I have a pretty powerful NVIDIA card. I'm not a fan of using my systems processor so I've been experimenting on trying to get a good set up for working with my GPU and I'm not finding any luck with in the render settings. I'm up to over 10 tries.

I have to say I LOVE the skin tone better with the GPU for starters but the graininess is horrible. I'm also have a devil of a time getting hair to render realistically, it's pretty blown out. I have 5 lights in the scene, I started out with a light set I found in my folder, loaded with like 37 spots lights and 4 distance lights. Seemed a bit overkill. So I deleted all but one of the spots, converted two of the distance lights to area lights and played around with the shadow settings for each light trying to get the hair to react to the lights better with darks and lights but to no avail.

For those that have been helping me, thank you. I'm coming from the DAZ Studio community and trying to get my head around Poser this late in the game but I'm determined so bare with me and again thank you for the help

Richard

I know Jack about superfly but try Ghostship2's lights at sharecg (probably here too)... all his stuff seems highly recommended for superfly.

Hey Rich, I'm not sure about all the other settings, but you should definitely raise the Pixel Samples. My fairly new laptop is a GTX 1660ti, so the same system as the new RTX cards. I don't always render with the GPU, but when I do quick test renders, I have the Pixel Samples set at around 20, and when I'm doing more finalized renders, I have it set somewhere between 40 and 50 Pixel Samples. That will help clean up the graininess you're seeing. Needless to say, the render will take longer the higher the Pixel Samples, but in the end you should be a lot happier with the results.

As far as the hair goes, I rarely do such closeups, so not sure what to recommend. I can tell you I very often use a freebie light set by Ghostship2, so if no one's already recommended it to you, you should check it out.

Poser Studio Portrait Lights for Poser 11

EldritchCellar posted at 11:01PM Wed, 06 May 2020 - #4388372

I know Jack about superfly but try Ghostship2's lights at sharecg (probably here too)... all his stuff seems highly recommended for superfly.

WOW, you beat me to it by 2 minutes.

That's because you were thoughtful enough to actually provide a link ;)

HAHAHA Thank you so much.

Hey Miss B. Hope you all are staying well and safe. HUGS

For progressive refinement you can set the render to continue indefinitely and cancel when happy. - for example set pixel samples to 9999. Its worth exploring the presets and using progressive refinement + high sample count to see the impact the preset has on quality and time.

ironsoul posted at 10:36PM Wed, 06 May 2020 - #4388380

For progressive refinement you can set the render to continue indefinitely and cancel when happy. - for example set pixel samples to 9999. Its worth exploring the presets and using progressive refinement + high sample count to see the impact the preset has on quality and time.

Do you render that way? Seems to take longer to render the whole image all at once instead of breaking it up into tiles.

ghostship2 posted at 7:22AM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388387

ironsoul posted at 10:36PM Wed, 06 May 2020 - #4388380

For progressive refinement you can set the render to continue indefinitely and cancel when happy. - for example set pixel samples to 9999. Its worth exploring the presets and using progressive refinement + high sample count to see the impact the preset has on quality and time.

Do you render that way? Seems to take longer to render the whole image all at once instead of breaking it up into tiles.

I have a very iterative approach so being able to see the overall look quickly and then cancelling if unhappy is useful. In this case I think its a useful way to getting a feeling how long renders take to converge although the hair may negate the process.

ghostship2 posted at 2:48AM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388387

ironsoul posted at 10:36PM Wed, 06 May 2020 - #4388380

For progressive refinement you can set the render to continue indefinitely and cancel when happy. - for example set pixel samples to 9999. Its worth exploring the presets and using progressive refinement + high sample count to see the impact the preset has on quality and time.

Do you render that way? Seems to take longer to render the whole image all at once instead of breaking it up into tiles.

It depends on the scene. For most, tiles are more efficient per rendered pixel but progressive will give you the entire image so you can cancel it earlier in case it meets your needs earlier than your anticipated.

Also, if you aren't already aware, raise your bucket size for GPU rendering... Forgot where I read it, but it was small bucket for CPU, large bucket for GPU. I have mine set to 1024 when doing GPU rendering.

