Quote - Switched to the head texture with hair.
Changed the SSS colors - less saturated and slightly darker.
Lowered the specular from .25 to .2.
Added the bump map at .05.

i know its old but do you remember if you used here an IBL plus the blury specular image in the shader? or only the panorama in the shader? 

Wierd.

Notice also i changed the left/right blend from U node to N node. My prop doesn't always have U lined up where I think it is, but left side versus right side is always correct.

Quote - i know its old but do you remember if you used here an IBL plus the blury specular image in the shader? or only the panorama in the shader? 

 
IBL plus the blury specular image in the shader. The IBL was using my shader on the IBL that converts lat/long panorama to angular map on the fly. I did not use the panorama in the skin shader for diffuse. The skin shader was ordinary diffusse node plus the Sphere_Map(lat/long panorama) to simulate soft specular reflections from the environment only. The diffuse part came from the IBL.

interesting.

but i think tis close enough for a panorama blury image. this really helped me. thanks. no i onl need to find out how to use this in the skin shader.

i used a panorama image for specular. intensity was 0,22.

i added an extra specular light above hes body to get some specular from the sky. intensity was 10 %. i got some specular in the shadow next to hes neck. but it of course made everything brighter.

i am not happy with the results. but i see a lot of potential in this. 

i also used a very high number for the phong in HDRshop. its not the same like the specular on the skin. its little to glossy.

and it was not a HDR image. just a normal image.

I put a ordinary Reflection and a small Noise bump on a sphere and render it big - 4K by 4K - because when you try this at normal scale it is too grainy. Then I reduced by 10x to 400 by 400.

Still not good enough.

How do other renderers do this so easily? Why is blurred reflection a hard thing for Poser to do? Drives me crazy.

All the soft ray-traced effects in Poser are grainy - very frustrating.

Quote - I just tried a different way, just for grins.

I put a ordinary Reflection and a small Noise bump on a sphere and render it big - 4K by 4K - because when you try this at normal scale it is too grainy. Then I reduced by 10x to 400 by 400.

Still not good enough.
**
How do other renderers do this so easily? Why is blurred reflection a hard thing for Poser to do? Drives me crazy.**

All the soft ray-traced effects in Poser are grainy - very frustrating.

soft reflection is hard in every 3d software.

did you watch Iron Man last summer? the material on the suit was very blurry. ILM said that it was very hard to find a solution. we need ot understand that they render for animation. so if one frame takes 48 hours then they have a problem. PIXAR realesed brickmaps for renderman. ILM used brickmaps. 
graphics.pixar.com/library/SoftReflections/paper.pdf

i was reading Blender also has a solution for faster rendering of blurry reflection.

but raytracing for skin i no an option in Poser. it takes to long to render for a subtle effect

when i have specular on skin plus the panorama image it also doesnt work very good together. i need a light with specular to show up the panorama image.so then i have two specular effect.s one from the ligt and from teh reflection map.
if i dont have it connected to the blinn then i wont have shadows so specular will be everywhere.
if we connect it  with the diffuse node then it will not work good with an IBL.

there must be a way grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I just thought of a way, but it is rather limited.

Suppose you do not include an environment sphere. Set up a Reflect node with a bright impossible hyper-white as the background color - plug a number into it like 10.

Now when the reflect node sees nothing in 3D it will return 10 * white. If it does see something, it will return the color of that thing which will not be so bright.

Plug this Reflect node into a Math:Subtract node, and subtract 9 from it. Thus it is 1 when no 3D object is reflected, and much less than 0 when something is reflected.

Now you have a value you can run into a Blender node, in the Blending Value.

Connect your Sphere_Map to Value_2 of the blender. Set the Blender Value_1 to black. This is your environmental reflection, blocked by local 3D objects.

Nah - that's no good either. The blocked reflection will have a hard edge. Needs to be soft.

yes. i made  a shader like that but then the arm reflection is very hard.

but you know what? now that i think i about it why even bother since IBL's are also not perfect? IBL is good for some fast global lighting. and it looks good with AO. but the light is  still without shadows. for example if in the IBL there is a bright light on the left then this means that boths arms will look the same. both arms will be lit from the left.

i think 3dsmax and maya have final gather for this. they make softshadows  with HDR's.

if i just add the panorama pic on top of it  it makes everything brighter. i used 0,2.

what if we use the fresnel effect combined with the blinn node? i dont mean the fresnel effect like its on the blinn node. but like on  a reflective material.

so lets say we use around the edge something like 0,2 plus where the light is coming . so we would get  where the light is coming plus on the edge. and that way we would get specular in the shadow.

look what i found here. very interesting. what do you think
www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php

I've seen that before, and if you're doing a very black shiny man with a very bump skin, it's great. All you need is an ordinary reflect node and the environment sphere. That guy is SHINY.

But a normal everyday human - no way. You have to have softer reflections.

yeah i agree.

then i try to match a plane object with my lighting.  like here.

its not perfect.i for example can nto use it for the blue sky. if i add a light above my figure i will also get the white specular from the Blinn .

maybe if i turn off the extra specular in the shader and only use the Blinn as a matte for the reflection map. then i would basiclly do every specular from the reflection map. then i could use an extra specular-only light above the figure and i wouldnt get extra white specular.

the downside is that i couldnt move the lights after the reflection map is loaded.

you know  with some tweaking we could also use this for glosy reflections on the eyes.

i tested this now and it works. not physical realistic but could be used for faster rendering.
the process is the same. you first position what you want to be reflected n the eyes. then you load BB's GenIBL  and render it out. then in HDRshopt you make a reflection image.

you need only Poser,GenIBL and HDRshop. everthing is free. and it takes 10 - 20 minutes.

i see noone giving an opinion. is it not good? 

Strange i've already seen that somewhere here ... :biggrin:

you gave me the idea. remember? in the reflection thread about the eyes?

i am showing it now how i do it.

IMHO he look a little "metalic"

yeah something is not right.

i used a reflection map from clouds. so the light is scattered and the specular is blurry. will try again.