i am not using the fastscatter. i said it looks like the fastscatter

ah.  no, you didn't quite.  you said "looks like from the fastscatter node "  not the same thing really, oddly enough. 

ok sorry.

i meant it looks like when you use the fastscatter node.

yeah, i'm on the same page now ;D.  maybe it's something to do with the pano image? does it have an obvious seam when it wraps?

its not a seam.
its from the light. this hard edge is from the shadow. very strange IMO

i noticed that if i use a Blinn node that then there is no  shadow visible.

BB what i wanted to do is use the specular like we talked and connect a panorama image to it. but  if i only do this then i can not use any extra rim lights. so i was thinking using both. for the left,right,top,front to use the panorama image. and an extra Blinn node for extra rim lights.

but if we use a wide Blinn it looks very strange

What you want to do is impossible. You're trying to use a Blinn (or any other Specular node) to represent that light is available from that direction, and modulate the reflection map based on shadows falling from that direction. But the Blinn node can only turn on within a hemisphere. That's why you get the sharp edge - it simply cannot "see" the light beyond the "horizon".

When you increase the Blinn and make it really wide, it fires at impossible angles, right at 90 degrees between the surface normal and the light source.

If you try to use multiple light sources then they overlap and you lose the shadows.

This technique is only going to work at limited angles and camera viewpoints and lighting scenarios. It's no different than the problem with using a camera lens that has problems with flare. You can't point such a lens anywhere near the sun. Other, better, more expensive lenses have multiple specialized coatings to prevent this and allow shooting into the sun. That doesn't make the cheaper lens useless - it just limits the utility.

So, too, there are other, specialized, more expensive renderers that can do soft speculars with environment maps. Poser doesn't have this but it's actually easy to do. If they would let me work on the source code for the renderer, I'm sure I could fix it. That's not what I'm working on. :)

Quote -

So, too, there are other, specialized, more expensive renderers that can do soft speculars with environment maps. Poser doesn't have this but it's actually easy to do. If they would let me work on the source code for the renderer, I'm sure I could fix it. That's not what I'm working on. :)

ohh nooo :( 

Quote - What you want to do is impossible. You're trying to use a Blinn (or any other Specular node) to represent that light is available from that direction, and modulate the reflection map based on shadows falling from that direction. But the Blinn node can only turn on within a hemisphere. That's why you get the sharp edge - it simply cannot "see" the light beyond the "horizon".

  :)

when i use the Blinn node i dont get the sharp shadows around the edge. with the Bllin node i found some other problems. will post  renders.

[quote
So, too, there are other, specialized, more expensive renderers that can do soft speculars with environment maps. Poser doesn't have this but it's actually easy to do. If they would let me work on the source code for the renderer, I'm sure I could fix it. That's not what I'm working on. :)

Oh I hope your working on hard  coding your shaders in Poser, so we can just click "use BB shaders" on the render dialog box, and thus they will be faster!

Quote -

So, too, there are other, specialized, more expensive renderers that can do soft speculars with environment maps. Poser doesn't have this but it's actually easy to do. If they would let me work on the source code for the renderer, I'm sure I could fix it. That's not what I'm working on. :)

What a waste of your talents. I'm sure whatever you are doing for them is quite brilliant, but everyone here knows you for your shader work and analytical approach to materials and rendering. It just seems insane that you're not helping to improve Poser in these fields by getting under the hood of the coding.
But I see you've discussed this already. If this is what SM's market research and development suggest is right for Poser I can see why they steer that way, but I can't help thinking that for an app whose main function is to render that this would seem somewhat short-sighted.
Oh well.

i was so happy with my test render that i used better settings and uploaded to the gallery
www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php

its my best realistic render IMO

i used the VSS skin shader. i changed the SSS to 0.3. specular is from the panorama image.

