Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: M4 Realism Kit?

Silke opened this issue on May 28, 2009 ยท 14 posts


bagginsbill posted Thu, 02 July 2009 at 10:43 AM

The effective color of a VSS shaded figure isn't determined by the texture or the shader. It's determined by the user, who chooses various values for luminance, tint, specularity, and subsurface scattering amount and color.

Every person has their own favorite technique for various tasks. Mine never involves editing color maps. If a map is too saturated, I desaturate it in the shader with an HSV node. If it isn't saturated enough, I increase the saturation with an HSV node. If it is too red or blue or green or whatever, I tint it with a Color_Math:Multiply node and a color of my choice.

On my monitors, the VSS figure above does not appear excessively orange. He does have some extra reddish tones in the shadowed areas, but that is intentional as it actually happens in real life. Unlike the bottom figure, which has almost no light reflecting from shadowed areas, the VSS figure is realistically responding to the lighting, which in my scene includes a considerable amount of secondary light as actually happens indoors.

It may be that for artistic reasons, you prefer the contrasty look of the figure without gamma correction. When one chooses to depart from reality for artistic reasons, anything is possible and legit, and if it just so happens that Poser's intrinsic errors in lighting and shading are exactly what you like, then that's great. You have the right tools. But this thread started by asking for something to improve M4's "realism". Frankly, if you don't think the VSS figure is more real than the un-modified figure, then you have no eye for realism. I'm not saying he's perfect - I've never yet achieved photorealism in Poser with a figure. But I think it is quite accurate to say that with VSS, the departure from realism can be reduced considerably.


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