SSS is absolutely amazing technology. It takes skin that looks normal and healthy and completely makes it look like the figure has aids. Sickly white, disease stricken, pale, unhealthy, sunlight depravation.

I've always wanted a technology that just "auto whites" a surface. Brilliant.

The "wax" look is incredible.

:huh:

Forums are amazing technology. They can take a seemingly normal and rational person and make them look like a troll. Short-sighted, misguided, creative effort deprived.

Incredible.

Quote - Forums are amazing technology. They can take a seemingly normal and rational person and make them look like a troll. Short-sighted, misguided, creative effort deprived.

Incredible.

I couldn't agree more.

Laurie

Quote - Forums are amazing technology. They can take a seemingly normal and rational person and make them look like a troll. Short-sighted, misguided, creative effort deprived.

Incredible.

:thumbupboth:

Zanzo, if you really want some help (and first  you could start off by being polite), you could try this:

If you're using EZSkin, on the second panel at the top, there is a color chip with H S and V beside it with numerical values. If you put 105 in the S value it will boost the color of the map slightly, enough that your figure may not look "like it has AIDS".  On the first panel, you have control of the shininess of the skin. If you don't want it to look "waxy" reduce the specular. The forum is here to HELP you. Be nice and you'll get all the answers you have questions for.

One more thing: if you're using Poser Pro 2012 rather than Poser 9, you may be running into problems with gamma correction. There is a plethora of topics on the subject if you do a forum search. I am not gonna tell you how to get EZSkin or the answers to gamma correction. I'm going to make you work since you made me work to help you after your insults ;).

You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

Laurie

Quote - Forums are amazing technology. They can take a seemingly normal and rational person and make them look like a troll. Short-sighted, misguided, creative effort deprived.

Incredible.

:lol:

Post of the day. 

Quote - Forums are amazing technology. They can take a seemingly normal and rational person and make them look like a troll. Short-sighted, misguided, creative effort deprived.

Incredible.

To paraphrase, "A good post is well worth repeating."

I have to be honest, I felt pretty much the same way about SSS that Zanzo does for a really long time. It seemed to blow out every texture it was applied to no matter how I adjusted it, and when it did work, it resulted in very realistic candle wax skin.

I can't give any advice about how to adjust it in Poser since I use Studio, but SSS will definitely take adjusting and experimentation to get it to look the way you want. I use a low value (20%) and darker colors to add just a little.

Zanzo sounded like he was being sarcastic...I really don't see this as trolling.

Well, you must admit a post like that won't garner too much help when Zanzo could have just asked "How do I keep my textures from blowing out and looking like wax when I use SSS? There would have been folks lining up to help ;). Instead the answers he got were just as sarcastic as his post.

Laurie

Quote - Well, you must admit a post like that won't garner too much help when Zanzo could have just asked "How do I keep my textures from blowing out and looking like wax when I use SSS? There would have been folks lining up to help ;).

Laurie

True, I just understand what he's thinking because I've been there.   ;)

I'm with LaurieA... I think the problems as described sound more like Gamma issues than SSS. As the resident expert on how to misuse GC, I really recommend Snarley's Scene Fixer.

Hint: At the risk of undermining Laurie's intent to make the OP work a bit, he might check the signature line of Snarleygribbley's post above...

I'm still trying to get GC down right too basicwiz :P. Since I've never had pro before I never had to deal with it...lol. Scene Fixer was a godsend.

It would seem between Snarly's awesome scripts and Semideu (sp) I'm all set ;).

One more thing the OP could check to see is if his/her lights are just too bright or the render settings are wrong. The exponential and HSV exponential settings can really blow stuff out sometimes. And if you're using BBs Envirosphere you have to reduce your lights again. Lots of variables.

Laurie

It seems most people are assuming the problem is between the key board and the chair. It wasn't a question it was a statement. If the user doesn’t like the feature they are not forced to use it.

Perhaps the the OP just wanted to express his or her feelings for the fact that for example the vendors of this site's marketplace want to get an accelerated compensation for years of abstinence from subsuface scattering by making extensive use of it in their promo images and using it as much as technically possible, which under the right circumstances can result in a slightly waxy look which in turn reminds the uninitiated viewer subconsciously of the barbie dolls he or she played with in his or her unhappy childhood in the orphanage, stirring up some tearful memories. There is nothing you could do about it: either you like Barbie or you do not.

Quote - It seems most people are assuming the problem is between the key board and the chair. 

