yeah, i just double checked.  Milan looks basically like an unedited photo painted onto a 3d mesh.  it's a good job, and a good photo source, though.  i'm definitely happy to own it myself.  but the bright, wide highlights on her forehead and under her eyes are in the texture.  they're frontal, so they work well in this light setup.

BB, what blows me away about this setup is the speed, I've been spending alot of time lately messing with light setups to try and increase realism - I always end up with scenes that take FOREVEER to render. This setup produces better than anything I've been able to come up with and its crazy fast..

it still looks pretty good because it has specular and shadow burned in. she's got no specular from lights, but she looks like someone with normally shiny skin, except on the face where it's excessively shiny.

Quote - Hi Guys, here's one with PM:Shine set to 0 - looks pretty good to me..

BB, what blows me away about this setup is the speed, I've been spending alot of time lately messing with light setups to try and increase realism - I always end up with scenes that take FOREVEER to render. This setup produces better than anything I've been able to come up with and its crazy fast..

Yes, well, that's the point of getting advice instead of wasting time experimenting yourself. I've already done the experimenting so you don't have to find the needle-in-haystack-solution. That's not to say you shouldn't experiment, because a scene like this won't cover every situation you run into. But it's a good start.

Glad you like it.

Quote - it still looks pretty good because it has specular and shadow burned in. she's got no specular from lights, but she looks like someone with normally shiny skin, except on the face where it's excessively shiny.

The whitish areas on the face are terrible.

Yeah, its the texture, I've tried several shine level settings and moved the lights around - still get the same results on the face. I don't have many textures to work with but I'm going to try a few others and see how it goes.

Quote - > Quote - Hi Guys, here's one with PM:Shine set to 0 - looks pretty good to me..

BB, what blows me away about this setup is the speed, I've been spending alot of time lately messing with light setups to try and increase realism - I always end up with scenes that take FOREVEER to render. This setup produces better than anything I've been able to come up with and its crazy fast..

Yes, well, that's the point of getting advice instead of wasting time experimenting yourself. I've already done the experimenting so you don't have to find the needle-in-haystack-solution. That's not to say you shouldn't experiment, because a scene like this won't cover every situation you run into. But it's a good start.

Glad you like it.

Just wish I'd found your stuff sooner - everything you put out is amazing.. I'm pretty new to Poser just got it a few months back.. your tutorials and these threads should be on the required reading list for anyone starting out with Poser.. I can't thank you enough for all the time you put into this and give it away for free as well !

Quote - Hi guys. Somehow I got unsubscribed from this thread. I didn't get any notices of postings in this thread for several days now.

So - is the demo scene idea a success? Should I do more? What sort of scene? Outdoor day, bright sun? Outdoor night, full moon? 

An outdoor day scene would be great.  Perhaps one with a sky setting for your environment sphere...?

Quote - Whew! 7 hours without anybody saying anything, I thought I'd posted my first dud. LOL Looking forward to see what you do, V.

:0) - As Always, I really appreciate what you offer to the Poser Community.
The truth be told I am still addicted to ypur IDL Wall Thread aspects.

Bookmarked this for the moment.

Do you think this would work with Poser Pro? I really like the lighting that I have seen so far in the forum.

The current version of Poser Pro does not do indirect light / global illumination.  It can be faked to a degree with other techniques, but the results tend to be pretty obvious for what they are (an attempt to fake global illumination) and for still-frame images, typically they don't save you a lot of work or render time unless you are always using a premade lighting setup, considering a lot of renders will be wasted work.

Next version of Poser Pro will include indirect lighting, when it is released.

