I have these (failed) renders, which are very different from the successful ones.

can you suggest what went wrong or what I should do to the Poser settings to get the much more "realistic" looks of the items?

the problem is clearly illustrated in the images attached.

Poser 6, Sykla Armor for V4 from DAZ.

thank you very much.

it is clear that in the first render, the Armor set lost its effect and turned into plain,boring second skin type, and the Face Plate part of the Helm looked weird too.

what is wrong with them?

the Face Plate of the Helm looked totally unreal.

what went wrong?

thank you in advance.

First that comes to mind, is that you may have neglected to turn on "use displacement map" in your render settings

I checked the "Use Displacement Map" box in Render Setting, but nothing changed.

any other suggestions please?

Go to your materials room and make sure the Advanced tab is selected, with the eyedropper click on the figure helmet...now is there an image map connected to the Displacement channel?

I do not have that model, but from the images shown of the helmet, it definitely looks like displacement maps are being used for the relief details.

There is a thread over at the DAZ forum that the author of this product has participated in.  That would get you closer to the source.

Alternately, you could post a screen shot of the material room setting for the faceplate and something might be noticeable

thx for the ideas, I will start trying now.

how do I make a screenshot with the material room features on?

thx.

PrtScn key on the keyboard, then paste image in the application of your choice (i.e., Microsoft Word, Photoshop, etc).  Resize image.  Otherwise, use an app specifically designed for screencapture like Snag-It.

I'm sorry but I don't believe you enabled displacement and then rendered.

Either you rendered again with it off, or you turned it on and expected the preview to show results.

Displacement does not appear in preview.

The product contents lists displacement maps - it uses displacement. We can clearly see that your render lacks displacement on the helmet.

In addition to displacement, if you are looking towards increasing realism, the reflective parts of the outfit are not reflecting the surrounding scene.  It has an image map connected to those reflection nodes; the reflection is casting earth and sky.

Also - and this is kind of important - just ticking Use Displacement isn't always enough, you need to set a bounds. So after clicking Use Displacment Maps, go to Manual Settings tab and look for Minimum Displacement Bounds. If it is 0.000 set it to something like 0.1 or 1 and then render.

0 bounds does not cause displacement to appear flat. It causes surfaces to be missed - not found - due to them not being where they started, but Poser not look far enough away to see them where they really are. It makes holes in a mesh.

One more nuance of displacement bounds. The value in render settings is not the whole story. That's just the minimum value assumed for all props. Each prop or figure actor has its own value. Whichever is higher is consulted at render time.

Further, in the later versions of Poser, every time you start a render, the highest displacement value found in any materials of an actor are copied to per-actor displacement bounds, found on the properties panel.

You cannot get it to stay below the correct bounds as long as the numerical value in the root node actually represents the maximum. (There are ways to make that not true.)

So, for example, as soon as you type 2 inches into a PoserSurface Displacement channel, rendering will cause that object to have a per-object displacement bounds that is at least 2 inches.

Another thing is, shouldn't there be a "probe light" node plugged in to make the wires glow? Similar to the thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2575899

Scroll down to jonthecelt's instructions on using the "probe light" node... :)

No there should not be a probe light node. That node is not to make things glow. That node is to simulate ambient lighting back in 1994, before IBL was invented. When used naively, it may be interpreted as causing a material to glow. Used properly, it would produce variable lighting based on the direction the surface is facing. The correct interpretation is it is simulating ambient light hitting and bouncing off your object - ambient light that has no official "light source" in the scene. Thus it seems to glow. Using it is way overkill and frankly that node should have been removed years ago.

If you want a constant glow, you just put the color in Ambient_Color and adjust the luminance with Ambient_Value.

But I'm sure the product already does that.

And if i look closely at the glow of the helmet (left illustration) i would say that the corona of the glowing parts was added by compositing - it looks like a blur of the ambient channel that extends beyond the actual geometry. You will not get that easily directly out of Poser.

