that does look pretty good.

Love esther

Very good eclark.

You are getting quite good at working her.    Jan

could this be the beginning of a new comic.  Surely android keeps you busy enough?

Love esther

What? I can't do two?

only if you give up your day job and marvel pays you.

Does anybody know if Netherworks has a Hair Conversion System for Alyson yet?

there's a python script called unhide dials or something like that which can unhide scaling in the head part of hair.  that helps.

Also there is total hair control (sold here) magnet sets, that help with adjusting (and styling) by kaposer.

Here's one of 3Dream's ladies.  I would really like to use them all at various smaller increments along with Alyson's morphs and my Face Room settings but it seems all of them replace the same morph target so they overwrite each other instead of adding a new channel and even then they're set at 0.0000 so I can't even dial them down a bit.  Is there a workaround for that?  I considered injecting and exporting each one as a morph target but I have a sneaking suspicion that the eyes will get messed up.   Anyone try to do something with 3Dream's morphs?

Sometimes when the eyes get messed up, you can sellect each eye, and use and "e" and it will return the eyes to their original position.

lmk

Looking rather good.  Are you working IBL, fill and main lighting yet?  Jan

Quote - Looking rather good.  Are you working IBL, fill and main lighting yet?  Jan

IBL is beyond my understanding at this time.

Well if your infinite light is parellel to the ground it won't cast a ground shadow, it will show up on walls less the shadowing going to the wall.  Try a 45 degree shot and see if the shadow is displayed.  Also ensure that shadows are activated in your light menu.  Jan

I see large buildings. Did you happen to use depth-mapped shadows? The depth-map that is produced by default is very low resolution and must be used to cover the entire "city". This means that something as tiny as Alyson won't even register as a shadow pixel.

Get used to ray-traced shadows all the time.

Crap, I forgot to mention use Raytrace, thanks BB.   Jan

If you're using IDL I suggest BB's environment sphere to light the scene and have the infinite at a lower intensity mainly for shadows.   I usually have it overhead.   You may also want to add a low intensity spot to light the face a bit more.

Quote - I see large buildings. Did you happen to use depth-mapped shadows? The depth-map that is produced by default is very low resolution and must be used to cover the entire "city". This means that something as tiny as Alyson won't even register as a shadow pixel.

Get used to ray-traced shadows all the time.

Indirect Lighting and raytraced.

If you render only with the infinite light, and no IDL, what do you see?

Figured it out. For some reason I don't recall, I rendered the ground plane invisible, so no shadow. So i turned the ground plane back on and viola',  there's the shadow.

In your last picture the ground plane should not be an actor since you have some object over it the road.  Go back to that one and get us a re render with the what BB wants

I think I know what BB is going for

Okay then, Now I am confused. Even with the ground invisible the shadow returns. This is one infinite light with no IDL.

Hi E. that is what I was getting at in the scene where you had only the ground plane, in that case, you do need to have it visible for the shadow to be seen.  Poser needs an object to display a shadow, your ground plane acts as an object when it is displayed. In the above one, the object that makes the road is visible so the shadow is displayed on it.

Try an invisible ground plan and place say a square from the primitives and place your figure on it.  Your figure will display a shadow on the square but not on invisible ground plane.  Now why would Poser ever give you the option of visible or invisible ground plane?  Here is an example, your ground plane's texture is water, you don't see a shadow cast on water, you see a reflection.  If you see a shadow, its because the water is shallow enough that you see it on the sand or muck below.  Jan

By the way, I like the way you are experiment with a combination of IBL and IDL (I'm with you on this a combination of both if you can put up with the long rendering time for IDL).  See how beautiful your last rendering is?  You did an outstanding job on it.  Two thumbs up   

Actually, I don't understand image based lighting at all. I'll have to read up on it.

I didn't either.  However, this is what I think.  It's fake IDL and a lot faster.  It doesn't need other objects in the scene to get that effect.  What it does is surrounds the figure and the figure only in a sphere that has say a office image in it and it is a 360 degree view both vertically and horizontally and fakes light bouncing off everything in it onto the figure.  That means that it is very important that you have a texture map node attached to the IBL light.  Just clicking on IBL won't do it properly.  This is done automatically when you select from the library one of the 10 IBL light sets.

You can check out the proper node connection in the material room so that you can eventually make your own IBL texture at some time in the future or switch the texture with one of the other nine without flushing your present light set up.

