@ironsoul - I think that the default using PBR Metal/Rough workflow is 4% for non-metals and 100% for metals. In the Physical Surface that is controlled by the Metallic setting i.e. if Specular is left alone, setting Metallic at 0 means 4% reflection while setting Metallic at 1 means 100% reflection.

This has been a super useful thread! Is there any way to tag a thread as "super useful" in rendo? I don't see a "+1" or upvote or "like" button. Nor a "follow".

In the comparison of ezskin cycles to physical, what were the render times?

I agree! Mark it super useful!! thoennes posted at 8:37PM Wed, 03 July 2019 - #4355964

This has been a super useful thread! Is there any way to tag a thread as "super useful" in rendo? I don't see a "+1" or upvote or "like" button. Nor a "follow".

In the comparison of ezskin cycles to physical, what were the render times?

A lot of great stuff here. Thank you all.

bagginsbill posted at 8:37AM Fri, 05 July 2019 - #4355505

I've done numerous other tests with more nodes as input and so far found no inconsistency. In particular, plugging in a gray map (i.e. same value in all channels) into the scatter distance inputs will trigger the bug. At least one of them has to be different from the other two

INCORRECT if and only if R = G = B

And looking at the Smith Micro Blog site, which still has all 235 Poser blogs still there just not the Videos, I came across this update that says they put the Sub Surface Scatter into the Physical Surface node and it is activated by changing any of the inputs off of ZERO. However I suspect that given all the posts here that it activates if the three values are not the same.

Link to Blog: https://blog.smithmicro.com/quick-poser-update-poser-service-release-4

I am playing with the PBR, my early replication of the posted node set up left me with the skin WAY too shiny. I added a fresnel node. My favorite lighting is EZDome 2 with some high resolution HDR's and a single "sun" light. Here is a comparison of my latest iteration. With Cycles on left for comparison. Still needs work- a little too much red scatter. The displacement node with + and - maps and using the math node is a carry over from the character maps. Seems a bit odd-but works for fine lines in face-of course I am Subdividing the mesh.

Hi Eric, I see that you use Displacement. SuperFly does Displacement on vertex level and not on pixel level as FireFly does.

Propose to connect to the Bump channel that works on pixel level in both render engines.

Hi Tonyvitters, Thanks. I use it for specific maps-like the following. You can see fine wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. So with Physical it will deform the mesh? I'll try that.I don't use Firefly these days. I can't seem to add any specular shine to the face Any odeas

A bit more play with Physical Root node. Here is a render using all Cycles on left and Physical Root for skin (only) on right. The Physical node results duplicate a more natural translucence and scattering for the ears (to my eye). For La Femme the head material is also the face material-otherwise I might decrease the scatter on the face while leaving the ears as is.. One oddity-is that it seems that a lighter skin color gives MORE scattering, I'll post examples later-but I had to change the RGB attenuation from 3 mm to 0.5 mm to make it look right with the lighter skin color.

To get visible specularity-rather than the dry look-I I set the HSV value to 12.

You might wanna set the Specular color (the one still connected to your specular map) to white, to avoid needing to pump it up so much with an HSV node. That gray is multiplying with your specular map, likely making it black and thus not giving you highlights.

Still perfecting his skin textures in Substance. Figured I'd do a test render in Poser just for kicks. Rendered in Poser. Didn't do the node thing, just 4 maps plugged directly into the root. Thoughts welcome.

Hey Teyon! Great head sculpt. Can you expand the root? Curious about your settings I am! Teyon posted at 9:51AM Sat, 24 August 2019 - #4360333

Still perfecting his skin textures in Substance. Figured I'd do a test render in Poser just for kicks. Rendered in Poser. Didn't do the node thing, just 4 maps plugged directly into the root. Thoughts welcome.

I have the Physical node settings the same for the Head and Face-yet I see a discrepancy on SSS- see glow below ear on right. Puzzled!![

Nodes-

sure thing. As I said, I'm still working on his textures and trying to find a nice sweet spot of saturation and roughness but here ya go.

Interesting. The Roughness map is controlling the degree of diffusion of specularity- and the Scatter map should give more scatter where the lighter color is? The skin appears somewhat dry in the render. I am trying for more translucence in the ears-since they ARE more translucent-and scatter more red light than the skin. The material is "head" with V4. The trick is getting the ear-glow with back lighting-and not too much with the rest of the head. I'll experiment with a grey scale map such as yours to control the scatter.

