I have no idea what product it is, but I'm heavy into retro. Especially retro scifi. This is the promo for Soul Mirrors available at DAZ. I would like to know what outfit she is wearing. No link as I don't wish to the MOD to fly to california and whup me good.

Again I would like to identify the outfit she is wearing. Not the eyes.Thank you again!

If it is available at DAZ you should ask over there

Thank you, Jules. But I don't know if it available at DAZ because I don't know what the product is. Not all products used in Promos are exclusively from DAZ or Renderosity or either.

That was an item called

SkinSuits_Gynoid#1

from RDNA

Available at RDNA

Which means, most likely it is at DAZ since they acquired RDNA.

Thank you, Boni, SpookieLilOne and A_Sunbeam, a simple mystery solved by your kindness and brightness.

Boni, A search of DAZ showed the Gynoid Techno series but not this one. I'll have to go to the orignal RDNA source.

Ouch! Almost 20 bucks and there won't be any sales anytime soon. Looks like I'll have to wait a month and hope they don't close down the entire site in the meantime.

I hope you get it! its a cool looking item!

That's not an outfit (aside from props on the ears), that's a displacement map.

Keith posted at 3:29PM Sun, 18 September 2016 - #4283760

That's not an outfit (aside from props on the ears), that's a displacement map.

Which is pretty simple to do if you have some Photoshop skills and patience. Adding colours and displacement to an existing texture is simple to do, also.

Keith, by your own definition, the props on the side of the ears make it an outfit. Semantics aside, I can see where you both are going with this. It might be worth the 20 bucks just to see how it was made. It has to be more than a texture and a map. Besides The head props do give the outfit the retro look I think is cool.

For anyone else this is what we are threading about.

and

For more disclosure. I've been watching EDart and his Gynoid series but I want it for Poser. He doesn't create for Poser. This is close enough that I could work with the textures and do almost as well. Once I get whole of Poser Pro 11, I can use the latest materials as well. Oh well, every Blender tutorial I finish, I get closer to making those wings and antenna on my own.

Sam, welcome back again!

You don't need to spend $20 to see how it was made. And no, it is nothing more complicated than a map loaded into assorted blender nodes. There might be a material for the metallic portion, but it isn't necessary.

And yeah, I kinda know how to do it. The attached image is from 8 years ago. The only difference in technique is that I didn't use an actual displacement to create the raised edge.

And here I'm going to save you $20.

As you can see, simplest texture possible on this, but that's all that's needed. Instead of white, I could have had anything at all in there: metallic, plastic, whatever shader I wanted. All I'd have to do is plug it into the correct blender node. And the human skin could also be as complicated as I wanted it to be: if I'd run EZSkin on it to add subsurface scattering, for instance, which connects to the AltDiffuse instead of the Diffuse channel, I'd just need blender node down there instead. Want to add reflection to the area now in white? No problem, add another blender node to the reflection value so the white area reflects and skin doesn't. And so on and so forth.

Here's an example of a more complicated skin (one I dug out from 2012, so the shaders are a bit dated).

What you've got here is a combination of Subscattered skin (I just used a simple flesh color for the skin, but the Simple Color node you see could be replaced by a texture map) in combination with a gold metallic skin. In this case there's no height difference between the two types of skin, but it would be trivial to do using the mask to alter the displacement and/or bump.

Nice Keith! Thank you for sharing that.

(Tucks that away in her little bag of Poser Goodies)

I know! I feel like I just schooled (gratefully) by a master artist! I'm not an expert at using Blender nodes but I do learn a bit in spurts as the need arises. To be honest I find it rather amazing. It's a lot simpler than I thought after reading the Vendor explanaion. Not only that, Keith thought of the entire concept years ago. Now I'm thankful to both Keith and Soroyama.

Geez I'm always behind the curve but no so far behind or humbled to say "Thanks, Keith".

By the way..."No non human animals were harmed in the making of this product". Man, I got a laugh out of that one! My thanks to Cyber Thrall.

Hey Catryna, thanks for the advice using Magnets! Clothes have never fitted better.

Jules, thanks for keeping this thread alive so that an answer could be found. It only takes one person to get a thread rolling. I hate starting a thread only to hear the echoes of crickets.

Looks like I have another late night project to work on.

quietrob posted at 8:30AM Tue, 20 September 2016 - #4283877

Geez I'm always behind the curve but no so far behind or humbled to say "Thanks, Keith".