I agree Ghostships lights are good. As for hair, a lot depends on the material, most hair has way too much specular on top of having highlights burnt in. BagginsBill, Ghostship and myself have all made attempts at more realistic hair materials for superfly and I created addons for EZSkin3 to make applying them easier (all 3 result in higher render times as a trade off for better quality)

bwldrd posted at 7:25AM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388393

Also, if you aren't already aware, raise your bucket size for GPU rendering... Forgot where I read it, but it was small bucket for CPU, large bucket for GPU. I have mine set to 1024 when doing GPU rendering.

My bucket size is 256 for Superfly. Anything larger and it starts to slow down.

AmethystPendant posted at 6:54AM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388411

I agree Ghostships lights are good. As for hair, a lot depends on the material, most hair has way too much specular on top of having highlights burnt in. BagginsBill, Ghostship and myself have all made attempts at more realistic hair materials for superfly and I created addons for EZSkin3 to make applying them easier (all 3 result in higher render times as a trade off for better quality)

My deal is I like realism, not totally because I come from a comic's background when I was younger and developing comic characters but it's just strange that the skin comes out looking fine but the hair does not. The hair in my screen grab above is one of SAV's hairs. I find that her settings do tend to be a bit over the top (node wise) and are greatly blown out, like the person is standing in a very highly lit place or in the glaring sun. I wanted something that was simple but with fine highlights running along the hair shafts. I've been able to achieve this in DAZ Studio under 3Delight and IRay but so far nothing even close here in Poser.

So if you have links I'm willing to buy or download and try the hair set up shaders to see if I can get her hair products looking more to my liking. Since there are so few hairs that look good and natural on L'Homme right now her collection seems the best for my needs.

Thanks so much everyone for all the advice!

Richard

This is what I use for Hair. it looks good in all light sources and with any decent hair maps. Don't use hair maps that show highlights otherwise the hair will look painted on and cartoonish. I use hair maps from Outoftouch's more recent hair models.

Hair will always take longer than the skin tone, I guess that is down to the transparency but I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong. I have used BagginsBill's hair shader on a number of different hairs from different vendors and, as you would expect, it works well. That said it is complex and it is certainly not going to help you to speed up a render.

and here is the same hair with different lighting.

Render times are not a huge deal using the GPU for me. My last grainy render, which did finish, took no longer for me than a render in DAZ Studio so that's not going to freak me out if I have to wait an extra 10 minutes. Just want to know where I can get the scripts Amethyst was mentioning.

Also thanks to bwldrd and Ghostship for the bucket size recommendation.

I THINK I may have one of OutofTouche's products for Poser, the shaved sided hair with length on the other side.

Yes, that looks very nice indeed!

Xenya Hair

just an FIY. SAV's hair models are pretty awesome but they are massively dense meshes that need around 30 trans bounces to render correctly. Also note that they usually load up with shadows turned off (neck actor) so they render quicker but don't look right that way.

RAMWolff posted at 5:04PM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388426

Render times are not a huge deal using the GPU for me. My last grainy render, which did finish, took no longer for me than a render in DAZ Studio so that's not going to freak me out if I have to wait an extra 10 minutes. Just want to know where I can get the scripts Amethyst was mentioning.

Also thanks to bwldrd and Ghostship for the bucket size recommendation.

I THINK I may have one of OutofTouche's products for Poser, the shaved sided hair with length on the other side.

Give me a little time and I'll package all 3 up (they all use EZSkin3 as the host and you can either use the maps that come with the hair or in BB's let it generate the whole thing)

Amanda

THANK YOU Ghostship. I just installed some of your goodies. I'll look over the shadows and up the trans bounces

Thank you so much Amethyst. I'll look forward to your gift.

RAMWolff posted at 5:50PM Thu, 07 May 2020 - #4388451

THANK YOU Ghostship. I just installed some of your goodies. I'll look over the shadows and up the trans bounces

Thank you so much Amethyst. I'll look forward to your gift.

YHM

OK, got the scripts.

ANOTHER question. I have the EZSkin 3 panel open but L'Homme is not supported. Is there a way to import the needed info to the script get this working?