Ice-boy, your render looks incredible.  Could it be possible to post your Material Room setup for closer inspection? 
 Also, how does your set up respond with a shadowless spot to brighten up the eyes?  The render is beautiful, but the eyes are lacking some sparkle.  Perhaps your glowing props can add the feature without shedding more illumination to the scene.

in the render i a little to much ignored the eyes.

i focused more on the skin. the shader is very strange. i will show you what i added to the shader. and then you just connect it

Thanks.  It will be interesting to experiment with this arrangement.  It may have great potential.

but you will need to render first a reflection map. go in HDRshop and make some changes. then you will need to go back to poser and match the lights with the reflection map.

Gotcha!  I do have HDRShop on hand.

That's excellent ice-boy. I'd be very happy with that result myself.

i explained here the workflow
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

your make a big prop that you want to be your specular. then you render out a the reflection map. in HDRshop you make it Latitude/Longitude.
then in HDRshop you make Diffuse/Specular Convolution. i used a setting of 3 or 4. 

Attached Link: My Olivia G2 render.

Quote - I just put up a render of Olivia G2 in my gallery. I am happy with the skin except in the nostril. That's what's throwing me off. Anybody got any suggestion?  The link is above. I tweaked VSS a bit

my dear friend i dont see shadows. 

Quote - > Quote - I just put up a render of Olivia G2 in my gallery. I am happy with the skin except in the nostril. That's what's throwing me off. Anybody got any suggestion?  The link is above. I tweaked VSS a bit

my dear friend i dont see shadows. 

my dear friend, ice-boy,  there are shadows... it's very subtle and if you notice under the chin.  Anyway, what suggestions do you have on how to improve the lighting... I am using Render Studio. Perhaps I should have stick with my 3 lights symphony that I created from the tutorial over at RDNA by Oliver(?).
I am going to re-do the lighting... BTW, aren't you going to post your lighting set up and material setting? I like the rendering you did.

Thunderstone,

Since you ask for feedback, let me make a few observations, while first acknowledging that it is a very good render. Just not excellent (yet).

I think the lighting is great, but not the shadowing.

There is no shadow from the hair. Partly the problem is that Poser does not execute ambient occlusion effects that should be caused by nearby surfaces (such as the hair) if that surface has any sort of transparency to it. So even if you're using AO, it won't help here. (Biting my tongue. Some of you know what that means. Those that don't - don't worry about this comment.)

Have a look at this photo:

http://img.wallpaperstock.net:81/megan-fox-portrait-wallpapers_11507_1024x768.jpg

See how under the hair across her forehead, there is a shadow. Notice also that this shadow is red - SSS! This is why you want to tune the skin shader to produce a distinct redness for heavily shadowed areas.

I suspect you may have disabled shadows from hair to save time. Don't! If you want realism, you need the hair shadow from the main light on the forehead.

The realism of the face is not matched by the blouse. First it floats off her back, which draws my eye away from her face and looks wrong. The blouse is overexposed and probably should have a GC shader on it. And it needs some realistic cloth-like bump. Some wrinkles and folds would help, too. Perhaps you should convert it to dynamic and let it drape.

The hair looks a bit fake - not your fault! Almost all transmapped hair falls short of realistic. If the texture is high resolution, you may want to render that with a lower shading rate. Or you could try using texture filtering on the hair images.

If I use my hands to cover your hair and blouse, I see a photo! But those two elements scream CG here!

under the chin is not a shadow but the model not lit by the light. i belive you that you have shadows.
but even subtle shadows would be visible under the shirt. i think you dont have shadows turned on but i could be wrong.

I agree that it sure looks like shadows are not turned on. Her nose makes no shadow, so you have nostril glow. Here upper lip makes no shadow on the lower lip, so where the touch is fully lit. If shadows are on I'd move the light.

thats what i am talking abut...............amazing
amazing.

add AO and it will be perfect

Add AO to the light or skin? I already added AO to the skin and shirt  texture... Perhaps I should increase it a tad bit? Thanks but it's still not perfect yet. To me it still reeks of "CG" or "POSER".

Quote - Add AO to the light or skin? I already added AO to the skin and shirt  texture... Perhaps I should increase it a tad bit? Thanks but it's still not perfect yet. To me it still reeks of "CG" or "POSER".