Going through the tutorial as we speak. Thanks, BB - the renders are incredible. It really brings out details P7 choked on. Of course, I had to push it to the limit and did this obscene render setting in P8 with transmapped hair (visible in RayTracing on) and min shading rate at .5 and 8 pixel samples, 2 raytrace bounces, all on my poor little P4 single core 2.8gHz with 1 gig of RAM. Wasn't happy with me this morning: it had only rendered half the image (the hair half) after 7 hours of chugging.
Finally finished now: wonder which setting I'll be turning down first so speed things up a wee bit. 10 hours is a bit long, maybe, for a tutorial render. Perhaps I should read a bit more of the thread and then ask this question again... :rolleyes:

A lot of hair models have specific min shading rate set to zero - you may want to check each part of the hair (if it's a conforming figure, or just the prop part if it's not rigged) and force min shading rate to be 0.5 or even 1.0.  Personally I don't worry that much about making hair visible in raytracing any more except for very specific, simple hair models (Kozaburo's tend to render fast) - it just takes too damn long.  You may get a little more speed by turning off texture filtering for all the maps used for the hair also.

Quote - A lot of hair models have specific min shading rate set to zero - you may want to check each part of the hair (if it's a conforming figure, or just the prop part if it's not rigged) and force min shading rate to be 0.5 or even 1.0.  Personally I don't worry that much about making hair visible in raytracing any more except for very specific, simple hair models (Kozaburo's tend to render fast) - it just takes too damn long.  You may get a little more speed by turning off texture filtering for all the maps used for the hair also.

Thanks for that, pjz99... another thing to check and tweak! It's those kinds of things that make the difference in the whole experience. After I wrote the above post, I double-checked my hair settings and discovered that I had actually turned Visible in Raytracing off - did that in P7 - but then I had a look at the shading rate for the parts of the hair: they are all set to .2!!!
Sheesh.
And I was kicking myself for not checking the Visible in Raytracing tickbox, but come to find out Poser 8 happily imports all your P7 pz3 settings.

I'll do another render of the same scene tonight with all hair bits shading rate set at 1 and my render settings min shading rate also at 1 and see how the renders compare. And how the render time compares.

Thanks again for that! Words to the wise... geez, I love this forum!

For anything but transmapped hair and use of indirect lighting, I think 0.2 is a fine min shading rate - just for that, render times go nuts.

edit: actually this applies to raytraced shadows cast through this kind of model even without using indirect lighting (aspect of the same problem).

Quote - Bookmarked...    I have So much to learn..

Sheesh, you and me both, mate... what's nice -or not so nice, depending if you're buying or selling - about this lighting process is that it points out glaring flaws in shaders... in this case, a hair shader that I tried to GC whilst preserving its original structure:

Nope, that shader needs help. Think I'll try yours, Bagginsbill and see how we go. It's bound to be an improvement over this!

Also, Charlotte is meant to be that pale: she's an anaemic waif from the Edwardian era. Okay, they didn't have that colour lippie back in those days: I'm taking poetic licence, just a wee bit.

BTW, the eyebrows are a WIP for Antonia... just tweaking them a bit more and I'll be getting them to you quick-smart, David: I promise... :biggrin:

Robyn, if you want her deathly pale, you could try BB's albino shaders.

Thank you for the suggestion, HBorre. Might have a go...

Do you remember the Nodes for Dummies thread? Charlotte is wearing that shader - the one Bagginsbill gave me the recipe for all that time ago... unmolested and not much done to it basically because every time I tried to tweak it too much, it ended up making my character look shocking.

In any event, I didn't want anyone thinking I'd mucked around any with BagginsBill's lights - seeing how pale Charlotte was: the lights are as they came out of the pz3, just parented to various parts of Charlotte.

I will have a go at re-doing the hair shader using BB's one... waiting for WinXP to finish Un-Indexing Service... I have a question mark - [ ? ] - instead of a file count next to my hair material folder name which tells me Poser 8 doesn't know what's inside?

Quote - The current version of Poser Pro does not do indirect light / global illumination.

What a crock! I thought Poser Pro was supposed to be the "be all end all" of features. Do you know where I could find a tutorial for faking indirect lighting? Not that I'd do it all the time, but I think it would be interesting to try out based on what I've seen from the results I've seen here.

Quote - > Quote - The current version of Poser Pro does not do indirect light / global illumination.

What a crock! I thought Poser Pro was supposed to be the "be all end all" of features. Do you know where I could find a tutorial for faking indirect lighting? Not that I'd do it all the time, but I think it would be interesting to try out based on what I've seen from the results I've seen here.

