Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: PoserPro2010 Firefly Render ignoring shader nodes that appear in OpenGL preview

an0malaus opened this issue on Jun 20, 2011 ยท 18 posts


an0malaus posted Mon, 20 June 2011 at 10:34 PM

@bagginsbill: Yes, indeed. Lots of hand-text-editing of the material .mc6 files to consolidate the animated shader nodes for every skin material on V4!

Ah, the hazy depths of one's thought processes when trying to overcome a seemingly simple problem.

Background: to achieve a reasonable appearing animated blush response, and not just look like an instant case of acute rosacea, both the saturation and value (intensity) of the coloured blush mask have to be animated. A solid, fully saturated colour is also not believable as an autonomic blush. Clown makeup, yes. Blush response, no. Experiment produced 25% saturation at 75% value (intensity) as a reasonable looking blush with a photoshop created mask with full white at the blush centres, gaussian blurred to black outside the blush area.

Recent past: then along comes a wonderfully subtle blush mask from a commercial texture set (Juniper). Unfortunately, the subtlety isn't quite overcome by maximising the Blush animation variable. What to do? Ah, I'll just change the texture_strength on the blush mask from 1 to 2! shouldn't be a problem, right? After all, examination of the mask's histogram shows nothing brighter than a 50% gray, so doubling that shouldn't exceed any bounds, should it?

Present: WRONG, CRETIN! OpenGL may have not problems sorting sanity from madness, but Firefly is assembled from ethereal glows of whimsy and cannibalised luciferase. Texture_Strength 2 is nicht und verboten. I must resort to more complex methods of intensifying a subtle mask such as raising it to a fractional power. One half seems like a good start for making the lights lighter and the blacks blacker.

As I proceeded to re-apply the animation and ERC shader complexity that was necessary to achieve the smoothly animated blush onset with a single dial tweak, I ran once more into the problem that fails to appear when you're just twiddling sliders in the material room; the blush just wasn't intense enough with the subtle mask, given the ERC was designed for a mask with full intensity gamut. The "simple" solution of bumping the texture_strength over 1 immediately blows firefly to the weeds and, admittedly, also plays havoc with the texture previews in the material room.



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