Having problems getting true detail in close ups of human skin. I know the market place renders are jacked to show the true potential of the product, but if I render really close up, I don't really get the detail. The pores, or the lines or slight wrinkles in real skin. They all are very smooth and almost blurred. I use high res textures 2000x2000, IBL, AO, max render setting, but still can't achieve the great detail I know these products are capable of. I was thinking of the camera. Do I need to change the focus, or other settings with the camera. Is it the lights? I know, it's prop all of these, but still no joy. Used textures that utilize SSS which gets closer, but again, when you zoom in to say the pelvix region or the stomach, and render, it does not seem to have the detail that should be there. OK, so if you guys can give me a few pointers/tips, I would be greatly in your debt. Thanks in advance.

Morph.

2000 x 2000 textures aren't considered hi res in the Poser world.  4096 or thereabouts and you're in the ballpark.

If the textures look blurry in renders, open them in Photoshop/Gimp/PSP and take a look at 'em.  If they are blurry in there, all the render settings in the world aren't going to make a difference.

Camera settings don't matter a damn to the quality or sharpness of the render, it's all down to your render settings.  There's a lot you can do with these to make matters better - or worse - but in order for anyone to give you some realistic chance of getting there, we need screen shots of your render settings, the version of Poser you're using and - possibly - the texture/character, too.

Morph.

I have a Dell Pavilion dv7 with wide screen HD. cost $1000, so I don't think it's the screen.

Depends on what you're aiming for, what version of Poser are you using and can you supply at test image.

Lighting is important, too little and the details won't show and too much and the textures burn out. If you're using IBL suggest adding a specular light too to catch the bump mapping. Make sure your Post filter size is set to 1 in the render options, don't use DOF at this stage.  Try a medium/high resolution render (2000+) to see if that improves it. SSS will blur the details so don't expect higher details with this option enabled.

Sorry, cross post

Based on your image, suggest add additional specular light might help.

Texture filtering set to crisp?

Where do you set the texture filter? Material Room?

Mat Room, on the image map node, towards the bottom.

OK. I'll try. does it really make a big diff in render?

Is anyone getting better results than I posted?

Tried it. Made NO difference at all.

Your lighting washes out the material.  If you post a render showing an example of skin you are after, then we can pin-point what lighting/rendering settings to use.  For now, it's all subjective as to what is good skin.

If the texture uses displacement at all - you are effectively killing it. You have your displacment set to 0 in your render settings. Try setting it to 0.1  - should be sufficient for most mats that use displacment.

Looking at base texture map  the details looks quite soft anyway. Possibly this is case of the image being compressed to keep the file size down (filesize 2MB compared with a DAZ Elite body texture size of 5MB).   

The detail in a render is never going to be as sharp as the original texture, there will always be very slight blurring or softening of detail.

Try this test: In a blank scene, add a default cube primitive. Apply a square texture to it, delete all lights except one white infinite light pointing directly at the front face of the cube. Set the render dimensions to match your texture dimensions. Set the Front camera so the cube fills the frame exactly (camera scale 10%, Xdolly=0, Ydolly adjust to suit). Do a render, compare the render and the original texture.

In theory there should be no loss of detail, each pixel on the texture should end up in exactly the same spot on the final render, but in practice there's a slight softening no matter how much you adjust the settings. It's not much, the equivalent, on a 1024x1024 render/texture, of running photoshop's gaussian blur at about 0.4 pixels.

Using the same test scene it would be easy to start adding other things like specular, displacement, SSS, IDL and see if any of them further affect sharpness, but add them one at a time.

When you are troubleshooting it's always best to start your tests as simple as possible and slowly build up complexity, otherwise you are trying to compare apples to fruit salad.

I'll try that test Thanks. So you think the light IBL is washing it out? Without IBL the renders look worse. Is there a light set you can suggest? Thanks.

Looking at your render and ender settings:

Render with:

SSS?  OK, but then you have to set texture strenght in the node at max value for sharpness (1)

Raytrace bounces 1 (one) more is throwing resourses out the door if you do not have multiple reflections going on. For this render 6 is way overdone.

IC; leave vinked ON but pull the slider back to start point (now you are at 100) => Pull back to the beginning.

Indirect light ALWAYS ON. No exeption, unless for artistic reasons under special conditions.

Indirect light quality from 7 to 50, more is overkill.

Pixel samples at 3 for draft, 5 to 6 for quality. Higher is overkill.

MSR at 0.2 => you have 0.1 = only usefull if you set 0.1 on each and every group in your scene. If you do not do that all renders at 0.2 anyway (Manual page 395)

Max bucket size set back to default 32. Setting it at 10 slows your render down and you gain nothing.

Displacement bounds, a low value. 0.001 to 0.1

Smooth Polygons ALWAYS ON for figures.

Displacement map ON, if you have a displacement map connected.

Poset filter size at 3 and on sync => Sharpest results

Gamma correction to ON at 2.2

Conclusion:
From looking at your render and render settings.
=>You have too many lights or lights set too strong.

In Poser Pro with IDL and GC, you need about half the light as before. There is not a single reason to render without IDL and GC in PPro.

