@BB, under non disclosure clause here, aren't you? So something is in the works, folks. Just be patient.

Quote - > Quote - The lacrimal and the lower eyelid will always be unconvincing until Poser updates it's material room with better shader nodes.

Mmmph mphfh fffhhsmppfh, mpfhfhfp hmfpmf mfpmmm.

Boy I hope that's you trying to talk with tape over your mouth! ;)  I can't think about upcoming versions of Poser.  I'll get restless until I have it set up ion my computer.  I know you can't say anything so I won't ask questions except this one:  Will there be mmmph mpfhh mphfphf....

[dragged off by the Poser police]

how come DOF is slow in poser? i thought that in reyes rendering DOF is fast?

thanks

Poser DOF is done (I think - not sure) by rendering the image from multiple camera positions and then blending (averaging) them together. So if you want really good DOF, you use a lot of samples. For example, if you set Pixel Samples = 16, then each rendered pixel is the combination of a 16x16 rectangle of sub-pixel samples - that's 256 - each of which was created by moving the camera  a little bit and re-evaluating the render. So that's 256 renders in 1. Compare that to the usual 3x3 sub-pixel samples, good enough for a little anti-aliasing, which is only 9 renders in 1. Doing 256 samples for each pixel takes a long time.

As an example of extreme DoF in Poser, here is "Balls2". This was done with 16x16 pixel samples. It took about 3.5 hours on my 8-thread I7 system.

I widened the aperture so that the DoF would be very shallow.

How do you rate the bokeh? I think it is bad, and until Poser changes the DoF technique, I would not go this far trying to feature the bokeh.

Observe the shape of the sun's specular highlight - the little hot spot on the balls. In the blurred versions, it is a square! No real camera has a square aperture, so this is a bit of a fail for photorealism.

Quote - Obviously 'bokeh'or DOF or Depth of field has nothing to to with reality, as the human eye doesn't perceive objects in that way.

Apparently you did not see the thread title. The word is photorealism, not humaneyerealism.

Quote - It is an strained attempt to turn a photographic bug into an advantage, an artistic effect that is most overused and tiresome, as bagginsbill has demonstrated.

I didn't demonstrate that's it's overused and tiresome. For a portrait of a human, or a flower, or a bug, I think it's always better than leaving in a distracting and irrelevant background. I and millions of others purchase lenses specifically to achieve that effect. If you don't like it, it proves nothing as to whether millions of others like it or not. Sales of expensive lenses with great bokeh disprove your assertion.

I thought all the images I linked to were fantastic, and if they did not display nice bokeh, would have shown less artistic merit.

Quote -  Unfortunately for them (the photographers) most people don't like 'bokeh' or whatever you call it.

You've clearly ignored its meaning. Bokeh is not blur - the word for blur is blur. Bokeh is the word for the characteristics of that blur - how it is created - the distribution of samples and how they combine. Is it jarring, or gradual, creamy or splotchy? This is the question that is asked by "how is the bokeh"? And it is truly absurd to claim that people don't like good bokeh. If that were true, then film producers would not buy million dollar lenses - there are plenty of much cheaper lenses that produce the same focal range, sharpness, color fidelity, and lack of abberation, but unfortunately with bad bokeh.

People who look at a blurred region prefer good bokeh over bad bokeh, by definition. The meaning of good bokeh is "blur that people prefer". To say otherwise demonstrates what? Ignorance? Stupidity? Willful disregard for others?

Quote - Serves only to prove that taste and style is more important than any technical knowledge.

This is a very tiresome, and trollish statement. Nobody said anything about what is most important to the point that style or taste become non-issues. Claiming that any single factor is so dominant that all other factors have no place in our thought processes is just ... mmmmph. I'm not allowed to use the appropriate words here.

Nobody is demanding that all CG artists pursue realism. By the same token, anybody arguing that it is an artistic sin to pursue realism at all, in any way shape or form, and should not discuss it, and will not allow it to be discussed without objecting to it, is being an ass.

Hi I dont understand this statement .

It seems to me that modeling the eyelid geometry with
some simple thickness to the rims would help alot without the need for yet more
"spaghetti" in the shader room

Here is a very primitive model/render I cobbled up in C4D to demonstrate.