Or, as we experts call it, the "External Mouse Driver". :) 

well, anything new can be frustrating til you get the hang of it.   sometimes you be up all night trying and have nothing to show for it in the morning.  antidote - practice, patience, and advice from forum friends.

Quote - > Quote - Well, you must admit a post like that won't garner too much help when Zanzo could have just asked "How do I keep my textures from blowing out and looking like wax when I use SSS? There would have been folks lining up to help ;).

Laurie

 

True, I just understand what he's thinking because I've been there.   ;)

Haven't we all ;)

Laurie

HAHAHA!

Quote - > Quote - It seems most people are assuming the problem is between the key board and the chair. 

Or, as we experts call it, the "External Mouse Driver". :) 

Judging from his other posts, he's probably just frustrated. Hope he works out his problems.

Quote - Sickly white, disease stricken, pale, unhealthy, sunlight depravation.

I've been struggling to get this very look in a render I'm working on at the moment... ;-)

It does sound like a good zombie type critter shader.

Quote - It does sound like a good zombie type critter shader.

Or other sundry creatures of the night ;).

Laurie

Quote - > Quote - Sickly white, disease stricken, pale, unhealthy, sunlight depravation.

I've been struggling to get this very look in a render I'm working on at the moment... ;-)

There are at least one or two freebie character mats which have that look. If I get time, I'll go through my characters and see if I can find something. I usually throw EZskin on them, so I can't remember which.

The OP may have put it badly (and a little sarcastically), but he does bring up something that has been my bug-a-boo for a while now. I have this airy-fairy idea to try to put a new character/texture package into the market place. After working with (and sometimes hating every merchant resource body maps I have for V4), I've finally come up with a set that I like. However, the sticking point here, is that the texture renders lighter and brighter in Poser than what I see of the base textures when working with them in Paintshop. My girl should be a medium pinkish tone but she renders lighter than I like. That and I'd like more control over the Blin node when working with EZSkin because I don't want my girl to look like she's been oiled.

Hum.  Well.  What a post opener.  I never had a problem with SSS.  I just buy skins with SSS shaders made in...no problems cause I ain't getting into all that apply stuff and being advanced :)   Works best with the IDL lighting IMO.  I bought PRO2012 for a few reasons..to by some SSS shader skin characters I saw here, 64 bit support, and use the fancy lights.  (Dang sparkly make up on those models!)

Sure all those selling points were great in the promo about tweak this and add that when they rolled the program out, and Pro2012 was a super upgrade to me from 7....but I haven't a clue how to use most of them; I barely knew how to work Poser 7 LOL.  Maybe one day I'll try to learn how to do all the stuff myself, but if you want to use SSS and don't know how to do it yourself there are several very fine textures out there and a lot of them are even in the PRIME store...and they come with readme files that tell you how to set the stuff up for best results....sadly most of my works are not done with SSS as I found I prefer the less realistic look for my line of work/post work.  I still like the SSS though :) 

To me..(hazarding a wild guess as the poster just chose to come in like an ass instead of stating a problem and asking for advice)  It sounds like a mix everything from lighting, gc, sss and old shader techniques.  Skin too shiney could as easily be way too much light in the scene as it could be an SSS wacro dumped onto an obsolete shader tree.  I could offer suggestions but why bother when the poster cant even be bothered to post any useful information about what they are trying to do.

best of luck

Quote - I'm with LaurieA... I think the problems as described sound more like Gamma issues than SSS. As the resident expert on how to misuse GC, I really recommend Snarley's Scene Fixer.

Hint: At the risk of undermining Laurie's intent to make the OP work a bit, he might check the signature line of Snarleygribbley's post above...

Quote - It does sound like a good zombie type critter shader.

I actually came up with a good zombie shader by accident.. just misattached a math node to the texturemap node and it greyscaled out.. looked pretty cool in BBs S+B SSS shader setup

It's good to see everyone here has a sense of humor! I love this forum :)

I should try to give SSS another chance.

I liked OP's post.  I loled.

Quote - It's good to see everyone here has a sense of humor! I love this forum :)

I should try to give SSS another chance.

Just grab a copy of EZSkin, play with the settings or ask others what settings they like. For what it's worth, I always turn down the spec from the default and boost the saturation slightly (thanks JoePublic!). Most of the time, my skin turns out pretty decent ;).

Laurie

Unfortunately, he didn't say anything about his set up. Is he using an environment sphere, like BB's free sphere?  Has he remembered to make sure that only the environment sphere is a light emitter (I say this, because this was my own stupid problem, I forgot to uncheck that little box for light emitter on my ID Cove backdrop). Has he got too many lights in his scene? I usually work with only two, a main light and a rim light.

