Quote -

Nice outfit! What is it?

Baggins,

I was not thinking of blending the procedural bump and mapped bump or the procedural specular and mapped specular. As you say, we don't have the real bump or specular maps anyway, so it is better to rely on the proc ones alone. What I meant was blending the procedural diffus with the mapped diffus what do you say?

?

Quote - Nice outfit! What is it?

That is "Complicated Eve" for V4.

TD

Quote - > Quote - Nice outfit! What is it?

That is "Complicated Eve" for V4.

TD

Thanks! Never noticed that one before. Might pick it up sometime.

Quote - So I tried to photoshop out the specular on the eyes.  I'm not sure if the light 'ring' effect on the bule iris is specualr or coloration of the iris.  Do these look accptable as eye textures?

The light ring on the eye could be an indication of poor circulation in the body of the person whose eye was photographed. It is usually a sign of too much salt intake affecting the body.

Yes...I took iridology back in the 90's when all those alternative healing trends were so popular :P

Current usable content thumbnails for my project.....

181 and more to come.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

Quote - Baggins,

I was not thinking of blending the procedural bump and mapped bump or the procedural specular and mapped specular. As you say, we don't have the real bump or specular maps anyway, so it is better to rely on the proc ones alone. What I meant was blending the procedural diffus with the mapped diffus what do you say?

?

I didn't do any procedural diffuse. I'm using the map.

Don't get me started on grayscaling the diffusion maps to make bump, displacement, and specularity maps.  I've been fussing about that for fifteen years.  Not that it's done any good.

The vast majority of "traditional" Poser and DS users give me the impression that they rather like the photograph taped to a mannequin. So for the free, base texture, I guess it's OK.

Ha - my never-released BBEye with autofit for V4 (one-click to load) works perfectly on Dawn without any changes. Amazing luck. Render coming up. I should sell these.

PS: Hmm - the iris is rendering fuzzy, not sharp and detailed. I am trying out scatter on the eye and I guess I have to adjust the texture detail or something.

CG is hard - so many parameters.

Quote - Don't get me started on grayscaling the diffusion maps to make bump, displacement, and specularity maps.  I've been fussing about that for fifteen years.  Not that it's done any good.

I assume you mean without making modifications after the initial desaturation. I can see maybe a modified grayscale for a bump map, depending on the texture, but what could one possibly hope to accomplish with a displacement map that's made from the texture. That would seem to serve no viable purpose, given what I usually assume to be a displacement map's purpose.

Baggins,

"The vast majority of "traditional" Poser and DS users give me the impression that they rather like the photograph taped to a mannequin."
If the photograph is perfect maybe but as we see here that is not often the case.

"I didn't do any procedural diffuse. I'm using the map"
But you have made a diffuse skin procedural before. The VSS_Template_Skin procedural could be the perfect medicine for imperfect photo mats. I realize that it is something like that you already did but probably too complicated for the avarage user- I am going to try the VSS_Template_Skin on the Dawn maps myself!

I went back to the original lip map shader without compensation for the burned in specular.

Another map problem - I mentioned this dozens of pages ago. The color map has blackened nostrils. This looks wrong in a closeup when you have accurate lighting.

Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

"Dawn face + BBEyes. Bump and spec is procedural - color is from map."

Very nice but "color is from map" sure, but not unmodified..

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

I always wondered about this myself. Most of the time I throw out the spec maps and try and do it with lighting and the gloss and spec settings.

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

I don't agree.  Some parts of skin are more oily and thus more shiney than other parts of skin.  Some parts of skin have larger, more stretched cell grains, like the top of the forearm as opposed to the under side of the forearm, etc.  Top fo the forearm tends to be more shiny as a result of having more flat, reflective surface area.

X-posted with BB's face render post.

BB did procedural bump and spec for the skin. 

Personaly, I would also invert the diffuse texture with a Math_Function in Poser and connect it to a displacement node to get some depth in the brows hairs.

shiny*  I always mispell that even though I know better.  >_>

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

A spec map is quite important if you want to achieve "realism"..and you said you are a "realist.

You have to remember, that what we are working with are not "real lights" and a 3d model is not a "real person"......in order to achieve a realistic look, we have to tell the renderer what to do and how to do it. That is where the value of the maps come in to play.

With the maps we are giving the renderer the specific information it requires to make a real looking render. The reason these programs have all these different nodes is so that we can add the elements needed to bring as much realism as we can. To intentionally NOT use the nodes does not make for a better render, in fact it is giving the renderer less information to work with and as such the quality of the end product will be that much less.