Cheers

This is not cool.

http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2006_potc_dead_man_chest...002.html

I don't care what sort of story you've got, I'm not paying to see that in a theater.

This is cool.

http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2006_potc_dead_man_chest...003.html

Don't even try to argue this point - the second image is the only one I'd pay to see and a billion dollars agrees with me.

Quote - "and the lower eyelid will always be unconvincing until Poser updates it's material room with better shader nodes."

Hi I dont understand this statement .

It seems to me that modeling the eyelid geometry with
some simple thickness to the rims would help alot without the need for yet more
"spaghetti" in the shader room

Here is a very primitive model/render I cobbled up in C4D to demonstrate.

Cheers

Wolf - you may be right, but I object to the incorrect conclusion there will be more spaghetti. You're a respected authority on CG (by me and others) so be careful what expectations you set.

[EDITED] I said more, but I feel I said too much. If you saw what this said before, please disregard.

Everybody just stop slamming Poser because it's driving me crazy.

I'm under NDA. Shut up for a few months. Do the best you can. Take advice that all is lost with a grain of salt.

"Wolf - you may be right, but I object to the incorrect conclusion there will be more spaghetti. You're a respected authority on CG (by me and others) so be careful what expectations you set.
Look - my human shaders for P7 are currently 40+ nodes. In Poser Pro 2012 they are 2. I have perfect lacrimals now. I can't say more."

Hi Bill My point is some Problems with "realism" (Yaa I hate that subjective term too), can be resolved with better mesh construction which would make people less dependent on one programs native shader system when using there models.
As much as I May Love Vray or Maxwell I would never buy a Figure model That Only looked "right" with the proprietary Shaders of those render engines,
an eyelid should look physically like an......eyelid.
 wether render in poser ,Modo, Daz Studio, Mental ray, bryce etc.

But Maybe here in 2011 My expectations  are too high.

Cheers

I agree in principle, but what I need to tell you I can't. Incorrect geometry is a factor. But... trust me, the dominant problem with Poser-itis of the eye area is that the correct shader cannot currently be implemented.

I could demonstrate some amazing before-after stuff, but I'm not allowed.

I would also point out that most people don't even use the shaders in the renderers you mentioned correctly, either.

Quote - I would also point out that most people don't even use the shaders in the renderers you mentioned correctly, either.

Alright, given that this thread is about "photorealism," I'll bite on this . . .  So what are "most people" (I presume this includes me) doing wrong?

They don't configure the lacrimal and eye white for sub-surface scattering, or the SSS values are set wrong. You can sort of get away with it on skin, but not these other places. And thin skin, like the eyelid - lots of SSS there too.

It is also SSS that softens the diffuse effect of bumps, i.e. small deviations in surface normal. When they use a Lambertian diffuse shader instead of SSS, it looks really wrong to have the bump depth set correctly. So people turn the bumps down, because they're using a Lambertian diffuse and they have to, otherwise the skin looks excessively dry and bumpy. But then the loss of variation in the normals adversely affects the specularity, causing it to be too even. If they notice, then they start doing specular maps, introducing variation in specular reflectivity that is not real. These maps are there to compensate for the inadvertant fakeness of the specular, due to trying to fix the fakeness of the diffuse.

The whole house of cards falls down at the slightest deviation in lighting or viewing angle.

When it's all working right, you are fooled into thinking it's a photo.

Close your eyes and ask a friend, holding a flashlight, to point it at your eyes. You can easily tell when they are doing so, even with your eyes shut. That means a ton of light is passing right through the eyelid and the eye. Even from the side, I can see the light.

Attached Link: Bronwyn's Portrait

Now, despite Robin's excellent work, I would NEVER mistake this render for a photo.  The hair, Bronwyn's nose, and her flesh simply don't look real to my eye--even though this is my character and my render.

Quote - That makes sense, but how do we know what values are "right?" 

Oy - this will take days to answer, but I'll try to give you the 10,000 foot level view.

First, you have to choose the right shading model. Then you have to tune it correctly. One way is to ask me, and you'll get the exact right answer, within the limits of what Poser can do. Sometimes I'll say there is no decent solution, but most times I have one. This is often how people have recently gotten good glass, water, leather, suede, gold, silver, copper, etc. for Poser. And this is how some have gotten decent  (not good) skin. I can only do decent with Poser as is.

