is the promo face 'in the box'?  

or at least a material preset for human skin, just add the texture map?

thanks.

Hi.

Reality 3 for Poser has a skin material type. In Reality materials have a type: Metal, Glass, Velvet, Glossy, Skin, Water etc. This is different from Poser and Studio where materials are all of the same type.

The way Reality works is not by a preset, that would not work because there are endless skin textures. Reality takes your Poser materials and converts them to its own type. The original materials are no changed in any way. When I say "convert" I mean that the conversion happen on a copy of the materials kept by Reality for its own use.

When a human figure is detected the materials are converted to the Skin type for the known areas: face, torso, legs etc.

The material is then configured to the best of what Reality can deduct from the Poser nodes. You can then fine tune it to your own liking. All the parameters are adjustable.

The image in the promo is made by a talended artist, as the images in all Poser or Studio promos are generally made by talended artists using those tools. The question is: is it easy to get there? And the answer is yes. You just need a bit of practise with Reality and LuxRender. Reality makes it as easy as possible to get there. In fact that is the whole point of the program. If you need realistic glass you should not be an expert in the physical properties of glass. With Reality you simply select the Glass material type and you get, thanks to LuxRender, astonishingly realistic glass.

That is the advantage of working with a physics-based renderer like LuxRender. Materials are so much easier to handle than with Poser or Studio. Skin is complex, in fact it's one of the mosy complex materials. If your base Poser/Studio material uses good textures that are obtained from photos, and you set your lighting in the right wat, you will get excellent results.

Reality 2 for Studio has similar tools but not a Skin material. Its Glossy material is very good and it has created very realistic skin, like this one:

Reality 3 for Studio is in development and will be released later on this year.

On top of all this, Reality comes with a 120+ pages manual, a series of video tutorials and an active community of artists who are eager to share their experience.

Hope this helps.

Paolo explains it nicely as usual! 

Let me just add from my own experience with Reality 3:

You can use all your skin textures you use in Poser. Reality will handle them beautifully. In some cases, as with M3, it fails to identify the skin and automatically set the material to "Skin", but that is easily fixed manually in the Reality material editor. For e.g. V4, the skin is handled perfectly without any manual intervention.

Reality will also apply Sub-Surface Scattering to the LuxRender "Skin" material, so no need to use advanced skin shaders in Poser for SSS. Just use a simple texture map for the skin and Reality will do the rest, SSS will be added automatically

Kelderek, thank you for pointing out the M3 issue. I was not aware of it. I looked at the code after reading you post and sure enough there was a slot missing for M3 so I fixed it.

Cheers.

after i set up a skin in a way i like, can i save it to use again?

thanks.

Quote - after i set up a skin in a way i like, can i save it to use again?

That feature is available in Realityt 2 for Studio but not yet in Reality 3 for Poser. The next update to Reality 3 will have it.

Cheers.

Hi Paolo,

I hope Misty doesn't mind me crashing-in on her thread but I wanted to catch your attention.

I upgraded to Reality for Poser some days back and noticed that although the Lux Render interface allows a minimum refresh rate of 3 for the scene and render, I can only set it to a minimum of 5 in the Reality plugin.  It gives me a love/hate feeling about the plugin.

Just wanted to point it out in case it's something you can fix, especially as the refresh rate makes things feel so much more responsive the faster it gets.  It's a shame that Lux won't let us drop it down to something like half a second, but at least it goes to 3.

Anyway, I hope that some day Smith Micro will go even further and give you even more probes into the interface so that you can dock your plugin and maybe even make use of Poser's controls and dials directly.  I always buy your plugin but to be honest I never use it much simply because of the need for three windows - I hate it - feels messy.  I know that's something you cannot control so I really hope Smith Micro will open-up much more stuff to you.

Other than that, nice plugin (and a very good price) :-)

Hi Pumeco.

Setting the refresh rate to 3 is very counterproductive. 5 seconds is pretty bad already but I clampded at that point to give that option. I generally set it to 100 seconds or more. You can simply click on "Apply" whenever you need a refresh. On the other hand, to set the refresh too fast slows down the rendering. So, as you can see, there is a good reason for that value to be the way it is.

Regarding the UI, it was not a matter of accessing the Poser UI that made me decide to have Reality as a separate applictaion. It's the only way to go. I would not turn Reality into a Poser panel. It's just not the right approach and it can't work in that way.

All the best.

Ah man, don't say that, would have been cool to see it dockable!

Ok, no worries, and thanks for the heads-up on the speed thing, I had no idea it would slow the render down with a higher refresh.

Cheers.

Ah man, don't say that, would have been cool to see it dockable!

It cannot be done and it was designed since the beginning to not be a panel. 

Reality needs a fully featured UI that goes well beyond what you can fit in a dockable panel. Reality is more than about 200,000 lines of C++ code. There is no way I would convert that to Python and no there is no reason for doing that. 

