Quote - ice-boy - guess what I found? The reflection data is included in the specular pass!

so you can use in photoshop a pass for only reflections?

fantaaaaaaaaaaaaaaastic.

My suggestion for those interested a linear workflow is to use OpenEXR where ever possible. That format is specified to be linear and most software seems to respect that.

Unfortunately, the Photoshop support for OpenEXR is very basic and it doesn't show extra outputs. There are 3rd party plugins like ProEXR.

To come up with an ObjectID from a color, it's red * 65536 + green * 256 + blue, assuming that your colors are in the 0-255 range. Yes, it is quite similar to the way colors in the UI XML are specified.

Notice the banding on the back wall. There was some very weak specular on the wall - I always do that for walls. Anyway, the banding is because I used photoshop levels to sort of GC the image so it would be easier to see the details. This is actually a bit of a problem.

For this reason, Stewers suggestion to use an HDR format is really important. Since we're dealing with linear colors, very dark things will only occupy the numbers from 0 to 10. If you post GC that, you lose the smooth gradients that are actually possible.

Quote - My suggestion for those interested a linear workflow is to use OpenEXR where ever possible. That format is specified to be linear and most software seems to respect that.

Unfortunately, the Photoshop support for OpenEXR is very basic and it doesn't show extra outputs. There are 3rd party plugins like ProEXR.

To come up with an ObjectID from a color, it's red * 65536 + green * 256 + blue, assuming that your colors are in the 0-255 range. Yes, it is quite similar to the way colors in the UI XML are specified.

AHA!! Thanks for that!!

stewer do you know what the texture coordinates,position and normal passes do? where can we use them?

thanks

Slow down ice-boy - I saw your question. It takes me some time to do the demos.
If I use words, people may not understand. You've asked like twenty questions already today and I'm going as fast as I can. (I'm at work, so have to sneak my Poser demos into the day.)

Quote - Slow down ice-boy - I saw your question. It takes me some time to do the demos.
If I use words, people may not understand. You've asked like twenty questions already today and I'm going as fast as I can. (I'm at work, so have to sneak my Poser demos into the day.)

sorry BB. i am so excited about PP 2010 now.

Quote - Slow down ice-boy - I saw your question. It takes me some time to do the demos.
If I use words, people may not understand. You've asked like twenty questions already today and I'm going as fast as I can. (I'm at work, so have to sneak my Poser demos into the day.)

Will you be going through each pass?

Let's start with the Normal pass.

The surface normal is expressed as a vector in XYZ, but the Normal pass converts this to a color. Red for X (left-right), Green for Y (up-down), and Blue for Z (forward-backward).

Using this information you can perform modulated effects based on the direction the surfaces face.

Unlike the N node, which produces components from -1 to 1, the Normal layer produces values from 0 to 1. (Or 0 to 255 if you prefer thinking in 8-bit integers)

It's not for looking at. It is for creating masks based on directions.

Depending on what tools you have, this may be only a little bit useful, or extremely useful.

Now how can you use this? An easy thing is just fill with white. Instant snow!

Bursting with excitement!!  Please go on...

Again, this is not to look at. It is for making masks.

I then invert the selection, and fill with white. Instead fog!

Nice examples BB, thanks for them!

Can you think of the most powerful procedural image manipulation tool we all have at our disposal? The Poser material room!

We can load these layers as images into a background material and then combine them using nodes to do various things after rendering.

So - to continue - let's look at the UV layer.

This is not 3D XYZ data, but 2D UV data, mapped onto blue and green. I cannot think of a single thing to use this for in Photoshop. But I can think of some interesting things to use this for in preparing textures. The biggest I can think of is baking 3D node and lighting effects into a texture!

We can render any effect we want into a layer. For example, we could render AO into a layer and simultaneously render the UV coordinates of what was rendered. Using this information, and doing some tricks with nodes, I can convert that back into a texture map for the prop or figure with the AO baked in!!!

Demonstrating this will take some time as it isn't easy, and will almost certainly require a matmatic script. I don't want to deal with all the necessary nodes by hand.

Give me some time to make a demo.

Perhaps Stewer can suggest other uses for the UV data. I don't actually know what he was thinking other than it was easy to do, so I'm just guessing about all the possible uses.

Hmm. On looking at the algorithm more deeply, it isn't possible to bake a texture in Poser even with this data. I would have to write a program to do it.

