@ Earl

???????
Lost in space here. LOL. As an end user allow to tell where I am at, after close to 20 years of Posering:

I am sick and tired of fighting:

• JCM's, that never do what they are suppposed to do.
• Dependencies that are rarely if ever symmetrical
• Extra errors that are injected to cure the first series of errors.
• Magnets in whatever position, shape or form in figures.
• Shader setups that require weeks to change
• Old style "faking shader" setups.

I am at a stage now:

- That NO object gets installed in Poser => First it goes to Blender to be checked over. (Symmetry, groups, materials, UV-Map,  just to name a few)

• That ONLY diffuse textures make it to my runtime
  - That NO cr2 goes in Poser before it passed a cr2editor. (And ALL materials are removed by me by default.)

Well, that's me. LOL.

I'v been doing this for about 3 months now, and in those 3 months, I learned more then in the previous 19 years.

**Poser only needs 3 things fo function properly.
**

• A high quality (not high polygon, but high quality) and symmetrical object file
• A lean and clean cr2
• A high quality diffuse texture set

And you know what?
My Poser never-ever crashes any more either.

Well, that's me. LOL.

 Apparently "end-user friendly" means different things to different people.

Back on topic.

Here's what I'm working on currently. It's just a texture for an existing model. I figured no sense reinventing the wheel, especially since I can't model much anyhow and have to depend on start clothes. This is for Valiant for M4.

There's a belt for the brown texture too and each color will have a version without the swirl decorations.

Now I'm in to the pants and then the boots.

 @ Redphantom: Looking good so far.

@ Earl
OK, granted, it takes some time to install a new item, but I win that ime back in the long run.

How many mouse clicks do you need to convert the Roxy shader setup to an Asian skinned? or an African skinned?

I need 2 mouseclicks in the Math room..

I'm flagging it now that he has some skin.

Nice .
 Brrr, would not llike that in my garden at night. LOL.

Back on topic.

Here's what I'm working on currently. It's just a texture for an existing model. I figured no sense reinventing the wheel, especially since I can't model much anyhow and have to depend on start clothes. This is for Valiant for M4.

There's a belt for the brown texture too and each color will have a version without the swirl decorations.

Now I'm in to the pants and then the boots.

I suck at textures, but I could certainly model a tunic like that for Rex or Dusk.

 RedPhantom : nice texture

Teyon : looks like ya boy has been painting his barn white ;)

Teyon, that is looking insanely cool.

I suck at textures, but I could certainly model a tunic like that for Rex or Dusk.

I could make the tunic in wings in about 2 or 3 weeks. But it wouldn't be rigged and I couldn't do the belt to save my life. I've been using psp for almost 20 years that helps but I got stitch witch and that makes it so easy.

Vilters Wrote:
"In bath now, so I will answer in detail later ... And YES, I am HARD here, I know. Sorry.
Well, not bad for a quick answer in a bathtub. LOL."

Well it depends on whether a person happened to be eating at the time they read that bloody reply, and I was!
I tell ya, Tony, that's one unpleasant vision that's gonna take some shaking-off.

i'se studying for the CCENT test.  

IPv6. >.< are we supposed to subnet mask that?

 @ Pumeco

Well,
You need less water when you go to bath with 60.000 polygons and then try to catch each one of them for individual weightmapping.

LOL.
The clean-up afterards is not so funny. Some vertex are damm good swimmers. Ah before I forget; Add less soap, the bubbles are free.
Now you also know why I like lean and clean cr2's. LOL.

Oh, do not try this at home unless you have a waterproof tablet, or a good life insurance.
LOL.

OK guys, playing time is over, carry on.

Here's the finished versions of the textures for valiant. I just need to package it up and get it uploaded.

 RedPhantom : nice looking texture :)

@Vilters
Roxie suspects you had a naked render of her on your tablet while in the bath, so maybe that's why you were hard.
Can't comment personally as I don't have a tablet and have never tried it, but I must admit, it does sound like a cool use for one :-)

FireFly test render. I need to sort out his specular map - his body is a little too specular and yes, he's a bit surprised to see us. Will have to adjust that too. 

 Teyon : wicked mesh !
Actually to me he's hole face looks like he just realizes he drank to much. which is kind ah funny ,so I'd keep that morph.
it would go good with a bottle in his hand.