I also found that I DO have a very expensive script from Dimension3D called D3D Perfect Skin. I tired invoking that and I got callback errors so not sure what's going on with that unless Ralf's script doesn't work with Poser 11? https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/d3d-perfect-skin-sss-pro/114500/

In EZSkin you can make your own definitions for figures, so which shader goes for which material. You can then save that definition and EZSkin will remember it for later re-use.

Is there a tutorial on how to do this? I'm curious!

EZSkin 3 does come with an instruction manual and should have come with the zip file. Many of the preset that already exist come from a community effort many years ago that participated in developing the original EZSkin. I was one of the participants.

Ah, silly me. PDF. thunk

@RAMWolff, regarding the Dimension3D Script, it does work with poser 11 (not sure it you need snarlygribbles avfix or not), but you have to manually setup every figure it doesn't recognize, which is a pain as it doesn't come with a built in editor like EZSkin does.

Ah, OK. It's a shame that someone hasn't offered a freebie for new figure setup's. I'm not very good with Poser as of yet so I can't tackle something like that!

I wrote them for all the Hivewire figures, animals included; and released them in a thread similar to this one over on Hivewire's forums years ago along with viseme files for same. Take a look. MissB may have them IIRC. That stuff all went the way of the dodo when we had our apt. building burn a few years back.

Oh dear. I'm so sorry that happened to you and yours.

Well with the Hivewire figures all headed towards their 2.0 versions I'm wondering if your set up will work on them? I can't remember I Chris stated he was going to leave the UV's alone or not.

parkdalegardener posted at 5:17PM Fri, 08 May 2020 - #4388532

I wrote them for all the Hivewire figures, animals included; and released them in a thread similar to this one over on Hivewire's forums years ago along with viseme files for same. Take a look. MissB may have them IIRC. That stuff all went the way of the dodo when we had our apt. building burn a few years back.

The only ones I could find installed are for Dawn, Dusk and Harry the Horse. I also found them for Paul and Pauline, but not sure where I download those from, and they're on my external hard drive, as I don't use those characters much. Any others for the HW characters I can't seem to find, so not sure I'll be able to find the post PDG made on the HW forum years ago, but if I do Rich, I'll let you know.

OK Rich, I only found Dawn, Dusk, HarryHorse, Legacy figure definitions, Paul and Pauline. The Legacy figures are the older Poser included characters. Paul and Pauline were introduced with Poser 10. I don't have Paul2 and Pauline2, which are updated versions included with Poser 11.

Check your Sitemail.

The Material Zones of Paul/Paul2 and Pauline/Pauline2 are the same. If you have the original Paul and Pauline definition files, they can easily be applied to the current versions.

Good to know, though I don't use them often, but still nice that they can be used for the newer character models.

So I got the EZSkin rendering. I still see allot of darks and lights. Someone mentioned that I could UP the amount of iterations to allow the render finish more cleanly.

So what part of the render settings do I allow to go and go and go until I'm satisfied?

Thanks so much Richard

Why are the checkboxes empty in EZSkin? Pixel samples need to be higher. Possibly 20 or higher. You can push the bucket size to 128 or higher on GPU. The hair transmapping will increase your render time considerably. BTW, that character's left eye looks a little off.

I can confirm that D3d's SSS script doesn't work in Poser 11 pro, I'm not sure if it's because La Femme is unsupported or not. No biggie if I can just create a figure definition (and there's always EZSkin3) but I just purchased the script and if it doesn't work in Poser 11 perhaps the powers that be should note that on the product page so others don't waste their money like I may have...

And as an aside to every texture creator that creates textures for the various Poser figures, stop baking in nostril and nose shadowing into your diffuse maps please. Including whoever textured La Femme for Poser's official figure release. Jeesh. It's just as annoying as baked in specular.

EldritchCellar posted at 10:52AM Sat, 09 May 2020 - #4388614

And as an aside to every texture creator that creates textures for the various Poser figures, stop baking in nostril and nose shadowing into your diffuse maps please. Including whoever textured La Femme for Poser's official figure release. Jeesh. It's just as annoying as baked in specular.

Every new character I buy has the nostril shadows. Not needed so I have to paint them out in Photoshop every time. Sometimes have to paint out speculars on the lips, tip of the nose and eyelids.

