Quote - I'm curious about your computers specs now Bagginsbill...

I7 860 (8 threads full speed), 8 GB RAM, 1 TB disk, 1 TB external disk, ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics

And it has a handle on the case - I take it with me wherever I am.

Quote - > Quote - It's almost not fair for me to play.

 

Noooooooooo! You have to play!!!

I Agree, so if he even explains a couple of those incredible shaders he comes up with, everyone wins.

Quote - I Agree, so if he even explains a couple of those incredible shaders he comes up with, everyone wins.

He will, someday. Patience.

Quote - He will, someday. Patience.

This sounds like you know something!  I hope it's what I think it is

What I do know (and feel at liberty to say, Kalypso) is that BagginsBill is a very generous man with his time and talent. Hidden in these threads are not only incredible shaders he has developed but also his explanations for why and how they work.

Yes, there's more - there's always more - but if an aspiring Poser shader developer were to just compile all these shaders and explanations into like a workbook and study and use them, that developer would be far, far ahead of the pack.

Wouldn't you agree?

Question for Bagginsbill - or I guess for anyone who knows.

I was watching a tutorial for GI in V-ray in Maya and in it the instructor was showing how he made an enclosed room, but with a see-through front wall. I say see-through becasue that's what it was, not transparent.

A transparent wall would of course allow photons to escape, and that would defeat the purpose. What he wanted was a wall you could render through, that the camera could see through, but the photons couldn't escape through. Essentially he used a double-sided plane that was opaque to photons on the inside, but transparent to the camera on the outside.

Is that at all possible with Poser's shaders? Such a thing would be excellent for interior renders where camera movement is a problem, where you don't have the room to back off enough to get the shot you want without drastically decreasing the camera focal length or  increasing the scene scale.

Attached Link: Looking through walls

One method is explained by BagginsBill in the attached link.

Quote - One method is explained by BagginsBill in the attached link.

I guess I'll have to check that out, so thanks.

I'm not sure that's the same thing I'm talking about though. I was wondering if it was possible to do it more simply, with some sort of shader network, instead of lens tricks.

Even so, that's prettyy damn clever, although I don't have the time at the moment to study it.

The lens trick I posted only works up to a point. If you push it too far, it produces wild distortion.

Schecterman - I can't think of a way to do this with materials in today's Poser. One of the drawbacks of the node system is that we can't make new ones by writing code. So we can only do things by assembling a fixed set of functions.

One of the key missing functions is a node that tells us where the ray is coming from - behind or in front of the polygon. We have the Edge_Blend node that tells us the dot product (cosine of the angle between) the ray and the surface normal, and it should be possible to use that. But, unfortunately, it returns the absolute value of the dot product - it is always a positive number from 0 to 1. If it was -1 to 1 (not the absolute value) then we'd know when we're behind the polygon whenever the dot product is negative. Alas - there is no way to get at the negative values.

I have other uses for such a feature. For example, the phenomenon of total internal reflection (such as produced by a cut diamond) can be correctly simulated only if I know whether I'm doing a reflection from inside or outside the object. If Edge_Blend had a mode where the dot product could be positive or negative, I could do the accurate reflection.

Another example - the ratio of index of refraction passing through a polygon from the "front" is different than from the back. But Poser's Refract node pays no attention to this. If I could read which side I was on, I could make this work correctly by switching the IOR.

Oh well - maybe in Poser 9.

Meanwhile - the real problem isn't a need for funky shader/camera tricks. The real problem is how to see through a nearby obstruction. We need the camera to implement the "hither" feature in rendering instead of just in preview. If it did, you'd just set it. A wall (or windows or hung pictures, etc.) would not be visible to the camera, but would be visible to IDL, reflections, etc.

Very interesting BB and thanks for the explanation. I'm going to have to look up some of your other shader threads - I know there are many.