But the data is there - it is possible to do this.

I did think of another thing one could do, but it would just be an "etude" rather than a useful workflow as I can't think of a problem it solves.

I could replace the color map texture used on something in the render with a different texture, without rendering again. But I can't think of why I'd want to do this instead of just rendering again. For a figure, with multiple UV zones (think V4) it would be incredibly tedious. You'd need a mask id for each zone and it would be a pile of spaghetti nodes.

So - let's ask Stewer - why do we want the UV layer?

 One of the intentions behind the P, N, uv and ObjectID layers was that they allow (Python) developers to write software that applies custom shading.

For example, we've seen some incredible work from Olivier and other when it comes to non-photorealistic shading and this should enable them to do a lot more. Basically, when you're writing a full shader in source code, be it Cg, OpenGL Shading Language or Renderman Shading Language, you mostly use P, N, uv as the input data. With those new custom channels, one could take the output from Poser and implement a completely custom shading engine or just individual effects on top of it, for example screen space AO or sketch rendering. Or one render unlit plain colors and textures to the custom channels, which then an OpenGL application with the aid of the P and N channels could apply realtime per-pixel lighting on.

UV specifically could be used as just one example in a sketch rendering application to determine the stroke direction.

someone was asked why they used the position pass on the movie District 9.
forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php

this is the answer
''The P-ref pass, in our case is reference position, or pose. It was xyz world space coordinates at the pose position of the model/character. (standing pose at 0,0,0).

• The character then always has fixed/static local coordinates across the entire model, or character's body. (including cloths, different patches etc.)

One very nice thing about this is that you can always find the same place on the surface that you want, no matter where the character is, or oriented.

• You can use these coords as sort of UVs if you want.. stick mattes, textures, to the character with the STMap node.... with one great benifit, you don't have 100+ different patches to deal with, just one.

• You can always use these coords to run gradients, noise functions, etc. through/across the whole surface..

It's not necessarily for re-lighting per say.. it can be used in combination with.. normals, z-depth, world/local xyz coords.. for 100s of different things.. I created reflections, refraction, environment maps, lights, multi-texture sub-surface passes / sub-dermal textures in the soft skin.. in the close-up shots.

-Ben Pierre''

i forgot about the old poser pro.but when we use envspheres and bump maps. do we need to set the GC to 1 or do we let it at 2.2.

i am asking because if i would start to use PP 2010 what would i need to change in materials.

Bump maps always at 1.

A self-lit EnvSphere directly viewed doesn't matter. But it does in reflections. Any image that is color data should be anti-GC'd on the way in at 2.2 unless you know the image is already linear.

And any time you're using Poser Pro render GC, turn off any shader GC by setting my Gamma nodes to 1.

i think now that PP is realesed we can clean the VSS skin shaders of all the nodes. it can also be used for Tone mapping.

i will try it this week.

I don't think you can get back to 2-node shaders, but certainly they can be simpler. You still need Blinn for specular and my Shine logic to keep it simple to adjust one parameter. And subtract that from the Diffuse_Value for conservation of energy. You still need to subtract .5 from bump maps to make them work right.  You still might want a little SSS. You still want to be able to tint the skin. You still want to be able to use the Boost to control overall brightness.

You can get rid of the GC stuff, but that is hardly worth the effort - just set it to 1. Only a handful of nodes deal with GC.

i dont mean 2 node shaders. but we can basicly throw out everything that was done for gamma correction. and there are a lot of nodes for this.

plus it would be easier to find every for little changes

The GC is two math nodes and two Color_Math:Pow nodes - total of 4. Then one more to combine diffuse + specular could be skipped. So you'd save 5.

ok so i found this screenshot from the material room in one thread. so i see now the custom-output

so if we connect now a white diffuse shader we would get then a pass that is black/white.  if we do this we would get a matte for lights right?  i could then use a white light in poser and render it out. then in photoshop i could change the colors right? this would give us 100% control.

and we wouldnt even need to change every material because we could use a python script where we would add a diffuse node to every material.

this could be done right?

i see. i would have to use one light seperate. eh thats to much work he he :) 

Oh you were planning to change the light color, not the material color. Sorry, I misunderstood.

