@Diogenes: I haven't checked any references, but that crease looks quite plausible to me, too.

Comments always welcomed; how else can I learn?

The picture looks good, wish it wa a little bigger. :)

Been trying to finish a render, it was started at 4:45pm and it is now 7:45pm here...sigh.

I'll probably post a larger version in my gallery, once I track down everything I used.  Credit where credit is due, and all that.  :-)

Quote - The picture looks good, wish it wa a little bigger. :) Been trying to finish a render, it was started at 4:45pm and it is now 7:45pm here...sigh

Been there, done that, just finished a render that took me 5:20h.

Attached Link: Gallery image

Hm, those girls don't seem like they're affecting the light/shadow on their horses much, if at all.

I think you're right.  Maybe if I add ambient occlusion . . . I see that OcclusionMaster just got updated, so that gives me added motivation to try the experiment.

I'd think more basic. Are shadows enabled on all your lights?

well if you're going to redo it anyway, those trees look a bit out of place. i do like the sense of movement you got.

Advice on lighting would be greatly appreciated.  I used one of Cyclorama's stock lighting packages.  Adding Ambient Occlusion yielded no detectable results.

The trees look out of place?  Are you suggesting that I remove them entirely, or move them somewhere else in the scene?  (They are part of the default for that particular Cyclorama setup.)

personally i'd remove the trees entirely, tall bare trunks like that are kind of wrong for the plains. unless of course they're phone poles....just my opinion; you're the artist

I think depth-mapped lights are being used and the shadow map is too low resolution.

Get modern. Use ray-traced shadows. They are more accurate and work with outdoor scenes that span thousands of feet. Depth-mapped cannot do that without loss of detail.

Quote - I'd think more basic. Are shadows enabled on all your lights?

Sorry I didn't see your post earlier.

The depth map shadows were turned on.  But when I used Ockham's lighting script to change all the lights to ray-traced, it looked MUCH better.  Now to see if I can change my upload to the new version . . .

All the lights? There should only be one. The sun.

And the shadow blur radius should be .5 (degrees).

See what happens when I don't read before I reply?

Quote - personally i'd remove the trees entirely, tall bare trunks like that are kind of wrong for the plains. unless of course they're phone poles....just my opinion; you're the artist

I think I'll keep them, Jancory:  if you look at the background, you'll see trees in the distance, as well.  I live in a rural area that is mostly desert, but in a few places, water is near the surface, and we get trees there.  It IS odd-looking, I'll admit, but if you'd like, I can show you a few pictures.  Dry desert vegetation and even bare ground, and then a small stand of trees.  Weird.

And Bagginsbill has the right of it yet again.  As a newbie, I rely ENTIRELY too much on default settings.  Well, by now, I'm no longer a newbie, so I'll have to side-grade myself to dilettante.  [wry smile]  The ray-traced shadows looked much nicer.

And BB got there again.  [grin]  Yeah, their default lighting system has a skillion lights in it.  (I find that seems to be especially true of the older stuff, or am I imagining it?)  I'll change the blur radius and see how that looks, as well.

Thalek, what I would advise is start a new scene. Delete all the lights. Add back one or too, maybe an infinite and a spot. Set them to raytracing. Get your blur setting etc the way you want. Then to go General Preferences and save that as your preferred state. Then, whenever you start a new scene, you're not carrying a bunch of useless baggage.

I think Thalek was using a light set specifically designed to go with that "scene" using the cyclorama, not the Poser default lights.

But Cyclorama predates IBL and IDL, and so in those days people did ambient (global) lighting using 50 spotlights. This is stupid.

You have an environment. Turn on IDL. There's half your lighting, without any lights at all. (Assuming you have a sky. If you don't, get my environment sphere. Then you have 7000 skies for free.)

Then add one infinite, at 80% intensity, white, raytrace shadows, .5 blur radius. That's the beginner's formula that keeps you out of trouble.

You will need to post-work your levels, but it will look pretty good. Later, you learn to adjust light intensity so that postwork is no longer needed. But this is advanced.

That sounds like a good idea, although I confess I've no idea what my preferences would be for lighting.

And to simulate a sun light for this particular scene, does anyone have any recommendations, keeping in mind that the background is a Cyclorama?  (I'm thinking I might need more than one light to make certain it gets lit.  Unless maybe indirect lighting solves that problem . . .)

The cyclorama should be self lit. Didn't they do that? Sigh.

OK here's the deal.

An "environment" whether it's a cylinder or a sphere captures the lighting and appearance of the world, sans whatever you are going to jam into the middle of that world.

Whatever light you introduce does not define the luminance of the world. The world already has whatever luminance it's supposed to have. Making "the world" be lit, reacting to your scene lights, when it is a cylinder pretending to be the world, will cause the world to appear to be a cylinder with a painting of the world on it, lit by scene lights in an indoor studio. This is a very bad idea. I mean, they got away with it in movies in the 1940s but have you looked at one of those lately? They scream FAKE.

So - your world object - sphere, cyclorama, whatever - should have its image be self lit. Adding lights to light it up, shadows falling on it - nothing like this should be performed, or we will see it for what it really is - a prop, not a world.

