I do renders in Vue that look like this and there is just a ground plane with an HDRI atmosphere to show up in the reflective materials and the vehicle.

I have been using Vue for many more years than Poser so I need help in this regard from someone who really know what they are doing.

regards, Tom

You'd probably want to be looking for posts by BagginsBill I'd have thought

I can help. What do you need, car paint? I have a good one on my site. Follow the link in my sig.

Get BB's Enviroshere, apply HDR file, render with IDL. It's free on his site. Also if its vehicles you specifically render, get hold of his car shader aswell, or buy the one on sale (can't remember vendor) Together the results are stunning.

Thought BB would be a long :) I can't render in Poser to save myself these days

bill, OP may wish to know how to use your envsphere with poser's ground plane (shadow-catcher).

I am looking for help on the render not with the shader, I don't think.

I will try the Enviroshere and see if that is what I need. thanks all!

Tom

Quote - I am looking for help on the render not with the shader, I don't think.

I will try the Enviroshere and see if that is what I need. thanks all!

Tom

Hmm. I don't mean to insult you but your Vue render looks way more fake than it should because your shader has two things wrong with it, which may not be obvious to you, but they scream at me:

1. The sum of diffuse + specular reflection is more than one. More light is bouncing off than arrives.

2. The amount of specular reflection is not following the proper Fresnel effect. The surfaces facing the camera reflect far too much compared to the edges.

So you certainly can choose to do whatever you like, but I'm telling you I can help you get a much more realistic picture, either in Vue or more particularly in Poser.

I also changed the composition, so that there were a lot more opportunities for reflections at a shallow angle. These reflections, obeying the Fresnel reflection equation, are stronger because we're viewing them edge-wise.

Poser has a built-in shadow catcher material capability but my shadow catcher is more powerful. You can calibrate it using your lights so it can exactly reproduce the shadowing found in the environment. Poser's won't do that.

Thanks you sir! I just started to work on a render today but needed my nap. :-)

Will most likely figure it out via the tutorial you provide on your site. Thanks a lot for helping so many people here in the forums!

Regards, Tom

I updated the shadow catcher page with a new 2012 version that works great with IDL and GC. The old one was from the Poser 6 era.

Hi Mr. Bill,

Just sent you a site mail.

Tom

So I discarded the notion of using new shaders, since that perhaps isn't worth the effort.

Here is a render where I set things up to work nicely with your existing cars and work in Poser 8.

I got rid of any directional light at all, since that introduced so much light that the shader blew up. You designed the shader to work in relatively little light, so I have everything adjusted for that.

How does this look?

For anybody else who is curious what the deal is here - it's simple. I'm using the doge.hdr file from here: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/HighResProbes/probes/doge.hdr

It is on my EnvSphere with Value 1, Gamma In = 1, Gamma Out = 2.2 (Remember, I'm targeting Poser 8 here)

There are no lights at all - just the EnvSphere.

The ground plane has my new ShadowCatcher 2012-R (free on my web site) calibrated for this lighting.

Whoops - I cannot upload the scene file - it is too big.

I will post it to my site.

Note:

1. I saved it from Poser Pro 2012. You will likely get a version warning. Ignore that - it will work in Poser 8 or 9 or PP2010.

2. When you load the scene, it will ask for the location of the doge.hdr file. You need to already have it. Show Poser where you have it on your system when asked.

3. Then, SAVE the scene for yourself. This will solve the version mismatch as well as fix the location of the HDR file.

4. I am not using GC here, either shader or render based. If I was going for greatest flexibility, I would use GC. But traditional shaders, full of compensations, don't work very well without modification.

5. If you wish to use other HDR files, you may need to recalibrate the ground shadow catcher.

OK It is posted on my site in the file cabinet, where I keep random things.

https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/file-cabinet

It's the file called TomCarScene1.pz3.

I will leave it there at least for a few months.

Note: It does not contain the car - just the EnvSphere and ShadowCatcher.

o.k., thx for files, bill.  they can get some freebie cars here (e.g. elele benzo), and then all they'll need are your car paints and chrome.  anthan posted a P8 version here with the schlick approximation.

Wow when you answer a question you really go all out! Thank you very much!

As I told you before my knowledge of Poser is quite limited so this will take me a while to wrap my head around. 

Thanks again Ted!

Tom

I tried some of the options and the burgundy paint. This paint has a different amount of reflection in it, although it should not. And the glass has more reflection than the default. So the two are out of whack here.

If you use my car paint, my thin glass shader, and my chrome, then all three will work together in every lighting situation.

You seriously need to sell some of these things - you'd make a fortune :)

Is there anything you can't do ??

this is what I got. couldn't get the paint to sparkle like I wanted :crying:, but at least the chrome didn't seem to need specular source.

When first heard about BB being the shader master I went looking for where to buy all these things I heard he had made...  So I searched and searched the stores trying to find it.  I came across the free stuff he hosts I'm like.. Ok  freebies.. where is all the for sale stuff... it took me embarrasingly long to clue in that the free stuff IS the stuff people were talking about....

sometimes I feel too dumb for the internet...

Quote - You seriously need to sell some of these things - you'd make a fortune :)

Is there anything you can't do ??

this is not an hdri render, but at least I got the sparkles to show better.  I looked at 2 silver metallic paint cars in a garage lit only by IDL, and the sparkles are visible, but one has to stand very close to see the sparkles.

In my car paint, I made the sparkles with a specular node. I did not anticipate pure envsphere rending, nor could Poser handle the necessary blur until recently. But now it may be possible to completely render without lights.

Specular reflection is mirror reflection. It is just a question of blur.

thx fr info, bill.  reflection noise/blur and specular noise/blur.  perhaps incl. in upcoming shader pak.

You are using a high focal length, which means a narrow field of view. Those bricks are probably (in real life) 4 to 6 inches wide. Or maybe they were 2 feet. I don't know. But you've  got them wildly bigger than they really are, given the size of a car.

Matching the scale and perspective of an environment sphere image is a tricky thing.

If you choose a focal length that causes only 10 degrees field of view, for example, then you are looking width-wise at 1/36th of the full panorama. Suppose the image is 8K by 4K. (I don't recall what the dimension is of that particular image, so I'm just using an example.) Zooming to 1/36th of that means you are filling your "background" using only 222 pixels out of that 8K. Render that in a 1000 pixel wide image, and you have almost 5x blur.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3621228&ebot_calc_page#message_3621228

If you followed that link, it led to another link where I give math calculations.

I won't repeat them here, except to say:

If you plan to render 1000 pixels wide, and you are using an 8000 pixel wide image, and you want the panorama pixels displayed 1 to 1 in your render, you must have a field of view of 45 degrees. To get that you must set your Poser camera to about 30.78 mm.

It sure is! I'm not used to thinking of 75mm as a particularly long lens.  Here it is at 25mm.

Thanx for all of the pointers, Ted!    In spite of having almost total control over the environment, this sure isn't snapshot photography...

Attached Link: Camaro Portrait

The sphere is great for reflections - but difficult to nail for background.

I tried a different approach in my most recent gallery image. I designed a new kind of cyclorama - one that blends and tints a background image, instead of slapping it on. And I used a painting instead of a photo.

Got in Staff Picks with it. Woot. Never had a staff pick before.

Am I an artist now? grin

Quote - Am I an artist now? grin

That is a great render indeed!

I've always thought of you as an artist, one whose sense of aesthetics lies on a fundamental level.  A luthier as opposed to a sculptor...