Other ways can be almost as effective, or horribly pointless, depending on:

a) How good are you at recognizing what you see in real life or in real photos - i.e. are your observation skills actually good enough to isolate realistic from fake, and be able to say why?

b) How much do you know about the parameters - what effect will happen if you raise or lower each in isolation - and in combinations, how do they alter each other's effects?

In general, people guess, render, and refine. If they don't understand what the shader parameters do, the refine is usually just another guess. If they do understand, they observe the differences, and make a parameter adjustment that moves hopefully closer to realism.

Certain shading problems don't require any experiments at all. For example, the Fresnel reflection coefficient for a dialectric material (such as glass, or car paint) are perfectly given by a fixed, well known equation. Such equations are usually built into the shading system of a renderer, but unfortunately this is not the case in Poser. I have published shaders that replicate this in 26 nodes, but people get wiggy about that. I don't know why. If it was built in, but inside it really did require 26 lines of code, why would you care? So when I give you a glass shader that does the same thing in Poser, I have to give it to you in node form, and unfortunately you have the totally unnecessary but inescapable opportunity to see the guts and react with fear and loathing. Ignore the guts. Why do you care?

Now there are some shading problems that are so popular, that there are published sources with detailed physical values you can just look up and plug in.

For example, for SSS, there have been some decent actual measurements made and widely published as to the reflection, scattering, and extinction coefficients required in a dipole diffusion model approximation of skin, apples, potatoes, ketchup, various forms of milk, wax, etc. If you have access to a shader system that accepts these parameters, you can just type them in from published sources and you won't need to experiment at all.

As to Robyn's shader, either she made a mistake, or something's gone wrong when you switched textures, because that isn't even slightly realistic. There is no specular effect at all. That's the biggest problem at the moment. There are others, but that's like 80% of the fakeness right now.

I forgot your question:

Quote -  And wouldn't these change, depending on the lighting conditions?

Approximations change, yes.

But with accurate material simulations, the response to all lighting conditions is correct, and you have nothing to adjust.

When you find yourself forced to adjust shaders after adjusting lights, what you're dealing with is that your shader is naive. It has left out some important part of the equation.

In general, the reason my shaders work in all lighting conditions is they are correct, not guesses or bad approximations, but accurate implementations of what actually happens with real light and real molecules.

You then may ask why does it take so many nodes to produce the right equations? Why are the correct realism equations not built into Poser? Why have the nodes stayed the same for so many years, using the primitive and incorrect ultra-basic things we find in there?

Go look at the arguments in this thread, and you'll find the answer.

"For ten years it has been done incorrectly but in the next incarnation it will finally be set right. Unfortunately I can not show you because I am forbidden."

Sounds suspiciously like religion to me! Unfortunatly I am not a believer.

Quote - ... Poser DOF is done (I think - not sure) by rendering the image from multiple camera positions and then blending (averaging) them together. So if you want really good DOF, you use a lot of samples. ...

....

In my subjective opinion, poser does not do that. The reasons for this can be seen in your image itself:

• the specular highlight and the reflection on the blue ball are relatively sharp, but if the camera would move they should be blurred as much as the specular on the far ball. If you would use a real camera to photograph the clouds, you would focus on the clouds, even if you photograph the clouds through a mirror that is only some inches away - specular highlights are just reflections of light-sources.

• try to use depth of field through a window (ie refraction node). It should work with a jiggle-camera.

I rather think firefly is using some trickery with the z-buffer to realize the depth-of-field, of course a am not sure either.

Quote - "and the lower eyelid will always be unconvincing until Poser updates it's material room with better shader nodes."

Hi I dont understand this statement .

It seems to me that modeling the eyelid geometry with
some simple thickness to the rims would help alot without the need for yet more
"spaghetti" in the shader room

Here is a very primitive model/render I cobbled up in C4D to demonstrate.

Cheers

What I mean, as bagginsbill has stated, is that even with perfect geometry we need better shaders for the "liquidy" bits under and around the eye.