Rob I am always behind...I accept my place in the back of the line. But thanks to generous advice over the last couple of decades I have learned a lot. Renderosity was my first home as (Wynter-somthing) I remember when I posted like many before me "I want to make a outfit/clothing - how do I do that" Just because I wanted a medieval style dress. At that time I hadn't even touch 3D. Didn't know how to model a sphere. lol. Anyway I digress as usual. Many thanks to all, past and present!

Hey Catryna, thanks for the advice using Magnets! Clothes have never fitted better.

No problem...now I'm trying to remember how to save magnet sets...I used to know...its hard getting old -wink- and my hiatus from anything 3D for years did not help...

But I'm "hammering things out". :)

I have a lot of irons in the fire but it's time I got started on this. Walking before the running. The first of the Screenshots is a basic texture, a bump map and what looks like a transparency map but it's plugged into the alternate specular node of the poser surface. I'm thinking that anisotropic node is what gives that shiny look. I want that shiny look. I want gold but I'll start slow and get some roots.

Is that how materials are truly made? I'm going to try it right now. The third (transparency) image map I'll have to make in photoshop.

In my opinion (being an obsessed Poser addict) I've always felt that Poser has hidden (and not so hidden) potential equal to some of the big guys and is far more robust than it's price would suggest. Here is another example of that power. Thanks for the wonderful techniques Keith.

Well, I did make a Vampirella outfit for V3 using the same methods. It was available at ShareCG until I pulled all me stuff. Anyone who downloaded it could see how the thing was put together, especially since I included a tutorial showing how to add it to your favourite V3 skin.

Oh well, some people just don't look hard enough. :D

I have a question ... how and where would a person add a texture set up to the masked area? I did ... but since it was plugged into the specular it didn't do well and that was the only node that accepted it in the mask. (taking the hint in post @4283859 with the Anistropic node added ... but then that IS a specular setting. sigh, ok, my bad. But still it is the only path that actually puts the texture inside the mask. I'll show an illustration later. I'm short on time at the moment.

I was never notified that anyone responded to this thread. I probably just missed it but since I'm still working on the outfit, I'm pinging it back to the top.

My apologies to the Great Sam Therapy and Bountiful Boni. I had no idea that anyone responded and thought I killed my own thread.

quietrob posted at 10:23PM Sat, 08 October 2016 - #4286139

I was never notified that anyone responded to this thread. I probably just missed it but since I'm still working on the outfit, I'm pinging it back to the top.

My apologies to the Great Sam Therapy and Bountiful Boni. I had no idea that anyone responded and thought I killed my own thread.

no, you did not kill it. Rendo has problems with sending notifications. That is why I've mostly been on the official SM forums lately because their forum works.

Ouch! Rendo. I love ya, but can you hear me now?

How did I do?

Bizarre Results after Render Testing

You need to do two things there:

Mask out the non displaced parts so that only the white sections are displaced. At the moment it appears the whole of the torso and hip are getting displaced.

Back off on the displacement settings. I don't know what your measurement units are in Poser - mine are inches - but that looks like everything is displaced by at least one inch, which is far too much.

Check the image map node with the B&W mask; make sure it is set to use custom gamma = 1. Click on the image name, as if you were going to browse for a new map. That prompt box shows the gamma setting. Black and white masks should be set use gamma=1 independent of the scene render settings gamma. Set the displacement value lower, maybe 0.005

On the torso, you need to control the displacement with the B&W mask, as in the skinhip zone.

What do you want the outfit to be? White plastic/latex? Metallic?

I admit that I fully don't understand displacement nor masking them out. In this case I was just following the example to try to get the effect keith did in his promo.

This is what I think I know. I believe that displacement raises portions of the skin or material according to the gray scale map and the strength of that map. The darker the color the higher that material will be raised. I understand now that the displacement map being too strong is what caused the bizarre results. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'll continue to experiment. We learn by following the direction of the teachers so the roots are deep and then we learn by doing.

I'll be looking for four materials. Glass (opaque), Silver (like the example), Gold (like the example except the color difference) and White Latex like in the very first picture when I wanted to know what the outfit was in the first place. Now I want to do it myself.

Here's that example of the silver second skin. After all, that's what this is, right? A Second skin.

White is full strength displacement; black is zero. Positive values raise the surface, negative values engrave.

