moriador posted at 11:52AM Fri, 01 April 2016 - #4263600

My own opinion is that the two most important aspects of realism in figure renders are lighting and posing. If either isn't right, the render will not seem realistic. Even with perfect lighting and shaders, if the pose is wrong, it will look like a photo of very realistic... mannequin.

Details are extremely important, as we humans notice even the tiniest details when assessing other humans. For example, in your first render, the position of the right hand, while possible, would be very, very uncomfortable to maintain for even a moment. Try it yourself. The hand moves pretty easily from side to side away from the thumb. But if you try to move your hand from side to side towards the thumb, its movement is much more limited. If you twist your forearm as well, as the model does in the pic, it becomes quite uncomfortable.

When I cover a breast with my right hand, I naturally bend my hand away from my wrist, without even thinking. So, while technically the pose you showed is _possible _, it's very unlikely because someone covering her breast will simply choose to bend in a much more comfortable way.

We will notice such things in a render, perhaps unconsciously, and as a result, it won't look quite right to us.

The solution is to use actual photographic references and to pay extremely close attention to the smallest details.

Notice the angle of the hand covering the breast in each photo:

Fortunately, as you can see, you can find photo references for poses pretty easily. I just googled: female covering breast with hand to get these images.

I think the best posing method is to use a canned pose that someone else created to get started, and then use photo references to fix their mistakes. (Even the best vendors will make errors in posing from time to time.)

Your right, when I saw the first render it looked uncomfortable to me even though I did not have an idea as to why. The references you use immediately seemed more relaxed although again, without your explanation, I doubt I could have explained why.

 

 

I use Poser 13 on Windows 11 - For Scene set up I use a Geekcom A5 -  Ryzen 9 5900HX, with 64 gig ram and 3 TB  storage, mini PC with final rendering done on normal sized desktop using an AMD Ryzen Threadipper 1950X CPU, Corsair Hydro H100i CPU cooler, 3XS EVGA GTX 1080i SC with 11g Ram, 4 X 16gig Corsair DDR4 Ram and a Corsair RM 100 PSU .   The desktop is in a remote location with rendering done via Queue Manager which gives me a clearer desktop and quieter computer room.