I think you've improved this image such a lot with the changes you've made. It started out as a portrait where the viewer was more aware of what was wrong than what was working, but has now taken on a much more resolved quality, even if it's not "perfect". There are always improvements and little tweaks you can make here and there, but I think you've produced a very successful portrait thus far not only with the materials and rendering, but also with the pose, and composition of the piece (she could maybe benefit from a little more in the background and perhaps sligtly more facial expressiveness).
I'm going to ramble a bit here - only because I've had my head stuck in my own obsession with realism for a couple of weeks. This isn't just a response to what you're doing.
To be honest I think we have to, at some point, question our intent with the whole photo-realism aesthetic as well as accepting the limitations of Poser when it comes to how far we can persue it . I don't want to be defeatist,  I think it's very tempting to strive for something that perhaps (for me at least) has only partial importance in the context of what we're trying to create - i.e. a portrait in this instance.
OK, if what you want is "perfect" (or even near perfect) realism you won't want to stop here. You can spend literally hundreds of hours experimenting and tweaking, losing it and then pulling it back - I go there regularly. But I think you have to be careful that you don't lose sight of the other elements that make image creation a powerful and satisfying process - the ideas behind making the image in the first place; the content or message. I think in your portrait as it is I have some of that reflection about who this individual might be and how they come to be there (obviously we know this is a 3d creation, but I think it already depicts something beyond it's mode of production (i.e. 3d rendering)). That's something that I don't often get from gallery posts here.
You can, of course, get obsessed with the whole photo-realist aesthetic (as I have), but then I think ultimately you may end up wanting to re-evaluate realism within the limitations of Poser but also the wider context of image creation.
A little OT from the VSS skin theme, but not wholly irrelevant.

You can see I've been winding myself up about this lately.

what kind of shadow are you using infron of the figure? or is it AO?

looks very soft

Quote - I think I got it... I re did the lighting arrangements. Dropped 2 lights to make it 3 lights... The main light, rim light and the IBL light,  and arranged them so that they follow bb's indoor lighting set up.
What do you think BB?

is the distance 20 or 30?

BB i think we will need to update the AO on the skin from VSS. the one with the specular as the matte.
i will start experimenting.

Quote - Thing is, I can't help thinking that with Poser it's all too easy to get caught up in the struggle with models, materials,lighting and rendering whilst forgetting what the image is supposed to be about. It can be a tricky medium in this respect...

I still think it's an excellent render... but your point is well-taken. I believe this is CobaltDream's mantra, really.
Art is art. Technology can make art more appealing, judiciously applied, but it is not a replacement for art. That's why I keep telling people: I'm no artist. I enjoy the technology too much.

I'm sure there is an artistic aspect to pure maths and such... but I'm referring to images that are meant to evoke an emotion when I say "art".

I have a house full of card-makers. As in: greeting cards. There's an interesting form of artistic expression for you: greeting cards! My girls asked me to make some images using my "Poser People" ... they refer to that sort of thing as "Digistamps". I did a few of these for them:

Heck with shaders... all they wanted was that! And they consider it art.

Thunderstone, huge improvement. Well done. It's a very good image now. I only have two distractions left. I'd make the shadows more blurry. The other is perhaps too much to deal with, but I hate the shape of her ear. If I cover that, I'm much happier.

In every discussion of CG art, we observe that pursuit of realism is not going to make a great render. Got it - and driving a car with three good tires and one flat tire isn't going to get you where you're going, either. This seems kind of obvious to me. Of course you pull over and repair the flat tire, not one of the inflated ones.

So, the four wheels of our CG artist car (ok more than four) are shape (geometry), color, and texture (materials), lighting, pose, expression, composition, and of course the story. When I see that materials or lighting are distracting, i.e. they are such a departure from reality that we can't even appreciate the expression or story, that needs fixing. By "fix" I mean removing distractions - departures from reality that are so obvious and disturbing the harmony of the piece that you might as well not tell a story at all. Once all the tires are inflated, then we can worry about where we're going.  

