She's very cute!

Wow...I would definitely like to see an Alyson in my runtime that looks like that...

Care to share?

Hello Talisman

There are really nice freebies for Alyson at Renderosity Free Stuff.
You can take a look at them with this link:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?section_id=430

Alyson it's a really nice figure!

3Dream has also created some nice face morphs for the P8 Ryan figure - which has been so criticized by some on this forum and just about universally over on Daz fanboy land. This thread proves the point that these figures can be unlocked to great potential in spite of the heavy criticism they've received.

I appreciate all the positive discussion Deec has opened up with this topic! Its great to see!

Yes, I also agree with you metabog. The P8 figures are very versatil and usefull as the most famous figures.
The creators/artists/merchants (if they want) just need to dedicate their skills to develop nice things to P8 figures.
I hope that other artists use my P8 creations in images or videos!
I just would like to say that my free face morphs for Alyson are original and the 3 free face morphs for Ryan are simple face poses because they change Ryan's face using it's own morphs.
ENJOY P8 figures!!!

Many thanks, 3Dream, for your efforts to support Alyson.

I really do like the figure you have shown above; too bad you do not offer a body morph as well as the lovely face...

In any case, I applaud your efforts, and this from a hobbyist who still uses a lot of P6 James/Jessi characters in renders!

If ever you change your mind about the body model you have shown, please let me know, ok?  I've not had nearly such good results in my efforts with Alyson.

Time permitting (usually very late night and weekends) I've been working on refitting my Bootie to Alyson .. and have also asked Arien if I could include some of her textures as freebies along with it. She's agreed.

I still have some work to do on it, which I hope to complete in the next week or two ... but thought I'd throw it out there that if anyone else has done a product with a custom body morph that I can include it built in to the Bootie ... I've been adding the morphs with "Morphing Clothes" and it's done a pretty good job of adding all of Alyson's body morphs, as well as my Taya (here), Tamyra, and Grace.

If you have a FBM and don't mind donating a copy to me I can add it into the Bootie. Just send me a PM here. And give me a week or two to release it, as I've been working on it as time permits.

Yeah, Aly is a nice Lady.
I'm making a character right now.
But in the meantime testing the IDL light to get the most out of it.
it is 2AM here in Belgium right now, and wayyyy paaaast bed-time,  so pics will have to wait a bit.
But P8 is a big improvement , as are the figures.  

Thanx 3Dream and Deecey, These look fantastic.

I really am enjoying P8 and the new figures. True they were ugly when I first looked at them (but hey most of us are) But I have found them easy to morph and work with.  Plus I love the new morph brush. I am not nearly as good as you two but just being able to make my own morphs now, right in Poser without having to export to other apps, finally a person like me who does not own or know alot about other 3D apps can have fun creating my own stuff.

So thank you, to you people who show us what can be done if we just try, and thanks to Smith Micro for making it possible.

 Just to clarify ... the "Bootie" is the outfit that Taya is wearing in the above render. It's basically a catsuit with feet.. There are some additional morphs that I have to add and I also need to tighten the morph up in places. It's the clothing piece that I wanted to add the FBMs to, not Alyson. (Sorry I wasn't more clear earlier).

Hello

Deecey, the clothes look super excellent! You are doing a excellent work for Alyson!

Talisman, in the big image I have just use the Alyson smooth body morph, nothing else.
The face morph is the first one of this freebies:
http://www.arrow3d.com/3Dream-FreeFaceMorphs.htm
The clothes, hair and pose belong to one of my commercial products: HOT HOT HOT
In the render I used the Ultimate Alyson MAT pose. The postwork was made in photoshop. I add a little of make-up, but the image it's almost identical to the render that I made in Poser.

Stepson, it's excellent to know that people are creating more morphs for the P8 figures. I wish you an excellent work.

GOOD NEWS!!!
I made another freebie for Alyson! It's 2 sensual poses + 2 mirror poses.
The freebie will appear in Renderosity free stuff but you can download it by cliking in the image:

I hope you use this poses in your renders. I had a lot of fun creating them.
The poses can be used in commercial and non-commercial galleries/images/ renders but you cannot use them (partial, re-worked or complete) to create poses for freebies or commercial products.
Sorry for my bad English.

