How do I make glowing effects on a characters hand?

Firefly or Superfly?

Is this what you're looking for?

This is done in Superfly.  If you are looking to do it for one hand, you would need to create either a new material grouping for each hand or an emission mask to isolate the hand.  It might be a little bit involved to get it right.  If you are looking for Firefly settings, I have to see if I have notes on a material setting.  Bagginsbill came up with one arrangement years ago but I think I have it buried somewhere.

The simplest method to achieve this in Firefly is to use an Edge_Blend node, assign each chip a color or texture map, and plug it into the Ambient_Color of the PoserSurface, setting the Ambient_Value greater than 0.  The attenuation controls how much of the Outer_Color will blend with the Inner_Color.

Firefly or Superfly?

The simplest method to achieve this in Firefly is to use an Edge_Blend node, assign each chip a color or texture map, and plug it into the Ambient_Color of the PoserSurface, setting the Ambient_Value greater than 0.  The attenuation controls how much of the Outer_Color will blend with the Inner_Color.

This is a simple setup getting something to glow.  As I mentioned, you require the Edge_Blend node plugged into the Ambient_Color channel, set the Ambient_Value to 1.

The Outer_color should be the color for your glow and the Inner_Color whatever texture you want to blend with it.

That's much neater than my 'rough & ready' approach, which is to make an ambience mask, super-dial beyond 1.00 to luminous, render in Superfly...

Happens to be a quick way of turning an imported set's oft-multiple luminaires into 'real' lights. Not so good for 'artistry'... 

My Ambience masks need white for lit, black for not: Care, must be black black, as even 'very dark grey that looks black' may glow well when you turn up the dial...

If you want your object to emit light into the environment (that is, effecting nearby objects) via ambient in Firefly enable IDL

You can also make things "glow" by plugging your maps into Alternate_Diffuse channel. They won't emit light but will glow in the dark.

Superfly always has IDL/GI on.

Are you doing stills, or animation?

If you want your object to emit light into the environment (that is, effecting nearby objects) via ambient in Firefly enable IDL

You can also make things "glow" by plugging your maps into Alternate_Diffuse channel. They won't emit light but will glow in the dark.

Superfly always has IDL/GI on.

primorge posted at 8:27 PM Sun, 26 September 2021 - #4428153

If you want your object to emit light into the environment (that is, effecting nearby objects) via ambient in Firefly enable IDL

You can also make things "glow" by plugging your maps into Alternate_Diffuse channel. They won't emit light but will glow in the dark.

Superfly always has IDL/GI on.

The amount of emission from the Alternate_Diffuse channel is very, very low.  The deep fake is to apply a dark red color to the Ambient_Color chip and set the Ambient_Value to a low value just enough to give the figure a faint glow but not overwhelm lighting.  It becomes apparent when lighting levels are too low and the self glow washes out shadow detail.

Was merely pointing out things that weren't mentioned. Ambient channel is the obvious choice.

In that spirit here's just maps plugged into Alt Diffuse in a completely dark scene...

This is neat info in all.  This is tough for me to ask.  Can anything like this be done in body maps or transparent maps or something around those lines?

I think this is what you might be looking for

If you want to isolate an ambient effect to a drawn map or pattern you can use a mask. Just draw your pattern as white against a black background and run it through a math functions: multiply as shown below, white will be the areas glowing... so if you just wanted the palm or fingertips glowing draw your mask with the figure template as a guide. Here's the simple Firefly set up, it's just as easy to use this arrangement amongst a more complex shader set up...

To clarify, white will be full glow, grey values less, black none.

Omitted an important fact (I was off to bed when I made the above post, glad I caught it this morning)

When you load your mask image it should be set at custom gamma 1. Any type of mask or black and white image such as bump, displacement, specular mask, transparency, etc should be set at custom gamma 1 in your materials...

One can draw or make shapes in the poser program or do you have to do that outside the program?  Ex: That butterfly mask was done out of poser.

That would be done in a 2d program such as Photoshop or Gimp

RedPhantom posted at 10:47 AM Thu, 30 September 2021 - #4428307

That would be done in a 2d program such as Photoshop or Gimp

I was hoping to do transparency map editing in the Poser program.

I tend to use free Irfan View to paint 'diffuse' maps of eg luminaire 'lamp+fitting+bracket+conduit' into ambience map to white-mask the glowy bits, black-mask the rest.. 

Plan_B is to haul luminaire's OBJ into a modelling program and dismantle it. Snag is this usually breaks the so-neat mapping...

Is there a way to paint a figure in poser?  My attempt to "paint" a characters hip leaves out the limbs.

Nope.  As RedPhantom posted above, that type of detailed work involves 3rd party software such as Photoshop or GIMP and your texture maps. or Blackhearted3D, or such programs, that will enable you to paint directly on the model.

Nope.  As RedPhantom posted above, that type of detailed work involves 3rd party software such as Photoshop or GIMP and your texture maps. or Blackhearted3D, or such programs, that will enable you to paint directly on the model.

Is there a way to paint a figure in poser?  My attempt to "paint" a characters hip leaves out the limbs.