The hither effect in render would be great. Why in the world did they make that only for preview anyway? It seems almost half pointless - is good for seeing through your walls to pose people or whatever inside, but obviously of no use for rendering.

So barring all these other things, it seems the remaining option would be to increase the physical size of all the objects, in order to be able to have the room to move the camera around in a "small" room. Of course that could play hell with shaders designed to operate on a set scale.

Well, whatever, I'm looking forward to this room project starting so I can have an excuse to play around with Poser's materials and GI in an arch viz capacity. So far I've only really used Poser to arrange people for export, but my recent tests at GI and shaders in Poser have shown me it could be worth it for me to learn it. It could stand to be faster - and I hope they're working on creating more optimizations and options, but the results can be made far better than I earlier gave it credit for.

I think the winner should have to do a tutorial on how they lit the scene (please) '.';

We're anxiously waiting...

Any updates on the progress you'd care to share with us, templargfx? ;-)

Hopefully I didn't miss this if it was already discussed but I have a question concerning the Poser versions that the file will be made available.

Don't laugh but I still only have Poser 3,4 (with PP)and 5.

Meh....Okay..go ahead and laugh.

8 )

Tom

Tom I think he's going to just do the basic thing and have some textures. Or maybe not.

Personally I'd like to see just OBJ files, no UV maps, no textures, just make it a full out texturing/materializing/lighting/rendering challenge.

if you want to have it a texturing challenge then you will need the OBJ's Uvmapped, or those taking part will have to UVMap them themselves before they can texture.

Quote - if you want to have it a texturing challenge then you will need the OBJ's Uvmapped, or those taking part will have to UVMap them themselves before they can texture.

Not technically, no. UV Mapping is part of texturing.
That was the idea behind me saying I'd prefer to see it a full blown challenge, but that probably is sort of pushing it.

Meanwhile, if anyone is interested, there's a challenge going on here:

Art Studio Rendering Challenge

I don't know how well Poser would be able to compete with what's already there, but I know there are people here who don't use only Poser, so they might be interested.

At any rate, it's a cool model you can get for free. ;-)

Although it's all messed up. I'm having to completely rebuild the entire frame and windows and remap everything. I've been doing that for a full day because it's in terrible shape and haven't even begun to even think about rendering it yet.

It looks like your basic 3ds max modeling disaster - way too many polygons, flipped normals all over the place and UVs that are just totally out of control.

You working on that challenge too ?  The mesh is a bit of a mess - I rebuilt the entire building in the end, it was easier that way :)

Quote - You working on that challenge too ?  The mesh is a bit of a mess - I rebuilt the entire building in the end, it was easier that way :)

Yep, I'm working on it. :-)

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time fixing it so far. It's just appalling as it is.

I can't believe the amount of unnecessary polygons, for one thing. I completely rebuilt the entire building too. Completely -  I just couldn't work with that tragedy of a structure. ;-)

And the light fixtures, and the pots and the pencils and pens and books... I don't know what I'm going to have left of the original by the time I'm done but at least it will look similar. ;-)

It started out as something 850,000 polygons and I have it down to a little over 150,000 now. I'm going to use instances for all the recurring objects like the books, pencils, pens and all.

That model would be about useless for anyone using Poser. After I finish my fixed version I'm going to see if the moderator would be interested in offering it for people who want to work with something sensible instead of the insanity they're offering now. ;-)

'A bit of a mess' is an understatement, the mesh is ridiculous in some places. That 80,000 tri tablecloth alone will give me nightmares for a week.

Quote - 'A bit of a mess' is an understatement, the mesh is ridiculous in some places. That 80,000 tri tablecloth alone will give me nightmares for a week.

LOL!

I just deleted that. ;-)

And you gotta love all those flipped polys from mirroring objects in 3ds max.

Not sure that arists need a prize, old son, or a sample.

Is it safe yet to assume that this idea died? ;-)

Quote - Is it safe yet to assume that this idea died? ;-)

Yeah, I guess that would be a safe assumption, lol.