All we can do is "simulate" realism with these programs..and to do that we need to give them as much information as we can.

I like the figure a lot though. This is a pretty subtle facial expression.

If I had a proper specular map, I'd use it to modulate the shine - the nose and forehead should give more bright and sharp reflection than the other areas of skin. The map does not need speckles and such in it - it needs broad sweeps of values that indicate how much oil is on the skin. I would use it to modulate the Blinn eccentricity and the reflection value.

bottom is with specular removed eye texture and shaders from a v4 set upo i had (likely swiped from BBs James thread at RDNA just after PP2012 came out.

Same render settings and lighting from BB environment sphere.  IDL GC and SSS.

Safe to say the default eye shaders could use some optimization

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

Just about all the 3D App's have specular maps.
specular maps can be used for any mesh human ,monster ,cars, bricks ,spaceships etc etc etc.

specular maps can be used to tweak realism or a FX on a fantasy monster.

not every one renders realism.

specular maps will give ya mesh a little diffrent look.if ya want it.

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

Actually I think of a specular map as being better used to adjust places you don't want to shine. Left on its own, Poser tends to over-shine areas like eyelid folds, inner ear areas, etc. I think a specular map makes a handy dampener when coupled with procedural specular.

I wonder, at this point, how many of the people at Hivewire are wondering... Why didn't these people find this stuff during the testing?

I know why the burnt in specular, it's to help the newbie people. Those who don't understand such things, and on top of it are poor when it comes to understanding lighting.

Then again I can also understand why the more advanced users are finding fault with it... I'm sure, however, that new characters for Dawn will come out and people will have addressed the faults.

Been busy with my project, now up to 251 usuable content thumbnails.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

Perhaps some of the more advanced people only came in as content makers and didn't want to do the hard work of the beta testing?

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

That's possible, and now they know what they're up against.

Quote - Perhaps some of the more advanced people only came in as content makers and didn't want to do the hard work of the beta testing?

I offered to beta test and was told they had enough testers.  Apparently not the right ones, tho'...

I think that is a wrong statement to make.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

guys its not like these are figure destroying issues.  How many of you use the default texture with v4?  How many use people use the dublin character with her burnt in specular?  As BB showed, nice renders are still very possible with bundled textures.  I was able to fix the eye texture specular in a matter of minuts.  

Also I dont think its fair to beat up on the testers, especially if it come from a place of 'sour grapes' so to speak.  Some of these issues may have been identified but deemed not of high enough importance to delay the project over.  We know the burnt in specular and nostrils were as they were pointed out in the forum. Its also not fair to assume they had tons of time to play around either.

Unless you ae a beta tester you cannot give any info and if you are you cannot give that info in a thread unless you are told to due to a possible NDA.

Beta testers do a dam hard job, and it's easy for others to put them down.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

The skin does not have uniform oil and perspiration glands.  If the skin is entirely covered in unmussed makeup of a uniform nature, then specular is not needed.  But if you want truly natural, then the oily spots need more specular, as does the neck and forehead for perspiration  And don't forget the elbows of an office worker who sits in an armed chair with rough fabric.  These things are subtle, but the difference between real and not quite right is delicate in the visual processing center of the brain.

Poser/DS users are so accustomed to the representational look that they don't see the divergence from reality like the average person on the street.  I have often seen Poser/DS users ask someone for feedback, and the praise they expect often doesn't come for these minute reasons.  It just depends on your audience.  If you're going to show Poser/DS users, you don't need the fine details that you need for those who are not constantly evaluating 3D renderings and only have reality as a point of comparison.

Quote - I wonder, at this point, how many of the people at Hivewire are wondering... Why didn't these people find this stuff during the testing?

To my knowledge she hasn't been released yet. The only people who have her are the testers and the content creators.

This is the time for those types of issues to be raised to improve the finished product.

Quote - Beta testers do a dam hard job, and it's easy for others to put them down.

I wasn't knocking the testers, just that you can always benefit by having more eyes looking at it; this is a free figure, so it's not going to cost sales. 

When we were working together on testing V4-WM, Richard, I (and everyone else!) looked right past the shortcomings of her elbows because we were concentrating on her shoulders and thighs.  Only after she was released did someone comment on them...

EDIT; now that I think about it, it might even have been BB who noticed it...

Okay, I have a bit of work to do at the moment on my project, so could you put the new problem things into a reply here, that way the HiveWire3D team will spot it all in one go and can comment on it.