Attached Link: You're Mine

So, what people like me end up with, then, is "the best that we can do."  I DON'T often get what happens when adjusting nodes in the material room.  You're correct about the "guess / render / refine" technique, but I find this exhausting and gave up trying to figure it all out.  In the attached render, I put a light probe in the alternate diffuse node of the male figure and played with the settings for many hours before arriving at a rough approximation of what I'd imagined in my head.

To be fair to Robyn (and I apologize for the misspelling!), the skin shader I mentioned for the Bronwyn render is a freebie I picked up years ago.  She may be far more skilled at creating these now. 

Further, I HATE Poser lights.  There is such a disconnect between the preview and what Firefly cranks out I can never tell what my images are going to look like until they've actually rendered.  Because I don't do this for a living, there is only so much time I can devote to a render before I abandon the task in favor of my next idea.

Now, you hint that some of these shader-related issues may be addressed in the newer version of Poser.  I won't ask you to confirm this, but for those of you who are deeply involved in what happens in the material room, understand that many of the REST of us would appreciate improvements in Poser skin, so that our renders don't look like plastic people under a variety of lighting conditions.

:)

Quote - I agree in principle, but what I need to tell you I can't. Incorrect geometry is a factor. But... trust me, the dominant problem with Poser-itis of the eye area is that the correct shader cannot currently be implemented.

I could demonstrate some amazing before-after stuff, but I'm not allowed.

I would also point out that most people don't even use the shaders in the renderers you mentioned correctly, either.

subsurface scattering?  

in the name of god......................... heheheheh :)

Quote - Everybody just stop slamming Poser because it's driving me crazy.

I'm under NDA. Shut up for a few months. Do the best you can. Take advice that all is lost with a grain of salt.

months? uhhhh thats long.i will not ask how long because you can not writte. hehe ;)  

Quote - We're not at all sure that the OP actually meant photorealism as rokket hasn't returned.

However, if you want to mimic what we're used to seeing in photos, then DoF is more than a matter of taste. Apparently you've never heard of the almost rabid quest for "bokeh" among photography enthusiasts and pros. This is the pleasing smoothness associated with the out-of-focus areas produced by the best, most expensive lenses. Google bokeh.  It's fascinating.

This is bad bokeh.

Submit this to a photography forum and you'll get slammed immediately, ten times worse than around here for lack of good shader work.

BB, being a mariner makes it hard for me to be on regularily. And since it looks like I started a big stink, perhaps I should explain what I am trying to do, and what I meant when I posted. I think photo realism was the wrong word. What I am trying to do is achieve a "look" to my renders and eventual animations that is beyond, or away if you will, from the look of other 3D animations. I don't want the cartoon look of the characters in most of the Pixar films, for instance. And I don't want the washed-out, colorless look of the Final Fantasy film.

I am not trying to get a render that looks like I took it with a camera. I am trying to get a render that looks like it has life. I believe the pose is the base for this. Which is what I am working on now. I too, have noticed a lot of renders that obviously took a lot of time, and the character looks like an expensive manequin. That's what I am trying to get beyond. So when I do start rendering animations, the characters move naturally, not stiff. Not floating.

So I think I should have titled this thread "Natural looking renders", not photo realistic.

Rokket, there are a lot of aspects that need considering when you start down the "natural-looking" path. BB's approach has a lot of merit - since nature has laws and those laws should not be disobeyed in art without a good reason - his method of using natural/physical characteristics of real materials that can be expressed in a maths formula will yield much more natural, believeable objects that the more common approach of randomly plugging nodes together until a desired effect is produced under that particular light set, with all that implies.

But there is more to creating "natural-looking" than just believeable materials. Figures with presence, for instance. The typical catatonic look in so many of Poser characters in the galleries strains that believeablility even when the textures are perfect, the shadows spot-on, and the lighting to die for. KobaltKween gave sage advice when she suggested looking at photographs (of your target scene setting, for example) to use as reference. You are the viewer: the figures in your scene are living their life, enjoying their moments, and you are capturing that.

I couldn't agree more. And if you look around you here at Renderosity, after who can do that, you will find that they who succeed best are the ones who knows how to paint. No amount of mathematics is going to help you.