How did you lower the polycount , zremesher or retopology  ? a wireframe would be cool.

** **

Thanks. Actually that's a bit overdone there. I had both the normal and displacement applied without realizing it. Here's what he looks like with just the displacement and some tweaks to the subsurface and specular.

I manually retopologised the model in Topogun2.

I'll post a wire when I get back home.

So, is this going to become the next Poser Standard Male Figure? "TerribRex" XD

At least "it" has a potential to become a virtual "G" killer, by the book, in renders...
Though I'm still amazed when I see people (not just Teyon) whipping up weird creatures like this :D

B.t.w., don't forget to put your tongue in the cheek when reading this ;)
All in all, very good work!

Regards,
-P-

EDIT:
That face, or the expression, looks somewhat familiar. An actor in a movie maybe? I don't know, but it does ring a bell...

@Teyon
I still think he looks top-heavy due to the tiny amount of area his feet have in contact with the ground, having no toe of mass at the front of the foot to stop him going forward means that he would fall forward as soon as someone pushed him from behind.  Seems a bit of an odd thing to do for a person with your skills and understanding of balance etc.  But very nice work, he looks very good, and he's a fantasy figure after all so I suppose you still passes on artistic licence ;-)

@All
I'm currently designing a Retrobabe, isn't she nice?
I want to marry her already!

The set is now available in the freestuff here or at sharecg

"While he needs 100 nodes to get something mathematically correct, I use far and far less."

I do love H. L. Mencken's famous statement: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.", often misquoted as "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple--and wrong." I actually prefer the misquote, so I am now including both.

However, shader node complexity doesn't always come from a need to be right or correct. There are some problems that admit to a simple solution, and since you seem to have missed them, I'm here to remind you that I've posted (and fully explained) hundreds of shaders that are 5 nodes or less. These are free, largely because they only take me a minute to make them. They happen to be correct as well, especially with P10/PP2014 taking on the proper math. Some of those I give away are still free, but complex, such as LLToon or BBNylon - complex because there isn't any way to do it with few nodes and still be that versatile.

Here is a demonstration of BBGlossy2 - a six node shader that reacts to environment and lights with beauty and simplicity.

Complexity comes from making a shader versatile (simple parameters creating wildly different appearances), from dealing with the older versions of Poser (that don't have Scatter, Fresnel_Blend, or GC), from being smart and helpful (how low can I automatically set reflect quality at any given softness so as to save render time) and from procedural pattern generation (such as my Avatar's fish scales.) I haven't seen your posted shaders providing any of those features, so of course they're simpler. 

I make versatile, multi-purpose shaders with parameters so they can easily be controlled without having to see the implementation nodes, which are on the right. For example, the nodes used to make a metal vs. rubber vs. leather vs. paint are exactly the same and there are just six, connected exactly the same way. (Not counting the bump map) To achieve each material is quite a few value and color changes and few people besides myself know those. I reduce those differences to a few parameters: color, shine, and blur. The other nodes take care of capturing the knowledge that I have on how to adjust the shader to all those variations. When I make shaders that are versatile, then they have a lot of nodes. When I make shaders that can only do one thing, then I have six nodes. If somebody asks me to help them make one material, I show them six nodes with all the values filled in. But I don't charge for shaders like that, I give them away in tutorials. I charge for the versatile, multi-purpose shaders you can't get from anybody else. 

The versatile version of the above BBGlossy shader has 21 nodes. The additional nodes are so that the user only has to choose Color, Shine, and Blur - from that I calculate the eight node parameters that have to change to get the right effects: Diffuse_Value, Fresnel Blend IOR, Blinn Eccentricity, Blinn Reflectivity, Reflect Quality, Reflect Softness, Reflection+Specular Color, and Reflection Value. I daresay only a handful of people in this forum know exactly how those should be set for the six materials I demonstrated above, and there are dozens more possible.

Node count can also go up because (until recently) I would include automatic shader-based gamma correction for those users who had no way to do GC. The automated GC (which turns itself off if you do have render gamma) is a lot of nodes and is only there because it is supporting a deficient renderer. Poser 10 and up don't need this and I don't do it any more. Shader GC increases the BB Glossy shader to 28 nodes.