You are blowing the details away with too much light, and then correcting back by removing IDL and GC.
The normal way is to render with IDL and GC and reduce light. => if your preview is too dark, add a preview light;

Sharpness is in the PFS at 2-3-4 and at sync => 3 and sync giving the best results mostly.

You want realism and you render without IDL or GC...... Impossible.

Indirect light is the "real" light that is around us, and GC is required for the close to true color calculations.

Happy Posering

Ps, in the render settings window,
Hover your mouse over a slider or value and Help will tell more about it in the "Help" window line below.

stronger bumps , diffuses

The London texture in your example is 4000 pixels, that makes e.g. the navel approximately 30 pixels in diameter. Rendering it to anything larger (like in your second image) will just scale up the texture and will not give you any more detail. Normally you should try to render smaller than the texture, texture filtering will always destroy detail when scaling up.

To get something like pores, wrinkles etc you would need a bumpmap (or displacement, same thing). The London texture in your example does not have a bumpmap (at least not for the torso), so you are out of luck, you somehow need to create one yourself.

In other words: the London texture is simply not suitable for your case.

BTW: opening the London material preset in the material node editor (see illustration) shows that Danae used simply used the color texture to plug it into the bump channel. A granite node was added to fake some bump-detail, but with a weight of zero, so it essentially does nothing. Things like these can often be found in products, where the vendors on one hand want to use as many nodes as possible to make it seem very complicated and they are doing a lot of work, but on the other hand do not really understand what they are doing, so they are making a lot of mistakes. In the end you either have to put a lot of work into it or find a better alternative (which can be difficult in your case because the high resolution you need, but if you find something let me know :-)

Thanks for all your help. I will try ALL sugestions and post my result soon. Thanks again my render friends. MUCH appreciated.

Morph.

Edit: Rendered with shade rate of 0.05(on all settings), with SSS and IDL.

That skin is in an urgent need of a diffuse texture controlled displacement map.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I would still say the problem is the texture map was compromised to meet a  market expectation, we all know the feeling of creating an image that comes in at 5MB and then having to compress it to fit to work with the site. Possibly the solution is for artists to provide an uncompressed image as an option to their product. The other thought is can a higher res image be created for V4 torso, my experience with Zbrush suggests a very high pixel count is needed just to do 4Kx4k.

you could take the texture connvert it to a black and white and load the B/W in the bump.
Then you would have a bump :)

Quote - you could take the texture connvert it to a black and white and load the B/W in the bump. Then you would have a bump :)

Doesn't work that way.  But a lot of free model content out there is done that way.  Thus, the free part.

Quote - > Quote - you could take the texture connvert it to a black and white and load the B/W in the bump. Then you would have a bump :)

Doesn't work that way.  But a lot of free model content out there is done that way.  Thus, the free part.

My bad ,I should have said you need to add some detail skin pores wrinkles ect ect to the bump.

Why other for dermatologic oncology training materials or just nano realistic bragging rights would you desire a macro-closeup of Vickies belly (or any other part of her dermis) to begin with? Not that it's an invalid desire.

To push the software to its limit.  To see beyond the Make Art button.

"To push the software to its limit.  To see beyond the Make Art button."

Care to clarify the meaning of this statement as you see it? Don't mean to derail but you've piqued my interest...

There are several make art button threads on this forum over the years.

Yeah, I know. I was just wondering what the expression meant in your mind in particular as a response to hyper detailed skin in digital media and its connection to transcendence in relation to art... Probably just pointless curiosity.

To me, the Make Art button in any program is whatever the program's factory default setting is.

Simple enough.

I think a possible response to the OP thread query would be "you can't achieve "TRUE" detail on human skin in Poser, it's not human skin." Somehow I don't think that would be a really well received response though.

I disagree, I've seen seme pretty realistic human skin rendering done with Poser 9.  It just can't be done out of the box without some extra effort.

v4 elite textures where pretty good.

zBrush displacment maps are killer. like Smeagol LOTR.

zBrush vector maps rule.

Of corse you can burn zBrush maps for textures,bumps displacments etc etc.

I think that BionicRooster's skin looked pretty good, for what it's worth. It's a very fair texture to begin with. I think after a while it might be a matter of diminishing returns. I'm  impressed when I occasionally see the really fine hairs that cover a womans skin in a render, Particularly if they are visible at the turning edge or profile of the skin, something that can't be achieved with bump alone. although I think the images I'm recalling were postworked, don't see why it wouldn't be possible in render with some fancy ingredients.

A lot of commercial contents as well....

Quote - > Quote - you could take the texture connvert it to a black and white and load the B/W in the bump. Then you would have a bump :)

Doesn't work that way.  But a lot of free model content out there is done that way.  Thus, the free part.

Quote - A lot of commercial contents as well....

Quote - > Quote - you could take the texture connvert it to a black and white and load the B/W in the bump. Then you would have a bump :)

Doesn't work that way.  But a lot of free model content out there is done that way.  Thus, the free part.

I found that the only thing that really works on, is wood or bark textures, everything else not so much.

Thanks Primorge.

