Quote - Hmmm, I wonder then how Blackhearted has worked material AO into his SSS setups? I am very curious to see a screen grab of that. Snarly, I'm also awaiting your new EZSkin with baited breath!

I've done it previously using a color_math node, set to multiply, immediately after the alt_diffuse...with the SSS node setup plugged into Value 1 and the AO in Value 2.

Pretty sure that's how it was set up... not near Poser currently.

I think I picked that trick up from a bone shader posted by Anthanasius... as used in the skeletons featured in my "The Invitation" and "The Inquisition" gallery posts.

BB's shaders are all over the place . . . looking good. :)

It looks like she's never been through a battle, but the armor looks quite nice in my opinion.   I tried to do the same for the chainmail, but...

Good bubblewrap.

I guess that chainmail needs two shaders, blended with a mask control map perhaps?

Is that EZmetals you're using on the armour Theta, or a shader of your own devising?

That BB wood looks superb... also looking forward to getting some more Faceroom compatible figures once Tyler, weight mapped James and Koji and Miki 3 arrive...

Actually, its basically the same shaders that came with the Knight Templar pack, except I replaced the spherical reflection maps with raytraced reflections.  Also, I adjusted the reflect node from .3 to .5

With the 'bubblewrap' mail, I tried to copy the armor metal shaders and use the existing texture maps in the proper nodes.  Came up with a slightly different result from what I was expecting.  lol

A bit off topic here now, but as for the chainmail above ...

A while back, while in search of "Mythril" (Mithryl? Mi.. how ever .. ), BB posted an experimental shader for a chainmail, with nice renders and an explanation of how to use it. Maybe it could be of use here, too:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3908915&ebot_calc_page#message_3908915

It's a bit down in this thread.

cspear's data were calculated in the absence of SSS.  the SSS precalc step is greatly increased if IDL precalc is not used, however the SSS variables may not be user-accessible such that the SSS precalc step can be skipped or decreased.  users trying SSS/IDL may find a geometric increase in render time (IDL precalc + SSS precalc + render), e.g. going from IDL IC = 50 to IDL IC = 90 may take twice as long, 90 to 95 = 2x render time, ... , 99 - 100 = 2x.

AFAICT d3d's RenderFF script calculates render time as SSS precalc + render, but doesn't include IDL precalc.

in the case of gold looking too yellow, reduce the diffuse value (if any) to ~ 0.001 and reduce saturation of reflection colour.

Unless I'm missing something in the process, we're not quite there with prop-based lighting. In real life, a lampshade will be translucent but the details of the lampshade will still be visible.

In the scene I'm rendering at the moment, I have placed an ambient ball primitive (scaled at 28% and Ambient set to 215) inside the lampshade. That of course is to replicate a light bulb.

The lampshade is set to 0.7 translucence and 0 transparency (which I also experimented with).

The lampshade renders as pure white instead of showing the details of the texture.

This reflects my previous experience with using props for light: they always render pure white.

This means that while ambient props may be great for lighting a scene, they're not so good if they need to be rendered themselves.

Am I missing something? Would it help for me to plug the color map into Ambient Color? or....?

I think an ambient value much above about 32 will white out the prop...

...that's based on advice I read from Seachnasaigh somewhere in this thread I think:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2847156&page=1

Let's be clear: I don't have the ambient value on the visible prop (the lampshade) at all.

Any time I have used ambient on a prop itself, it whites out the prop, even if the level is 1.

In this case, the problem is probably as much with translucence as with ambient. Translucence seems to make the entire material equal in how much light gets through.

But I had to crank up the ball's ambient value really high in order to get anything close to a realistic effect in terms of the light it was throwing.

Hm, Miss Nancy mentions using HSV nodes in that "mesh as light" thread... wonder if there is value in toning down the ambient value and playing HSV on it? but I'm pretty lost with that. < edit: never mind, seems that was discussed further in the thread and probably wouldn't work.

I did do a test and discovered that plugging Ambient Color into the texture map works to a degree, although I don't know if I would call it a satisfactory degree....

method of simulating a translucent lampshade in poser is not intuitive.  e.g., translucence channel is light-emitting, like ambient.  as of the last release, there was no transmitted transparency (colour/pattern) feature.  if the lampshade itself is the light source, any pattern/weave will be blown out at values large enough to light the scene at 80% falloff per bounce.  if the lampshade is not the light source, but surrounds the sphere used as light source, then turning off "cast shadows" for the lampshade would look wrong.

not sure how to make it right.  how to preserve the lampshade pattern but also cause the lampshade to emit light.  one thing I haven't tried is whether, in an IDL-only render, a posersurface with "cast shadows" unchecked can allow an adjacent posersurface to act well as emitter.  if so, then it would be a two-lampshade solution.

Uhh - you have a scatter node, right?

It uses scatter. Poser scatter is the real deal - light passing through the insides of things.

Thanks, BB. My understanding was that scatter wouldn't really work with things that didn't have thickness, such as the lampshade.

I don't know where to start, but will give it a shot....

This particular one is marble, scale=.2.

The numbers on each box tell you the thickness in inches.

Your lamp shade should be set up very easily, but if it is one-sided you will not get maximum realism.