Um, I'm not suggesting replacing mathematics and science in art. Without it, art is rather chaotic and stretches believeability and credibility to breaking point... particularly CG artwork. I'm saying that it isn't sufficient. I know, I was told not to post this stuff here where technique was the topic at hand... sorry, couldn't help myself. I'll go back into my burrow now. :biggrin:

Hi RobynsVeil...i hope you ain't goin' back to yer burrow cuz i think if most righteous dood DaVinci wer here right now,  he'd agree with ya.

Quote - "The lacrimal and the lower eyelid will always be unconvincing until Poser updates it's material room with better shader nodes. "

Mmmph mphfh fffhhsmppfh, mpfhfhfp hmfpmf mfpmmm.

Bill...Is that a cryptoquote or did you just get back from the dentist?

Quote - I am not trying to get a render that looks like I took it with a camera. I am trying to get a render that looks like it has life.

A camera photo can look like life just as the photo you posted does.  Or a camera photo can look like an amature photo-flashed red-eyed blurred polaroid image, which is not how the eye sees life.  But there is software that can render scenes that way as well to make it look like a '70s flipflash shot.

I'm still curious how you will animated/render such a realistic human.  Motion capture is very tricky.  Even real Japanese robots don't look, move, or sound like humans yet.  So having the computer do it on screen is even tougher.  Everything has to be there.  Everything.  Eye shine.  Skin pores. Peach fuzz. Hair.  Eye lashes/brows. Wrinkles.  Bone joints.  Muscles. There is also the clothing and everything that is invloved with clothing.  The way shoes bend while walking.  The way arms move while walking/talking.  Don't forget breathing. (Fallout 3 has breathing for their characters).  People are also moving when they stand, unless they are leaning on something.

Even if your animation is in the uncanny valley, I still want to see it.  Not many are brave enough to show theirs.

My opinion is that the "uncanny valley" is a moving target, and varys from person to person.

As far as photorealism, kind of reminds me of that old Steve Martin movie, where he's lost and asks directions. The guy he's asking says "If I was going there, I wouldn't be starting from here." :-)

I agree with Robyn that realism also involves attention to posing details.  Simply having a scantily-clad female standing in front of a fractal background and staring, often wide-eyed, at the camera isn't really accomplishing very much from an artistic point of view.  Posing should look natural.  That's part of what makes a render look real.  (It's also harder to pull off when more than one figure is in a scene.)

She brings up a related issue, however, that we would do well to understand.  Perspective in art is an applied mathematics.  The geometry of the Golden Section and the Rule of Thirds has helped artists create work that mimics reality and is pleasing to the eye.  This blending of maths and creativity has been integral to the creation of quality art for centuries, and it makes perfect sense that it should extend into the realm of CG art.

So, maybe what we should be striving for involves a broad variety of skills.  To make a render look "natural" requires an understanding of how Poser works, in terms of its limitations, its lighting, material nodes and rendering features.  But we ALSO have to incorporate the REST of our artistic capabilities.  Changing figure rigging and having the finest texture mapping in the world won't help if we ignore compositional technique!  I spend DAYS working on renders because there is no easy way to do everything well without exerting significant effort.

Quote - I couldn't agree more. And if you look around you here at Renderosity, after who can do that, you will find that they who succeed best are the ones who knows how to paint. No amount of mathematics is going to help you.

painters need to always start from beginning in poser to achive photorealism.  

BB's mathematics allows us to use shaders  with all lights . and this is hes point. to make something that can be used in all situations.

Every product and tool try to fence you in by offering proprietary shaders. It is not only Poser, there are C4D shaders, Vue procedure material, Genetica texture, Max shaders etc etc in all infinity. All they have in common is that they have an artificial look & feel - inferior to Hi-res photographic material, - not real. Photos is also more practical. If you build a model you want it to be able to be used in all tools and program and above all in the ubiquitous OBJ format.



I think procedural textures have their place, Vintorix. The water in this picture:

...is procedural. My challenge to you: can you reproduce this effect with a colourMap?

That's a photograph, Vintorix. I can do that with my camera too. What about in Poser? Your point was:

"All they have in common is that they have an artificial look & feel - inferior to Hi-res photographic material, - not real. Photos is also more practical."

Is there a more realistic, more practical approach to creating the effect I got with a procedural shader with a photograph?