I think Poser Pro 2010 will be the "be all end all" of features...

This is the setup I'm using - the small box behind the figure is a box with the same material room settings as box_1 in your scene - I bumped up the ambient value to 3.

Rim lighting is a specular effect and IDL doesn't contribute to that. I included a rim light in the scene. Did I forget to turn it on? Turn it on, and make sure shadows are re-enabled on it.

I experimented with a glow box attached to it, but it didn't make much difference, unless you moved the camera so that it wasn't a "rim light" anymore.

If you're using a backdrop, it can get in the way between the rim light and the figure. Don't just turn shadows off. Move the backdrop or the light.

Thx, I'd like to come up with something that gives more of the backlight effect like this - the highlights around the edges from a backlight. You're rim light was on, but I moved it forward and above to be in front of the backdrop prop - should I just move it behind the figure an crank it up a bit ? I'll keep testing.

Thanks..

http://www.dphoto.us/forumphotos/data/500/73IMG_1766.jpg

Quote - I like the lighting in the scene. Here is one of my tries with it....

Very nice - love the pose and POV. Great job with the hair! Tell us about how you did the hair.

Also very good! I love how the speculars played out on the skin here.

You jumped ahead of the class! I was going to do a scene with the "glow sphere" technique, too! Do you want to give me yours? I'll post it on my website if you like with the other(s) - yes there will be more. I've started working on the "bright sun outdoor" set.

Here's a preview. This is a work in progress - not finished yet. I mixed up the materials on the car by accident, leaving the wrong one on the bumper. I'll fix that and post the materials for the car, too. Also, the ground with puddles will be included.

 Very much looking forward to that, mostly for the materials. How's the render time with those reflective puddles?

The puddles cost practically nothing. It's the glass that is expensive. Render time for my old Dell laptop was under 10 minutes if I remember correctly.

 Wonderful to hear. Excellent way of teaching us, I think.

Quote - > Quote - I got a wild idea and decided to try it. Took a few hours of tweaking and rendering before I was happy with it. What I did was bring in Bb's EnvSphere and applied the ambient shader from his light box. I deleted all but one spotlight that was pointing at my figure's head and played with the balance of the light and the ambient on the EnvSphere until I got this.

Also very good! I love how the speculars played out on the skin here.

You jumped ahead of the class! I was going to do a scene with the "glow sphere" technique, too! Do you want to give me yours? I'll post it on my website if you like with the other(s) - yes there will be more. I've started working on the "bright sun outdoor" set.

Here's a preview. This is a work in progress - not finished yet. I mixed up the materials on the car by accident, leaving the wrong one on the bumper. I'll fix that and post the materials for the car, too. Also, the ground with puddles will be included.

I did screen captures of my light settings, render settings, and the material settings on the EnvSphere. I can post them here.  Are you asking for a copy of my pz3 file? Sorry, a bit confused on that point.

Quote - I did screen captures of my light settings, render settings, and the material settings on the EnvSphere. I can post them here.  Are you asking for a copy of my pz3 file? Sorry, a bit confused on that point.

 
I usually show screencaps of the settings, but people often forget to copy something accurately - that's why I'm trying the technique of posting the pz3 file. So, yes, I'm asking for a copy of the pz3 file.

What I do is remove all content that cannot be distributed and save a new copy. Poser scenes are allowed to be shared as long as they only contain Poser primitives, or things to which you hold the copyright. The props I included were mine (the EnvSphere) or primitives (the boxes).

So if you're of a mind to share that scene, send it to me, along with the render, and I'll post it on my site. I'll PM you my email address. Don't publish it, please.

Fantastic stuff!  I can't wait to try this out! 

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=338522

Sorry it took all day to get back to you. I made screen caps of my settings at the time that I got the balance that I wanted between the ambient on the EnvSphere and my main spotlight (which Points At V4's head).

After reading only the first couple of posts, I grabbed BB's lights and went to work on the attached pix.  It took three times to get these results since I had his bump up way too high in his face.

