Why not use the background for lighting instead of the dome? It casts highlights and shadows, the dome does not. It also renders with less noise than the dome. this is illuminated with the background only. No lights and no mesh emitters. Real shadows, real highlights, and background image just like the dome.

What is your background set up in the Material Room? And I am assuming that you are using HDRI as your image.

hborre posted at 1:59PM Thu, 28 January 2021 - #4411271

What is your background set up in the Material Room? And I am assuming that you are using HDRI as your image.

Yes, HDRI. Make sure that it's a high fstop image otherwise no highlights. HDRI Heaven is a great source for those. Note that the background will be flipped/reversed from what you'd expect that is why I have that -1 in the scaling.

a couple more notes: If you remove the default nodes like I have done in this image they will be put back in and re-attached to the root and you'll have a grey background and lighting. Just leave them in the window but not attached and that problem is solved. Also, you might need to use the Post FX exposure settings to lighten or darken the image when you are done.

I've gotten so used to domes, I forget about the background.

Thank you very much. That scale always throws me off. I will definitely play around with this more thoroughly in the future.

Playing with @bagginsbill's undersea godray setup:

Impressive. Most impressive.

I likey!

ghostship2 posted at 3:16AM Sat, 30 January 2021 - #4411278

a couple more notes: If you remove the default nodes like I have done in this image they will be put back in and re-attached to the root and you'll have a grey background and lighting. Just leave them in the window but not attached and that problem is solved. Also, you might need to use the Post FX exposure settings to lighten or darken the image when you are done.

First thank you for sharing this, i learn every day with posts like this one.

Changing the scale do not work, with minus i can revert the hdr, but 0.5,0.5,0.5 do nothing. rotation, works. how do you scale the background in cycle ?

Ludovic.

lsauvage posted at 8:26AM Sat, 30 January 2021 - #4411413

ghostship2 posted at 3:16AM Sat, 30 January 2021 - #4411278

a couple more notes: If you remove the default nodes like I have done in this image they will be put back in and re-attached to the root and you'll have a grey background and lighting. Just leave them in the window but not attached and that problem is solved. Also, you might need to use the Post FX exposure settings to lighten or darken the image when you are done.

First thank you for sharing this, i learn every day with posts like this one.

Changing the scale do not work, with minus i can revert the hdr, but 0.5,0.5,0.5 do nothing. rotation, works. how do you scale the background in cycle ?

Ludovic.

You don't. To scale the background is the same if you are using a dome: Change the Focal length for the camera you are on and the camera's position relative to the figure.

Thank you for you answer. I'm still a bit bit puzzled, to why it's like that. I have to make experiments. I suppose it is depending on the focal used to capture the image used as texture for the background.

yeah, I guess that will be a problem if you are trying to match the FOV to the background. I don't even bother with that. Most of my stuff is portraiture and if I need to see feet touching the floor I use an interior model or something else like the car patio I used in the image up the thread.

you might look up a tutorial on photography/Field of View on youtube to get a better understanding on it.

It looks like the tech team managed to break this in the 12.0.387 build that was released 1/29/21. You can see the HDRI background clearly in the preview window but no preview in the Background node. I'm going to have to report this.

It may be your image, i can see the preview in the node with same fresh new version. I encoutered a bug when i clicked the key to animate the rotation, the interface looping refreshing the background properties, but it worked in a way i could get out and render a movie with rotating background.

The image is perfectly fine, I've worked with it before in P12, a couple of days ago. This is the first outing with the new build that came out yesterday.

I agree, they broke something with the hdri files. My default one suddenly renders wrong, and so do all the rest that I've tried. Like, hborre, it has a red tint to it, as if it's only reading the red channel. Here is what it looks like on an environment sphere.

here's the same in poser 11

When I use a jpg, it works like it should, but without the lighting of course.

Report it. I just did it a while ago. Let them know that jpg images will work but HDR images are not showing in renders. BTW, I do see that the jpg images are color casting but I don't know how close to accurate.

It's been reported

@bagginsbill's godray technique, adjusted to make foggy air:

seachnasaigh posted at 1:35PM Fri, 05 February 2021 - #4411673

@bagginsbill's godray technique, adjusted to make foggy air:

That looks so cool!

An unplanned, test quickie - my wip characted Debora wearing my Marcela Hair.

Looking good Ohki. Looking very good.

