Hi, I am creating some M4 characters and now suddenly my skin looks weird in the final render. I think it's best seen in the attached pic. I have no idea why this happened. I created some figures and they are fine and suddenly I get this result. It is Raphael skin. I guess I clicked by mistake on something I shouldn't have... can you please help? Thanks!!!

PLease show screen capture of your Material Room settings for the skin

Also, what are you rendering with? Firefly or Superfly?

Anyhow, it looks like it's got the old Ambient fudge switched on, which is why all the detail is smeared out into a generalized colour.

Best bet, IMO, is to run it through Snarly's EZSkin, whichever flavour is appropriate for your render type. Great results every time, next to no faffing about, either.

I agree with ST. It does look like an ambient bloom or an over-active SSS. I, too, would be interested in a Material Room screencap.

Maybe an old school SSS hack using translucency, IIRC that would cause glowing problems when IDL was first introduced.

Whether in firefly or superfly ... the quick fix, if you have it is EZskin3 or 4 from Snarlygribbly.

To my knowledge, there aren't any EZSkin 4 available yet.

sorry for being not able to reply earlier... this is a firefly render, here's a screen of the skin material:

Can you do a screenshot of the advanced settings? The "Erweitert" tab.

sure...

ah ok... I have now turned the Transluenzfarbe from lightbrown to black... and now it looks good again!!!

Glad you fixed it. I was just going to post that the translucence color didn't look right.

Thank you for your help! I never figured out to click on the "Erweitert" tab at all... only strange that it got to this setting at all as I can't remember to change that.

It's still wrong. Specular shouldn't be blue and Diffuse should never be 100%. Ambient should also be zero. You should also get rid of whatever bump maps are provided because they are always, without exception, wrong. In all the years I've used Poser, I have never seen a single bump map for skin that's correct.

You really need to run it through Snarlygribbly's EZSkin. It will fix up all the maps and give you the option of much better, procedural bump maps.

Probably the specular is blue because the color map (i.e. orange) is plugged in and should not be. Whoever did that was upset that the speculars looked strange and compensated by multiplying with blue. Two wrongs make a -- wrong.

The color map should not be plugged into the specular channel at all, and the specular color should be white.

bagginsbill posted at 5:24PM Sat, 22 August 2020 - #4397499

Probably the specular is blue because the color map (i.e. orange) is plugged in and should not be. Whoever did that was upset that the speculars looked strange and compensated by multiplying with blue. Two wrongs make a -- wrong.

The color map should not be plugged into the specular channel at all, and the specular color should be white.

Well, yes... but seeing as EZSkin sorts it all out, I didn't think it was necessary to go into everything, mate. :D

Interesting. I've noticed a lot of older Poser characters have a diffuse color that's pale green or blue, and look really unattractive in Firefly, unless you change it. I just figured it was something that worked in the old P4 renderer, but doesn't now.

randym77 posted at 7:53PM Sat, 22 August 2020 - #4397513

Interesting. I've noticed a lot of older Poser characters have a diffuse color that's pale green or blue, and look really unattractive in Firefly, unless you change it. I just figured it was something that worked in the old P4 renderer, but doesn't now.

I think it was something that started around the time of P6, as a fudge to get something like SSS. Some of 'em had a slight amount of blue in the Ambient channel, too.

SamTherapy posted at 4:13PM Sat, 22 August 2020 - #4397509

bagginsbill posted at 5:24PM Sat, 22 August 2020 - #4397499

Probably the specular is blue because the color map (i.e. orange) is plugged in and should not be. Whoever did that was upset that the speculars looked strange and compensated by multiplying with blue. Two wrongs make a -- wrong.

The color map should not be plugged into the specular channel at all, and the specular color should be white.

Well, yes... but seeing as EZSkin sorts it all out, I didn't think it was necessary to go into everything, mate. :D

Moreso ironic that he invented the scatter+blinn that EZSkin was based on :D

Answered OP's question in the 3rd post in this thread rofl.