This is M4 wearing a Vss'd version of Jepe's Rodan  texture with my facial settings.  The VSS settings are set to give him a "moist" look.   The hair is a VSS'd version of Neftis' Billyhawk Hair using my own "orange" colored textures - meaning, I adjusted the color of Neftis' original textures.

I made no adjustments to BB's P8 Soft Studio light PZ3 except the settings.  Which I forgot to snap a photo of before setting Poser off on it's next render.

Because of the hair and the settings I used, this took 2 hours to render on my 3Ghz Mac Pro Quad-core with 6GBs or RAM.

After reading the remaining 5 pages of the thread, I tweaked the settings and started rendering again.  Unfortunately, I'm about to leave for the weekend so I won't see the results until late Monday night.

I'll post again then.

BTW, once again, THANK you BB!

Here's the settings for my single spotlight.

Latexluv, I noticed your displacement value in D3D's render setting is set to 0.0.  I wouldn't recommend leaving that way.  If you ever render a displacement intensive scene, you will crash the app.

Oh? What should I put the value at?

If you're not using displacements you can just uncheck it.  I usually leave it at 1.0.

You could even keep it at 0.2.  Just as long as it is not 0.0, you should do just fine.

When I load the studio I get the light box in the front of the figure and the dark wall on the left side as I look at the screen. I load the figure and the figure faces the light box. Is this how it is supposed to come in?

If so would it be possible to replace the lightbox with a plane and make it a one sided poly that don't show from the back? Or would it show as black from the back? Just a thought and am headed to bed so no time to try it.

KY

KY, yes it is loading correctly.

Somewhere early on BB explained the light box is parented to the main light, so you can move the light to wherever you want it and the light box will move with it. Or you can just increase the main camera focal length for a closer shot, which will exlude the light box in its starting position.

(Edited to add: remember to make the lights Point At your subject's focal point... head or whatever).

As far as I recall, there is an issue with rendering the back faces of one-sided surfaces - the render time goes through the roof. Not sure if this has been changed with any of the SRs.

Oh, and one more thing, for the record...

Quote - Also, my main light is neither a normal light, nor a specular only light. It is in-between. Look at its shader. The Diffuse_Color is RGB 96, not 255, nor 0. Clever? Eh? Eh?

Yes I invented it. What shall we call this sort of light?

I'm sure that's a tongue-in-cheek claim. I've been using this type of main light since my early IDL testing days, implemented my own way... see screenshot. :O)

One more thing for possible discussion. I notice that the main and rim lights in the tutorial scene have fall-off set to inverse linear, rather than inverse square. I have not yet found any mention of this in the thread. Was this simply the default, or intended that way?

And how is the light fall-off from the light box treated? I'm going away to find out....

It probably doesn't make much difference in an empty environment with a single centre-positioned subject, but with surrounding or backdrop geometry it surely would.

Correction: I suppose it would also affect the bounced light from the left hand wall.

Another thing that hasn't been mentioned - well, let's say not emphasised - is IDL does work with linear colours, so those of us GCing our materials shouldn't do that final correction. IOW, no:

Surface.Alternate_Diffuse = linearColour ** 1/2.2

@ my dearest friend m: please know that I am NOT contesting what you are saying at all - not in the slightest... you are my guru, next to BB!!! - but I am making this point here because IsaoShi brought up other unmentionables, so I felt empowered. And want to start a discussion on how they might think it best to handle this. Like:

Surface.Alternate_Diffuse = linearColour

or

Surface.Alternate_Diffuse = linearColour + specular

???

Excuse me quoting my own question, but not having an answer (yet) I experimented using a light meter material developed by... well, not me... guess who. Correct.

I'm not saying this is conclusive, but it certainly appears to demonstrate that the falloff for surface-emitted light is just as it should be - inverse square. I think.

Edited to add: this also demonstrates the rather random nature of IDL light calculations. I've been doing IDL renders on low to medium quality settings, and two consecutive renders with precisely the same settings can be quite noticeably different. Just something else to keep in mind...