On top of that Reality is written to be host-agnostic. There is a DAZ Studio version of Reality and using your approach would mean to re-write from scratch ever version. Even if there were more people than simply myself that would be just an absurd amount of work that would be completely unviable. In fact the original version of Reality was wrtten for Studio and it was completely boudn to it. I wrote Reality 3 from scratch and decided on a design that would be non tied to a specific host.

Reality 3 has been designed from scratch to be one app that runs with both Poser and, soon, DAZ Studio. There is a tiny layer of Poser python that runs inside Poser, and there is a small layer of C++ that runs inside Studio. These layers communicate with the main application, which doesn't need to be rewritten for a new host. 95% of what Reality does is done by the app and so portiong to a new host is simple enough to be done in a few months.

There are a host of benefits in Reality being a separate application:

• It doesn't not interfere with Poser

• It doesn't not slow down Poser

• The OS can prioritize it automatically

• It does not take memory away from Poser

• It can perform a series of tasks in parallel

• The UI can be expanded to any level of complexity without polluting the Poser UI

• If it crashes it lives Poser unaffected

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Cheers Paulo, didn't expect all that info - that was mighty fine of you!

I get what you're saying.  And actually, when you listed the benefits of it, you just gave me the idea of havng a second monitor so that I could maximise the Lux screen.  I could have Poser and your Reality on one, and Lux on the other - that would be doable I think.

I think one of the reasons I get so frustrated with it is because I like the output of Lux very much.  I have an Octane licence as well, but for some reason, the renders from Octane look ever so slightly less convincing to me.  Can't put my finger on why, but Lux definately looks better to me - somehow.

Anyway, thanks again.  I'm loving getting back into Poser so maybe in the not too distant future I'll grab a second monitor.

PS: Nice to see someone who talks in photographic terms in his videos.  I realise it's important with Reality, but still, I wish more people would do that.  Have to admit an evil grin crosses my face whenever I watch this stuff because I like to think plugins such as Reality will encourage people to think in a real 'photographic' sense; F-Stops, Aperture and ISO, instead of Brightness and Contrast etc.

All the best,
Len

Quote - Cheers Paulo, didn't expect all that info - that was mighty fine of you!

Glad that you liked it.

Quote -
I get what you're saying.  And actually, when you listed the benefits of it, you just gave me the idea of havng a second monitor so that I could maximise the Lux screen.  I could have Poser and your Reality on one, and Lux on the other - that would be doable I think.

That's one way. I keep Poser on one monitor and Reality on another so that I can easily switch between the two when I setup a scene.

Quote - I think one of the reasons I get so frustrated with it is because I like the output of Lux very much.

This statement  I can't understand :) If you like it so much then why are getting frustrated? The two feelings seems to be opposite :)

Quote - PS: Nice to see someone who talks in photographic terms in his videos.  I realise it's important with Reality, but still, I wish more people would do that.

Thank you. It's one of the biggest disservices to the artists that so many renderers don't provide exposure control. The brightness or darkness of an image is created by controlling the exposure, not by acting on the lights. Having that tool available is invaluable and not having it creates really bad habits. It's one of the things that I like the most about having introduced Reality to the market, the fact I have the opportunity to talk about it so often.

BTW, another benefit of the stand-alone UI of Reality is that I'm free to set the keyboard shortcuts. For example, I have added one for "Copy with Textures" and another one for starting the render from anywhere in Reality, not just the Render tab. More shortcuts will be added soon. This new feature will be part of the next update. There is no way of doing that in Poser Python.

Cheers.

Sorry Paolo, all I meant by the frustration is that it's frustrating because I really like the output of Lux, but to get it within Poser I have it deal with the extra windows.  I just hate having windows floating all over the place because I'm constantly having to move them or switch between them.

That's why I like the idea of a second monitor now.

Agreed on the bad habits thing, it's the same with playing an instrument.  I was self-taught (and it shows) and now I have the bad habit of holding the wrong fingers over the wrong keys, something I don't think I'll ever be able to stop myself doing because I've had the habit so long.

Thanks for the heads-up on the shortcut facility on the next release, I'm all for anything that allows customisation.  One thing I hope you'll add some day is for the material preview to be able to use a custom mesh.  I wish Smith Micro would do that as well (within the FireFly material nodes).

Cheers.

I think that I can help with the window switch. 

You might now that Reality actually does have a dockable panel. You enabled it with the Window | Addons | Reality menu.

In there you have a button to call Reality. If Reality is not running the button will start the program. If Reality is running it will bring it to the foreground. In this way Reality is always one click away.

Hope this helps.

Of course, but I thought that was the only method to use Reality, well, either that or through the menu option :-)

Pret-a-3D

I just put this Awesome program in my cart but was tring to find out a bit about it

Do you have a Thread set up for all, don't want to just in someone elses.

Don't come in here not sure where or how to find what.

Want to know for one is it a software mailed to you in a box, or does it have to be on line only?

Thanks & sorry for jumping in.

Aletha 

I made a post for this with other que.

I don't see a edit or Delete on my post above.

So If a Mod would Please Delete it & this one.

Sorry again

Aletha