The image is what the default blond shader looks like in Poser 7, with a simple light set (one infinite light at 125%, a couple of fill lights). 

And the really weird thing...if I open this file with Poser 7 and save it, when I open it Poser 2012 and render, it looks like the first image.

I can't figure out what the difference is.  It must be in the render settings, but darned if I can figure out which one makes the difference.  (I used the auto settings to render.)

What is your gamma render setting?  Difference between P7 and any of the Pro series versions is gamma settings. 

Thank you!  That's it.  Opening a file in an older version of Poser resets the gamma correction to 1.

I left the gamma correction alone in Poser 2012.  It came set to 2.20, and I seem to recall checking the manual or the SM site and it said that's what it should be. 

I like how it looks at 1.00 better.  Though I guess it is less realistic.

Try leaving Gamma at 2.2 and cutting your light intensity, or better yet, get rid of extra lights. You usually shouldn't need more than two plus an IBL (or just one infinite for an outdoor daylight scene).  If you use indirect lighting you don't need the IBL.

Also, if you leave Gamma at 2.2, run the ChangeGamma script under MaterialMods and set 'All of the above' to 1.0 to un-Gamma correct trans and bump maps...

Using a gamma setting of 2.2, or actually using a linear workflow, you will need to lower your light intensities considerably to achieve similar, if not better, results as P7.  You will also require lesser light sets to render scenes closer to realistic light conditions.

I've been using the Envirosphere and an infinite light set to less than 50%.  Transmapped hair looks good, but dynamic hair doesn't. 

And hybrid hair - part transmapped, part dynamic - looks terrible under the envirosphere.  They don't match any more.  The painted part is as vibrant as ever, but the dynamic part looks flat and dull. 

I've been trying to fix this by using brighter lights.  You think I should be using lower light intensity?

lower light levels with 2.2 gamma = better results. (usually)

Strand hair color reacts more to light than transmapped and pp12 lights can be very different than p7.

Lower the light intensity and either lighted the specular color or increase the highlight size on the hair node.

To get colors to match fairly closely on hybrid hair plug image map from the modeled part into the root and tip colors. (You might need to crop it some in a 2d editing program if the hair color doesn't take up the whole image. Save that as a new image) The translucence color may need to be adjusted some to help the hair closer to the same color as it was in p7.

Still don't like the hair.

Just saw Red Phantom's suggestions.  Will try those tomorrow.  I gotta get up early to work tomorrow.  :-P

PP2012 comes with IDL (Poser 7 does NOT have IDL)
PP2012 comes with Gamma Correction, (Poser7 does NOT have Gamma correction)

You can not take a scene from one version, and render it in the other without changing the lights.

For outdoor scenes use bb's free sphere and one Infinite light at reduced setting of around 50-65%

You last picture has no specular.
Not on the figure skin, not on the hair.

You need to play with Specular or the Blinn node in the shaders for both, the hair and the skin.

As said above:
PP2012 needs a LOT less lights, as "In Direct Light" from the sphere will fill in the rest of the light.

You can not render older scenes in PP2012 unless:

• You change the lights, ==> Mostly remove IBL and reduce the number and intensity of the lights. ==> IBL + AO (the old setup) is fake.
  IDL is how it works in real life.  

• Material room work to adapt the shaders to GC and the IDL now present.

am i misremembering, i'm pretty sure i read somewhere that if you use the envirosphere with an image map, gc should be set at 1.0, or is this a case of one mince pie too many?

BB 's user file says when the GC in@out on the sphere should be set at 1.

The standard strand shader is outdated. Reflection Lite Mult has to be unchecked, Opaque in shadows must be checked.

Actually, it looks to me like you can render older scenes in Poser 2012 - just change the gc to 1.0, and they'll look like they did before.

Don't get me wrong, I use the Envirosphere and EZskin and weight-mapped figures all that cool stuff.  But sometimes, I want a more illustrative or toony look.  Realism not always my goal.

Bob - thanks!  Will try your shader tonight when I get home from work.

I'm glad I started this thread.  I've asked about this a couple of times before, and people didn't seem to know what I was talking about.

BB's sphere and one infinite light at 75% (The picture on the sphere is rather dark)

Poserpro 2012 needs more density for hairgroups compaired to older versions. See the threads about dynamic hair with carodan's posts, he has made a lot of experiments with higher hair density settings and shaders.

I've made some setups with dynamic hair in PP 2012 and I always doubled or even tripled the hair density to get better results.

In my experience it renders better and faster than any version before, but you have to use IDL,raise the hair density and change the shaders. A lot of old shaders, used translucency, which doesn't work ( at least not the way they were implemented)

I'll try to get some time the next days, to show the results of my experiments with dynamic hair and the shaders I use.

regards,

Bopper.

I suspect there's still a lot of work to be done on hair shaders for new version of Poser.

(Image is EZskin Jessi with the Envirosphere and one infinite light set at 50%.  I usually prefer lower light than that; the skin already looks blown out to me.  Hair still doesn't look as nice as the P7 render.  IMO, of course.  YMMV.)

I would ordinarily use a much higher hair density for a render.  These are just test renders.  Also, when I use dynamic hair it's usually because I want it to be dynamic.  That means it can't be too high res, or Poser can't handle the calculations. 

But yeah, Poser 2012 can render hair that would choke older versions of Poser.  That's very nice indeed.

Do you have an image on the Envirsphere?  If not, she's basically standing in a white-hot furnace, light-wise.

I've got an image of a cloudy sky on the Envirosphere.  Rendered in Vue. 

