mechanical? I mean..I can't seem to be able to see no human emotion in them..they so so argh..hard to describe it.. there's no softness in them. No real sensuality in them, no emotion about them..no matter how much you make them smile or change their eyes or anything.

I wanted to have two hands touching.. even the hands without the body is so unnatural. Argh.
Sorry..i had to explode. Got this image in my mind..stolen from a movie..sorry..but the hands are so not there. Any way I can mat hands with human skin and emotions?? ???

Pardon my explosion..

 Putting emotion into digital characters is incredibly difficult. One way to help would be to maybe make two people pose their hands the way you like, and take photos from it from different angles so you have a good reference of what the hands and fingers should really be posed like. Its easy to make a pose that "doesnt quite look natural" but it can be very hard to find out whats making it look unnatural.

Apart from that, good textures can definitely help. But its really difficult to make skin look realistic in bryce, because there is no such thing as sub-surface scattering..

One way you could use to fake sub-surface scattering is to use extremely blurry refraction/transparency. Basically, you use diffusion (and maybe ambience) for the surface color, speculairty for specular highlights etc. and transparent color for the subsurface scattering color. The blurry refractions will make the object look less transparent, but still translucent. But it will still most likely look different from real human skin i think..

Maybe you'll be able to tweak the look you want by combining a few renders in photoshop? One with a strong subsurface scattering effect with blurry refractions, then another without scattering effects, and maybe even a separate render for specular effects only? You could then combine them in photoshop, blend the translucency in where needed, etc. without having to re-render the thing over and over.

sub surface scattering???

elaborate..oh wise one. am at your feet listening... all ears..

 well, real human skin excists of several layers. there's a thin surface layer that gives the basic skintone, but underneith are more flehsy layers, veins, etc. In real skin, the light partly travels into the skin, and gets scattered around as it passes through the tissue underneith the surface layer. The tissue underneith the outer layer of skin is much more red and pink-ish tather then pale or tan or brown etc.
The scattering makes it so the skin looks soft and organic rather then hard and plastic.

You can see an extreme example of this when you find some dark place like a dark room or such, and shine through your fingers with a flashlight or something similar. Your fingers will light up with a red/orange color. This color is the result of the light from the flashlight traveling through the flesh of your fingers, getting scattered around while doing so.

In professional CG programs, shaders are created specifically to mimic these effects of multiple layers of tissue with their own colors and their own scattering behaviour. However, bryce doesnt have those.

What bryce does have, is a  "transparent color" which can be used to change the color of light as it passes through the object.

Bryce also has blurry refractions or transmissions (i forgot which name bryce uses and dont have it with me right here) which 'blur' the light as it passes through a transparent object. If the light gets blurred enough, it will no longer visually strike you as transparent, because you cant look through it and distinguish anymore whats on the other side. However, the light, while strongly blurred, still moves partly through the object, making it look translucent.

When this light gets blurred and moves throug the transparent object, the transparent color gets applied to the light passing through. As a result of this, the transparent color can thus be used to behave a bit like an 'internal scattering color' (the color the light picks up as it scatters through the flesh).

...it can also be because a lot of (other) people just don't bother with emotions. I've run into a problem with open mouths; the internal textures look so fake that I wind up retexturing them to dark colors (except for the teeth).

2nd Skins, special textures, etc., tend to help give some realism. You can do a lot of tweaking to get some expression out of the face. Here's a couple I use.

1. For medium and long-distance shots; I select each eyeball, and set Object, Point at, Main Camera. This gives you the famous 'eyes following you around the room', and establishes a connection, at least.

2. Dialate the eyes slightly (it expresses interest; it's why all the merchants in the market wear sunglasses, to avoid giving themselves away on prices). .2 or .3 is plenty.

3. Three! I meant three! A fanatical devotion to...;) Just tweaking dails, but sometimes favoring one side of the face to avoid the 'machanical symmetry'...I tend to raise one eyebrow, let one eyelid be lower than the other, etc.