Well if you wanted to adjust the overall lighting, you don't need this. You just edit the diffuse layer. If you wanted to adjust the individual lighting per light, then what you're asking won't help.
You'd still need to turn each light on by itself and render that alone.

However!

There are scripts that do this already, including one that comes with Poser. It's in the menu Scripts/RenderControl/RenderPasses. I just tested it in PPro2010. It saved multiple layers of PNG files for each light, one pass per light. Cool! So I got a separate diffuse, specular, and shadow render for each of my lights, stored as PNG files. Because I had 3 lights, I got 9 files out of 3 renders.

It would not be hard to change it so that each pass was just one PSD file or any other kind of file you want.

can i  ask why this didnt work in previous versions? can SmithMicro make a SP3 that would fix this? come on. not everyone can buy PP 2010 . and everyone deserves this function. how many time did someoen had to spend hours and hours to load all body morps seperate. here its 100 times easier.

i mean a fix for Poser 8

Quote - i can confirm that full body morphs work  on the whole body.

can i  ask why this didnt work in previous versions?

Yes, you can ask. But the answer is obvious isn't it? It wasn't implemented at the time previous versions were released.

Quote - can SmithMicro make a SP3 that would fix this? 

Yes, they can. They could add any feature of Pro to P8, since they are built on a common code base now.

Quote - come on. not everyone can buy PP 2010 .

That is the central premise of having two products. You're looking at it wrong. Poser Pro is not a super version of regular Poser. Rather, regular Poser is a cheaper version of Poser Pro with some important workflow enhancements removed, in order to reach a larger market who just don't care about these features. Of course I don't know the exact figure, but I think it is fair to guess that a very large majority of Poser users never make their own morphs, nor do they make their own materials. You could almost argue that the material room (shader design) and the setup room (rigging) should be a Pro-only features, since the vast majority of users have zero use for those.

Quote - and everyone deserves this function.

And I deserve a Nikkor 500mm f/4 VR lens so I can more easily take pictures of birdies, but it is $8000 and I'm not getting one. Instead I have the Nikkor 70-300 VR ($450) and sometimes I scare the birdies away and have to walk farther, but I can still take pictures of birdies with this "reduced functionality" lens.

Questions like these are not Poser questions. They are marketing questions and are very complicated and there are no "correct" answers.

SM is a for-profit company with shareholders. They will (must in fact) do what maximizes shareholder value. They are not a philanthropic organization. They could make one product with all the features and sell it for $100, but the people who would make such decisions would be fired. They could sell one product at $500 but they would only reach a smaller market. By having two products at different price points, they can sell to a larger market. The hobbyist market (generally non-content creators with a lot of time on their hands) would not actually care for the FBM feature you're talking about, and they would not be willing to pay.

In the end, they have to choose some features to exclude from the lower price point product. Arguing about which exact set of those to exclude from the point of view of an individual's needs is fruitless. The decision has to be made on the basis of market segment statistics, optimizing the sale of 10's of thousands of units. Even if you could personally name 300 users for whom this matters, you're not even beginning to make a legitimate argument about the market.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand these principles, but it does require that you take off your "user" hat and put on your "businessman" hat.

Having said all that, it may well be that P8 SR3 will have this feature in it. I'm not involved in these conversations so I don't know. There is a beta of SR3 available to me but I have not downloaded it yet, so I can't say what's in it because I don't know.

fullbody morph should have worked 4 years ago.it was already in poser but it chashed poser.

 without full body morph you would need the whole day to load all parts seperate and then you would need to write a CR2.

i disagree that this function should only be in PP 2010. its a basic function that would make a lot of things easier.

Well it's free anyway.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2241486&sid=804edf1d7f7eb8f9d8bdacabd3cfee84&flatnum=1

if it works then this is fantastic for poser 8 users.

The utility for full body morphs from the thread linked above, is presently unavailable.  For the time being, the author suggests using Kaweki's utility in Renderosity FreeStuff. It is called Morpher.

Do a search, if I provide a link, it breaks the page.

LMK

Blast! I think I broke it anyway!

LMK

I have a test copy of P8 SR3 patch. Where do I look for this full body morph feature? I don't know what to look for to see if it is in there.

Well, I just bought Poser Pro 2010, but I'm scared to death to install it.  I'm afraid of compatibility issues with some of my content.  Silly, I know.

