After I posted a couple images in a thread on Reality I got quite a few requests for info on my setup, settings etc. so instead of replying individually I figured I'd post here in case anyone else is interested.

Reality discussion: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2866186

First and formost - credit where credit is certainly due. Bagginsbill's soft studio lighting setup is the key to all this along with his shaders and Snarlygribbly's EZSkin 2

Here's the studio lighting scene and the original discussion thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2792309

https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/tutorial-scenes/poser-8-soft-studio-lighting

now on to the setup.... gonna post a step by step with renders so you can see the impact of the changes.

I opened the Soft Studio Lighting Scene

added the studio backdrop prop from pp 2012 props

Added v4

Loaded up Danae's Dublin Character

seleced a basic pose and hit render.

render time was 1min 30 secs

poser pro 2012

dual core amd

Select the main light and use Object>Point At to aim the light - I used point at v4's Head

for the rim light I used Point at Neck

Here's the result - same render settings

here are the settings I used

Still 1min 30 sec render time (all pics are 500x500px)

Thats it, add your hair and boost up the render settings a bit (not too much) and you're done.

Nice thread.

Thank you for this - added the thread to my favorites list.

Thanks BB ! and thanks again for all the support and great stuff you give to the community.

One more thing to add - render settings. one thing I finally came to grips with - cranking your render settings and rendering for hours is not going to improve the result if your lighting and materials suck to begin with. cranking up samples and .001 shading rates etc are not going to help at all if the basic stuff is not setup right. When I first started I would crank all the sliders as far as I could and wait hours (or days) for renders - as I learned from BB and you can see by the settings I posted - you don't need to crank the settings to get good results.

Thanks LAJ1, very clear tute.

She's a bit shiny for my liking - does the Soft Studio Lighting have a specular light included? Maybe it could be turned down a tad, or the specular on the skin itself in EZSkin. I'm looking at my arm and the skin isn't shiny to that extent.

THIS !

I'm preaching efficiency for 13 years now, but sadly still many people think that render time is somehow directly related to render quality.

Yes, busy scenes and "render to print" quality will usually take longer than a single figure and "render for web" quality, but 99% of the renders I see could be easily done in a fraction of the time with "smarter" render settings and better mesh and texture efficiency.

But I guess the "more is better" thinking is hard to unlearn. ;-)

Anyway, thanks for the tutorial and reminder.

Attached is a render using BB's scene pretty much out of the box.

And here's my usual light setup:

One white IBL as filler and one infinitive sun for shadows. Here I added a point light as a rim light.

SSS and EZSkin as above, but no IDL.

Rendered in 1 min 40 sec on my i5 laptop.

here's the fist adjustment - turn down the intensity on the main light. this is with it set to 50% (down from the original 70%)

The specularity is driven by a modulation - derived from the color map itself. As a result, the brightness of the color map will also influence the shine. This is unavoidable - nobody includes specular maps that follow any standard "strength" notion, so even if you have a distinct and dedicated specular map in your texture set, EZSkin has no way to calibrate its specular strength. Combined with a texture where the specular map is a derivative of the red channel of a light-skinned texture, you get a lot of specular.

On the other hand, a dark skin will accidentally produce a derivate specular modulation that is too low. You want to adjust the specular strength every time, and especially with very light or very dark skin.

This is simply one of those things people need to be aware of. There is no such thing as a standard around specular strength values. You have to be ready to adjust the numerical value in your skin shader.

Do not hack your lights - use the light meter and calibrate your lights first, without regard to shaders. Then, adjust shaders to show what you want them to show, once (and only after) you have the light levels squared away.

If you randomly tweak both, you will never have a consistent set of shaders in your library.