This thread inspired me to dig out one of my old Marketplace products and have a play. This is still very much a work in progress but it's needed surprisingly little revamping to get to this stage. This is good old V3, the weightmapped version, though.

I haven't yet added specific shaders for the metal parts, nor the skin. I may make a few other adjustments on the way.

I'm really hampered by the fact I lost my psd files of the original work so I'm faffing with the product files, which is far from ideal. I may just remake the whole thing from scratch.

After a little more work.

Probably not going to pursue this further; just a fun diversion.

Now that I know a little more about displacements, I find this truly amazing. I see what is meant by not using inches. It's why I got that bizarre look to my own try. To those complaining about nothing new for V4, I think this is something new, simple, exciting and with endless variations. That must be some serious Mapping! I said I wanted four materials and here I see on the last posts, perhaps 7 or 8 different materials including that blue to green gradient. I love second skins. It allows me to put more into the render without taking up resources on my mid-level machine.

Well, that's a bit of a cheat, my set above. It's not truly a second skin; the package was a complete texture set, with the colours and skin baked in. I've taken the old maps and edited them a little, to allow for more selective displacement between skin and shell. Then I re-edited it to make a specular mask. I could go further with it and make it a true second skin and add provision for the colour gradient. It's a real pain in the bum when you're working from the old jpgs though. I had a HD crash and lost the original files so getting these to work anything like reasonably well made me jump through hoops.

I have to say, though, working on this reminded me why I stopped making texture sets. I bloody well hate it! With a passion. I much prefer making models.

Hah! I never minded working with textures though how people can easily look at a UV map and know front from back is still beyond me. I have to take the seam guide and color it. After application on the model then I can make adjustments on what to change. Making models, I think I still have to learn Blender. Hexagon just isn't that intuitive. Things that should be easy due to repetition isn't. It shouldn't take me days of trying and retrying to make a crate. I've heard that Blender is a bit more intuitive like Poser versus DAZ.

From looking at your AMP in the marketplace, you may not like making texture sets but you're rather good at it.

So what did you do? Use the complete texture set with colors and skin baked in as a second skin then added displacement?

Not quite. I already had a black and white bump map which was simple enough to edit and make a selective displacement out of. I just coloured all the non displaced bits - the skin - black and left anything else as it was. I then made another version for the glossy bits, some of which aren't displaced, so that meant I couldn't just use the first map as it was. More adding of black and white bits. Threw them into Poser, crossed me fingers and there you go.

Thank you for the kind words. There's not a whole lot of texturing to that amp set. Most of the detail is modelled in. The covering, speaker cloth and so forth are mainly displacement with a bit of colour here and there. The control panels were a matter of typing in the whole text, matching font sizes and checking positions against the real thing I have at the side of me here. Easy enough, just time consuming.

BTW, I've only ever dabbled in Blender. I use Wings for all my stuff. Limited feature set but simple to use and does most of what I need. If it can't do it, there's always a workaround.

Thanks for the advice, Sam! Blender is an obvious choice because it's free, though I'm a big believer in generally speaking, you get what you pay for. But before I bother my son to use his college ID to get Zbrush, I thought I better learn how to walk and jog before I learn how to run.

Okay! Displacement problem solved! The skin looks tight though I will even out the open texture on her, um, torso and the neck needs redoing unless the part that looks rather opaque is part of the head texture. I'm used to working Aiko but I do like what you can do with V4 and more people seem to work with her.

Anyway, the skin is tight, reflective, covers her open shoulder and works with her limbs quite well. I had to take the Displacement map down to 0025 to get it so she doesn't look all puffed up. Now how would I go about changing that white reflective material to Silver (Chrome) and gold?

Boni! Is this what you wanted to do?

Simple way to go would be to make the Diffuse channel a very dark grey, Diffuse_Value 0.3, Specular to a light grey and make the Specular_Value around 0.3. Then, add a reflect node with Reflection_Value of 0.5. Set quality to 1, Softness to 0.2 or lower. Ray Bias is something I don't pretend to understand well at all. I sometimes get render artefacts with low values so now I have it set at 3.

The above gives you a reasonable silver finish. Change the greys for dark and light yellows respectively for a gold.

Of course, BagginsBill has much better shaders. If you bought any of the Dreamland Models furniture sets, or the Car Patio, there are a good selection to choose from in those. IIRC, all Dreamlands stuff now has BB shaders.