I am shocked...she has such strange proportions to begin with!  If 'smooth body' works such wonders, I shall be very pleased.

I tried her with the 'fashion model' height instead of 'ideal adult' and got some very strange, twisting distortions of her upper arms.

In any case, that taller figure height gives better proportions for her generally, save for the distortion.

I loaded her in a scene with P6 Jessi, without tweaking anything on either model, and the proportion differences are fairly great.

In any case, I shall give that 'smooth body' dial a twirl and see what results...many thanks for the continued interest in the model.  I too, use the head morph and the higher quality materials for the model texture.

I am certain that my fascination with the P6 versions is not as anamolous as first I feared, and  I still tweak and play with some of the G2 versions, but mostly the males...they are actually quite good.

Hello Talisman
A simple pose can change a lot the figure appearence. This happen to any human figure!
I think that my 2 free poses are nice and I think that they "give" Alyson a nice body appearence.
Nice poses = Better body appearence

A couple of things I've noticed about Alyson...

I had the chance earlier today to observe the mesh in a modeling program, and there are (at least) 15 points in the mesh that are not welded.
Oddly, they are all in her butt region.
Not to get into details here, but someone seems to have had an interest in making sure certain orifices can be easily opened by those with the modeling tools to do so....
It kinda surprises me that while they were at it they didn't make it so for certain other areas in that region, but to each his own, I guess. ;-)

On a similar note, I also had a chance to mess with Poser 8 today, on a very capable  and high-powered computer. And I should know, since I built it. ;-)
For now, I will not mention what I thought of it, but I will say it seems to be working fine on that machine, and it's nice to see Smith Micro has brought raytracing render speeds up to the standards to compete with the quality and speed of other apps.... five years ago...

My only real complaint about Alyson though is that it seems kinda silly that the arms were mapped vertically, where it would have been easier on developers to map them horizontally, IMO.

Quote - A couple of things I've noticed about Alyson...
Oddly, they are all in her butt region.
Not to get into details here, but someone seems to have had an interest in making sure certain orifices can be easily opened by those with the modeling tools to do so....
It kinda surprises me that while they were at it they didn't make it so for certain other areas in that region, but to each his own, I guess. ;-)

OMG! Digital Sodomy?

Many thanks to all of you who have such positive energy about making this model useful and attractive.

Thanks, 3Dream, for the suggestion about the 'body smoothing' morph.  I tried it and was very pleased with the results.

I see that we have discovered many eccentricities about Alyson, particularly concerning the length of her arms, but I discovered last night, tinkering with her, that the 'shortness' issue is apparently an optical illusion.

When you compare her 'zeroed' figure to other, more acceptable 3D models, her armspan is about right.  What is not apparent is that her abdomen is too long, vertically.

I did the following:

1)  increased her whole body scale to 109%; and
2)  decreased her abdomen 'y-scale' to 75%.

Now her arms appear to be relatively correct in length, and her overall stature is about right compared, say, to standard P6 Jessi.  I try to align Alyson's crotch and breasts to the model I like by adjusting Alyson's abdomen length.

The stock poses seem to apply correctly, and I see no apparent distortions using these settings.

I'm working on an IL render of her, and I will try to post the results this evening.

In my opinion, she looks really cute now.

@3Dream

thank you very much for your alyson freebies!

i tested your face morph and this lovely pose:

texture: maria
hair: hebe hair
string and sticky tapes: made by me

"talisman"

did you scale the abdomen or the waist to 75%?

Quote - @3Dream

thank you very much for your alyson freebies!

i tested your face morph and this lovely pose:

texture: maria
hair: hebe hair
string and sticky tapes: made by me

Wow! 

Now all we need is one of the communities awesome uber riggers to lengthen the arms of her .obj base geometry slightly and it's rigging to match and she's perfect. Wooooot!

I scaled the whole figure up first to 109%, then the ABDOMEN down to 75%...here's a render of her, with 3Dream's nice face morph.