The infinite light is brighter than I usually use, because I like the glossy look the old hair shaders have under the old style lighting.  That's what I'm trying for.  Vilters says he used 75%, but when I tried it it was way too bright for me.  Hair looked okay, but the skin looked completely washed out.

I agree on the intensity; even 50 is a lot with the 'sphere

You could try a specular-only spot on the hair...

Quote - You could try a specular-only spot on the hair...

Is it possible for it to light only the hair and not the skin?

Vue can do that.  You have a light affect only certain objects in a scene. 

Quote - > Quote - You could try a specular-only spot on the hair...

Is it possible for it to light only the hair and not the skin?

Vue can do that.  You have a light affect only certain objects in a scene. 

 

alas, we dont have the option to include/exclude objects or actors from a lights influence. That would be useful.

Re. Skullcap poly density - just to clarify the conclusions from my previous experiments, I found that higher res skullcaps yielded better rendered results in terms of the potential for  a more randomised appearance of the populated draped strands, but at the cost of vastly increased simulation times. More geometry allows for more complex styles, but with the current styling tools its almost impossible to control all those strands.

It makes a lot of sense in Poser to use lower poly geometry for both styling and draping, but the lack of a way of randomising the appearance of the populated strands at render time is a problem for me, making me more inclined to go for higher poly skullcaps - but only as things are. As already touched upon in this thread, I'd like to see something like a 'randomise populated' slider in the hair room, as well as beter styling tools. I think this might make the creation, styling, draping and rendering of dynamic hair more manageable and faster while also rendering more realistically.

When I use dynamic hair, I generally want it to be dynamic.  Which means I don't use the styling options much, since styling is nuked when you run a sim. So I might not fully understand what you want.

But...maybe you could have the best of both worlds by using two (or more?) lower-res skullcaps together, one inside the other? 

Quote - When I use dynamic hair, I generally want it to be dynamic.  Which means I don't use the styling options much, since styling is nuked when you run a sim. 

That rather depends on your simulation settings.

Absolutely right! And the parameter you're thinking of is "Root Stiffness".

You can also use "Position Force" a bit like hairspray. Try a value around 0.01.

Root stiffness, thanks. Funny how you can forget something you see all the time.

Quote - Poserpro 2012 needs more density for hairgroups compaired to older versions.

Well, not quite.

What requires more density is if you lower the default root and tip widths (which are clunky thick). Naturally, if each strand is thinner, you will need more strands in order to get to the same overall "thickness."

Re retaining a style after draping: root stiffness will affect that, but theoretically at least, mostly at the roots. For general retention, Position Force would be the more apt setting to turn to. There other settings having to do with resistance to bending etc too that will play in here.

Hmm, now I'm remembering something.

While you can't have a light that affects only chosen items in the scene, you can go into Materials (Advanced tab) for the light and set Diffuse to black and Specular to white. So do that on a spotlight you're pointing at the hair and see if that helps. Adjust intensity and Point At rate to suit.

Of course, this isn't a way to "get things to look like they used to." But it should get the hair brighter and shinier relative to the rest of the scene without blowing things out.

Note: I've never used specular-only lighting myself (I guess I would for a particular effect, but usually I'm after realism), so can't comment on its effects.

Oh, should add: you'd want to turn Shadows off for that light, I would imagine.

Having done some low quality test renders with a spec-only light directly overhead and pointed at the skullcap, I'm not sure you'll get what you want with this method. But your mileage may vary....

I don't think it matters in this context, but I should note that I rolled back to SR2.

Specular_Color: I've experimented with this both as white and as a bright version of the overall hair colour. A lot of folks use gray, but I don't think that would have the effect you're after.

Specular_Value: Even if everything else is set up in Alternate_Diffuse, you can turn this back on. I've had it cranked as high as 5.0, but depending on what else is going on, for the sort of look that Randym had in the initial post of the thread, probably somewhere between 1.0-2.0

Translucence_Color: seems to affect how the hair looks between strands.

And of course, the Specular_Color on the Hair node itelf.

The other thing I experimented with in a couple renders was low level Ambient_Value ( 0.05-.0.2), with Ambient_Color set similar to specular. It creates an interesting effect.

The point of the exercise here is not realism, obviously, but getting something less real but arguably more dramatic.

Note: you want to make sure you turn off "Light Emitter" for each hair group in the Properties tab.

In the render here, I've gone pretty dramatic. I'm using the Sat in the HSL colour settings advanced tab to saturate to a pretty bright yellow (which again, is of course not very realistic).

Hmmm. The idea of adding a specular light to add sheen is interesting. I've been trying to get a similar effect by adding various specular nodes in the shader.

I'm trying to make a hair shader that will deliver decent results in all possible lighting situations. Just as you did, I experimented with ambient and translucence, and found these could deliver dramatic effects, but a small change in the lighting would then produce strange and unpredictable results.

But an additional light on the hair is more akin to what would be done when filming in the real world, this may help me find the general case solution that I'm looking for.

Thanks!

Quote -  

Translucence_Color: seems to affect how the hair looks between strands.

 

Translucence gives your hair a  strange self-luminous appearance. 

Quote - Translucence gives your hair a  strange self-luminous appearance. 

Well, it depends what colour you put there.

Self-luminosity is more the function of Ambient.

Thanks!  I'll experiment with this later. Looks promising!

So the conclusion is that a new or updated hair shader is needed? Maybe those corrections could be done on the next version by default...

Believable3D, that first image (7:34 pm) is really nice.