The simplest way to set the material up is this.

Starting from a new material:

Diffuse_Value = 0

Specular_Value = 0

Alternate_Diffuse  = white

Add an Image_Map, connected to Alternate_Diffuse

Place your "world" picture on the Image_Map.

That's it.

Turn on IDL and the colors in the "world" will be used to light your central 3D scene.

Then add your sun, as I directed above.

That is all. One light, one "world" prop, self lit.

That Cyclorama looks small to me, as well. It should be huge.

My free environment sphere has a diameter of 1500 feet, and even that is small, but larger than that requires people to adjust camera "Yon" away from default values.

Waitaminute.. do you mean it's not necessary to put something in Ambient value?

No, although you could. There are some complicated rules when transparency is involved.

But - assuming the following:

No transparency, Reflect_Lite_Mult is off, Reflect_Kd_Mult is off.

Then all of the following do exactly the same thing - draw whatever it is you plugged into them.

Ambient_Color

Reflection_Color

Refraction_Color

Alternate_Diffuse

Alternate_Specular

Of the five, the first three have a corresponding XYZ_Value. The color is multiplied with the value to arrive at the final color.

All five of those inputs are added together - they are internally connected via Color_Math:Add.

Of the five, the one with the fewest oddities and exceptions triggered by those three things I mentioned is Alternate_Diffuse. That channel is as straightforward as can be. It is the equivalent of "Poser - draw this and shut up". Ambient_Color is similarly simple, but you have to also set Ambient_Value and why set two things when you can set one.

Which explains why I use Alternate_Diffuse like 99.9999999% of the time.

I'm so confused. If that accomplished the same thing, how come whenever Alternate_Diffuse is used, the figure doesn't glow?

It does glow if you just plug in a color with no respect for lights.

But nodes like Diffuse, Clay, Scatter - they all pay attention to lights. They are the lighting, in fact.

Did you never wonder that the light stays the same, but the shader makes it look totally different?

Lights are just data. They turn into actual light sources bouncing off object if and only if we use shaders that treat them that way.

I can make a shader that treats light sources as energy suckers instead of energy creators. I can make a shader that treats light sources as color selectors but pay no attention to the light brightness. And I can make shaders that ignore lights completely.

Ambient_Color is not a glow channel. It is a channel that does nothing but draw what you plug in or set it to. If you set it to white, then it draws white, whether there are lights or no. Same with the other 4.

If instead you plug a Diffuse node into Ambient_Color, then it will not glow anymore, at all. It will only show something if you shine a light at at. That is what Diffuse nodes do - they figure out how lights should be dealt with based on simple diffuse reflection rules.

@Netherworks: I am sorry that I am so late! But anyway: I've tested your limit-pose and it works perfectly. Thanks a lot for your effort, this was exactly what I needed!!

I learn more in ten minutes with BagginsBill than I learn with all of the Poser manuals.

:laugh:

Quote - I learn more in ten minutes with BagginsBill than I learn with all of the Poser manuals.

Heard that :biggrin:

Quote - I learn more in ten minutes with BagginsBill than I learn with all of the Poser manuals.

Some people prefer Poser over DS because of clothing room. I think that BagginsBill is more important plugin for poser then any other feature.

I just posted an image starring Antonia dedicated to some of you folks...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2253031

I think that BagginsBill is more important plugin for poser then any other feature.

Sweet!*

Do I have tolook under Wacros or in the Poser Scripts for it?!

Quote - I just posted an image starring Antonia dedicated to some of you folks...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2253031

Pretty!

Looking fabulous, Diogenes!  :woot:  :woot:

Ooh, this is exciting.  Drool.  :lol:

Looking great!

Looking really good... can you give a closeup of the front underarm area with arms down? Looks like a bit of a wonky crease there... everything else looks good to my eyes, so far. Thanks so much for your work on this!

Amazing!

Did you have to change the groups? I think that would break my morphs >_<

Nope no group changes and no jcms so morphs should be good. I also did not map the face because I did not want to ruin those gorgeous expression morphs. and mapping the face gives little advantage anyway.

Thanks... yeah I still see that crease. Not as noticeable as I thought from the smaller pics, though. The way the arm itself sits is good, it's just that crease a couple inches into the arm that looks a bit off.

she looks terrific!

No Joint control morphs... magic!!!

Yes weight maps make things much better.

I see where you mean believable3D I think I can adjust that out with the bulge maps, I am going to continue to work on it through the night on little things and put it up for download in the morning. That way everyone can see how it is working and point out problems to fix.

Quote - Nope no group changes and no jcms so morphs should be good. I also did not map the face because I did not want to ruin those gorgeous expression morphs. and mapping the face gives little advantage anyway.

Wonderful news then, I was worried about that! :D thank you!

Please let us know when she's good to go... and if you need a tester drop me a line, I'd love to help.

Problem:    When using symetry from right to left it breaks the weight mapping in the helper bones. It is all good with symetry from left to right.

Notice on the left side the actual weight map number is listed for the bone under zones.