Also, if you want to improve the look of the second skin above, make it a much higher res to eliminate the jaggies, and save the files as PNG or PSD. If you really have to use JPG, save at the highest res. Something that's counter intuitive is that you sometimes have to make the map lines bent in order for them to look straight when they're applied. The area around the breasts on the above pic shows some texture distortion. Just trial and error getting it to look right, unfortunately.

I removed the cut out altogether. I had it there originally as I was following Keith's example. He also has a nice no ear morph I intend to add for the antenna's. I'll redo the textures in PNG format and collect the size information. They are based on the original skin texture so I thought it would be big enough. I did the face mask myself and it looks a little smoother as far as the jags are concerned.

I've bought a few of dreamland's models but I didn't collect the furniture during the last sale. Hopefully he'll come back and NOT pull his stuff from here so that he is a DAZ only vendor. He still makes stuff for Poser so I'll still spend my bucks on his city block models and other models he's come up with.

Now then I know it sounds as dumb as toast but I don't how to add a reflection node. Do you mean add something to reflection value? Like that Anisotropic node I have blended into the alternate specular channel.

Never mind! I think I found a reflection node under lighting, raytrace. I'll give it a try as soon as I can!

Alright! I'm smarter than toast!

Ehrm, you have to watch out for toast. It's sneaky. One minute it's on yer plate, the next it's all "I'm in ur Runtime, raytracing all ur stuffs".

I could be making this up.

Found that toast. It was sneaky but I captured it. I'm still looking for butter.

Sam, I have a ton of materials that I've purchased. Is there anyway to use those rather than trying to make a shader of my own? The actual suit is to be smooth and comprised of a single material anyway. I'm still experimenting with the gray as silver but it looks well like reflective gray rather than silver. In the meantime, here's that toast.

I eliminated the cutout as not needed and I can do a better one with a better design anyway. I'll work on the cowl as well. it's uneven at the chin and one of the temples. Still a good first effort I think. Keep critiquing or I'll get no where!

Oh and for some reason, the missing ears morphs removes her face morph to something I don't recognize. If you know of any good remove morphs I'd take it!

Hmmm, you could apply the bought material to a prop, for example, then copy that and paste it into the figure's materials. It shouldn't detach anything already there, so you'd be able to hook that up to the masked out areas as necessary.

Can't help with the no ears morph, sadly. You could always make some of those retro/Sorayama style ear cups from a cone and a cylinder, then stick those over the ears. Also, the displacement needs work on the face. It's ballooning up and you can see cracks under the eyes and nose.

Yay! No butter but it would seem nobody will be short of milk for a while. :)

Hey! You're right! I'll give it a try and hope I won't turn her face gold or silver. What I normally do is use the script from Netherworks that allows me to copy any material from anything to another prop or figure. But I think it does cut out what I've done. I'll try the cut and paste method. I found another free morph that removes both nose and ears. I'm hoping I can remove them one at a time AND it won't affect my current character morph.

My friend, the Great Simon3D has gracefully made me some antenna that should fit over her ears once I've shrunk them down. Thanks again, Simon. You're the best! Simon, if you're following this, I read your story. All of it. There are some things one shouldn't skip over.

Those black lines are from Displacement? I had no idea where they came from. I'l look at my map and see if I left some artifacts.

Yay! No butter but it would seem nobody will be short of milk for a while. :)

Possibly the best line of any thread, anywhere!

Don't forget that if you have a reflective surface, it needs to have something to reflect. I'm rendering something for you now and I'll post it later, along with my node setup for it.

Do you have Victoria 3, or any of the Daz 3 females? The texture set works with A3 and SP3. I can send it you if you like; it was a "to buy" set but it's long gone from the Marketplace.

I have ALL figures from DAZ up to Genesis 2. I had to stop there because I can't use G3 in Poser. My favorite figure is Aiko 3 but I am loving what can be done with V4 with respect to emotions.

Thank you. Node information is so informative. Renders let me see what could and should be done. I've learned a lot from this DIY thread! Heck, I've even learned what baking is, though I have no idea how to do it with Poser Material like that quasi-skin for V3 earlier.

I'm guessing you want this kind of effect.

This is how I did it. Far from perfect because the silver Diffuse should be lower and I haven't bothered controlling that but it's not bad for a quick and dirty.