Teyon posted at 3:28PM Sat, 24 August 2019 - #4360359

sure thing. As I said, I'm still working on his textures and trying to find a nice sweet spot of saturation and roughness but here ya go.

The skin looks dry because I'm still working on the roughness but good on you for pointing it out. While it will have a little more oil to it, I'm not going for a super glossy look because he's not meant to be sweating a lot. So I have to play around with the texture in Substance to get the effect I want. Also need to get rid of those eyebrows. Super messy looking. Yes, the brighter areas on the scatter map are meant to allow more of the effect in that area. I may need to darken the grey a bit while leaving the white areas white but again, this is all early stages still. I find the biggest thing that helps skin look realistic though is pores that have direction as opposed to just a simple noise. That's what really sells the look.

Nice! And pores are great for realism. I tried grey scale map for scatter- I made the ear texture brighter- and it's closer. I notice the back of the head appears more glossy now.

Teyon posted at 9:23PM Sat, 24 August 2019 - #4360399

The skin looks dry because I'm still working on the roughness but good on you for pointing it out. While it will have a little more oil to it, I'm not going for a super glossy look because he's not meant to be sweating a lot. So I have to play around with the texture in Substance to get the effect I want. Also need to get rid of those eyebrows. Super messy looking. Yes, the brighter areas on the scatter map are meant to allow more of the effect in that area. I may need to darken the grey a bit while leaving the white areas white but again, this is all early stages still. I find the biggest thing that helps skin look realistic though is pores that have direction as opposed to just a simple noise. That's what really sells the look.

Honestly I'm loving this thread~~

Great to see people experimenting!

This has been an interesting thread and has taught me a lot. I'd love to see a sister thread about SSS for Hair Using the PSR

ypvs posted at 6:21PM Sun, 25 August 2019 - #4360450

This has been an interesting thread and has taught me a lot. I'd love to see a sister thread about SSS for Hair Using the PSR

I could be wrong about this but I believe that SSS in Cycles/Superfly requires "thickness" in the mesh to work. SSS will work on things like your figure's fingers but not on one or two sided strip hair. For hair you would use translucence.

Please ignore the place holder eyes. They are crap. So now I've pushed the texture too far into the sweaty area and need to tone it down a little bit but it's getting there.

A bit sweaty-may make it more diffuse with roughness? That seems to be the effect I see on specularity with roughness at least. Great sculpt by the way! Teyon posted at 6:10PM Sun, 25 August 2019 - #4360454

Please ignore the place holder eyes. They are crap. So now I've pushed the texture too far into the sweaty area and need to tone it down a little bit but it's getting there.

@ Eric - in Superfly there is no Specular - not in the way there is in Firefly anyway. SF only does raytraced reflections, but these make FF crawl so Specular is fake reflection in FF. The Specular plug on the Physical Surface root should be called Base Reflectance (or Direct Reflection, or F0). With a PBR texture-based setup it should be left at the default. The appearance of the reflected light is then controlled by Roughness - lighter values are rougher and the highlights are more diffuse as you've seen, darker values give tighter and sharper highlights.

@ Teyon - I would say (being picky) maybe not enough colour variation, the yellow tones are a bit overpowering. Some surface blemishes or beard follicles too? Roughness - some areas look great to me like round the eyes, top of nose, lips but it seems too much at the base of the nose and chin. When I try to set up Roughness I make the diffuse black; I also make the environment black to avoid bounced light and then use a single infinite light at 100% so that I know I'm only getting direct reflection (I think bagginsbill does something very similar and had a demo a while back).

The skin detail is excellent - is that hand sculpted (I did read your sculpting thread in the Zbrush forum!)?

Hi Caisson (and thanks for the kind words). Eric, Thanks. Caisson is correct, about how roughness works. @ Caisson, I'm still fiddling with his skin in general. I found a roughness level I can live with. Now I'm going to go back in and refine his actual color and maybe give him a beard. I'm texturing him in substance painter so I can work on each aspect of his texture separately without involving other textures (I just turn his base color off entirely when mucking around with roughness). I'm also working with a yellow tinted light in Poser so that will kick things more yellow regardless. Not really caring about his skin color too much in Poser right now, just trying to get his roughness and sub surface right. I find it interesting I have to pump the roughness map so much in Poser compared to a real time engine like Toolbag. To answer your other question, yes the skin is entirely hand sculpted using brushes in Zbrush.