I find poser 9/ pp2012 lighting much easier than previous versions, but you definitely cannot just plug some of the new features into old scenes or older ways of doing things and get good results.  IDL + GC + SSS can give amazing results, but you do have to set your scene up for it propperly.  If you are doing things the same old way you wont get good results.  The good news is that the new way is not that complex

Quote - I find poser 9/ pp2012 lighting much easier than previous versions, but you definitely cannot just plug some of the new features into old scenes or older ways of doing things and get good results.  IDL + GC + SSS can give amazing results, but you do have to set your scene up for it propperly.  If you are doing things the same old way you wont get good results.  The good news is that the new way is not that complex

OMG.. IDL AND SSS together? That would take forever to render.

Do you guys have multiple PC's doing the render? I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

"I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops."

I need Bar Rafeli to show up on my doorstep wearing nothing but a fur coat and carrying half a kilo of primo weed and a magnum of Dom - after parking the Rolls in my driveway of course :-) 

Quote - I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

He he. Sounds like you probably need to invest in a commercial level set up then?

A fairly high-end one at that.

Otherwise it sounds like you're between a rock and a hard place. Get something that looks less good and get it faster. Or wait for what can be a much better result, if you can use it properly.

That said I've got a quad core imac with 16 GB ram and it will certainly enable Firefly to pump out a render of a straight forward scene, with just one or two figures and not too involved a backdrop or envsphere panorama, with IDL and SSS enabled and maybe 1 or 2 ray trace bounces, maybe between 3 and 7 IDL bounces, in around 10 minutes. That's running with between 6 and 8 threads set...

So if you're on 8 cores, it doesn't sound out of the question for simpler scenes, to achieve those render times... if you've also got enough memory?

...I guess it all depends on how complex the scene you're rendering is really.

My final quality render times are generally ridiculously long, solely, as I've realised, because my finished scenes end up being so crammed.

I don't know how Firefly benchmarks against the likes of V-Ray for speed?

But for the comparisons I can make, against Vue and Lux, it seems to perform pretty well.

I think of it as sending my drawn artwork off to another department / artist for colouring / inking... i.e. there's a real world lead-time to be accounted for in the creative process.

I just plan around having to wait for a render to complete... and with the background render option and / or Queue Manager, I can work on one scene while another is rendering.

Or, more often, I can go and do something else altogether...

;-)

Quote - > Quote - I find poser 9/ pp2012 lighting much easier than previous versions, but you definitely cannot just plug some of the new features into old scenes or older ways of doing things and get good results.  IDL + GC + SSS can give amazing results, but you do have to set your scene up for it propperly.  If you are doing things the same old way you wont get good results.  The good news is that the new way is not that complex

OMG.. IDL AND SSS together? That would take forever to render.

Do you guys have multiple PC's doing the render? I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

 

 

8-10 minutes may be asking too much. IDL+SSS taking forever? Not necessarily, if you know how. If you start asking specific questions, you will probably get better answers.

By the way in my last render there in my gallery, "The Inquisition", I've used EZSkin for the human figures.

I don't think they look too sickly or pale? (even though one of them is meant to probably be a bit on the unwell side. LOL)

Maybe these examples do look sickly or pale to some people... it's so subjective really I guess, this sort of thing!

One's idea of what constitutes good skin tone will possibly be based on socio-racial-geo-cultural background I guess??

Coming from Scotland myself, good skin tone to me is probably just anything that isn't too transparent... ;-)

I have found I need to turn a lot of the default EZSkin settings down... specularity and fresnel reflections I think primarily.

In that render I've also manually applied SSS to the skeleton (based on a mat room sample posted by Anthanasius), the brain, the tentacles (based on BB's "Creepy Skin" post) and the beatles.

There's a variety of different results that can be had from SSS I guess... so of course it will need some tweaking for different applications / circumstances I suppose...

Quote - OMG.. IDL AND SSS together? That would take forever to render.

Do you guys have multiple PC's doing the render? I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

Um, no it doesn't? IDL and SSS look great together? And I don't know of ANY render engine (unless it uses the gpu to render) that will do a commercial level render in 8-10 minutes. If that's why you got Poser then you may as well take it back. You're barking up the wrong tree. Make everthing in your scene and stick to Cycles in Blender. Even then, 8-10 minutes is shaving it really close - if you're rendering an orange and nothing else. rolls eyes

Laurie

Zondo, Zondo, Zonzo, in another post you stated you did not want to read a 800 page manual.

