Hi Ghostship2,

I agree completely with you that quality settings for renders only make sense if they really enhance the quality, me too I try to keep them as low as necessary. I also use from time to time a depth-z render and do the DOF in Paintshop postwork, just like you.

What I wanted to make very clear (from my personal point of view) was, that the desired quality of the final render should dictate your settings, and not impatience or 'being in a hurry today, but I want to post this anyway'.

Sometimes I am a bit annoyed when people think they have a right to have a perfect image with a single mouseclick, and on top of that it has to come out within a minute, otherwise they abandon... Looking around in the galleries you can find so many posts where people even admit they didn't want to use raytrace or real reflections or IDL because 'it takes so much time'. So they prefer to post a crappy image rather than waiting for a good one. But then they start complaining why others have so great quality images, and they assume that those posting great images must have some secret settings to achieve perfect images within a second...

Some people post that they have been working on their image for an extraordinary loooong time, which is one hour. Heee? If I start a project (I consider each of my images a project) I have a workflow beginning long before I even fire up Poser, and then in Poser I usually work between 2 and 10 hours on an image, to work out all materials in a way I want them, fine tune poses and expressions, lighting, camera settings, and so on. Then, before I post any of my images, I leave them and hide them in some drawer for at least a week or so, to forget about them. Because, seeing the image again after a week, helps to detect immediately the flaws which you could no longer see when working on it initially. So I rework, leave it again hidden in a drawer (just like my traditional paintings and drawings in charcoal or water colors), and only if one day I occasionally pull it out and say by myself 'wow, was it me doing this?? I can find nothing to improve here...', then I am ready to post my image.

Seeing that the thread starter sheedee3d seems to be a newbie, I wanted to share this, and that I don't even fear long render times, if NEEDED for the desired quality. Trying to encourage people to go for quality instead of mass or quick posting ;-)

 

I like your render- and EZSkin settings, they are very similar to mine. You seem to have a smaller machine though, because of your bucket size, mine is optimized at 32 and even has no speed losses at 64, but then (depending on the images content) sometimes a single bucket can get stuck for long time while the rest of the image is already finished, that's why I remain with 32.

Only I always put my Texture Filter to NONE. I put all efforts in receiving, buying or producing high quality and high resolution textures (like 4000 or 5000x5000), so I really hate when Poser messes around with them. Only for far distance props or figures I can of course activate 'QUALITY' instead and reduce ressources, because the occurring blurring doesn't disturbe in that case. But for closeup skin textures, like the thread starter asked, I always switch texture filter to 'NONE'. (Didn't try the 'CRISP', because I never felt a need for it, maybe its okay, too).

I have a question about your M3 render, do you use Bagginsbills Light Meter? This image seems a bit overexposed to me, which flattens the SSS and reduces saturation in the skin color? Just asking, because that Light Meter really made me understand how the typical 'Poser disease' too much of light (even if Gamma Correction is applied) can somehow destroy the variety in textures. The Light Meter helped me to disciplin myself and I got used to far far lower light intensity settings than I had used all the years before.

Poser Pro 2014 GameDev, Lightwave 11.6.3, Blacksmith3D Pro 6, Bryce 7, Carrara Pro 8.5, Reality 4 & LuxRender, Python 2.7 & Wx-Python, UV-Mapper Pro, XFrog 3.5, Paintshop Pro X7, Apophysis 7x64

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Don't render faster than your artistic guardian angel can fly...