Before there was a Fresnel_Blend node, it took at least 5 nodes to approximate (9 if the IOR is variable) and 22 nodes to make it exact. You have only to look at shiny things rendered in Poser 8 vs. Poser Pro 2012 vs. Poser 10/Pro 2014 to see the problems I'm solving there. Poser 10 and up don't need this and I don't do it anymore. But supporting the approximation so that it works for Poser 7 or 8 makes the BB Glossy shader grow to  37 nodes (or 50 for the "correct" version.)

So - before you spend too much time bragging about your "simple" approach, let me see you do glass, metal, plastic, paint, rubber, and leather in one shader with only three user-editable parameters, and then let's compare node count.

By the way - this variability through parameter modulation is how PBR shaders work. BB Glossy is a PBR shader and always has been. If/when Poser gains a PBR node, then you'll see this shader drop to one node - but until then, it's 20+ nodes to do all those materials in one shader.

Baggins Wrote:
"By the way - this variability through parameter modulation is how PBR shaders work. BB Glossy is a PBR shader and always has been. If/when Poser gains a PBR node, then you'll see this shader drop to one node ..."

Interesting stuff, Baggins, and adding PBR to Poser might actually give it a realtime renderer of sorts if the nodes output were visible in the viewport.  If only that viewport could show live PBR like a game engine they would have the beginnings of a native realtime renderer in the viewport.

All they'd have to do then is add fog, bloom etc - done!

@Teyon
I still think he looks top-heavy due to the tiny amount of area his feet have in contact with the ground, having no toe of mass at the front of the foot to stop him going forward means that he would fall forward as soon as someone pushed him from behind.  Seems a bit of an odd thing to do for a person with your skills and understanding of balance etc.  But very nice work, he looks very good, and he's a fantasy figure after all so I suppose you still passes on artistic licence ;-)

Thanks. Pumeco, it was a concious design decision. I tried increasing the length as well as increasing the width and just didn't like the look of it. Besides, this gives him a bit of a comical look, which is partly what I was going for anyway. However, I'm going to have to stop calling him an Ogre. He's very much a Satyr now.  Anyway, started his rig today. I'm about two hours into it Just need to tweak the joints and make some morphs however, my mandatory vacation is over so I probably won't get to that until the weekend. Final model (if you guys care) stands at 20,540 quads or 41,088 triangles if triangulated in UVMapper. I'm thinking of using Atangeo Balancer to reduce the count to around 10K and see if I can transfer the rig and morphs to that version for a lower res game model. Like I said though, all to be done on weekends now.

@Teyon
Understood, and funny enough, he looks more sure-footed after seeing that last one than he did before.
He even looks like he's attempting ballet :-D

Now that would be sight, to see him doing a ballet routine as an animated promo video!

That very thought is why I left the feet as is.

:-D

Thought I'd post this render of Roxie doing a selfie just to tease Pumeco and his Roxie, but just noticed some interesting poke thrus that don't seem to show up in Preview. On the other hand I suppose it could be a couple of highlights.

Here's an update on an outfit I'm working on. I've got it textured. It needs to be rigged and I don't know how to do that so it'll be a bit before it's done.

Yeah, listen Clarkie, it's not even an iPhone!!!
Roxies use special phones that are based around a tiny Raspberry Pi Compute Module, and we just attach a screen to it!!!

We only make it look like an iPhone to attract the dumb Vickies!!!
They'll tell you anything if you say something nice to them!!!
So we extract all their data from them!!!
We learn where they go and what time they go there!!!
It makes it easy for Roxies to plan Vickie cullings!!!

Plus, we use our special phones to talk to each other about our owners!!!
Your Roxie tells me what it's like to live in your Runtime, and what you are like!!!
I tell your Roxie what it's like for me to live in pumeco's Runtime, and what he is like!!!
We both have a good laugh about you both!!!
And Vilters as well!!!
His Roxie does the same!!!
We do the same for her!!!
All Roxies do it!!!

Thankyou RedPhantom for the outfit!!!
It looks really good and it will match my Blade as well!!!

Later,
Roxie - Girl With Blade

This sort of thing happens when you are illustrating a book. I needed a "grandma's teaset" and couldn't find a complete set in the style I wanted. So I made it in three colours. The flower decorations are Poser renders as well. It's going into my freestuff here and at shareCG.