Pardon, but BB's water puddles on cement shader looks just as good and reacts properly to whatever your light setup is for the scene. With a photograph, you are stuck with the lighting at the time the photo was originally taken. Poser and other 3d programs use both photo textures and shaders and thankfully for the Poser world we have BB.

But Robyn I have just said that there might be rare occasions where shaders might be appropriate. But even then - don¨expext realistic results! For that reason I would prefer to add the effect in Photoshop in post work.

One of the great things with Poser is just how easy it is to export to OBJ format and indeed that Poser even works internally with OBJ! That is one of the things they got right - In  contradiction to Vue.

Postwork is postwork. Again, like using a camera, I can do that too. I'm talking about in Poser. Let me put it this way: until someone can show me a texture-based alternative to BB or KobaltKween material shaders that rivals or even surpasses the quality and effect of the procedural shader, I'll consider your contention with procedural shaders a personal preference thing and that's it.

This is Poser and Firefly we're talking about, Vintorix. Not VRay or Maxwell or any of those high-end renderers. Given the constraints and limitations of this renderer, those procedural materials look pretty darn good.

Quote - My opinion is that the "uncanny valley" is a moving target, and varys from person to person.

Interesting.  Is there an uncanny valley animation clip you can point to that you were not disturbed with while watching?

Quote - Rokket, there are a lot of aspects that need considering when you start down the "natural-looking" path. BB's approach has a lot of merit - since nature has laws and those laws should not be disobeyed in art without a good reason - his method of using natural/physical characteristics of real materials that can be expressed in a maths formula will yield much more natural, believeable objects that the more common approach of randomly plugging nodes together until a desired effect is produced under that particular light set, with all that implies.

But there is more to creating "natural-looking" than just believeable materials. Figures with presence, for instance. The typical catatonic look in so many of Poser characters in the galleries strains that believeablility even when the textures are perfect, the shadows spot-on, and the lighting to die for. KobaltKween gave sage advice when she suggested looking at photographs (of your target scene setting, for example) to use as reference. You are the viewer: the figures in your scene are living their life, enjoying their moments, and you are capturing that.

I belive I mentioned the posing and expressions in my last post. But I am still learning how to use shaders. I am not randomly plugging nodes together because I don't know how to do much of that yet. About all I've managed to do so far is change the skin tone on Sydney. I am not a fan of the pasty white skin on a lot of the models, so I changed hers to suit me. I also don't like the catatonic, mannequin look. I tend to spend a lot of time, swithing between camera views, tweaking this, changing that, until I get the emotion I am trying to convey. I recently messed around with an animation where I had her doing a little dance, keeping her face turned toward her perceived audience, and having her expression change as she went along. I learned how to use the "point at" feature. It worked pretty well, but I still had to tweak it when she lifted her head.

All in all, I am thinking one more year with the program and I will have learned enough to start doing my movie. Right now, I am certain I don't have a clue what I am doing, and most good results are accidental, and non-repeatable.

"This is Poser and Firefly we're talking about, Vintorix. Not VRay or Maxwell or any of those high-end renderers. Given the constraints and limitations of this renderer, those procedural materials look pretty darn good."

But I do have VRay Robyn, in C4D. I was argumenting about shaders in general - not only Poser shaders. I far prefer VRay over Firefly, and it has nothing to do with shaders.

To sum up I have never said anything else that I am a beginner, but I rotinely export and impor:t between different programs. Should I use shaders, my whole workflow would crumple like a house of cards.

"Postwork is postwork. Again, like using a camera, I can do that too"

I hear you. But just for the record, becoming an expert in Photoshop is far more difficult than becoming an expert in Poser. ( I am speaking generally not about you - I am sure you are an expert in Photoshop)

You know you two are arguing about two completely different jobs that shaders have as if they are the same topic.

Vintorix is right, you generally cannot reproduce every feature of real-world patterns in procedural shaders. Some things, like granite, some wood grains, leather, yes, but in general, no. The pattern of denim - yes - the pattern of the pockets and zippers and rivets and seams - hell no.

But the color and bump patterns of procedural shaders are only half the battle. The other half, the part I actually think about and publish all the time, is how the material reacts to light. How the material reflects the light sources and the other objects in the scene.

This is what Robyn is talking about, and Vintorix is either wrong or not understanding that.