One of those mess of lights is your IBL , the others are deactivated.  I usually go through and delete everything except for two.  One is my main light containing the shadow, the other one is a fill light (shadow deactivated).  The fill light is used to balance out the shadows of the figure with that of the shadow displayed by the character if necessary.   Jan

PS  I recommend that you experiment with just IBL displayed and the character, rotate that IBL light every which way and render the scene several times.  You will note that the lighting never changes even if you put the IBL light behind the figure.  That is what it is supposed to do. 

IBL does not always require an image at all if you are only using straight single color lighting in that light set.  You will, however, need to adjust it's intensity because a high setting will wash out the scene.  If you do render with IDL, any AO active in IBL will be disabled which may require adding AO nodes to all material zones and have it enabled for consideration during IDL.

My rule of thumbs integrating single infinite lighting with IDL in outdoor scenes, decrease infinite light intensity to 75 - 80%, adjust all material zone diffuse values to less than 100%, and incorporate a skydome (BB's envsphere) to suppliment the ambient global lighting which IBL would provide.  Using BB's light meter helps tremendously in balancing the all light settings.

I tried to get it to look like she was holding a camcorder or video cam of some type hence why her thumbs are on the "lens".

and she is a very curvacious cutie

Quote - I can't remember who it was that said that Alyson can't work in Vue8, but luckily they were wrong. I guess the extra 4gig on my Win7 install allows her to load up just fine with Vue8 which allowed me to do this render. :D

I tried to get it to look like she was holding a camcorder or video cam of some type hence why her thumbs are on the "lens".

Best looking Alyson closeup I've ever seen.

Quote - I can't remember who it was that said that Alyson can't work in Vue8, but luckily they were wrong. I guess the extra 4gig on my Win7 install allows her to load up just fine with Vue8 which allowed me to do this render. :D

I tried to get it to look like she was holding a camcorder or video cam of some type hence why her thumbs are on the "lens".

So what character morph is that?

EClark, it looks like I just did Izumi @ .2 and Maria @ .76 with various random face/body tweaks.

This is why Alyson is one of the best poser figures imho.

Here's Alisha and Marcus in the shower together. One point light, with indirect lighting. Anybody got any ideas about how I can make them wet, other than playing with the highlights?

Another thing I like about P8 Alyson. Notice the difference in height between Alisha and Marcus. I think there's maybe half an inch difference between V4 and M4. And now with Genesis, not even that.

Crank up the specular.
Specular and a bump or displacement map can make them look wet.
Put a noice or turbulence node in spec and bump map,
Start there and play with the settings.

Thanks for the advice, vilters. So i tried what you said.

hmmm, I need to try that, thanks vil

One can also play with the highlight slider. Sometimes it makes it "sharper".

Specular and  highlight play together with light to get you these relfection.

if the wall has smooth, perhaps lightly colored tiles, you can put spec, hightlight, bump,  on the wall also and render with IDL.

Gets some nice relfections from the skin.

I'm really having fun using Alyson. Interestingly enough, I never try to get this artistic with V4. 

Just add a reflection node to the reflection channel.

Quote - Just add a reflection node to the reflection channel.

Tried that. Didn't work.

Simple reflect set up.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2829788

Thanks, Hborre. I'll give that a try and see what happens.

I wrote a pretty long response but it disappeared/deleted. Let me try again.

The linked thread hborre gave was for reflections on a transparent ground so it could be composited. That's not a good shader for the tiles. Also, the amount of reflection intentionally was high because the "table" it was going to be composited with was being viewed around 80 degrees from vertical.

The Fresnel effect must be respected. Surfaces viewed from vertical appear to reflect very little. Surfaces viewed from horizontal appear to reflect very much. The change in reflection as viewing angle changes follows a very specific curve.

You can get this effect from my BBGlossy shader.

Glossy materials with true Fresnel effect using matmatic

Also, there is an ongoing thread about tile. I have been rather busy lately, but I will be returning to this thread to discuss shiny tile techniques in more detail.

Poser 8 - How do I lay a floor?

Just to elaborate further, BB is absolutely correct, I just pointed out a very basic node arrangement from recent postings, but there is definitely more.  On the flip side, you would want/need to build up the scene better with proper surroundings for reflective surfaces to achieve a more realistic effect.  The shower scene has too much light cast upon it which indicates an open shower area or the lack of behind the camera props to properly interact with IDL.  This is one of those instances where forethought to composition would help to improve the render a little more realistic.