 Yes that's very nice!

Very well done.
i thought you'd take the waist, as it is larger (higher) so more flexible to work with.

Nice render, and great light.
Just one remark; The shadows are a little HARD., Sharp. Brutal.

And a question (again)
The public hair is a displacement map, or noice node with a mask?
Or?

I am a bit curious about the body shadows myself, since the render is one point light with IL; I've a weak system, and this took a long time to render.  With IL, I'd thought to get softer shadow blends.

In any case, I probably have messed up my render settings somewhere, and I'll have to sort that out.

The pubic hair is actually a free V4 prop, acting as an independent figure, whose compressed folder has no ownership details, so I can't tell you where, in the wilds of the vast Internet, I found it.

It comes in six variations, and I have found many uses for it over the intervening years.  I think it was on Renderotica, but it has been quite a while since I first saw it.

Her hair is the Portia model by AprilYSH.

I made some dial adjustments on the body shape, just to suit my particular likes.

Even with IDL, if there's nothing around your figure reflecting light onto her, then the areas in shadow will be black. Here and there, her own lit skin can light other nearby skin areas. But in this render, for example, her right wrist can only be lit by her right buttock. Since both are in shadow, both are black.

I don't know how you did the background. Unless it is a real object behind her, such as an image attached to a square, then there's no ambient light around her at all. (The Poser "Background" is not an object - it is what your virtual "paper" has on it before the figure is drawn on top.)

Build a room around her, and you'll get ambient reflected light. Place my environment sphere around her, and you'll get ambient light from the environment sphere. If you do neither of those things, then she'll look like she's being photographed floating in space with nothing around for millions of miles. In that case you should use an IBL to provide synthetic ambient lighting. With IDL, the IBL provides the starting point for ambient lighting. Then IDL will bounce it around amongst your actual 3D objects.

As for the hard edge on the shadows, you probably didn't change the shadow blur radius, so the radius is 0, i.e. no blur at all. Soft shadows are accomplished by specifying a blur value. Many people think that's only for depth-mapped shadows, but it isn't. With a point light, only ray-traced shadows are possible, but they can be soft if you set it up that way.

However, a point light is more complicated than a spotlight, resulting in extra rendering time that you don't really need. A point light is best used in a 3D room to model a light bulb located within that room, throwing light in all directions. If you're just going to do an isolated portrait like this, you'd do better to use a spotlight. Of course, you'll want to position the spotlight and adjust its cone angle and angular falloff to create a nice effect.

Lighting in Poser seems mysterious, but with Poser 8 it can be very realistic and easy to set up. The thing to realize is that if you don't know how to light a subject in a blackened studio, then you're not going to know how to light a subject in Poser, either.

With Poser 8, you can actually use spotlights, gobos, reflectors, walls, etc to create interesting lighting.

The figure on the left is standing in empty space. The figure on the right is standing in a corner of the Poser 8 prop "StudioBackdrop". There is a single infinite light. I set the studio to not cast a shadow so the wall between the two figures doesn't prevent the one on the left from receiving light. (Can't do that in a real studio.)

Observe how the isolated figure is in stark light/shadow. We can't even see his right arm. The other figure looks much more natural. Observe his shadow on the backdrop. See how the edges are soft? That's because I set the Shadow Blur Radius to 3 on the light.

I confess that you have the right of it; she stands alone in a vast electronic wasteland with nothing to reflect upon.  I kinda wondered about that.

I took your suggestion and put her in a small enclosure and made a very simple, infinite white light of zero-zero-zero orientation upon her with IDL.  The shadows will fall where they may.

I did notice that, even with IDL triggered in the render settings, I can still adjust light shadow % in the light dialogue, so I set it to .500.

I really don't know how light shadow % and IDL interact; it seems like the same function to me, making raytraced shadows less intense.

In my earlier render, I had left the point light at 1.000, which also contributed to the harsh shadows.

In any case, I set the edge to 3 and let my creaky old gear get to cranking on the render...it may take days.  After an hour or so, it was still 'precalculating', which doesn't bode well.  I am well-and-truly CPU bound.