Now that I'm happy with the roughness and general subsurface look I'm going to go back in and alter his skin color so it has more variation, some blemishes with color, color up his veins and maybe add some eyebrows that make sense, lol. This has been a cool little re-education for me. Thanks for this thread gang. Been a while since I've used Poser.

@Teyon - I find I have to disable AO in Painter if I've baked it as it's applied in the viewport shader. The other thing (I am speculating but I think it could be relevant) is that real time rendering is straight to monitor which will be sRGB while Poser renders using a different gamma curve that isn't as contrasty. If you pop the Poser render into an editor and add a bit of contrast with a Curves adjustment, I think you should find that the result then matches the real time displays. So your original roughness export may be correct ;)

Meanwhile I'm having trouble with mine.

the textures are getting blurry. (The eyebrows are in a different material zone)

This is my level of detail in my texture map and it's lost.

Huh. Found it. For some reason I had unplugged the ScatterDistG and ScatterDistB from my SeparateRGB node. Fixed it I think.

(I also messed a bit with my maps so now her nose sides aren't as stained and her veins are much more subtle.)

Ah. That makes sense. Ok. The things you forget over time, lol. Thanks! caisson posted at 9:32AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360491

@Teyon - I find I have to disable AO in Painter if I've baked it as it's applied in the viewport shader. The other thing (I am speculating but I think it could be relevant) is that real time rendering is straight to monitor which will be sRGB while Poser renders using a different gamma curve that isn't as contrasty. If you pop the Poser render into an editor and add a bit of contrast with a Curves adjustment, I think you should find that the result then matches the real time displays. So your original roughness export may be correct ;)

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Huh. Saved, shut Poser off and when I was back, the ScatterDist plugs had all plugged to the R part of the SeparateRGB node again. I think there's a bug. I took the node out of the compound and that seems to have avoided the bug. Wish I could report this.

Glitterati3D posted at 11:56AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360629

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Thank you! I'm now having problems with her morph - I opened her jaw and some vertices from inside her mouth flew everywhere. This happened with Anuli's morph too, I had to go and smooth them and it was an annoyance to do so while avoiding to mess with the shape of her lips (and also because it's hard to reach their correct position from inside the mouth, and also also because it's hard to select those single vertices away from everything else). I wonder if this is an issue with GoZ, LaFemme or both.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 12:12PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360646

Glitterati3D posted at 11:56AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360629

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Thank you! I'm now having problems with her morph - I opened her jaw and some vertices from inside her mouth flew everywhere. This happened with Anuli's morph too, I had to go and smooth them and it was an annoyance to do so while avoiding to mess with the shape of her lips (and also because it's hard to reach their correct position from inside the mouth, and also also because it's hard to select those single vertices away from everything else). I wonder if this is an issue with GoZ, LaFemme or both.

I don't use ZBrush, so I can't help here (just outside my budget for now). Contact user Letterworks and see if he can offer any suggestions, perhaps?

Glitterati3D posted at 12:18PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360648

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 12:12PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360646

Glitterati3D posted at 11:56AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360629

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Thank you! I'm now having problems with her morph - I opened her jaw and some vertices from inside her mouth flew everywhere. This happened with Anuli's morph too, I had to go and smooth them and it was an annoyance to do so while avoiding to mess with the shape of her lips (and also because it's hard to reach their correct position from inside the mouth, and also also because it's hard to select those single vertices away from everything else). I wonder if this is an issue with GoZ, LaFemme or both.

I don't use ZBrush, so I can't help here (just outside my budget for now). Contact user Letterworks and see if he can offer any suggestions, perhaps?

Letterworks? Why that user specifically, if I may ask?

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 1:01PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360649

Glitterati3D posted at 12:18PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360648

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 12:12PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360646

Glitterati3D posted at 11:56AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360629

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Thank you! I'm now having problems with her morph - I opened her jaw and some vertices from inside her mouth flew everywhere. This happened with Anuli's morph too, I had to go and smooth them and it was an annoyance to do so while avoiding to mess with the shape of her lips (and also because it's hard to reach their correct position from inside the mouth, and also also because it's hard to select those single vertices away from everything else). I wonder if this is an issue with GoZ, LaFemme or both.

