A problem now looms before us as we begin to use Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012. The SSS will not look good with textures that have "highlights" burned onto them, nor will they look good with body hair painted onto the textures.

Using Jepe's body hair transparency maps on a second figure will allow the primary skin to use SSS, and still look good. So, that product, used as Jepe suggests, will be the easiest way to render body hair in P9/PP2012 that looks good with SSS. The improvements in rendering speed help offset the increased time that trans-mapped objects take in P8/PP2010 or older (also trans-mapped hair renders faster). Likewise the improved speed helps offset the increased resources needed to work with the extra rigs and polys that extra figures bring.

BUT, the textures that we have from Jepe with the body hair painted on them will not look good using SSS. This problem could have been handled with nodes if Jepe had included trans-maps of the body hair with his texture packages. Those can be used as masks combined with nodes to exclude the hair from the SSS functions. From some of the texture sets, the body hair information can be acquired using (still more) nodes, but not all of the texture sets can be used this way.

Right now vendors are worried about trying to provide products for two applications that are diverging. The big problem will actually be to provide products that take advantage of the special features in either program. It will take a rethinking of what should be included in texture sets, and the sets that will sell are the ones that have included what we need to use features like SSS.

I am experimenting right now on the easiest way to add the second figure needed for the body hair trans-maps in Jepe’s Project: Hairy at DAZ3D.

For static renders (not animated), right now I think that the easiest way to handle the situation is:

Save a material set to the material library that removes all nodes from M4, and sets all values to zero. EXCEPT, set transparency to 1 (one) on things like teeth, tongue, eye parts, and fingernails (anything that cannot grow hair).

Set up your M4 figure (textures, morphs, poses, bump, displacement, specular, etc.), and SAVE, SAVE, SAVE your work. You could set up the whole scene, because you will be tweaking the figures as you work. The body hair should be among the last things you set up.

When you are ready for the body hair, make a duplicate of your M4 figure in the Edit menu. It will already be posed and placed, and will be created in the exact place where the base figure is located. Apply the blank material set to the duplicate M4. Inject the inflation morphs that Jepe has provided in his set. Add the texture pose for the body hair that you want.

If you add anything to the Displacement channel of your base figure (such as veins or scars), you will probably need to add the same displacement to the second (body hair) figure, or the displacement might poke through the hair. Jepe plugs the body hair trans-maps into the Bump channel. It will look more realistic if attached to the Displacement channel, but this can cause problems with clothing that the displaced hair might poke through. You may need to detach some of the maps for areas that will be covered with cloths, or make masks to partially hide the hair that might poke through cloths.

From this point on, any change made to the base figure (pose, morphs) will need to be made in the second figure. The many new features for P9/PP2012 may offer some answers for fitting a second figure more perfectly to a base figure. If I find a better way, I will share it. Sorry, I don’t know what to do for our animators.

lmk

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.