Many thanks for the suggestions, and the free tools you offer; I shall work on the environment sphere and the IBL probes that you have conjured.

I had always, for my IBL purposes,  just rendered a high-resolution, reflective ball set large in the middle of my render scene (sans actors, of course), and used that as my IBL image...seemed to work., but who knows?

just a tip, certainly for "long renders"

if during the precalculation, you see "highlighted area's".
You will get too much reflection in the final render on those spots.
bright to bright orange. . . .
Armpits are prone to this.
Or any other  "close together area".

Reduce the Diffuse setting to .8 on the texture can help.
Or play with the amount of light you are giving. . 

Talisman,

Reducing shadow strength is a hack. It simply let's a certain amount of the light pass through objects as though they are partially transparent. This is better than a totally black shadow, but it's completely inferior to any other technique. It's a legacy from Poser 5 days when we had no way to easily manage some sort of ambient lighting.

With IBL, you can fill the shadows easily, albeit not with the precise and accurate results you can get with IDL.

When IDL fills the shadows, it doesn't do it by simply adding some light the way IBL does. It examines all the other object nearby and let's them contribute secondary light. So all manner of effects including occlusion and color bleeding work correctly. You don't get color bleeding with IBL+AO, and AO provides only an approximation of the effect of objects blocking ambient light. IDL fully takes everything into account, giving by far the most realistic results.

Thank you, Vilters, for the tip; I wondered what those little 'sparkles' in the pre-render view were for...I'll try the diffusion reduction, too.  And, btw, I also tried your suggestion to foreshorten 'waist' as well, and the results seem worthwhile...I sorta combined the two 'y-axis ' reductions to get the appearance I was looking for.  I also lengthened her legs at the thigh and shin in small increments.  Now she's all beautiful and leggy, too!

Bagginsbill, I am glad to hear what you've offered by way of the various lighting clarifications.  I can see that Poser did these work-arounds to get an effect, even if it was not entirely correct.

Given your thoughts on this, should I set light shadow to zero?  and if I use IDL, should I eliminate any AO/IBL in the scene, including textures that have 'AO' built-in?  Many modellers offer AO and non-AO versions of their textures.

I think the render times should shrink dramatically if poor Poser only has to do one set of light calculations.  Hopefully, I'm heading in the right direction here.

Shadows at zero? No, the shadow should be 100%.

IBL is fine to use with IDL - in that case, IBL pretends to be a glowing environment sphere. There's no need to remove the AO on an IBL light because IDL automatically ignores light-based AO. However, you should get rid of material-based AO. Not only will it introduce inaccuracy because it is an approximation, it will also double the occlusion that's already properly calculated by IDL, and it will add render time exponentially.

I just hope that SR1 comes with a IDL user guide.

Now, we get a lot of very usefull information, but it's all over  the net.
Ok, today, tomorrow i'll find it back, but in a month or so?

Yes BB, you told before that AO should be removed from materials. I remebered.
But it would be nice to have info like that in a more " rigid" and permanent form.

In one to 2 months we'll be about a 1000 post further on. so. . . . . 
forum info gets lost. . . 

But we thank you , oh do we ever thank you. . . . . 

Once the render engine changes stop, I'll make some guides on my web site and collect all the info. Maybe some videos, too.

Neat, and a very good idea. Thanks.

But I know, a thank you does not bring bread on the table. ;-(

wow you guys are really working this mesh. :) Very cool.

How about her joints, does she bend her legs and arms in  good way?
Also, how is she when it comes to extreme bending?
Could her joints and bending be compared with the G1 or G2 figures and Miki 1020 or Miki2 , or perhaps DAZ Generation 3 and 4 figures?

Would be great to know :)
Cheers

I see the usual knee geometry breaking in extreme bends, and her shoulders are really problematical, but, like 3Dream says, just be mindful of how you do it and the results are quite nice.

Here is another render of the poor, ugly girl.  I really don't know why I let her clutter up my runtime...

The morph was made largely using the morphs included with Alyson, but I had to resort to using Zbrush for eye shaping and adjusting the forehead.