Some were blurry, some were lit wrong because we had a mix of blue light from a window as the day was ending, and yellow light from a chandelier. We didn't bother telling a story with any of those messed up images. I simply deleted them.

When I got an image that had no distractions, then I did the artistic post-processing magic, to tell a story and create the mood I wanted.

This is the image I started with.

Intentional - that's the key.

Quote - > Quote - I think I got it... I re did the lighting arrangements. Dropped 2 lights to make it 3 lights... The main light, rim light and the IBL light,  and arranged them so that they follow bb's indoor lighting set up.

What do you think BB?

is the distance 20 or 30?

BB i think we will need to update the AO on the skin from VSS. the one with the specular as the matte.
i will start experimenting.

The AO distance  in the shader was set to 40. Now I don't know what unit of measurement is on BB's poser but on mine, it's set to inches. So that may have something to do with it.

Know what? I was thinking there should be a uniform set of measurement, so that we can see a consistence among the rendering in shaders.  Of course, then it will become boring if every one got the same result across the board.

Going to go back to the board and use 30 in the AO's

Quote -
In every discussion of CG art, we observe that pursuit of realism is not going to make a great render. Got it - and driving a car with three good tires and one flat tire isn't going to get you where you're going, either. This seems kind of obvious to me. Of course you pull over and repair the flat tire, not one of the inflated ones.

So, the four wheels of our CG artist car (ok more than four) are shape (geometry), color, and texture (materials), lighting, pose, expression, composition, and of course the story. When I see that materials or lighting are distracting, i.e. they are such a departure from reality that we can't even appreciate the expression or story, that needs fixing. By "fix" I mean removing distractions - departures from reality that are so obvious and disturbing the harmony of the piece that you might as well not tell a story at all. Once all the tires are inflated, then we can worry about where we're going.  

 

Good analogy. I get easily frustrated when I get hung up on the technical stuff when I just want to get on and tell the story. I should know better, being a painter, how long it takes to master a medium.

Now you now how photographers feel about their craft.  Anyone can take a photograph.  Just point and shoot.  It takes ingenuity to think outside the box to produce one of those images that makes you pause just long enough to take deep notice.

OK, I started again at page 1 and started re-reading the entire thread and taking notes and copying images with instructions etc. I am only up to page 38 and have yet to find an answer to a really dumb question...plus I don't see it in the readme-tut doc either. my near term goal is making series of props to use with P.I.C.K and BB's nylons then back on to PR3 and skin. The question is, are there any naming restrictions for a saved off prop? Internal name of the prop when loaded not the file name? There has to be something the script looks for when you do a snyc to know it has found a VSS prop. Just don't want to gum up the works. If this is explained in pages 1 to 38 of this thread and I missed it, please don't beat me up too bad :)

thanks
Gary

You can open the script in a regular text program and follow the program line by line.  In most instances, instructions and descriptions are included.  Perhaps others with infinite experience with Python Script will interject when they see your post.

If it's any help, all my various versions of the VSS prop load with an internal name beginning with "VSS". Just avoid that and you should be okay.

It knows a VSS Control Prop because it has a material called Apply Rules and a material called Shader Rules. Any object with those two things can be a VSS control prop - even another figure can be a VSS control prop.

If you load V4, and set up templates and Apply Rules and Shader Rules on her, you can use her to configure herself, and other figures, too.

Perfect. Thanks very much. Want to change the friendly name when specific to a character, does not effect any nails or for example P.I.C.K.

It appears to only find one when you sync. By mistake I left PR3 loaded and then added the one I made to do the nylons and it only ran the PR3 one. Out of curiosity I selected the Nylon one from the drop down and it still ran the PR3 one. Had to delete the PR3 one to sync my nylons one. I assume this is proper behavior.

FYI, I made the nylon one to load the colors as a detached node, vs having to call it-load it up ever time I load that VSS prop. I'm lazy and VSS is perfect for lazy people:)

Lazy people invented efficiency!

regards,

Bopper.

Where is this generic GC shader???

It comes with the original install or vssPR1 (vssPR1.zip)