If you explain what you want to paint and which figure I might be able to help. 

lakes123 posted at 3:05 PM Thu, 30 September 2021 - #4428317

Is there a way to paint a figure in poser?  My attempt to "paint" a characters hip leaves out the limbs.

If you explain what you want to paint and which figure I might be able to help. 

Sure thing, but let me ask this.  Can Poser turn surfaces into light emmitters using light emission maps?

primorge posted at 4:31 PM Thu, 30 September 2021 - #4428323

lakes123 posted at 3:05 PM Thu, 30 September 2021 - #4428317

Is there a way to paint a figure in poser?  My attempt to "paint" a characters hip leaves out the limbs.

If you explain what you want to paint and which figure I might be able to help. 

Sure thing, but let me ask this.  Can Poser turn surfaces into light emmitters using light emission maps?

If you mean light emission maps from unity or such, that's an interesting question.

I imagine you can utilize maps in SuperFly CyclesSurface Emission nodes in a similar fashion. Whether you can use maps intended for a different renderer would need to be tested by yourself or answered by someone who utilizes Superfly CyclesSurface Emission nodes. 

In Firefly, as I've shown, yes you can utilize alpha maps to control ambient that will emit light. I imagine with some additional nodes you can drive multicolored maps, or color them via such nodes, through the ambient channel. It requires IDL global illumination to be on if you want the light to bounce off nearby surfaces. You can activate IDL in render settings.

In Superfly IDL is always active.

Do you use Firefly IDL or SuperFly?

High ambient values in Firefly tends to overwhelm and wash out color input from maps. I'm fairly positive there's workarounds for this.

(Rendo's very short edit post window is getting really annoying)

Sure thing, but let me ask this.  Can Poser turn surfaces into light emmitters using light emission maps?

Now that I'm done work for today and have some time off I figured I would take a closer look at this question.

I watched this tutorial on making Emission Maps for Unity.

https://youtu.be/pAba4ys_XAg

Turns out it's very easy, as an alpha with color being driven by settings or as a color map. With this in mind I created a quick color map in Photoshop...

I then attached this map to a one sided square prop and used an Emission Node hooked up to a CyclesSurface root and rendered in Superfly... here's the result.

Yes, Poser can utilize Emission Maps.

primorge, thanks for the big tip.

...with a caveat 

If your trying to use maps intended for unity renderer in Poser, black in the unity map won't operate in Poser in the same way as it does in that tutorial. You'll probably have to hook up a separate mask for areas you don't want lit. You'll have to test this yourself, I don't see why a black and white mask hooked into the Emmision strength socket wouldn't work as it would in Firefly ambient value example I posted earlier. I'd do another test for that but I didn't save the test scene and am already working on a personal project. Heads up on that.

Tangential, I've been playing with the free table lamp by Moin3D....

https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/89674/simple-table-lamp-01

Rather than tediously import/export via DS' migraine-inducing UI, I ripped the DSF to OBJ with ($$) DSF Toolkit. After editing the output 'one-material' OBJ with Wordpad, I imported to Poser. Rather than my usual 'super-ambience' work-around to light the filaments, I hunted through 'advanced' material properties. Daringly adding a physical surface node, I woke the Emission. Surprisingly, this 'topped out' much, much dimmer than I'd expected. Cranking the 'EmissionStrength' up to silly numbers (>70k) gave no further gain. And still not bright enough for shadows...

This is so different to 'super-ambient', or  even Poser's lights, which latter may be dialled to 'Dazzle'...

Have I missed something such as a limit setting ? Or is 'Physical Surface' simply the wrong route ??

Your glass shader might be blocking the emission.  It is showing a slight opacity.

Transparency 96 %, edge 33 %, fall-off 0.23. T was compromise between seeing glass and transparency.

IMHO, I would have thought losing a few percent thus would be far out-weighed by setting 'EmissionStrength' = 2, 5, 15, 25, 50, 75, 100, 250, 500....2500....75k ?

Playing around with this further, I have found that the type of glass shaders used for the bulb does influence the amount of emission generated from the LED filaments.  You also need to consider that the filaments themselves are rather small in comparison and cannot really shed enough light to do proper illumination without cheating.

This is how I use the emission node in Poser Cycles.  The LightFalloff node controls the type of illumination as to whether you want constant lighting or an inverse square effect.  This works fine with unobstructed glowing mesh but once you put a glass shader surrounding it begins to have problems.

This is my render with the above settings.

Same settings except the strength have been increased to 10K.

This is my glass shader setup.

This render is with the Quadratic channel on the LightFalloff node connected.  

Forgive the noise, I haven't found the right render setting for these renders.  Mesh lighting can cause quite a bit of noise.  No lights were active in these renders.  

Here's another glass shader that I think works better with this bulb.

Emission strength and channel.

And render.

OOPS!  The top image got repeated.

Same glass and settings as above except for the active Quadratic channel to imply the inverse square.

Wow !! Thank you.

Will experiment thus...