Well, I think it is time.

Click-drag-drop-render does not work in PP2012 that is far and beyond better then any Poser version before it. But due to all these changes. . . . . .

For PP2012?

1; Never ever use a texture that was not made or upgraded to PP2012 and all the new features.

1. Never ever use a light set that was not made or upgraded to PP2012 and all the new features.
2. Never ever use a material room node setup that was not made or upgraded to PP2012 and all the new features.

learn learn, learn, what changes need to be made to render with;
IDL
SSS
Gamma Correction

Then:

IDL + SSS

Then:

IDL + SSS + Gamma Correction

Only then you start to explore the fantastic PP2012 possibilities.

You use older textures, with older node setups, in older light sets, and expect it all to work like a Swiss clockwork? na-na-na-, NO GO in any app.

1. Maintain the textures in diffuse_color, delete ALL the rest. And I mean ALL the rest.
2. Start with deleting ALL lights. ALL of them.
3. Load ONE infinite true white light inside BB's sphere but read the instructions first. OK?

Start from there.
And build and learn all PP2012 new features one by one.

Mastering lights is a life time achievement in any 3D app.
Mastering the Material room is another life time occupation. => it's been BB's speciality for years now and even he discovers new things any hr of any day.

Sorry sir, time to read the manual.

Quote - I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

...if you find out how to manage that, share with the rest of the class! ;)

(Seriously, I don't get a normal shot out that fast with no bells or whistles.)

IDL+SSS has been the best option for me, at least. It takes longer, but not remarkably longer on average than any other promo renders I have to do. Maybe 25% longer... but my promo renders average an hour presently. That's still a marked improvement over previous versions, though!

Maybe I'm wrong, but I dont think that is true..

My understanding is that the box is poorly named, and doing so removes the object from any IDL calculations.  Having the box checked does not cause the object to emit light.

Quote - And here's the trick that I don't often see people tell newcomers to Poser 9/2012 to use when they are rendering. Everything loaded into your scene comes in with the Light Emitter box checked. This box should only be checked if you are using an environmental sphere like the free one from BB, or mesh objects that you are using as light sources.  For all other objects in your scene (i. e. the figure, hair, props, ground, scenary), this box should be unchecked.

Quote - OMG.. IDL AND SSS together? That would take forever to render.

Do you guys have multiple PC's doing the render? I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

Yikes.  Not even in Vray. haha.  Well ok, maybe in Vray.  But I've been playing around with SSS and IDL in 2012, and it's reasonably fast on my rig.  Similar results to just about any other engine offering the same feature set.  Granted, haven't gone too far into doing LARGE scenes with lots of props yet, etc.  But one toe at a time.

Running the 64bit version of P2012 on a Core i7, under Win 7, with a Gforce GTX 2gb (card doesn't assist in final render).  Firefly handled a very decent resolution on my last render in just under an hour.  Results similar to what i grew used to in Vray.  Resolution was far larger than I would ever need in animation, unless I was shooting for HD.

Quote - Maybe I'm wrong, but I dont think that is true..

My understanding is that the box is poorly named, and doing so removes the object from any IDL calculations.  Having the box checked does not cause the object to emit light.

I think you are correct, at least from what I have been doing so far with IDL.  An object will only emit light using it's ambient color/value.  Checking or unchecking this box only seemed to exclude or include it from  the calculations.

If you turn of the emit light (yes poorly named) then it cannot even bounce light.

It's very wrong to turn it off, except for small or dark things that don't contribute much to the room lighting (such as hair).

But - if you turn it off for room parts (walls, ceilings, floors!!) then you will totally lose the indoor lighting calculation, which doesn't even get close to correct until it bounces at least three times off those surfaces.

Skin to skin also - like in the armpit or under the chin. Those parts will get unnaturally dark and not as red as they should be if the skin can't bounce light.

I have no problems with SSS and IDL. This rendered in under 10 minutes on my i5 Laptop. (Had to reduce pic quality by half to attach it to this post)

And yes, what Bagginsbill said: Keep "light emitter" checked for everything, including the skin.

Not sure what you're doing wrong.

I mean, running a texture through EZSkin , ticking IDL and adding a single infinite light to your scene can't be that complicated, can it ?

Quote - I have a 8 core processor which still takes too long to render. I need to pump out commerical level renders in 8-10 minutes tops.

^i nominate this for stupidest post of the year.

Quote - ^i nominate this for stupidest post of the year.

LMAO.  Why would anyone bother with CPU rendering on a single machine if you need that much production?  Sheeeeesh.