Many thanks to everyone for the advice and pointers contained in this thread, most enlightening. Just making sure PP12 works okay on my Mac and BigSur, before committing to the purchase :) and also looking at what SuperFly now does following improvements. A couple of unexpected things with eyes appearing white as the SF skin texture Eyesurface had a transparency on it (solved by uncoupling the transparency) and also some mesh lines appearing which again are simple solved by changing the skinning method for the figure from Traditional to Poser Unimesh. Include a side by side comparison of an old image with FF and SF renders, no lighting tweaks between the two. Most impressive initial result and lots of new things to learn :)

Another test in PP12 with HDRI and SuperFly. Some strangeness with the dynamic cloth, but the render quality looks really good imho

paul_gormley posted at 2:02AM Mon, 08 February 2021 - #4412256

Another test in PP12 with HDRI and SuperFly. Some strangeness with the dynamic cloth, but the render quality looks really good imho![Astarte 03-04-01.jpg]

Gorgeous picture <3 Which hair is it? it looks great

Hi Y-Phil, It's the Lizanna Hair by Out-of-Touch for La Femme, but designed to work with V4 as well. The look is seemingly improved by having an Area light working as a street light in addition to the HDRI also in the properties settings it is subdivided to 2 for render, all other settings are default apart from choice of colour

Final upload this time with a render in SF with 3 lights and dynamic outfit that looks normal. There is, however, strangeness if the cloth is fitted while render settings are under SF. Switching to FF before fitting the cloth doesn't come up with any strangeness — no idea why but it has worked on two files okay. So work around seems to be fit cloth under FF and then select SF before rendering rather than the other way around. Only other downsides I've noted so far are

1. (on Macintosh BigSur) PP12 takes a long time to quit.
2. The materials room is really slow to change things when using HDRI
3. When rendering in SF and quitting after a quarter way the auto post work gives a very good quality finish
4. Dynamic cloth doesn't like working under SF selection (haven't tested this cold from start up)
5. Selecting Poser Manual from the menu doesn't seem to open it up... Other than that PP12 is a huge improvement and the team deserve a congrats on their work. Many thanks to Ghosthip2 for the HDRI primer :)

@paul_gormley
Nice work. Looks kinda semi-cartoonish with a pin-up feel to it.

Cortana and Master Chief in the ARC (LaFemme as holographic Cortana)

I just saw this over on the HW forum, and just sat there staring at it. You have such an uncanny way of capturing people's attention with your renders.

Thank you, @Miss B !

Mulberry despatches Imperial droids, burning clean through one with her lightsabre, and using "the Force" blast to slam the other. P12 Superfly with motion blur engaged; the force lightning, molten metal, and lightsabre are lightcaster meshes. View from behind Mulberry is rendering now (motion blur takes a long time to render).

Aiko 3 (with Sarsa's Mulberry morph and lightened MAT) is wearing Appleseed gear, but using Jedi weapons, and she looks more like Buffy the vampire slayer than like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Stonemason's the ARC (circa 2007, P7 era) updated with Superfly metals and lightcasting.

paul_gormley posted at 11:22AM Fri, 12 February 2021 - #4412256

Another test in PP12 with HDRI and SuperFly. Some strangeness with the dynamic cloth, but the render quality looks really good imho!(https://live.cdn.renderosity.com/forum/comments/4412628/file_38b3eff8baf56627478ec76a704e9b52.jpg)

It looks fantastic.....

View from behind Mulberry:

If you want to convey motion, engaging motion blur in the render settings is very handy. It will take considerably longer to render. Using adaptive sampling is a lifesaver; if a pixel hasn't changed after X number of samples, the renderer considers it finished and doesn't waste time calculating more samples for that pixel. So, near the end of a render, Superfly is actively working only on the most difficult areas of the image. I had adaptive sampling set at 0.003% for this render.

ghostship2 posted at 10:12PM Sun, 14 February 2021 - #4407736

really digging the Post FX options.

How are they an improvement over simply changing exposure and saturation in Photoshop? Surely, it's better to render relatively flat rather than limiting your post editing range?

AcePyx posted at 9:25AM Mon, 15 February 2021 - #4412801

ghostship2 posted at 10:12PM Sun, 14 February 2021 - #4407736

really digging the Post FX options.

How are they an improvement over simply changing exposure and saturation in Photoshop? Surely, it's better to render relatively flat rather than limiting your post editing range?

