushing render is not interesting enough to me.

plus i dont want that people think that i am a  guy who is always complaining. but this is poser. its about human figures. and its 2009. i think there should be a better ''fake SSS''  material in poser.

maybe we will even give the makers an idea.

Well I've been using Poser for like 9 or 10 years now and I've been thinking this whole time that it should have a better this, that, and everything else, and yet every new "improvement" is something half-assed tacked on.

But hey, people use it, people figure it out, people manage to force it to do stuff it doesn't want to do, so if you enjoy that, have at it.

If you want to give the makers a good idea, tell them to ditch Firefly. Compared to modern render engines, it really sucks. That's the heart of it all. As long as the render engine sucks, you might as well forget about SSS or anything else but some hacked in faked workaround.

but what are the chances that tehy will replace it with a different render? wouldnt this need a complete rewritte? 

I agree with all you said above, mikej. I also understand why ice-boy tinkers - same reason I do. It's something to do, and it helps the "poor" people, makes me feel good.

I could buy better software, but then I'd have to be an artist and what's the point of that?

Let's not forget that Firefly was a replacement renderer - not an evolution. There's no technical reason why another renderer could not be added. It won't be, but there's no reason it couldn't. It is not a complete re-write.

bagginsbill do you think that with Firefly we could have some subsurface scattering? maybe not like 3dsmax or maya. but at least something that calculates SSS?

it doesnt have to be the best.

It should be possible, but I don't think we'll see that in the next release. Other much more important stuff is being developed.

so again only fastscatter? 

to bad.

Quote - I agree with all you said above, mikej. I also understand why ice-boy tinkers - same reason I do. It's something to do, and it helps the "poor" people, makes me feel good.

I could buy better software, but then I'd have to be an artist and what's the point of that?

Let's not forget that Firefly was a replacement renderer - not an evolution. There's no technical reason why another renderer could not be added. It won't be, but there's no reason it couldn't. It is not a complete re-write.

I can tell you enjoy it. I've read through most of those long-ass threads about lighting and shaders and all the math. I spent well over two hours the other night reading over that "nodes for dummies" thread and trying things out along the way. You've beaten the nodes into submission with the brute force of the immutable laws of mathematics, and it's quite impressive.
I don't know if you're on the Poser beta team, but if you're not, you should be.

Quote - It should be possible, but I don't think we'll see that in the next release. Other much more important stuff is being developed.

whats more important then SSS? :) he he 

maybe to give you an option to build your own nodes?  ; ) 

*I could buy better software, but then I'd have to be an artist and what's the point of that?

*To me an artist is someone with refreshing ideas and extraordinary skills, in that aspect you can define yourself an artist.
And better software doesn't make the artist.  >  Point!  <

best regards,

Bopper.

is there a way to blur the diffuse with nodes? i think with this we could maybe make better fake SSS.

Blur the diffuse? You mean spread it around, so there is less contrast? Sort of. Use a Clay node instead. It has an extra parameter for roughness that makes the angle of incidence make less change.

However, nothing in either Diffuse or Clay is going to get back-side SSS to work. By that I mean light passing under the shadow terminator and showing up on the shadow side. That is true SSS and we just can't do it.

Bagginsbill, do you have any insights into why Poser pro will render a bump map in more detail the closer the camera is to it, and less detail the farther away it is?
In other words, I have a bumpy surface, which looks great close up, but not even a hint of bump a little farther back away from the camera. And I don't mean so far away that it's just not noticeable due to distance. I mean, it's showing no bump whatsoever, and it SHOULD be at least a little visibly bumpy.

Blender doesn't has  ray traced SSS, has a kind of fake one using light maps, but works really good, way better than poser one.

Quote - Bagginsbill, do you have any insights into why Poser pro will render a bump map in more detail the closer the camera is to it, and less detail the farther away it is?
In other words, I have a bumpy surface, which looks great close up, but not even a hint of bump a little farther back away from the camera. And I don't mean so far away that it's just not noticeable due to distance. I mean, it's showing no bump whatsoever, and it SHOULD be at least a little visibly bumpy.

Usually that's texture filtering at work. The idea behind texture filtering is that when a single pixel of the render covers many pixels of the texture, a problem occurs. If you just sample one data point from the texture, you essentially get a random subset of the values, and this can create severe aliasing or moire patterns. If you know something about sampling theory, this phenomenon should be familiar.