Hope that helps.

And yet which are the most popular images here at Rendo?

Yes the emotionless,blank faced,bare arsed females with large plastic boobies and huge hair who just happen to be taking a walk through the mist.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1957603&user_id=4147&np&np

Paul..yes..assemetry helps.. but I'm not talking of that.  Each skin has a character in itself that has emotions.. The reason you'll look at a woman's skin and have emotional thoughts. Or a baby's foot and feel like caressing your cheek with it. Or a man's rough skin.. and want to soothe it with a kiss..

Incognitas... they looking at the sexual aspect of it.. a woman can be bland..but have a great figure.. and people will fall over her. Art/sensuality doesn't exist at that instant.

Pakled.. I love the hints.. esp no 1. I always wanted to create someone with those eyes following you.. creepy though..but wonderful. The eyes say loads.. and one look.. eyes talk, express..makes a big difference

Rayraz.. it is amazing..looking thru skin in the dark with a flashlight. Given all the aspects of skin.. maybe I wil have to render and layer it in photoshop. I do see what you mean with the sub surface scattering ..now that you've explained it. Interestingly.. I had this strange incident with photoshop..and light. I used  a glass poser figure.. dropped in a light..I didn't expect it to go thru the glass..it did.. creating this strange effect..like as you said.. when you look at your skin in the dark thru a torchlight. But it was glass.

Yes..i'll have to work on the translucent (spelling??) and the blurry bits..

this is the original skin..

the hands without the photoshopped texture.. I used the world top thinggybob.. and I diffued it and gave it a slight..so slight transperency.
I have to  crop..so never mind the top.. I liked it for one reason.. my housekeeper walked past, saw it and exclaimed that the top bit of the hands..where the texture colour change isn't there..looks like my Dad's elbow.. I have no idea how those folds along the muscles happened. And it is true..looks exactly like his forearm..not the hand.. a few months before he became a star. he had lost tons of weight.
Probs is.. there is a colour change.. and the rest of the hands look a bit weird. Mind you..I haven't touched the fingernails.. and I had to put one small tiny light under the palm of the hand.

ok.. have i jumped into a murky well or floating on a flying carpet, or just stuck in the middle of a rather muddle puddle?

btw..hate the blank thumb..lighting or texture probs?

 Usually the diffusion color would be about usual skin-color we see every day, then the transparent color would be a pink or red color.
From there its a matter of tweaking the amount of transparency, and the saturation and brightness of the transparent color. Also, if the transparent color doesnt look quite right, you could try playing around with the hue. The blurryness of the transparency should be very high. The amount of blurryness is controlled with the brightness of the specular halo.

Currently most likely, your object is too transparent, and the transparent color is too orange instead of pink/red-ish

oh i only now see the second one. That looks quite good! I dont think that one is too transparent anymore now.

If i have to guess a setup off the top of my head i would do the follwoing:

• 1 render with too much transparency, and exagerated transparent color
• 1 render without transparency, and a normal skin color

then i would set it up in photoshop

• translucent render at the bottom, on normal mode
• normal non-translucent render on top, on luminosity mode
• normal non-translucent render on top, on color mode (or alternatively you could split this in one for hue, and one for saturation, if needed)

Then from there i would tweak the transparency of the top two layers to let some of the overly translucent render shine through from underneith. You could also use a mask to selectively favour, or disfavour translucency in certain areas.

 ooh that really does start to look good!
I wonder if TIR makes a difference or not.. i actually never experimented with that..

too  much yellow? I increased the transparency colours in bryce to a reddish hue..
I quite love the way it is going.. esp with the sort of background..the lighting is a bit yellowish..
can feel the skin a bit now.. delicate touch.. .. a gently glow..

TIR.. wise person..please elaborate

I'm not sure if its too yellow.. this is typically one of those things where i would play later on with a new layer to adjust colors slightly. either with a colorgradient or photo filter or curves...
some areas it looks slightly over-illuminated? not sure why..