I make versatile, multi-purpose shaders with parameters so they can easily be controlled without having to see the implementation nodes, which are on the right. For example, the nodes used to make a metal vs. rubber vs. leather vs. paint are exactly the same and there are just six, connected exactly the same way. (Not counting the bump map) To achieve each material is quite a few value and color changes and few people besides myself know those. I reduce those differences to a few parameters: color, shine, and blur. The other nodes take care of capturing the knowledge that I have on how to adjust the shader to all those variations. When I make shaders that are versatile, then they have a lot of nodes. When I make shaders that can only do one thing, then I have six nodes. If somebody asks me to help them make one material, I show them six nodes with all the values filled in. But I don't charge for shaders like that, I give them away in tutorials. I charge for the versatile, multi-purpose shaders you can't get from anybody else. 

I, for one, do not understand all of those parameters and what they would need to be for make this material or that material. So I really appreciate your shaders BB! And frankly I am always astonished at how much work you do and then give away for free. You are truly a gold mine to the Poser community!! :D

Making Roxie a Catgirl morph.

So far the ears have been the hardest to do.

And of course, I've had to make a separate tail.

Looks like you made efficient use of the ear polygons, Clarkie!
It would be great if the ears were a seperate morph to everything else, then they could be applied to any Roxie head without changing other facial features.

Looks like you made efficient use of the ear polygons, Clarkie!
It would be great if the ears were a seperate morph to everything else, then they could be applied to any Roxie head without changing other facial features.

Well, except for the little bump on Roxie's Bum where the tail fits, that is all I've done for now.  Although I am thinking of  giving her face a more feline look. around the nose and mouth. Of course, the only thing I can see them being used for is catgirl ears.

I hope to have her in the Marketplace soon.

     I've been working mostly on hardware lately, recovering from storm damage, but now I've got the workstations back in service.  I've updated my P8 light sabre (wielded by Creech) with an improved IDL emitter and much improved glow aura.  Rex sports a new light claymore.

  Both weapons are automatic IDL light-casting props.  This scene has no Poser lights - it is lit by the light sabres and the wall torch in the background.  Rendered in Poser Pro 2014 with IDL and 3D motion blur.

Those look good. Is that motion blur you used on the light sabers?

Thank you, RedPhantom.  Yes, that is the 3D motion blur available in the Firefly render options.  It takes noticeably longer to render, though.

Hmmm... the claymore's blade should be longer.  I like this better.

For the fun of it, and for something relatively simple while I take a breather from my huge 3d workload (I'm wiped out after a 10 month site migration and rebuild combined with major model projects), I decided to create a set of simple Faerie items for my Anime Girl Kristin figure. So far I've made and rigged Wings, Boots and a Flower Cap... I'm just trying to decide what else to create...

To everyone else who's posted in here since my last post, keep up the great work!

As I take a break from my sorceress outfit, I needed a new outfit for Ryan 9 for a render. Here's what I have so far. It's primarily done in Blender. I'm forcing myself to learn one of my modeling programs. The clothes were done with starter clothes. The boots, I made myself totally in blender. I think I'm ready to think about uvmapping and so far what I'm thinking is, this is not going to be fun. Mostly I'm worried about the laces. I'll upload it as a freebie once it's done, and I'll see about having the Tyler morphs, but does anyone use Ryan or Tyler these days?

  Do you have a means of "unwrapping" the laces, RedPhantom?

I do. It's just going to take some time.

 @RedPhantom: I use Tyler A LOT... I had just finished this suit for him and uploaded it when this texture fell into my lap thanks to Miss Nancy. But I got in a hurry and uploaded so now I am kicking myself square on the backside. I guess I could upload this as an Add-on.

Pinging for interest!

Here's an update on the outfit for Ryan. I took a short cut and made it all dynamic, except the boots. This is the first texture. I have a couple of other textures in mind.

nice job RedPhantom

     That looks good, RedPhantom!  Dynamic is better for lacing and loose tails.  That outfit could serve for medieval scenes or for Lord of the Rings genre.

.

Chk2033 Thankyou

Seachnasaigh, Thanks, I've been on a medieval kick for quite a while now. I've got 125 ideas pinned on Pinterest of things I want to make eventually.