To combat this we can do one of two things. We can over-sample the material and average the sampled values. Or we can low-pass filter the texture first. (Texture filtering) Over-sampling is more accurate but slower. Effectively, you "render big" and then reduce the result. The texture filtering is much faster, but it really needs tuning to take and Poser provides no tools to do that. You either turn on texture filtering, or you don't.  The big problem with texture filtering is that it effectively blurs your texture. If conditions are right, the blur can lead to a complete loss of any detail - only the low frequency elements are retained and if you have none, then you end up with nothing.

Try disabling texture filtering on that bump map. You may then experience moire and aliasing, but usually not with something like a human skin bump map. It happens with things like cloth weaves and such - something with a repeating pattern. If you do have aliasing problems, you can decrease the shading rate and increase pixel samples, or you can render at 2x size and then reduce in postwork. Recent experiments indicate that rendering 2x desired size can actually do a better job of anti-aliasing than asking for more detailed render over-sampling.

Ah thanks. Unfortunately, it IS a cloth weave I was using. ;-)
It's a nuisance to have to readjust the strength all the time, but that seems to work. I was hoping maybe I'd overlooked a "don't f-up my bump map" button somewhere which needed to be pressed. ;-)

Quote - Blender doesn't has  ray traced SSS, has a kind of fake one using light maps, but works really good, way better than poser one.

yeah they are using a light map. i say its better then nothing. 
it would be just nice to have at least a better fake SSS effect in poser. not true SSS but something that is better then fastscatter and the skin node.

Quote - Blur the diffuse? You mean spread it around, so there is less contrast? Sort of. Use a Clay node instead. It has an extra parameter for roughness that makes the angle of incidence make less change.

However, nothing in either Diffuse or Clay is going to get back-side SSS to work. By that I mean light passing under the shadow terminator and showing up on the shadow side. That is true SSS and we just can't do it.

i was reading this 
www.superrune.com/technical/software_superscattering.php

the diffuse and shadows are blured. the texture that is on top is sharp and in focus. i

Very interesting. What he's doing is not possible with Poser. We can't "bake" lighting into a texture.

ok.

then we will have to find something different. :)

Quote - ok.

then we will have to find something different. :)

Yes, export your models and render them with Blender :-) it's more easy with Daz Studio than with Poser and you can use the super fast  Aproximate Ambient Oclussion too.

what about applying several clay diffuse nodes together with varying roughness values to simulate this?

combine them all together with a few math nodes using MAX (I think, we want to take the lightest color out of the 2, and use that)

Won't work. The issue is that once the shadow calculation is performed, these nodes simply do not reflect light from the shadow. It's not possible.

You can change the gradient for the lit area, but you can't make them do anything with the unlit area.

what about using an inverted diffuse node to mask the areas that are not affected by light?

I'm just pulling at straws now. man I wish I had poser at work

Think about the blur effect that SSS produces. The amount of light bleeding out of the lit area into the shadow area depends on how close the terminator is. A simple levels-based masking would treat the whole shadow the same.

hmmmm could we use the refract or the reflect node to blur the diffuse with the sofftness ? 

bagginsbill 

would it be possible to use  the refract node to blur the the diffuse node or maybe the fastscatter node?

thanks

I experimented with fastscatter a lot and it just does not produce the kind of terminator that is correct. Also it doesn't work without depth-mapped shadows and I'm never going back to those.

I also experimented with refract a couple years ago. Nothing there seems reasonable.

Imagine a hard-edged shadow falls on a box. The edges should blur, allowing some of the nearby light outside the shadow to increase the luminance inside the shadow on the same surface. Refraction cannot possibly be made to help there, since the refracted ray cannot travel sideways and sample the surface nearby. It can only go through and sample the other side of the figure. That isn't going to be helpful. For example, refraction rays traced from the nose would travel through the nose. Some would hit the back of the head - of what use is that information? We want information about other parts of the nose nearby, not the other side of the head.

Yet another reason why Poser needs all new lights and/or an all new render engine before it can have "real" SSS: it's all wrong in Poser.

Sure, the lights can cast rays like any raytracer, but Poser's raytracing is as simple as it gets in the 3D world - shadows are straight and don't even come close to real physics.

Render engines such as Mental Ray, VRay and LightWave have lights such as area lights which cast more realistic shadows. Even with a very bright light source, an object's shadow won't be a hard edge along the whole thing. The farther along the surface the shadow is cast on, the more blurred the edges should get - in the real world. And the above-mentioned raytracers can do that with area lights as well as directional lights. You want that in Poser, well... you can't have it with the current lights and Firefly. There's the blur setting, but that's not realistic at all.