FWIW, lighting eg RE's SCG OBJ RE2 freebie sets using only set luminaires ambience-masked & super-dialled, I often need a lot of pixel-samples, so lengthy renders, even run remotely on  my networked 'Box'...

Oh yeah, I find mesh lights take quite a bit of pixel to clear up the noise.

Somewhere in Poser's code, there seems an inherent limit to objects' 'surface brightness'. Would be useful to know what it is, and have an option to change.

As things stand, beyond the comparative simplicity of  'super-ambience' hack, becomes horribly complicated to get 'emission' bright, even if still not bright enough...

At least 'displacement' limit may be changed !! ( Finding that option turned my imported 'lawn' into 'Elephant grass' !!)

Huh: I remember when we used to craft custom Poser lights and parent them within luminaires...

Could that be a clue ? Lights seem to have no upper limit on brightness ...

Hmm...

Tangential, I sorta fell into Poser via cover-disk P3 then ($$) P4 as a way to put posable figures into sub-scenes from the sprawling Medieval-ish sets I was crafting in IMSI's classic 'Floorplan 3D'. I made lots of 3DS arches and such in the bundled TurboCAD, serendipitously figured how to make wall-cutting props. The arcane, un-documented attribute I found flagged those to auto-dock into FP walls, rather than just collide. Sadly, IMSI had licensed FP's core code, fell out with its developers when FP needed re-compiling for  ?x32. So, IMSI licensed new core-code with different UI and internals. The 'New, Improved' FP was very nice, but had a totally different work-flow. Worse, apparently for legal reasons, it was incompatible with the old FP file formats, could not port my plans or use my custom wall-cutters. I was bereft...

As per the other thread. Hollow glass ball with emitter cranked up wat too high to illustrate the point. Look at the shadow from the table and the light halo around it. I suspect your problem is that you don't have enough transmission bounces for the light to penetrate the shade of your light above. That and I don't know if your fixture is solid, single sided or double sided. That would affect the glass shader you use as well as the number of bounces to penetrate it.

I think you're expecting too much of the lighting. If you compare it to a point light, you get similar results.

This is a similar setup with a single point light at 24% intensity and an inverse square fall- off

and here it is with the table light set with an emitter with the strength of 2000

It looks like you're comparing it to multiple lights with the fall-off set to constant. If you want your emitter to be constant, use the setup hborre posted.

Thank you for those thoughts...

FWIW, made an interesting discovery about OBJ+MTL I/O: Material parameters are 'range trapped' at import, but not at export...

eg Load a Poser primitive box from library, dial super-ambient to eg 10. Nice glow, yes ?

Export box as OBJ+MTL, open MTL in eg Notepad. Ka 9.9  9.9  9.9

Re-load this OBJ+MTL, super-ambience is lost as 'invalid' ambience value is trapped.

Re-exporting confirms: Ka 0 0 0

Oops...

Did some digging, found MTL specification should accept values outside 0 ~~ 1 range...

You are not finding out anything new. You should be looking at the illumination models in the file. The illum lines in the MTL. Ka is the ambient colour stored in RGB where the value can only be 0 to 1. The illum line has the following arguments:

0. Color on and Ambient off
1. Color on and Ambient on
2. Highlight on
3. Reflection on and Ray trace on
4. Transparency: Glass on, Reflection: Ray trace on
5. Reflection: Fresnel on and Ray trace on
6. Transparency: Refraction on, Reflection: Fresnel off and Ray trace on
7. Transparency: Refraction on, Reflection: Fresnel on and Ray trace on
8. Reflection on and Ray trace off
9. Transparency: Glass on, Reflection: Ray trace off
10. Casts shadows onto invisible surfaces

There is no one all singing, all dancing; file format that will do everything you are expecting it to. You are expecting more out of FBX than it is capable of. Same with MTL. This is an old file format. It doesn't support a lot of more modern information. I really suggest that you fully investigate file formats first and see just what each actually does instead of blindly expecting results from whatever one you seem to play with at any given time. Just read the file specs before you blindly expect results. People are trying to help you; but you aren't accepting the answers you are given. That or we are not properly understanding your questions due to an inability to express the info as we require it in order to help. Check out the file specs and maybe you will be better able to explain just what it is you want. Ka vs. Illum as an example.

Poser will build a corresponding MTL file for any OBJ it uses that does not have one. If you don't want Poser to build a MTL file when you import your OBJ make sure there is one already there. It's not a Poser fault that it builds a MTL file without asking you anything. It isn't supposed to ask you. MTL generation is automatic upon OBJ file creation in most software and Poser expects the file specification to be followed. If the corresponding MTL is missing Poser will generate one.

Thank you all. Will try harder to follow the excellent advice on using more modern approach(es).

FWIW, MTL specification(s) divided on Ka limited to 0~~1, and Ka allowed 'any', including negative.

Clearly, Poser holds to former for imports, so hacking the complex set's OBJ's MTL is not going to work.

Beside trying to learn 'nodes' beyond the rudiments, I'll try to split the complex OBJ into 'building ' and 'decor', so glazing and luminaires are more accessible.