Ditto ghostship2. That's not so difficult, just annoying. 99.9% of the La Femme MRs suffer from this. Maybe all of them. I'd certainly buy more stuff if this weren't the case.

Burnt in hair specular and lip specular are the really tricky ones. Especially hair diffuse textures with the specular burnt in. I've managed to repaint some hairs to where it's not so bad, very hard to do though, and use an anisotropic for the specular, but that's old news going back to BB's experiments with such. Anyway, apologies for the brief hijack.

@EldritchCellar, no idea why the D3D script isn't working for you, unless it is something in the lite version. I have the Perfect Skin SSS Pro, and it works just fine.

Thanks so much for the tips. Here is my attempt at a EZSkin definition for L'Homme.

Select code, load into a text file and name the file L'Homme.defs

[OBJLOOKUP] lafemme1 = L'Homme

[L'Homme] skintorso = (u'skin', u'1') skinhead = (u'skin', u'1') lips = (u'skin', u'1') skinlimbs = (u'skin', u'1') innermouth = (u'innermouth', u'2') gums = (u'innermouth', u'2') tongue = (u'innermouth', u'2') fingernails = (u'nails', u'3') toenails = (u'nails', u'3') teeth = (u'teeth', u'4') sclera = (u'sclera', u'5') iris = (u'iris', u'6') pupil = (u'pupil', u'7') eyesurface = (u'eyetrans', u'8') tearline = (u'tear', u'9') innereye = (u'lacrimal', u'10') eyelashes = (u'eyelash', u'11') eyebrows = (u'eyelash', u'11')

Also, it seems that the forum software here doesn't respect the line by line thing so it's all loaded as a sentence. Sorry about that!

bwldrd posted at 1:25PM Sat, 09 May 2020 - #4388631

@EldritchCellar, no idea why the D3D script isn't working for you, unless it is something in the lite version. I have the Perfect Skin SSS Pro, and it works just fine.

Humph.

Maybe it has something to do with the extreme morphs I have on La femme at the moment. Mucking up the uv map expectations of the script? I think that would be a long shot. Or maybe even the fact that La Femme has UDIM ranged uv tiles, which more than likely would be the reason considering the out of range error notation. I could convert her to stacked UVs via Deecey's script, that might fix it.

I should try running it on V4 and see if I get any errors.

Just ran the D3d's perfect skin script on V4, which is supported, identical error. The only difference between the lite version and the pro versions are freckle and tan line options in pro. I can create my own freckles and tan lines if I need them that's why I purchased the lite version. I had a feeling it was redundant buying it, EZSkin does exactly the same thing for free. Oh well looks like it's EZSkin instead...

bwldrd posted at 10:55AM Sat, 09 May 2020 - #4388631

@EldritchCellar, no idea why the D3D script isn't working for you, unless it is something in the lite version. I have the Perfect Skin SSS Pro, and it works just fine.

I tried to set up the Script's loader that I have docked permanently in Poser. I got this feedback when I tried to invoke Perfect Skin Pro:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "D:PSP.py", line 3017, in File "D:PSP.py", line 3013, in main File "D:PSP.py", line 22, in init File "D:PSP.py", line 781, in init IndexError: list index out of range

Here is the path I entered in the mainButtons.py: ":Runtime:Python:poserScripts:ScriptsMenu:D3D Perfect:Perfect Skin SSS Pro.pyc", "PerfectSkin Pro")

So something may be off where I have it installed or it's not functioning as it should when the calls are put out for the scripts to start.

RAMWolff. Does your EZSkin definition work? If so thanks... I get almost identical errors with D3ds script btw.

I dont think it's anything to do with how we've installed it. I tried running it from scripts menu and via file:run python script. Identical results.

Plus Perfect skin, like EZSkin is not set up for La'Femme nor L'Homme. Looking through the Perfect Skin.psa file there is only mentionings of:

k4, m4, v4, daz3, baby2, girl (not sure what generation), v3_v2, mill_1, mill_2, steph (1st generation?), paul, rex, roxie, alyson, ryan, g2f, g2j (WHO?), g2m, james,
p6kids, p5, p4nw, miki3,
miki2, ty2,
nearme,
sad, skye, staci, dennis, dusk,
dawn,
gloria,
antonia,
antoniaa,
apollo,
mavka,