Could be that I just don't know what I'm doing with Photoshop, but I could not get the same results with exposure/brightness/contrast/hue/saturation. It's pretty easy to just bump up or down the brightness using the exposure controls in Poser.

seachnasaigh posted at 12:21PM Mon, 15 February 2021 - #4412654

View from behind Mulberry:

If you want to convey motion, engaging motion blur in the render settings is very handy. It will take considerably longer to render. Using adaptive sampling is a lifesaver; if a pixel hasn't changed after X number of samples, the renderer considers it finished and doesn't waste time calculating more samples for that pixel. So, near the end of a render, Superfly is actively working only on the most difficult areas of the image. I had adaptive sampling set at 0.003% for this render.

Very nice motion blur ! Cheers !

seachnasaigh posted at 4:11AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4411673

@bagginsbill's godray technique, adjusted to make foggy air:

Wait, what? Cool. Where is this technique described???

seachnasaigh posted at 4:15AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412617

Very cool scene.

How did you get the corner "wear" in the mats? In blender I use kitops bevel to do that.

Stonemason's stuff still looks cool.

And A3 was always a fave of mine.

thoennes posted at 6:17AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412901

seachnasaigh posted at 4:11AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4411673

@bagginsbill's godray technique, adjusted to make foggy air:

Wait, what? Cool. Where is this technique described???

BB explains underwater godrays

quickie on adapting this for foggy air

thoennes posted at 6:26AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412907

seachnasaigh posted at 4:15AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412617

Very cool scene.

How did you get the corner "wear" in the mats? In blender I use kitops bevel to do that.

Stonemason's stuff still looks cool.

And A3 was always a fave of mine.

I still use A3 a lot

Stonemason's sets are indeed still useful (the ARC is from 2007, the P7 era); they look much better with the materials updated for Superfly.

The scuff is already there in Stonemason's texture maps.I used PhotoImpact X3 to select the paint/rust colors of the texture images, and used that as a metallicity mask. So, anywhere the paint is scuffed away looks metallic. In the metallicity mask, white is metallic, and black is diffuse.

seachnasaigh posted at 11:27PM Wed, 17 February 2021 - #4412912

thoennes posted at 6:17AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412901

seachnasaigh posted at 4:11AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4411673

@bagginsbill's godray technique, adjusted to make foggy air:

Wait, what? Cool. Where is this technique described???

BB explains underwater godrays

quickie on adapting this for foggy air

Cool, thanks!

omg, I wish there was a one-stop shop for the "wisdom of the mat, lighting, node, and rendering gurus" through the ages. At this point, I've forgotten more than I ever knew.

Skill in those areas can turn a lame scene into an eye popping drool-worthy scene. Having the occasional render pop can be such a pleasant ego boost, in these ego withering times.

Sweet Brielle... An Aiko3 character, By Thorne & Sarsa (2005) Mat setup using the Physicalsurface Root node

Very nice. I really like the way the hair rendered on A3. May I ask how you assembled the hair shader?

Ooh, nice. Brielle holds her own several versions of Poser later.

hborre posted at 1:57AM Mon, 22 February 2021 - #4413537

Very nice. I really like the way the hair rendered on A3. May I ask how you assembled the hair shader?

Ok. I took the time (45' lol) to load each hair prop/character I have, just to be sure that the way it's built isn't in a sold package. I'm pretty convinced that it has already been presented somewhere in a forum, was it Ghostship? Biscuits? I can't remember, but I'm afraid to break a copyright...

If you think that it's ok, I'll publish it here. It's a setting I'm using with all hairs I have, sometimes I just have to cross the highlight sizes of an anisotropic node. Not sure why.

seachnasaigh posted at 3:16AM Mon, 22 February 2021 - #4413543

Ooh, nice. Brielle holds her own several versions of Poser later.

Ok, dear artist....

You'll have to be very careful with my Druid: if there's too much light on her face, that's on purpose, so that you'll get caugh by her magical, mysthical eyes..... he he he he...

Character: "Dancing in the Wind - druid", with Liana's head, a Vic4: Heperia Hair and... a Vic3 pubic

I wish I could 3D print her... ?

recently submitted to that pinup contest that Rendo had. I did not win and am a little bitter about it. lol

ghostship2 posted at 3:25AM Tue, 23 February 2021 - #4413619

recently submitted to that pinup contest that Rendo had. I did not win and am a little bitter about it. lol

So What? ur... You clearly deserved it <3

A gratuitous car