Quote - I have a test copy of P8 SR3 patch. Where do I look for this full body morph feature? I don't know what to look for to see if it is in there.

It's probably the Morph Brush tool that now works across body part group boundaries.

For previous versions it was always possible to load an OBJ, create a morph and then use the existing scripts to import as an FBM, but it's obviously a lot more convenient to have it work directly on a figure.

Quote - > Quote - I have a test copy of P8 SR3 patch. Where do I look for this full body morph feature? I don't know what to look for to see if it is in there.

It's probably the Morph Brush tool that now works across body part group boundaries.

For previous versions it was always possible to load an OBJ, create a morph and then use the existing scripts to import as an FBM, but it's obviously a lot more convenient to have it work directly on a figure.

No, the morph brush tool working across boundaries was introduced in Poser 8 already. ice-boy is talking about the ability to load a full body morph all at once across multiple actors, instead of having to load each actor as a PBM and then make an FBM to control them all.

I found it in Poser Pro 2010 under Figure/Load Full Body Morph. P8 doesn't have that.

i think its

object / load morph target

Quote - I have a test copy of P8 SR3 patch. Where do I look for this full body morph feature? I don't know what to look for to see if it is in there.

I just read about that in the PP2010 Manual.
Hopefully the same with Poser 8??????

Load Full Body Morphs: OBJ files can now be loaded as full body morphs without the need to break the OBJ into individual body parts beforehand. This is discussed further in “Loading Full Body Morphs” on page 490.
To load the modified body shape into Poser, follow these steps:

1. Load the original figure from the library into your scene, and select it to make it active.

2. Choose Figure > Load Full Body Morph. The Load Morph Target dialog appears.

3. Click the button to the right of the Geometry file section to locate the morphed OBJ file that you exported from your modeling application.

4. Enter a name for your morph in the Label field. This is the name that will be assigned to the parameter dials in the Body and individual body actors in the Parameters window.

5. Choose OK to complete the process. You should see morph dials in the body and under each individual body part.

Test the morph by adjusting the dial in the Body section of the Parameters palette.

• If the morph does not work, it may mean that the OBJ you imported did not contain groups. Check to see if a dial appears in any of the individual body parts. If they are absent, your OBJ file did not contain groups. Consult the documentation for your modeling program to determine how to export the groups with your OBJ file.

• If the morph works but it makes the figure “explode”, repeat the process. This time, check the Attempt Vertex Order Correction option in the Load Morph Target dialog. This might resolve the problem.

Well, one could just search the Poser Pro manual for "full body" and find:

Quote -
You can use a third-party application to create a full body morph for a Poser figure, and then use the Figure > Load Full Body Morph command to apply the complete morph to your figure. The Load Full Body Morph command will then split the morphs across each individual body part and create a parameter dial in the Body actor to control all of the individual body part morphs.

The Figure > Load Full Body Morph command was added in PP2010, which is what I think folks are referring to here.

It is different than the Object > Load Morph Target command (which is available in all previous versions of Poser, including P8). That command loads OBJ files as morph targets on only one body part at a time.

It's also different than the Figure > Create Full Body Morph command, which basically just links individual morph dial settings under a single "Body" morph dial.

Ok, as you mention, in PP2010 it is there.

Quote - I have a test copy of P8 SR3 patch. Where do I look for this full body morph feature? I don't know what to look for to see if it is in there.

I replied with the PP2010 Instructions below.

Maybe you see it there in P8 SR-3 Beta??
OR
It is in a different location in P8 SR-3 Beta?

Quote - Well, I just bought Poser Pro 2010, but I'm scared to death to install it.  I'm afraid of compatibility issues with some of my content.  Silly, I know.

I have P5,P6,P7,PP,P8 and PP2010 Installed.
I haven't encountered any problems to date. PP2010 installs as it's own program.

PP2010 is my Fav version of Poser.

Yup Poser Pro 2010 is definitely a winner!

Quote - Yup Poser Pro 2010 is definitely a winner!

It hasn't taken me long to grow fond of the Floating Library in 64 bit.

Quote - i think its

object / load morph target

Everybody seemed to just blow past my second post on this, without reading what I said. When I first asked the question I was at work and didn't have time to look it up. When NR posted in the evening, I looked it up.

I repeat:

Quote - I found it in Poser Pro 2010 under Figure/Load Full Body Morph. P8 doesn't have that.