Quote - Mathman, why are you using blue tinting in Alt_Diffuse?  Is this for the skin?

Good question. Short answer is, I don't know. In any event, I have now fixed it, but the problem persists.

Quote - Does the eye cover involve a refract node? If so, do you have enough raytrace bounces (2+) to get through the lens and the eye cover?

BB, what do you mean by the eye cover ? ... I tried rendering with more raytrace bounces, but once again the problem persisted.

Perhaps it is the units; 0.85 for the ray bias (in the refract node) is very high, if you use poser units.

millighost, 0.85 was the value in BB's example.

You are right, though. I incrementally decreased the magnitude of the RayBias, until I started seeing a result at about 0.03.

math, dbl-chk to make sure all the eye surface settings are o.k., e.g. none of them have refl_lite_mult, and change the lites to ray-traced. poser sometimes has a problem with transparency and IDL, but in yer img there's no IDL AFAICT.

Nancy, you are right. There is no IDL.

I'm not sure what you mean by refl_lite_mult, though. The eye components each have a specular value of 0.5 and a highlight of 0.05, if that is what you mean.

Oh yes of course, thanks :)

Quote - Would you like a VSS sRGB skin shader? I could set publish one pretty easily.

Hey BB,

Did you ever publish the sRGB version of your VSS skin shader?  and/or your Hair Shader?

It doesn't look like you updated the files/links on the VS homepage. Would love to get those when you get a chance - thanks.

How can I fix the awful black pooling in M4's eyes ? (...see earlier entry for my shader setup for the "lens").

What is your setting of the ray bias? If using poser units, where bagginsbill uses inches, you have to divide by approx. 100, ie. 0.85 -> 0.008.

The lens is not doing the eye problem. I posted what my guess was - refraction on the eye cover and not enough bounces.

If you want more than a guess, show me eye material settings, particularly the cornea. Because of the viewing angle and the size of the image, I can't really make out well if the eye white is messed up or just the iris, or just whatever is under the cornea, or is it involving the whole eye cover. (There are multiple eye parts that can be set up for refraction or transparency, and possibly incorrectly.) 

Then I may have other questions.

Also, how does it look without using the lens?

Also, how does it look with shadows disabled in render settings?

I may have other questions later about render settings, but first we need to figure out which ones matter. That means knowing what the shaders are doing.

Hi millighost, I am using PNU. I am also using very low values for the ray bias. Still no luck.

thanks
Andrew

Mathman,

Not to state the obvious but if you are frustrated with all the eye surfaces, why not make the eyecover invisible? Then add your speculars to sclera and cornea.

Or, set transparency to say 88% on eyecover. You can still get refract effects, etc.

It may not be the current way of doing it but you can progress and pick up on other tech as you go. I put a reduced size anistropic right on the cornea and increase reflect to 2.00 sometimes.

I'd turn IDL on first. Render it small so it's fast...

nor sure you need bump or imagemap on cornea.

he can't turn on IDL yet.  but I still dunno why he's using depth-map lites.

p.s. it almost looks like he got both the sclera and cornea transparent and/or refractive.  maybe that's why it's dark.  they're both covering an unilluminated space.

Probably wont help with the eyes but try these render settings.

bounces: 3

cache: 85

samples: 5

shading: .20

bucket: 16

Nancy, the base v4 texture has that as well and doesn't give these problems under my normal settings but...

Mathman, try turning your raybias on the lens down to .085 and see what happens.  I seem to be getting the problem on my base viki with the raybias over .3 (really noticable at 3.5, not so much at 3.2).  I'm guessing that's what's happening to you too.

Here's the basic version of the lens, basic viki has VSS shaders applied.  RB = .4

I tried it again with the stock viki and I seem to get the same problem.

BTW, check out the earlier part of this thread.  Realmling was having a similar problem.  Now I'm wondering if he had his raybais too high as well.

Quote - Mathman,

Not to state the obvious but if you are frustrated with all the eye surfaces, why not make the eyecover invisible? Then add your speculars to sclera and cornea.

Or, set transparency to say 88% on eyecover. You can still get refract effects, etc.

 

It may not be the current way of doing it but you can progress and pick up on other tech as you go. I put a reduced size anistropic right on the cornea and increase reflect to 2.00 sometimes.

I'd turn IDL on first. Render it small so it's fast...

nor sure you need bump or imagemap on cornea.

The eye surface is already invisible.

Quote - Nancy, the base v4 texture has that as well and doesn't give these problems under my normal settings but...

 

Mathman, try turning your raybias on the lens down to .085 and see what happens.  I seem to be getting the problem on my base viki with the raybias over .3 (really noticable at 3.5, not so much at 3.2).  I'm guessing that's what's happening to you too.

I already have RB set at 0.03. Doesn't make a scrap of difference.

Ifeyecover is truely invisible then make cornea invisible also for now until this is solved. It's not a proper node setup for cornea anyway. It has sclera and pupil on its colormap..

Save the map with two cornea spots to material library first (or copy/paste)so you can get it back..