The shaders I talk about for Poser (piles of nodes for Fresnel, fake SSS, etc.) are non-existent in the high-end workflow of the expensive apps (or even the free ones), because the accurate response to light IS BUILT INTO THE APPLICATION.

Poser has ZERO accurate reflection models in its basic shader. Nothing whatsoever is based on reality. So to get realism in Poser, with regard NOT to the PATTERNS, but to the response to light, how it reflects, you must deal with shaders of some non-trivial complexity.

Technically, these are not "procedural" shaders, even though the calculation of the response to light is a procedure of some kind. Rather, the adjective "procedural" is short hand for "I made the pattern of color and/or bump that you see using math".

For example, you may have a wood grain pattern that you got from a photo, or you may have done it with procedural math. The photo pattern will probably be more interesting visually. But in either case, you must use a realistic Fresnel reflection, taking into account the right amount of blur, with conservation of energy, or it will not look like real wood, even if it's a photo of wood!

Water is one of the things that can be convincingly produced via procedural tactics. In fact, all the giant waves in the movie "The Perfect Storm" were 100% procedural. 

Now if you're talking about water on pavement, give me a photo of dry pavement, and I will demonstrate how to make it look wet, using a shader. Or I can procedurally generate the pavement, and then apply a dry or wet shader to it.

I'm a big fan of image-based shaders. I'm fond of creating interesting patterns with math, but I do not promote that at all. (My avatar, the Koi fish skin color pattern and scales, is 100% procedural.) People get confused because I show those things as amusements, and I do so as shaders because that's how you do it. But really the pattern generator, and the response to light simulator, are separate and distinct processes. They happen to both live in the material room but that's in no way suggesting that it makes any sense to conflate those things in an argument.

I forgot to mention -

I've shown techniques for procedural skin, but you cannot find a single thread in which I've suggested it was better than using an image. Clearly, image-based skin patterns are superior.

But - compare any texture using a basic common no-node Poser material, versus the same texture with my VSS skin shader. They're completely different, and argue whatever you like, I know which one is better. Even if you don't want realism, but art, I know which one is better. Or use my Vargas shader with the same texture, and you get airbrushed style "art". Or my toon shader. Pick whatever style you want, but the texture BY ITSELF is going to look like shit and is not art.

It isn't only a question about using an image as texture another fun part is displacement, bump, specularity, occlusion maps, manipulating with or without filter, blending, HDR (fake or not), gamma and so on and so forth. There is one caveat about that though, the photo must be a virgin. If someone else has done anything and the image is not longer in virgin shape is it is worthless to you and you skillset is no longer valid.

Attached Link: ´Mantova

If I want a "toon" shader or whatever, I prefer to do that myself.

For example, you may have a wood grain pattern that you got from a photo, or you may have done it with procedural math. The photo pattern will probably be more interesting visually. But in either case, you must use a realistic Fresnel reflection, taking into account the right amount of blur, with conservation of energy, or it will not look like real wood, even if it's a photo of wood!

I agree on that when you mean lacquered wood, but when you have a simple sheet of untreated plywood, a photo and a diffuse or clay shader will do.

best regards,

Bopper.

Quote - For example, you may have a wood grain pattern that you got from a photo, or you may have done it with procedural math. The photo pattern will probably be more interesting visually. But in either case, you must use a realistic Fresnel reflection, taking into account the right amount of blur, with conservation of energy, or it will not look like real wood, even if it's a photo of wood!

I agree on that when you mean lacquered wood, but when you have a simple sheet of untreated plywood, a photo and a diffuse or clay shader will do.

best regards,

Bopper.

Duh - what is going on here? Do I have to spell out every exception before I make any point? LOL

Materials with close to zero specularity are the only ones that do not require some kind of special treatment. You can plug that photo directly into Diffuse_Color and you're good.

As soon as you need specularity, the Poser Surface alone fails.

Has anybody ever asked me for how to make a shader for raw lumber or a clay pot or paper? No. It's not difficult. I talk about difficulties, not simplicities, in my shader threads.  It's not very interesting teaching people what they already know.

I get asked all the time about skin, metal, metallic skin paint/makeup, glossy lips, water, glass, leather, paint, finished wood, plastic bottles. None of these work well without nodes in Poser.