Greetings and Salutations All,

A) I picked up "SteamPunk" by Bobbie25. The clothing set came with templates. I'd like to make a texture set but have no idea how to make one. Any tutorials?

B) I am creating a scene with the character is black. I'm having a hard time lighting her so that her features show. I have enclosed a sample render using P6 default lighting, which doesn't do justice to her features. Any suggestions?

Many Thanks in Advance,
Viper

When you have all of your textures and maps the way you want in the Material room just click the plus (+) sign at the bottom of the Material room panel and select Material Collection, you then can choose what parts/groups you want to be included in the Material Collection...press OK!
You did it!

prehaps a soft spotlite or soft point lite  would bring out her features

Pretty basic but one if the first Google pulled up:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4493758_texture-poser-clothing-using-texture.html

Thank you Imckenzie

I missed this on my search
Viper

ViperKilzz: did you sort out the lighting for your black figure?

With zero diffuse colour (and no reflection), you are relying on specular light and specular colour to pick out her features. Your figure already has some specular colour, and the specular highlight size is giving a good highlight spread, so that's okay. I think it's just the Poser default light set that sucks. I would get rid of that light set and set up a ring of a few neutral-colour lights (infinite or spot) at various angles.

The attached image is Terai Yuki with a diffuse skin colour of pure black and a specular colour of mid-grey. I set up a ring of seven spotlights to give plenty of specular highlights to bring out her features. Most of the lights are set up as shown on the right, except the rim lights which are higher intensity.

Hope this helps a little!
Izi

Shame on you, Izi. You know better.

What have i been teaching for a year. Here it is again.

When you notice that your figure is not rendering right, dark areas are too dark, and you find yourself saying "I'm having a hard time lighting this" it's NOT the lights.

Lighting is easy. What is the problem, then? You are displaying a linear render on a monitor that is not designed to display a linear image.

YOU NEED TO GAMMA CORRECT.

The traditional and immediate response of most Poser users is to add more light. While it is possible to compensate for the rendition of darker areas by lightening them with lights, it is far better, easier, and more accurate to simply render everything properly for your computer display, your printer, etc. All of these devices expect the content to be gamma corrected.

If you have Poser Pro, enable render GC. If you don't, use my VSS shaders, or make your own. I've only published various GC shaders in threads here 7 or 8 times in the last year.

Here is M4 with black skin - totally black - no diffuse, no sss. There is a single spot light here at 95%.

Add more lights, like the 40% times 5 = 200% above? Hardly.

I shall now reveal that I have too much light already.

Gamma corrected. Same specular settings, same light.

Another common mistake is that while trying to get the specular to fill in better, you over-spread it. But with the highlights properly displayed after gamma correction, that isn't at all necessary. You can tighten them up nicely, while still getting some peripheral spill of the specular effect. Without the GC, the falloff would appear to be instantaneous, resulting in completely black areas outside the tightest part of the highlight.

With settings like that (wide specular, lots of extra lights) you can never get it to look real. This is real.

If you're making your own shader, be sure to use the Blinn node for specular, not the built-in specular or the Specular node.

Only the Blinn node can get you the proper rim-lighting effect you see here. I added one light from behind left at only 20%!!!

I forgot to enable shadows on the rim light, but it still illustrates the point well enough.

If you're making some kind of alien, I guess totally black skin is ok. But no human does that. For really dark humans, you still want a tiny bit of diffuse color. I'm using M4's skin here with my VSS shader, using a Tint of RGB 63,63,63. This lets a tiny bit of diffuse back in, and also some SSS.

Wrong assumptions, bb, I use Poser Pro and always have render GC enabled at 2.2.

Also I used mid-grey throughout for the lighting colour and the skin specular colour, which is why the lighting intensities appear to be very high. 40% * 50% * 50% * 5 = 50%.

I just noticed an error in the light node I showed - the diffuse and specular colours are reversed. I did have these the right way round for the demo picture.

Of course you gave a better demo than I can (no sarcasm).

But at least I prompted some response to VK's problem! :O)

Oh, well that's different.

Did you know that setting the light color is not the same as setting the light intensity when GC is involved?

With Poser Pro render GC enabled, all material node color parameters, including those on lights, are anti-gamma corrected before being used. This means that your 50% gray was not 50% gray. It was about 22% gray. That was multiplied with the 40% intensity, yielding an effective illumination of 8.7%, not the 20% you thought. So your effective total illumination from 5 lights was 8.7% * 5 = 43.5%, less than half of my single WHITE spotlight at 95%.

In your last post you said 40% * 50% * 50% * 5 = 50%. In that calculation what is the second 50% for? Without GC the calculation would be

Intensity * color * number_of_lights = 40% * 50% * 5 = 100%

With GC the calculation would be:

Intensity * color * number_of_lights = 40% * (50% ^ 2.2) * 5 = 43.5%

For this reason, I never use gray to decrease a light intensity. I always use white, and I use the intensity dial to adjust ... intensity.

Damn... I had indeed forgotten that Poser Pro anti-GC's things that I don't want it to. Thanks for the reminder!

(I understand the reason they coded it that way, but I wish they hadn't - or at least that they had given us the option to define linear colour space RGB values in colour channels.)

The second 50% in my equation is the specular colour of the skin, which as I said I also set to mid-grey (for a reason - which now escapes me). That would give me more like 38% overall.

I wouldn't want to model such a figure myself. But hopefully ViperKilzz got what he needs from this discussion.    (?)

VK, I've just been experimenting with bb's set up, using Blinn nodes instead of the specular channel as used by TY's default skin, and a single main specular light.

Using Blinn nodes makes a massive difference. No way could I get those sort of results using the specular channel, no matter what lights I had.

But the most important thing for you with Poser 6, as bb explained, is to use gamma correction in your shaders. Since he told me off so roundly (I deserved it) I made the mistake of thinking his lesson was aimed at me, but of course it was intended for you!