I've been Posering for more than a decade-and I had forgotten about that.

Every now and again it helps to read the manual.:-)

Quote - try lowering the min shade rate even lower (try 0.05 at first) on all body parts of the figure and in your render settings, Poser uses the greater of both values (lower quality setting) so the settings need to match in both figure body part properties and render settings. Use the attached script to change all figure parts shade rate in one go, drop the .txt extension. Also think that the IBL might be washing out the detail.

Quote - BTW: opening the London material preset in the material node editor (see illustration) shows that Danae used simply used the color texture to plug it into the bump channel. A granite node was added to fake some bump-detail, but with a weight of zero, so it essentially does nothing. Things like these can often be found in products, where the vendors on one hand want to use as many nodes as possible to make it seem very complicated and they are doing a lot of work, but on the other hand do not really understand what they are doing, so they are making a lot of mistakes. In the end you either have to put a lot of work into it or find a better alternative (which can be difficult in your case because the high resolution you need, but if you find something let me know :-)

I have yet to speak with a vendor who uses many nodes just to show "they are doing a lot of work". I don't think customers really care about how many nodes you have ( ok, some select few do love to open them up and disect them to death ). What they do care about is the end result.

I did not add tose nodes to show people that I am a good girl and do a lot of work. I made them for a reason. Most of the node set ups are based on Bagginbill's shader work and he is certainly doing a lot of work.

The body map is 4000x4000 and if I make it any bigger I get reasonable complaints from people with more modest machines. You have to remember that a product has to try accomodate everyone and not just the people with the super jet computers and lots of hours on their hands wating for renders to finish.If somone caters for the higher-end systems, you get flooded with complains. If you go low key, you get flooded from the other direction. So you try to be somewhere in the middle and possibly use small cheats to deliver more detail without giving the machine a stroke.

Going back to the 4000x4000 body texture-map issue: for this resolution, it has been my experience that bump maps look crude, low res and downright awful. This is why I do not use body bump maps. The face however, is another matter and since the 4000x4000 face map offers more chance for detail, I do offer face bumps.

I think the majority of Poser users never go into the material room and if they do it will be in 'simple' mode.  If any vender is adding nodes to look good it would be wasted on a large proportion of their customers.

I would have little chance of producing good skin texture so I build my characters from a series of purchased textures.  My main character uses the body texture from one set and the face from another.  I then used Paint Shop Pro to add further details such as freckles and then yet another tecture to age my character, merging the layers to custom the look to what I want.  It may not be to everyones liking but as the saying goes, it works for me.  Other than the image maps the rest of it is almost completely buiilt from the materials set-up from Baggiinsbill which was created in the early days of Poser 2012. 

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2434288

I don't thing anything will work in exactly the way you want it stright from the box as most software is built to appeal to the largest number of potential buyers.  To push it to the limits you need get your hands dirty and try and use the experience of the more seasoned Poser users to point you in the right direction

High res torso maps are not high on my list of must haves but to be more circumspect

(this is a general point NOT about specific texture maps)

1. What is the impact of higher res texture maps on the quality or V4 renders

2. How many people want these extra hight res texture maps

3. Would people pay more for these higher res texture

4. How practical is it to make these higher res maps.

I say this because with the wider use or unbias render engines, I think detail will become more important.

Quote -  

High res torso maps are not high on my list of must haves but to be more circumspect

(this is a general point NOT about specific texture maps)

1. What is the impact of higher res texture maps on the quality or V4 renders

2. How many people want these extra hight res texture maps

3. Would people pay more for these higher res texture

4. How practical is it to make these higher res maps.

I say this because with the wider use or unbias render engines, I think detail will become more important.

You may be right on the last point but I do still think there is limited appeal for such high quality for a number of reasons.  Firstly, by far the largest number of Poser renders are of the Pin UP type and skin detail is rarely the goal of such renders.  Skin detail is only really important for close up work, I do some close up but most of that is a throw back to my photography days where I did a lot of portrait work.  Finally, for a lot of people, a skin texture that is photo realistic is a step too far.  If they want that sort of detail they would use a camera.  I think I lend towards this idea in that I want my characters to believable not photorealistic so what I achieve skin texture wise is about as far as I want to go.

Yes, good points and agreed, even high end digital cameras would struggle to produce the same detail but do we know what effect higher resolutions would have. I'm aware of similar technology trends for example the Internet which if we went at domestic market pace it would still be 300 baud and use acoustic couplers.

I guess my point is that some people may be prepared to pay more for a perceived better quality (whether this helps them or not) and this would benefit the overall market over time. V4 came out because people bought V3, its not necessarliy fair but that's how the market works. It would be interesting to see what an 8kx8k texture map looks like in a good render.

An 8Kx8K texture would be interesting if only to see what impact it had.  Providing there was a decernable difference there may be a market for some high textures.  I guess we will never know until someone decides to try.

Here's one of my latest efforts.I'm using a displacement map I made from a Normal Map made by Caisson on RDNA forums-I converted it with Photoshop. Also SSS as applied by EZSkin. Two point lights and indirect lighting by Bagginsbill's Envirosphere.