 TIR = Total Inernal Reflection. It allows the light to bounce around inside the object if the refraction dictates it. When TIR is turned on, the refraction can generate reflections both when the light enters the object, and on the inside when it leaves the object, instead of only upon entering.

i hope that quick explaination helped a bit. sorry i gotta run lol got a date!

run!! don't even wait!! have fun...  :b_cool: and have a gorgeous time! and I hope she is a wonderful person..

I'll work out on the yellowish and the over illumination in the final ..
thanks a gazillion for helping out on this.. hugs and cheers and bless ya!

TIR.. .. would be interesting.. really interesting though..,,
think we can try that if you walk me thru it?
as for now.. vamoose and scoot and shoo!! your date awaits...

thank you guys for this discussion... though it hasn't gotten thru to me yet.  My thought  is how come the painting masters of the past and present could paint such people that their humanity and souls were unquestionably there on the canvas.

artboy..paint.. the mastering of light, how to create a diffused look, understand light and paint.. and strokes..
yes.. they did capture souls on canvas. ..... expression, skin, light, colour. and a passion.

You might  want to actually check out tutorials on '2nd skins'.  It's one way that people put textures on Poser people.

That being said, the textures you have right now look great. Keep 'em up.

thanks pakled.  I'll look up the tutorials. I still find a lot of them way too flat though.sadly.

Rayraz.. one minor probs has cropped up.. because both renders are transparent.. this has come up in several places. 

Either

1. I post work it on photoshop.. cleaning it up
2. reduce the transparency in bryce.. but that spoils the whole effect.

Did something go wrong somewhere? I rendered to disc at 300 dpi.. 30 inches by whatever. Just to see what it would be like.The bigger..the more faults you see.  i rendered it with the sky background ..the grey -reddish one..(removing the grass as they showed thru the lower hand,  then removed the background.. thinking I'll photoshop it in after I tweak the three layers. I want that anyway as my background..

Maybe I ought to 'cheat' and render it small.. As it is, with the background, I don't need it that large!

Your views?

There is less yellow here.. I exxagerated the transparency colour to a more reddish tinge than before
The background had lots of yellow..so that shone thru the skin.

 Do you have blurred refractions on in the premium render settings?

nopes..i rendered normal..
um..er??

aha.. now i know why I um-ed and er-ed in my previous post.

blurry transmissions
blurry reflections.

blurred refractions???

Ah okay, thats the origin of the problem then :)

Blurry refractions are in the premium render options.

Refraction is what happens when light travels from one medium into another medium with a different refractive index. For instance, from air, into glass. The light changes direction once it crosses over into the glass object. This is how lenses work etc.

In real life, surfaces are rarely perfectly smooth, the rougher the surface, the less clear the surfaces reflections are. This is why brushed metal is shiny, but doesnt look like a mirror.

Imperfections on transparent surfaces can do the same thing to refractions (like matte glass). In bryce this gets implemented by randomly changing the angle at which the surface changes the direction of a light ray. This change is made relative to the refraction index of the material so the refraction index still plays a roll in the final look of the refraction.

This link, while a tutorial for blender, illustrates the effect quite clearly => http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/glossy-reflectionrefraction/

In the situation of fake sub-surface scattering I use blurred refractions. That way i still keep the translucency, while obscuring the stuff thats seen on the other side of my transparent object by blurring it beyond recognition.

I quite like the feel of it..the lower hand is soft, gentle. The upper hands.. manly. Both are actually Michael's hands.. I'll adjust the curves though.. and the saturation.. the red is a way bit too much..

btw..you are a welcome sight..i was waiting for you to go thru what me done and help me get out of that muddle puddle!  :biggrin: 

OH...am i dumb..i just reread your post.. oops..
I can't find blurry refractions in premium..

 ahh yes thats what i meant, blurry transparency :) i didnt remember if bryce used the term blurry refraction or blurry transparency.. anyways, your settings seem to work quite well!

thanks a gazillion, billion trillion times!
hugs and cheers