They may change things, they might not, but at least they will have that info to work on.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG (totatlly thumbnailed out at the moment!!! Lol)

Quote - Dawn can be a tough girl too...

Clothing courtesy of V4 via autofit in DAZ Studio. Hair borrowed from Genesis.  Materials, Lighting and rendering in Vue 11.5 Infinite. The Vue materials are still fairly simplistic. I am workling on a more sophisticated version.

Ciao
TD

the outfit looks good, but the hair is not suitable for Dawn and looks too masculine imho

For Dawn, Long hair is the only way to go!

A small general remark and please no body feel offended. This remark is not personal at all.

When you develop a new figure, you need "figure" testers.

What you do not need at that stage are content creators as "figure" testers. That does not work and is usually pretty counterproductive.

Content creators "create content for $$$". That is what they do. And they should come in the process at a later stage.

If someone detects an error in the figure after a month or so, the team will try to correct it (hopefully)  but all content creators will cry out loud, yelling that there IS NO PROBLEM.  Because they will have to rebuild what they have made so far.
Objectivity is lost.
That is why it is not such a good idea to have content creators play the initial role of figure testers.

Also it is not the number of testers that is important, but the quality and argumentation of the reports.

Some will look at shape, some will look at texture, others will look at rigging, others have more experience in polyflow.

You need to "know" what your testers specialities are to get the whole project covered.

Just my 2 cents.

This was a general remark, and certainly not for or against the team or the figure at all.

So far my remarks from what I have seen are:

• Breast shape and height on the chest.

• Finger-hand-thumb-forearm shape. => There is something odd about the fingers, thumb, hand, wrist-forearm.
  The fingers and thumb are too thin, the wrist too thick, and the hand too square.

Happy Posering, Tony

Quote - Work in progress..

Quote -  basicwiz just showed me how to get rid of the shoulder bulges...
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2869878

 

I am very interested in outfits of this nature, especially if the vest can be hidden or loaded separately, giving us a decent additional top for our wardrobes.

Quote - Okay, since BB was so nice to describe his light set up (something I wish that Vendors would do when stating the credits for their promos). I have set up my lights and run a demo render.

Now this picture she really looks like a redhead... the skin even fits more with a redhead then some skins I've seen. And in this case you can blame the red as being the result of the freckles. :)

I just want to clear up my intent about my gripe about the legs. It wasn't to belittle the maker or to cause trouble.  I know these are MR's and I know how to adjust them in Photoshop I just wanted to get across to the makers of Dawn that IMHO the legs looked off. Yes I understand why it happens but from what I have been reading HiveWire want to to this better than what they did before and again in my opinion it needed to be said.

If HiveWire want to start off as they mean to carry one then things like this needs to be adressed. They said they were makng one set of SSS and one non SSS so I presumed this would have been sorted so the red can come from the SSS instead of us having to find a happy medium by changing the diffuse colour and SSS colour. Having a professional that has keener and more trained eyes to do this is more preferable to me than doing it myself. Yes I should have asked first but I was a little shocked to see it to be honest.

Or am I in a minority or just don't know enough yet? It is possible as I am fairly new still to all these advanced SSS shaders.

VERY lovely Liz :)

Laurie

Thanks Laurie! On my rework of the base textures/Merchant Resource, the red color got more enhanced when I 'pink-a-fied' the textures. But I can tell you that the original photo model had red hips and legs to begin with. This does happen when the photo model has been standing for a while. I have tried pull out some of the red on the legs and particularly the knees. I'm rendering a face demo right now but I'll do a full body in a little bit.

Someone said the skin works well with the red hair, and yes, actually it does. So I put together some green eyes and I'm rendering. Although, to be honest, not all red heads have green eyes, it's just an associated combo.

Love Bagginsbill's skin textures.  Especially the lips!  Lips are the first thing I notice about a character -- and when hard edges around the lips (no blending with the skin) show up, it really detracts from the overall texture.   

Quote - Face Demo 3.

Very Nice!

Quote - If HiveWire want to start off as they mean to carry one then things like this needs to be adressed. They said they were makng one set of SSS and one non SSS so I presumed this would have been sorted so the red can come from the SSS instead of us having to find a happy medium by changing the diffuse colour and SSS colour.

There's been a trend lately (IMHO) of making character textures with reddish legs.  I've read that the "red" is to mimic blood flow to the lower regions of the body.  In some renders, Dawn's thighs do look a little too reddish -- in others, they look totally natural, so maybe lighting is influencing...something?