There's two pictures here. The first one shows what i'm talking about with a render of michael 4. The second one shows my light positions, light settings, and render settings. Note that this also happens at max render settings. I'm using poser pro 2012.

Would appreciate any help on this.

You need to put a value in the Shadow Blur Radius in order to have a soft shadow. It's in the lights properties panel and chose the "Properties" tab. Your light needs to be selected to see the info in the properties panel. Anywhere from 3.0 to 5.0 makes a decently soft shadow.

Laurie

There's definitely some weirdness around the shorts area.  Looks like he's wearing flesh coloured shorts under his boxers.

Quote - Thank you! That helped the edges a bit, but does the shadowing on his skin look normal and natural? Or is there something else i need to do. Depth map shadows seem to do well, but everyone keeps telling me ray traced shadows are better, so i'm trying to learn how to use them properly.

If you look at the hip-area of your figure: The shadows there look much softer than on the other bodyparts, where they look a bit harsh (somewhat cartoonish i would say). So my guess is that your problem lies not in the lights and shadows, but in the materials. Compare the material of the hip (called 2_SkinHip for michael4) and the other materials; perhaps there is some suspicious color-ramp node or something like that in there.

millighost: It's a default michael 4 figure. Let me try to add a texture to him and see if that gets better results.

edit Ok, i added a texture from the hero series. Does this look alright and normal? Or do i have to tweek my raytrace settings some more? What i did was lower the shadow setting from 1 to .7, shadow blur radius to 5, and shadow min bias to .1 (i heard i should always lower this when raytracing to avoid artifacts).

Does it still look too cartoony and bad?

How many lights are you using?  I see no light screencaps as you mentioned.  The shadows are soft, but are you using IBL in addition, multiple lights, etc.

The default in poser pro 2012 shown in the picture: The leftmost pinkish one is a diffuse ibl. The one next to it is a spotlight. The light i'm testing is the white one to the right, which is my infinite light with raytrace shadows and the settings i mentioned above. There seems to be a fourth light in the back which is a spotlight.

But is the raytraced shadows coming out like they're supposed to, or do i need to tweek the settings for them?

If you want to do outdoor lighting your best bet is IDL with one light or IBL lights. Don't mix lights like you're doing. That's what causes the "toony" look.

Laurie

Here's my light settings for that current light.

As I posted at the duplicate thread, most of us prefer to use the manual section of the render settings or Dimension3d's render setting found under Python Script.  I would delete or turn off all lights except the one you are working with.  Your shadows are soft because of IBL and the colored lighting may be giving you the toon effect that Laurie mentioned.  Start with that first, then build up from there.

Yeah i don't use default lights in my renders, i was just using them here to test out raytracing. My original problem was the raytraced shadows were too hard, with lines on his chest. Now i think i might have upped the shadow blur radius too high. But other than the lights/render settings (i use manual as well but was using this for test purposes), do the raytraced shadows look ok or how they're supposed to look like?

Btw thanks for all the help. I pretty much got this working because of you guys.

Don't use auto settings use manual. When IDL is enabled one outdoor sun is all that's needed. Your light settings don't look too bad. I usually increase my quality settings a bit more, but that does increase the render time ;).

Poser isn't all that hard to learn and you'll be speeding along in no time :).

Laurie

LaurieA: Yeah i was testing out a few renders with IDL lighting. At first i was scared because i thought IDL would take forever to render. But to my surprise, the renders were very fast, and i liked the results a lot. I'm gonna have to experiment more with baggins enironment sphere and hdr maps.

hborre: That looks really nice man. So the basic rule of thumb is start with one light and work from there? Even though i've only been using poser for like a month or so, i'm starting to see that lighting pretty much can make or break a picture.

Yes, exactly.  Depending how you construct your scene, you have many options available which can optimize your light setup especially with PP2012.  Render gamma correction will require lower light intensities, IDL will take care of ambient lighting and naturally reflective surfaces.  Outdoor scenes, try to incorporate a self illuminating sky dome (preferably BB's envsphere) and 1 infinite light for the sun.  Indoors, observe the rules of inverse square lighting and place your light source realistically within the room.  Don't be afraid to use self-lit objects (lighting panels, light bulbs, candles) to illuminate interiors; with IDL you will get a more realistic effect.

Don't rely on prefab lights sets, learn to build up your own; you will find that it becomes easier to create a lighting system.

I wouldn't use more than one light set to constant. Ever. I do use a lot of point lights if I'm doing an interior and there are lamps, ceiling lights etc. I'll use more than one spot too, like if I'm doing a portrait. But when it comes to lights that essentially equal a sun, I only use one :).

Make sure you use good render settings as that makes all the difference too. You have to take gamma correction into account as well.

Laurie

oops...crosspost ;). hborre knows what's what. Take the advice...hehe.

my advise it to keep the 1:10 ratio between blur radius and samples (default 2:19), otherwise soft shadows tend to become "blodgy" (whatever the word is, irregular, with dark and light spots).

So when I crank up the radius to 20, samples is set to 200. And soft shadows don't come at 100%, so shadow intensity has to be reduced too (say 50%, 70% max). Min Bias means that small details from displacement maps will not generate shadowing, only larger details will. This is a softening effect too: softer, more ambient / environmental light has a larger Min Bias.

One does not need IDL only to get better shadows, just master the shadow-settings. Shadows are important in portrait photography. Like landscaping is "painting with light", so is portraying "painting with shadows".

All the best.