I'm no expert in poser, but could maybe the fact that there is nothing else in the scene possibly be effecting the quality too?

Oh sorry guys and thanks BB, I've only made something glow once (I made some makeup on V4's face glow) and indeed I did use Ambient and Alternate_Diffuse with a black and white image map to say what parts I wanted to glow... it worked fine.

So I guess the probe light is just for if you wanted the light bulb in a lamp model to actually illuminate like a real light, right?... Just clarrifying...

And I'm sorry, I guess I can't help, I'm not sure as to what else could be stopping it from glowing like the original promo's, unless it's a trick of lighting, or it could simply be that DAZ has different settings (obviously) and you simply need to change some of the Disp and Spec values??

We're using the word "glow" to mean different things.

Glow as in self-lit is simply using a shader that doesn't require light to produce a non-black color. That is possible a million ways, but the easiest and most straightforward is to use the ambient parameter.

Glow of the air around a self-lit region is postwork here, as millighost pointed out. It's not a trick - it's a filter in Photoshop.

The probe light node does not emit light. It generates a pattern of lighting as if there was a world around it. The nature of that world is controlled via a bunch of parameters. People who use the probe light node to make a self-lit material are like people using a car to crush ice by driving over it. Yes driving over ice with a car does crush it, but you do not need to go get your car to crush some ice. There are simpler ways.

So in other words, the promo's lied... ??

Looks like that's a possibility.

It was my understanding that post-work like that wasn't allowed in Promos. Maybe Daz is different on that policy tho. Seems kinda like false advertising to me.

ok, thx for the tips.

I will give a try right now.

wish me good luck.

here I attached some screenshots of my Poser features before rendering.

and also you can see another problem with the helm: everytime I checked the Use Displacement Maps box, the Face Plate of the helm distorted.

really confused.

some more helps please?

thx.

Your render settings are a bit low, set min shading rate to 0.25 and increase texture size to 2048 at least (depending on the final size you'll be rendering). Increase pixel samples to 5 and check for smooth polygons.

I don't know what version of Poser you are using but you might have to disable texture filtering on every texture of each material too.

As for the bloated look, seems like the settings for the displacement map are set too high, but it would be unusual for the vendor to include wrong settings like that.

Some proper lighting will be needed too, the default poser lights will not do for a good render. 

Your displacement maps aren't loading.  You should have something other than a white space in the preview

 since they are not loading, it is taking the maximum value for displacement

could some Poser experts take a close look at them please?

maybe you can help me figure out what has been going wrong.

thx.

clearly, there must be something wrong. here are some key problems I have.

1)everytime after applying textures from Poser Pose folder and render  for the first time, Poser will pop up a window, saying that "texture could not be loaded. Image map file could not be found."

2)under the same situation, the same message will also pop up if trying to go into Poser Material Room, rather than trying to render.

1. everytime the Face Plate of the helm distorts, if the Use Displacement Maps box in Render settings is checked. 

4)tried disabling all "smooth polygons" functions from both Properties and Render settings, but nothing changes.

5)tried activating or disabling Use Displacement Maps in Render settings and setting Min Displacement bonus, nothign changes, escept that with Use Displacement Maps On, the LOWER part of the helm distorts, as shown by the image attached.

desperately need helps!!!

it seems to me that Poser just refuses to load the _bmp and _dis images, no matter what I do in the Material room. the two mini windows relate to bump under both "Simple" and "Advanced" tags are simply blank, whether or no I manually direct the image source to the targeted image files.

some helps please

Did you check that the _dis and _bmp are actually images? They may be corrupted.

You need not have explained in such detail what happens. We saw right away that you have no displacement map, as CyberDream pointed out.

We cannot poke around your machine for you. The images that are supposed to be there are not, and Poser is telling you that repeatedly.

Go into the product and examine the inventory - verify that you have the files it lists.

Verify that those files, by name, are the ones selected in the materials.

Either you don't have the files or the wrong file name is used in the materials. It's as simple as that.