Quote - Ifeyecover is truely invisible then make cornea invisible also for now until this is solved. It's not a proper node setup for cornea anyway. It has sclera and pupil on its colormap..

Save the map with two cornea spots to material library first (or copy/paste)so you can get it back..

If by invisible, you mean set the transparency to 1, it already is that way for the cornea (and also for the eye surface).

I believe I have stumbled upon the solution. Originally, the RB attribute of the Refract node was 0.03. Very small, but I reduced it by a power of 10 (to 0.003). The problem went away.

math, maybe it means if yer using PNU (approx 8.2 - 8.6 ft, dep. on poser vers.), ya gotta lower raybias proportionately.  ISTR one of 'em mentioned that above.  the manual doesn't specifically say that raybias is function of user's units pref, but what if ya changed yer units to inches or feet or metric unit? if changed to inches, maybe raybias could be 100X larger.

I told you it needed to be reduced... I even posted an example.  It's not my fault your unit prefs were differrent than mine.  :p

I was going to write the same - but got busy today. When somebody says "My ___ is set to .03" they are saying nothing.

.03 WHAT? Feet? Miles? Millimeters?

I'm still mystified why this matters - ray bias isn't supposed to apply to transparency, and certainly not to objects other than where it is set. In this case, you guys are showing me that the refract ray bias on the lens is altering how light works on the eyes. That is news to me.

In any case, so be it. Observe my signature. MY DISPLAY UNITS ARE INCHES.

I'm using feet, (so that'd be between 3.0-4.0 if you're using inches) and I think I just figured out another part of the problem.

I'm using 8 bounces with the lens.  I turn off transparency on the EyeSurface mat of viki and the problem goes away.  I tried turning my render setting up to 12 bounces (the max in 7 which I'm using ATM) and the problem is still there.

Not to take this thread in a completely different (but still relevant) direction, but I'm stumped. Is there a way to make the artistic lens also affect the background image or movie? I tried copying the background shading network and setting it as the background input on the refract node, but it still just renders over black.

No there isn't. The "background" is "written" onto your image as a separate step, before rendering. Then the render is layered on top, as a 2D image manipulation, much like layers in Photoshop. The background is not part of the 3D scene and is in no way visible to the lens.

However, that doesn't mean you can't have an image or movie in your scene, behind your subject. Place a one-sided square, suitably positioned and scaled behind your subject(s). Then place whatever imagery you want on that object in the material room. For self-lit backgrounds, connect the image or movie to Alternate_Diffuse or to Ambient. If using Ambient, set Ambient_Value = 1. In either case set Diffuse_Value = 0 and Specular_Value = 0, so that no part of its appearance is influenced by lighting.

Thanks Bill! :D That worked.  Eventually I figured out that I could also just copy and use the artistic lens square's shader network, replacing the Refract node with the background image/movie, on the background shader.

Is there a way to get truly random, grain-sized noise? I'm attempting an in-Poser film grain effect (part of an artistic challenge I set for myself).

This is OT, but generally speaking, computers have a very difficult time of doing truely random anything.  In programming you usually cheat by setting the seed which generates the results to date/time.

Yep.. but strangely you can't set the seed in most Poser shaders. I figured out that with an X and Y scale of 128, the noise generated by Poser is exactly 1 pixel each grain. Anything bigger than that and you get rectangular splotches (which looks cool, and would be useful for digital compression errors). Also, if you set the ZScale to .001 * frame_number, that makes the grain change for each frame, giving a passable film grain (Assuming your noise min and max are within reason).

A very clever use of object properties. +1 internet

There are some cool uses of this lens on here!  Nice work BB, for the idea.  Would there be an option to use a lens like this for a less or more exaggerated "depth map" type of render?

I am on the road and don't have Poser with me to verify, but I'm pretty sure the lens obstructs Posers notion of "depth". Depth does not transcend refraction - the depth registered would always be of the lens itself, rather than what you're seeing through the lens.

Now if there was a Refract_Depth node, a node that returns the depth of what is encountered by refraction rays, then it would be possible. In fact, other important effects would be possible in general. For example, many attenuated refraction effects, such as obsidian, could be done if we had a Refract_Depth node.

When light passes through an attenuating medium (such as colored glass), the amount of coloring varies with how much volume was traversed. The formula is simple, but the information needed to pass to the formula is just not available in the current material nodes.

Quote - Depth does not transcend refraction - the depth registered would always be of the lens itself, rather than what you're seeing through the lens.

Ah, good point.  Thanks for the reply.

Maybe another way would be a camera with a lens capturing a greyscale image, combined with a large panel light that had a falloff, which based on the brightness of what it hit, could simulate the depth of the object in the image...?  Perhaps then varying the falloff and intensity you could modify/exaggerate the depth.  Of course it would have to be like a clay-like render, to ignore the maps.

Is Tilt/Shift effect possible using this method?

Quote -
At this point you can render and your original scene should appear unchanged. You have a neutral lens. Save this in your library for future use as a starter.

It works, but it loses the background color.  Is there any way around that?

Nope

You can stop using background - use a one-sided square instead.