I don't use ZBrush, so I can't help here (just outside my budget for now). Contact user Letterworks and see if he can offer any suggestions, perhaps?

Letterworks? Why that user specifically, if I may ask?

One I know who has helped me with questions like this personally. Another suggestion might be Blackhearted. Both are very knowledgeable about ZBrush and morphing figures.

Glitterati3D posted at 1:07PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360654

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 1:01PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360649

Glitterati3D posted at 12:18PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360648

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 12:12PM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360646

Glitterati3D posted at 11:56AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360629

Afrodite-Ohki, she is looking wonderful! Great stuff. I can't wait for her.

Thank you! I'm now having problems with her morph - I opened her jaw and some vertices from inside her mouth flew everywhere. This happened with Anuli's morph too, I had to go and smooth them and it was an annoyance to do so while avoiding to mess with the shape of her lips (and also because it's hard to reach their correct position from inside the mouth, and also also because it's hard to select those single vertices away from everything else). I wonder if this is an issue with GoZ, LaFemme or both.

I don't use ZBrush, so I can't help here (just outside my budget for now). Contact user Letterworks and see if he can offer any suggestions, perhaps?

Letterworks? Why that user specifically, if I may ask?

One I know who has helped me with questions like this personally. Another suggestion might be Blackhearted. Both are very knowledgeable about ZBrush and morphing figures.

I'll look into it, thank you!

Hey Caisson! Thanks! I recall being inspired by your displacement maps for V4 a few years back! Here I am trying to get a more natural translucent scatter for the ears. Not quite. I'm playing with blending two different grayscale maps for the head texture-ears specifically to try and control the scatter on the ears. Not satisfied as of yet.

caisson posted at 8:43PM Fri, 30 August 2019 - #4360472

@ Eric - in Superfly there is no Specular - not in the way there is in Firefly anyway. SF only does raytraced reflections, but these make FF crawl so Specular is fake reflection in FF. The Specular plug on the Physical Surface root should be called Base Reflectance (or Direct Reflection, or F0). With a PBR texture-based setup it should be left at the default. The appearance of the reflected light is then controlled by Roughness - lighter values are rougher and the highlights are more diffuse as you've seen, darker values give tighter and sharper highlights.

@ Teyon - I would say (being picky) maybe not enough colour variation, the yellow tones are a bit overpowering. Some surface blemishes or beard follicles too? Roughness - some areas look great to me like round the eyes, top of nose, lips but it seems too much at the base of the nose and chin. When I try to set up Roughness I make the diffuse black; I also make the environment black to avoid bounced light and then use a single infinite light at 100% so that I know I'm only getting direct reflection (I think bagginsbill does something very similar and had a demo a while back).

The skin detail is excellent - is that hand sculpted (I did read your sculpting thread in the Zbrush forum!)?

bagginsbill posted at 4:37PM Sun, 24 May 2020 - #4355176

With your Poser Display Units set to inches like me, create a Point Light and set its intensity and XYZ position like so

Not getting this to look right . Trying to follow along perfectly from start to finish. I've set Poser to Inches, Two spot lights and both have the exact input of the Trans and zeroed out rotations. Intensity is set to 400.00 as instructed but the image I'm getting is ..... well not good. I'm using L'Homme.

But BB didn't use spotlights for the demonstration, he used point lights that don't depend on Angle Start and Angle End. In addition, if you are trying to emulate the scenario, your construct diffuse and specular should be set to black to eliminate any reflective surfaces. That also included the figure itself.

Ah, I thought they were spot lights. I'll redo the scene tomorrow. Thanks so much!

bagginsbill posted at 4:37PM Sun, 24 May 2020 - #4355176

With your Poser Display Units set to inches like me, **create a Point Light **

bagginsbill posted at 12:14PM Mon, 25 May 2020 - #4355174

Set the Construct to all black on diffuse and specular. We want no bounced light. Load your figure. Set all of its material zones to black on diffuse and specular. We want no bounced light.

Bounced light confuses you during analysis. Eliminate it.

I think I got it..... BUT then you stopped with the lesson so wondering how to take this base skin to the next level for realism.

Thanks Bill!

His name's Ted! Lol