You must understand that one-sided props are truly a nono when trying to treat them as containing a volume of various thickness containing a transmitting medium.

x-post I see you do understand. Nevertheless what it means is you will have to play with values. It does not mean it won't work.

Look at my shower curtain draped over Andy. That is one-sided.

my apologies beforehand on being completely Python-ignorant...

can someone please feed me a script that launches a firefly render with the current settings and throws an alert or text window at the end with the total render time. This is for use when not deploying the d3d RenderFF

Thank you

::::: Opera :::::

Opera: I can't script... but for large, high quality renders, I always use Queue Manager (a lot easier in resources), which has start and end times in its main window.

BB: Yeah, it was your image of curtain that made me think it would be possible. Should be better than what I've got, at any rate.

I remember those RDNA images well. They were the first hint for me that PP2012 might be something special. :)

Quote - my apologies beforehand on being completely Python-ignorant...

can someone please feed me a script that launches a firefly render with the current settings and throws an alert or text window at the end with the total render time. This is for use when not deploying the d3d RenderFF

 

Thank you

::::: Opera :::::

import time

t1 = time.time()

poser.Scene.Render()

dt = time.time() - t1

print "Render time = %.1f seconds" % dt

thanks BB

Wow cool. Nice one.

the scatter tile is on the lampshade?

Would you be willing to give a screenshot of the shader?

Yes, I'm applying the scatter to the shade. The actual light is supplied by the ball inside the shade.

Which shader screenshot did you want?

Meh. No matter what I try, I seem to get that funky pattern that looks like a weird clown mask.

the shader on the lampshade with the custom scatter.

i don't see what you mean by the clown maskl

I haven't saved any full setups to this point, as I wasn't happy, but I didn't delete much either, just disconnected.

So this is the material room as it looks now. The custom scatter image above was with the settings at top right (but plugged in obviously). But I wasn't trying anything with Blinn or transparency at that stage.

thanks

Would maybe be good I there was a "glass" or "plastic" option in that scatter node that has "chicken", "ketchup" etc as options?

EDIT: maybe add "paper" to that wishlist?

Is that actually still the right node to use for skin, i.e. using "skin1", "skin2" options in the node, or should the separate "sub surface skin" node be used??

Cheers

Starting to look very nice indeed there Believable

The "stickled" plaster texture on the wall is a great touch...

I agree on the wall texture there! Mind showing a screen cap of that?

I know we are all focused on the lighting from emitters to get Global Illumination here, but we are getting to the point where two other elements are not contributing to the illusion because we have not turned our attention to them:

Depth of field is one. I know you all are aware of it and that it is best performed in post, but not having it in these renders is making the eye too critical, in my opinion.

The other is: lack of turbulence in the corners of rooms and on the edges of props. The furniture, lampshades, etc. have too-perfect edges. Note: i have not played with BB's "distressted" shaders, so I don't know if they put displacement noise on the very edges themselves.

Just my two cents. Not a criticism; i know this is a workshop in lighting.

 ::::: Opera :::::

Yeah, really good points to bring up Operaguy... atmosphere is maybe the other element to consider?

This particular situation of a lamp is taxing Poser's IDL for no particular reason. It's a small light source - you'd be a lot better off using a point light in there, not a glowing sphere.

[click for full 600x800]

Ok, here is my distressed furniture + PoserDOF render.

Furniture:
First of all, another shout out to BB for these shaders. Frankly, they are fucking fantastic. Just as I hoped above, the effect here is convincing for "damage" to the otherwise uncanny straightness and sharpness of the edges. Thanks for this library, BB.

Render:
It's remarkable what noHair, noSkin, noEyelashes, noTranslucentClothing, noSSS etc can do for render time!

At first I had this scene cranked all the way up to the highest settings, but due to the DOF toggled on, after 45 minutes only three small squares in the upper left had rendered. I turned it off and turned down some of the quality settings. This 600x800 render took just over 3 hours. (Corei5 8GIG) I am sure that if V were in view with strand hair, it would have taken overnight.

I made the depth of field too small; if I were to re-render I'd extend it about another 12-18 inches. More to the point, any serious work with DOF probably belongs in PS/AfterEffects etc where you can manipulate the DOF from a map.

Scene is a room with odd-angled walls/ceiling made from hi-res panels. Lit by  two emitters, one pointing at the ceiling, one elongated and warped into a complex curve by a magnet. There is a small spot on the goggles with raytrace shadows at 5.0.

No postwork.
If I had done some I'd have pushed brightness/contrast around a little.

This little composition is a salute to Amelia Earhart, the search for whose end has recommenced.

::::: Opera :::::

I screwed up my DoF - Poser's Focus guide is buggy. But you get the idea.

Point light.

4 bounces

IC=80

Samples = 3000

16 minutes.

Ok, BB, that's what I was using before, but of course the idea in this thread seemed to be to go "lightless."

But riddle me this: why should a "Poser light" render faster than a prop acting as a light? (Mind you, we're comparing apples and oranges, anyway. Your computer is FAR more powerful than mine.) They're both creating illumination for the IDL algorithms to calculate.

BTW, at full size your image is extremely fuzzy. This that happen in upload?

Replaced the chainmail textures with BB's chainmail Material #1 shader.  (I don't think I've ever seen that many nodes in one shader before...  O.O  Thank you very much BB.)