Yeah I know this thread is about SSS, but as I've said before and I'll say again, Poser needs alot of work with its lights and render engine before it's ever going to be able to do anything but unrealistic fakes and clever workarounds.

I personally don't think it's going to happen. That's why they created the Poser Fusion plugins - to get Poser stuff into more capable programs with more capable render engines, and I think the best we could hope for in Poser 8 will be more 64 bit and multi-threaded integration, and better support for Poser Fusion and the newer versions of the target apps.
I can't imagine how much it would cost them to license Mental Ray, for example, and I'm not real confident that a maker of cell phone software is going to create a modern, fast, and efficient new 3D render engine for Poser.
Of course, the information on how to do all that it is out there. The capable programmers are out there too. But the cost of it all will be the reason Poser never improves much, and why there will always be more of an emphasis on getting Poser stuff into other apps.

On the other hand, I bet Content Parasite will continue to be worked on and grow and thrive...

we work with what we have

lets just try to make the best of what we have :)

Quote - we work with what we have

lets just try to make the best of what we have :)

I agree. That's a good policy.
And that's why I use Lightwave. ;-)

Biting my tongue.

Sheesh, are there no lightwave forums?  There's a similar thread in the carrara forum extolling the virtues of Lightwave along the same  "my kid's gorgeous, your kid's ugly" lines.

Waste of time.

Klebnor are you always this uptight?

If it makes you feel better I use Poser too, and have been for about a decade now - every version since Poser 3, and now Poser Pro. That entitles me to trash it from time to time if I see fit. Just so happens I gave up on trying to get any degree of realism out of Poser because I want to spend my time making stuff, not fighting the program's deficiencies, so I use other programs for that.

Did I upset you? Did I upset anyone? If so, good. You ought  to be upset that Poser limps along in the dust of other apps'  screaming development.

And then channel that anger towards the people who develop it and demand of them something better out of it.

I wasn't aware that discussions about various 3D program's strengths and weaknesses were a "waste of time" at a 3D forum. You seem to have not noticed I wasn't extolling the virtues of other programs here but rather pointing out Poser's shortcomings.

But don't take me as some kind of Lightwave fanboy either. Maya with Mental Ray blows them all away. :-)

Even using the right tools, SSS is not an easy thing to control, much less master - speaking as a hobbiest myself. Almost every setup is different, requiring endless extended test renders, tweaking, renders, tweaking, etc.

Frankly, I'm not sure if the result is worth it.

You will have to be the judge for yourself.

Quote - Even using the right tools, SSS is not an easy thing to control, much less master - speaking as a hobbiest myself. Almost every setup is different, requiring endless extended test renders, tweaking, renders, tweaking, etc.

Not entirely true. You just have to understand how it works and what it's supposed to be doing. If you go for a pre-conceived "look" about an object with a render engine such as Mental Ray (I'm not going to say the L word, since it seems to upset people), you are likely to have problems.

But SSS is at it's most "real" when you have a competent render engine that is capable of a good degree of physical accuracy. At that point you decide what your object is made out of and adjust settings accordingly. Meaning,  for example, SSS settings for skin won't likely make a convincing candle.
Really, it's a matter of knowing your surface properties, e.g., refraction, diffuse, spec and so on, but also being able to set up your lights to show off the SSS effect. And of course you also need to know your scene parameters and particularly your object's size and thickness and how it relates to your scene size and lights.

In the end, it's not that much guesswork, but good setup and taking the time to consider all the scene variables and plan accordingly.

Poser, on the other hand, has no "real" SSS, and its lights are problematic and terribly unrealistic at best. People like bagginsbill can beat it into submission with pure mathematical knowledge of what Poser is up to under the hood, but that's Poser's trip and very little you learn in Poser is going to help in Maya, for example (Not gonna say the L word....), because Poser is... Poser, and while there's a certain degree of unity among most 3D apps regarding basic principles, Poser just does things.... its own way. Even something simple like a directional light - you can learn to master how Poser does it, but then give it a shot in Maya and at first you'll be lost with all the settings that Poser never taught you. Learn how to render with Mental Ray lights and shaders, and you'll be blown away at how much Poser lacks.

I'd love to see bagginsbill dig into mental Ray nodes. I can't imagine what he'd be able to do with them, considering his penchant for mathematical thinking.

...No offense intended...but, Mike, you're very clear on the fact that you don't have a use for Poser...so, what's your point, other than repeating yourself a lot?