I'll follow the above directions, and render again.

Forgot? I guess I didn't fully understand. I thought I had done that. Oh, well, my bad. Perhaps I'll learn. Thanks for being patient with  me.

OK, we'll see what the next render looks like.

By the way, I don't like the washed-out look of IDL only (as I mentioned above).

You aren't able to judge yet whether you like IDL or not, because you're looking at overcorrected images. You're not looking at what they really look like. You have the opposite problem than most Poser users. Instead of darks too dark, darks are too bright.

Gamma correction brings the darks up where they should be. But doing it twice takes them past where they should be, resulting in a washed out appearance. This has nothing whatsoever to do with IDL.

Question - Are you using really high render settings for these test renders? If so, you're wasting your time, immensely.

For quick evaluation of lighting, use:

Pixel Samples = 2
Min Shading Rate = 2

It will go much faster. Also, render half size. It's a quick pulldown option on the render tab of the preview window. It usually says "Full". Click that and choose "Half".

Note that the meter is telling me the diffuse light level is good - perhaps a teeny bit dark. But you have no specular at all.

You will not be able to judge skin shader quality with no specular effects. Much of what makes skin look like skin is how specular reflections behave. My shader is set up to do a decent job with that, but not if there isn't any specularity in the lights.

Of course I understand that this last render was IDL only, which is only diffuse lighting. But keep an eye out for balance when you do the rest of the lighting.

Setting up a uniform ambient illumination like that is not the point of IDL. That looks as bad as Poser 5 era skin shaders where the ambient was used to boost the ambience. It looks fake because it is.

Put him in a realistic environment, like this, and add a sun light.

Set yours like mine, Synchronize to apply them, then render.

In particular, with IDL, you don't need so much faked SSS.

Well, hey now, that looks good! Your lighitng is perfect. Well done.

Do you think his skin is a bit pale? Try putting a very light pastel brown in the PMC:Tint color chip. Synchronize and render. Try different colors to get a feel for how that behaves. Fine tuning the color of a texture set is pretty easy using that. You can get all sorts of different ethnic looks with it.

At the very bottom of the parameter nodes is one called PM:Boost. You can use that as an overall luminance adjustment for the final skin, including all its effects.

The PM:Diffuse Reflectivity control is another way to alter the skin luminance. It controls how much light is reflected immediately from the top-most layers of skin. If you decrease that, less is reflected there, and more is reflected from the sub-surface, using the SSS color. Decreasing that value will make the skin look more red and translucent.

Don't forget to Synchronize after making changes to the Template Skin shader.

Does the two-light image look better than the one-light image? I believe the shadows look a little softer.

I could go either way. We're in the realm of subtlety that could be largely overwhelmed by the differences in our monitors. My laptop monitor isn't so great. To me, the latest looks a little washed out. But the light meter tells me what's there and it looks good - decent contrast and max levels are in the right place. 

I'm on the road and about to drive home. In a few hours I'll be able to look at these on my good monitor and tell you what I think. I trust that one.

 Is there any way to save this texture, as it's been modified, under a new name, so that it could be applied to another M4 model from the PoserPro2010 Library?

Yes. Go into the material room. In the library window switch to the Materials category.

Select a folder where you want to save this. Maybe you want a new subfolder first, which you can do in the library - there's a button at the bottom to create a new subfolder.

Having created or selected the folder where you want it, select some part of M4 as the current actor. Then click the "+" button at the bottom.

You will get a prompt dialog to enter a name. Type something useful. Also there is a choice for a single material, or a material collection. You want to use the material collection option. This will save all the materials of the entire figure in one file.

Hit OK.

In the future, you can reload this. Select M4, then you can double click the material collection you saved, or you can grab the icon and drag and drop it on M4.

You can also save partial material collections. For example, suppose you just want to save the skin zones, but not the eyes or mouth materials. Then you'd use the "Save Subset" option.

 Ah, wonderful. Thanks for the information, Bagginsbill. I am going to save it.

Another tip. When you save anything from Poser in your library, it tries to make an icon from your scene or materials. I find these not so.

You can render anything you want and export the image as the icon for your new library items.

Traditionally these are 91 by 91 pixels, but in Poser 8 and Poser Pro 2010 you can make them any size you want within reason. The library GUI forces these images to be a certain size, but when you click one, you get a bigger version. Also you can make them all big in the tile list. Very nice if you have a lot of screen space to work with.

Anway, if you have a material collection called Foo.m6c, then the corresponding icon is Foo.png, in the same folder. Just export a render as the rightly named .png file and it will work.

Then refresh that folder and it will show up in the GUI.

 Ah, great. Thanks for another tip.

 I want to thank you all, especially bagginsbill, for a good deal of help. I feel I've learned something about IDL and IBL, and editing shaders. I've saved the pages of this thread as pdf files. I'm going to use this to work on another shader, and soon, to work in the knowledge. 

I hope this isn't derailing what was a great thread to go through.  And I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere and I missed it.

Is it possible to use the environment sphere for lighting, but not have it render to get the image to have a good alpha map?

Thanks everyone.

Indi.

Hi all,

Nevermind, I got it.  :)

Indi.

Quote - Hi all,

Nevermind, I got it.  :)

Indi.

What solution did you go with to do that?
Generally i add another environment sphere and scale it down to 99.9% without adding any image on it, and i tick off the "visible to raytracing" box. But there is for sure a better solution :)

I was mistaken.  I had turned off a switch in D3D's XO (visible in render) that gave me the alpha... but didn't use the light.

I agree, there must be a better way.