Thanks for all the tips guys. What kind of starting light sets do you recommend i build for the average render. A few sets that i read from tutorials included the 3-point lighting system, with an infinite light as the key light, a back light, and a side light with either infinites or spotlights. Another one i seen uses one diffuse IBL, a key light, and one spotlight either to the side/back. And should i use HDR files for both my diffuse IBL image map and the environment sphere?

my advise is first to look at the real world, and second to consult a book on photography. Or three: lighting for fashoin & glamour, lighting for bridal shots and lighting for indoor & outdoor portraying.

Outdoor => skydome
Sun => infinite light (one only)
Light bulb = point light (one per actual bulb), soft shadows mostly
Studio light = spotlight (one to one again)
Camera flash = ditto (high intensity, hard shadows)
Softboxes etc = buy the recently launched studio / car pation set from Dreamland / Bagginsbill

enable IDL. use Gamma correction (see my Missing Manuals site for a tutorial on this)

Do not put lights where there are not placed in real life. Do not use IBL nor ambient occlusion, as these are means to overcome the problems in P7 which are all dealt with in PPro2012. Do not use ambient (in materials) unless you're presenting glowing led lights and other things that actually do illuminate (like softboxes in BB's studio set, and the skydome).

Portraying a girl outdoors just requires a skydome / IDL, one (!) infinite light and one or two spotlights for flash. Period. In my opinion.

EDIT: Env Spheres do fine with HDR, there is a current thread by Monkeycloud who makes Vue scenes for that.

have fun, looking forward to your results.

Quote - Thanks for all the tips guys. What kind of starting light sets do you recommend i build for the average render. A few sets that i read from tutorials included the 3-point lighting system, with an infinite light as the key light, a back light, and a side light with either infinites or spotlights. Another one i seen uses one diffuse IBL, a key light, and one spotlight either to the side/back. And should i use HDR files for both my diffuse IBL image map and the environment sphere?

Can't answer most of these but I can say for definite most people here don't recommend any light sets at all.  If you're looking for good lighting, learn to use them yourself, since a premade set will seldom give you what you want.

If you testing these lights on skin, I suggest you use EZskin, to see the difference materials will make on how light interacts with objects. Lights are fairly easy to get the basics, materials not so much.

I think everyone has giving you solid advice so far, I would just add to aRTBee's post about the lights, when using lights as lights use the fall off setting.

With depth map shadows, the shadowing is always good on characters faces. However, with raytraced shadows, it comes out looking bad. The eyes are usually too dark and notice the polygons under the eyes. What am i doing wrong here?

Here is a comparison between depth map shadows and raytraced shadows on the face. The position of the light is exactly the same for both images. The render settings are exactly the same.

I'm using Poser Pro 2012.

The character i created using Michael 4 morphs with props and textures. Everything else in poser i'm pretty comfortable with, but the lighting/shadows are giving me a real headache :( I would always use depth-mapped shadows if i could get them to come out crisp on backgrounds, but everyone keeps saying ray-traced is better, but i'm running into problems with them on people's bodies.

Try increasing your Shadow Min Bias to 0.5 if that is indeed mesh.  It almost looks like SSS artifact under the eyes.  Do you have SR2 installed?  What is your SSS scaling value?  A value of 1.5 or greater, not a problem; lesser than 1 you might get artifacts.  Though the image I posted has a value of 1 for SSS scaling, but I do have SR2 installed.

With render gamma correction, your light intensity shouldn't be 127%.  Way too much lighting. 

I'm gonna test the shadow min bias change and see if that has any effect. Where do i go to see my SSS scaling value?

The other problem is not just the artifacts under the eyes, but the eyes themselves are too dark. With depth map shadows, the eyes are nice and bright, but in raytracing, the eyes always come out too dark.

Ok, i changed the subsurface scattering to .5, no difference.

I turn off subsurface scattering, no difference.

I increase the shadow blur radius to 4, and it softens the edges, but stil the eyes are very dark and bottom of the eyes show the same darkness.

I decrease the shadow itself down to .2. This fixes the eyes and brightens them, and lightens the bottom of the eyes. While this works, it makes the shadows in other areas too bright, and this would seem counter to having ray-traced shadows because the value is so low.

With depth-mapped shadows, i don't have this problem. I'm not sure what else to look at. Are ray-traced shadows really better than depth-mapped shadows? Because so far i'm seeing better effects of DMS on faces than ray-traced.

If the eyes have true reflection nodes attached then you will need an environment to cast actual surrounding reflections.  You might connect the textures to the ambient channel but that defeats realism if that is what you are achieving.  The only time you would really need clarity in the eyes would be for closeups.  Angled lighting and distance will show very little detail.

Scaling can be found on the SSS node in the MatRoom.  Higher values, less translucency, lower values, more.  You do need raytracing for this feature to work adequately. 

Attached Link: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/fast_bssrdf/

SSS does not require ray tracing, it's using a point based method. See the attached link for details.

Quote - I started from scratch and attempted to create my own lights, but i've run into another problem with raytracing shadows. It seems raytracing shadows work well on backgrounds, bringing out crisp defined shadows, but it's coming out bad for me on character faces.

With depth map shadows, the shadowing is always good on characters faces. However, with raytraced shadows, it comes out looking bad. The eyes are usually too dark and notice the polygons under the eyes. What am i doing wrong here?

Are there any transmapped objects in front of his eyes, like a mask? 

As far as i can tell, there's no transmapped objects in front of his eyes.

Stewer, thank you for that clarification.