Does Real Skin Shader by face_off work in Poser7 with V4, M4, A4 etc etc?

There's a V4 version available at DAZ. It sort of works for M4 too.

i think face_off has a tutorial on his website about how to add extra figures in the Real Skin Shader script so as to accommodate more figures. 

http://www.users.on.net/~pkinnane/RealSkinShaderSupport.html

And, if I'm not mistaken, there was an update some time after V4's release to incorporate v4's material settings into the script (update date 05/26/08). Just checked, and indeed V4 is supported, so M4 is supported as well since they share the same surface names.

It is very easy to modify Real Skin Shader to work with any figure per the post above. Works very well on V4 for me. The script is in regular text so you just search for the list of materials and ad the ones need for your figure (e.g. "SkinHead", "SkinScalp", "SkinFace", etc.). Much easier for a dummy like me than vss which I don't understand at all. The other Face_Off products use specular maps and are specific to P6 Figures, Unimesh Figures, or V4. The RealSkinShader I have used even to make procedural skin for figures for which I have no textures.

LOL you keep saying that. VSS works on every figure without you doing anything at all.

LOL. And you don't have to run it again when you move your lights.

Load the prop. Run the script. Push Synchronize.

I'll post a video when I have time. It will be 20 seconds long.

Thank bb. I do not know why I am so dense about it... I read the VSS for Dummies page... I think I sometimes just have a conceptual blindness about some things at times. I do get it to run and all but have not been successful at adjusting it for a less "IBL" look.

Certainly I don't mean to denigrate your skills, effort and generosity but I'm just too dumb technically to grasp the several really cool things you have release as freebies but it is clear I am in a minority since most people love them :)

I need to work more on it... the problem might be that I am confused by the combination of script/prop/material. I think it is the control prop that throws me as opposed to the Python input panel on Real Skin Shader which I have been able to grasp pretty intuitively. I'll try to post some sample of what I am getting but you should not bother yourself about it... I'm an old oil painter and not a CGI person so who knows what my visual predjudgices are :)

I understand completely momo...  I am extremely phobic of computer things in general, so learning to use poser7 has been an exhausting (but rewarding) exersise for me so far.

I love VSS!!!! I use it all the time now. I have the Real Skin shader also, but it is light dependent and if you change your lights, which I freqently do, then you have to re-run the Real Skin Shader script. There is no need to do this with VSS. I am so glad that BB gave this to the community and I recommend it to anyone who wants to improve the realism of their renders.

I think it must be the prop/script/mat thing... I found magnets really confusing untill I learned to screen out the awful magnet/zone/base analogy... the magnets in Poser are so usefull and powerful but the interface paradigm can put non-technical people way off. I just need to reconceptualize vss somehow I'm sure so it can seep into my dinosaur bain. I may be the last person in American now without a cell phone... there is even a program to give them with montrhly usage allowance to people on public assistance but I just can't figure out how to operate one and have never owned one...funny since my only current income derives from royalties on old work on the graphical aspects of cellphone GUI when they first came out :) Went into a store and tried to buy a cell phone with no menue interface but could not get one... I want an on/off switch and the dialing keypad... nothing else. I'm a real primitive.

The VSS control prop is just data - that's all. Instead of putting the data into a mysterious file that nobody understands, I used a prop to hold all the data.

Most of the data it needs is nodes - what shaders do you want on your figure? That's why I used a prop. The prop is a stand-in for something that needs shaders. VSS copies shaders from the control prop to whatever props and figures you are using it for.

Wow! That helps... I have the problem of not being able to use a thing unless I have some coherent mental model of how it works... doesn't have to be an accurate or correct model... just a shoe box to put it in.

"Instead of putting the data into a mysterious file that nobody understands, I used a prop to hold all the data." That is a statement that really puts a lot to rest. I had the misapprehension it was some sort of control prop I had to manipulate directly somehow. If I can tell my self it is just an expedient, a sort of memory buffer that the material room can read shaders off of that is a big help for me. Next I tell myself that the MATpose somehow put the shader data in the prop/buffer and that the script tells poser to read that data onto the figures from that prop. May not be true but it is at least a mental model I can work with.

I can handle some occult stuff such as that I don't understand the Poser core code but if I see a piece like that prop hanging out with all these dials on it instead of the data being hidden from me in some .dat file in a python sub-folder I get all stymied spinning my wheels trying to figure out what it is and what it does and what I am supposed to do to it... it provides a non render shader tree to copy shadder setting off of is something I can grasp even if I don't know the details. The only reason I can use Poser at all is that it is all based on ASCII, the mesh, the morphs, the .CR2s.

I'm one of those people who can't even use household appliances until I have established some model (accurate or not) as to the principal and mechanics of their operation... might be some sort of Low Latent Inhibition thing. I have no idea how other people can watch TV or ride in a car or fly in a train or even read a book for that matter without a lucid model of how those things are produced, what principals they work from and a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics. I always wonder what it is like for people who live in a world wear Big Macs and Mac Trucks just appear out of nowhere... no history, no origin, no conceptual basis... I can't imagine these things aside from in the context of their history and production... all the many people involved in thinking them up and making them possible.

It seems to me for those people who drive around and don't know the principals of internal combustion engines, gear systems, breaking and steering assemblies or how AGbuisness and McDonald's gets a burger to their table that they must live in a magical world... a Harry Potter world where things are summoned up as though by magic and anything is pretty much as plausible of anything else. Thank god I know how a keyboard/CPU/RAM/OS/wordprocessor/forum software/internet connection/LCD display work in principal at least or I probably couldn't write this post :)

It is interesting that so few Poser users can manage magnets but no one seems to have trouble with a product like Natural Bounce which is just a magnet set where the magnet part geometries have been changed to something more coherent to users... the magnet is a ball shaped handle in smooth Shaded Mode, the base is a flattened disc also in solid shaded mode, and the zone is a a sphere but is hidden or wireframed.

Give people an outline view horseshoe. an ugly rectilinear base in shaded mode that seems to function without regards to its spatial orientation, and an outline zone and they don't know what the hell they are doing... can't follow the analogy. Offset the base from the zone so that the relationship of the magnet handle ball is explicit to the base and they understand it. They now understand that the zone interacts with the target mesh and this is controled by the magnets interaction with the base... somehow this is obscured when the base, zone and magnet are all intersecting the target mesh.

Even the shape of the base (rectangular prism as opposed to a non-directional disc) and the magnet (horseshoe instead of a simple ball or cone or pyramid) establishes false analogy and false directionality... the ease of use dirrived from shaping a deformer as a ball or cone as opposed to a horseshoe is no small thing in terms of human/perception based design.

The magnet is classic coders design, symbolic... the cone is user interface design, pseudo ergonomic... extraneous detail is suppressed and form supports function. I swear that if the base were a disc or ball, the zone was default wire frame or now in P8 a translucent solid, and the "magnet" was a cone pointing at or "sitting on" the base everyone would be using magnets!