DCArt posted at 9:45 AM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454480

The Physical Surface node and the Principled BSDF node work much better with metallic and roughness maps than with specular and gloss maps as used in older Poser shaders.  Specular maps typically show shinier areas as lighter colors. Roughness maps are the opposite, they show shinier areas as darker colors.  It’s not a simple matter of inverting the specular map to turn it into a roughness map. There are other differences as well.  There is a “Gloss/Specular Converter” compound node furnished with Poser 11 and 12 that will help make Specular maps work correctly with the Physical Surface and Principled BSDF nodes. 

1) Go to the Poser 11 (or 12) Content > SuperFly Tileable > !Guide folder. In there, you will find a Spec Gloss PBR shader.  Select a PREVIEW material in your scene (do not apply it directly to the character’s skin). After you apply it you’ll see a whole bunch of different images with text guides attached to the physical surface node. You don’t need those. ONLY copy the Gloss/Specular Converter node. After you do that you can delete all the maps connected to the root node.

2) Copy and paste that Converter node into your figure’s head material.  (There is a red outline around this node in the screenshot). 

3) Drag and drop the Specular image for the head texture into the material editor. NOTE that you will need to set the Custom Gamma to 1 for ANY map that is not a color map. This will be true of bump, displacement, specular, metallic, roughness, AND normal maps (the reason your preview squares look funny in the material room is because your normal map is not using custom value of 1). The only map that should use the default gamma settings is the diffuse map. The shininess on the lips in this case is ALSO coming from the specular map.

4) Connect the Specular Map to the Specular INPUT connection, and adjust the color chip to choose a light to medium gray color. Pure white will add too much shine.  Also, set the Gloss setting to around .1 for starters. Adjust both settings until you are satisfied with the results on the skin.

5) Connect the Roughness and Specular outputs from the Gloss/Specular Converter Node to the Roughness and Specular inputs of the Principled BSDF node.

6) Adjust your Subsurface Radius to 0.004820, 0.001690, 0.001090. This is a good value for caucasian skin.  For darker skin, try 0.003670, 0.001370, 0.000680

All the other skin materials in your character will need these changes done as well. Lips, torso, and limbs.  You’ll also notice that instead of assigning a subsurface color, I put the skin textures through an HSV node, and adjusted the saturation and value to .95 of the original. This would use a slightly grayer and darker version of the skin texture colors for the SSS.

Thank you very very much DCArt for explaining in detail like this.

I was really touched by your kindness.