Hello All,

its been about 6 or 8 months since I've done anything with poser or 3d, so i had some questions to help get caught up again

1. is there a fix for the 2012 poser hair issue? What I mean is when the last time I used poser, almost none of the hair products worked with poser 2012 without having to spend hours changing the bitmap files etc so that the hair actually shows up in renders.  If no new changes, i'm thinking of switching to a lower poser version but had some questions about using existing projects between the two versions

2. any new utilities that are must have in the past 8 months?

thanks

Spending hours? I don't get it. All you need is a copy of Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer and it changes the gamma on all the black and white maps in a second. Even if you did it by hand it doesn't even come close to hours, but minutes. Unless you're clueless.

Laurie

Even without scene fixer, pp2012 came with ChangeGama in the python scripts (and also a wacro) which would do it in seconds.

EZskin2 is absolutly necessary

Bill

Yeah but SceneFixer does so much more ;).

Laurie

Yep, creating inj/rem files makes it worth the price ;)

Bill

Free is good ;)

Laurie

I am unaware of any "2012 hair" issue.  All the hair products that I have used in previous versions of Poser work in PP2012.

What exactly are you having to change that takes hours?

Gamma compensation is a non-issue, easily taken care of by Scene Fixer mentioned by LaurieA and there are built in tools in PP2012 that will do same "Image Gamma" by D3D

Quote - Spending hours? I don't get it. All you need is a copy of Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer and it changes the gamma on all the black and white maps in a second. Even if you did it by hand it doesn't even come close to hours, but minutes. Unless you're clueless.

Laurie

no need to flame, i see the forums still have unfriendly people :)

I remember using the scripts to change the gamma but  there were still some issues that needed to be done to the hair to get a final product other than changing the gamma. I cant remember what I did but it wasn't "in minutes" as you stated.  

Yeah, but hours? Really? Maybe if you have 500 ppl in the scene, each with a different hair. I can do a hair that has 20 material zones in less than 2 minutes. By hand.

Laurie

Quote - Yeah, but hours? Really? Maybe if you have 500 ppl in the scene, each with a different hair. I can do a hair that has 20 material zones in less than 2 minutes. By hand.

Laurie

ok we all know ur a pro, we get it. you know exactly what to do to fix this issue and which files need to be fixed (if not using scripts)

but a beginner using poser would not instantly know how to do it in minutes let alone know where or which files to fix.

and the gamma change is not the only thing that was needed on some hair products.  Sometimes the gamma change would produce awkward colored hair that did not look natural or the desired intended color. from my understanding, not all hair products were created equally, some vendors did things differently then others, so applying the same script sometimes didnt fix everything.  

I don't even resemble a pro....lol.

Laurie

Quote - > Quote - Yeah, but hours? Really? Maybe if you have 500 ppl in the scene, each with a different hair. I can do a hair that has 20 material zones in less than 2 minutes. By hand.

Laurie

ok we all know ur a pro, we get it. you know exactly what to do to fix this issue and which files need to be fixed (if not using scripts)

but a beginner using poser would not instantly know how to do it in minutes let alone know where or which files to fix.

and the gamma change is not the only thing that was needed on some hair products.  Sometimes the gamma change would produce awkward colored hair that did not look natural or the desired intended color. from my understanding, not all hair products were created equally, some vendors did things differently then others, so applying the same script sometimes didnt fix everything.  

Some  hair products have ambient in their materials. That does not look good. Turning it off is a matter of seconds

Otherwise, you could also turn off gamma and not use IDL. Then you the same result as the previous version of Poser

Quote - Spending hours? I don't get it. All you need is a copy of Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer and it changes the gamma on all the black and white maps in a second. Even if you did it by hand it doesn't even come close to hours, but minutes. Unless you're clueless.

Laurie

cough, cough, ahem, sputter...LOL!

C'mon, that was not mean, it was just funny!  ...plus you got an answer to boot!  :tongue1:

Most hair out there is rather, let us say it friendly, OLD, OLDER and OLDEST.

Most hair have OLD shaders with tons of faking nodes in the material room.
DELETE ALL THOSE nodes. PP2012 does not need them.

Plug the hair texture in the diffuse channel, with diffuse color at true white.
Plug the same texture in displacement at 0.1 to 0.3 (my units are inches)

Load the transmap at GC 1.000

Render and enjoy.

PP2012 does not need all that faking from before.

I think, at this point, we need specifics to offer helpful hints.  Vilters simplified the answer, making it possible to render something acceptable under PP2012.  But for more details, screencaps perhaps.

yes, what specifically had to be changed.

There is the old "hair appears transparent until rendered" thing but thats the object display mode for that item so that leaves gamma , ambiant and a bunch of other tricks to fake lighting that Poser pro now does.

I've had issues with some hair products that were not so easily fixed. Even with the data image files set to gamma = 1, quite a few products show white streaks on the edges of the trans and colored image maps. I'm not sure what causes it, but the only way I managed to fix it was to take both the trans and colored maps and make sure they were all on a black background. For some reason, if they were on a white background, some of that white seemed to "bleed" over. Just adjusting gamma on the data images wasn't sufficient to prevent it.

Some of these hair products would have 5 or 6 different maps for 5 or 6 different material zones, and that's just for a single color.

So, indeed, actually fixing these does take quite a long time.

white edges are due to changes in texture filtering.

Scene fixer deals with that, too. I think people who are learning how to fix a scene should use scene fixer, click the button called "all of the above" or something similar and then reevaluate how hard this really is.

It removes ambient, removes translucence, selects crisp texture filtering, sets gamma to one where it should be set that way, blah blah blah

pp12 is a big investment to let it sit on your hard drive.

-in the qetting acquainted stage,
don't turn on all the new features right away out of the box.  i can't remember now what the default render settings were, the new features may be on by default. 

• first feature to get accustomed to is speed.  rendering p7 scenes in pp12 64-bits. :wub:
  done before my coffee pot finished percolating.  really helps with deadlines.

-second feature i would recommend learning is SSS, at first, by itself without turning on the other new checkboxes.  it's a render setting, but you can't use the p7 default material arrangement.  you'd need to spend a lot of time in the advanced material room settings. there is a wacro to add the sss node.  And not just for skin, it's fun to use on anything that would soak up light.

-3rd feature i would recommend studying is the new light properties palette options.

and come back to ask questions.  there are dedicated sss threads at rdna forums

This is for rendering with IDL in Poser 9/2012? or for rendering with any  lighting with 9/2012?

You have to change the gamma of the black and white maps to 1.00 if you're using gamma correction. And fix the ambient some vendors have added to their materials.

Laurie

I see - thanks LaurieA !

I don't have Pro 2012 yet, was just curious. Thanks!