I was sitting on the bus the other day looking round at the other passengers when I realised why to me all poser figures look false.. look at your arms. see the fine body hair? you don't see it at a distance that well.. but it adds to the effect you see... hands and feet.. see the radial bones? one thing I've never see in any poser figure... also we have many wonderful textures.. but remember.. the one thing thats almost universally missing.. veins! yup veins! I've not seen any texture yet that has them.. think on these points.. got a feeling that they won't be in P5.. maybe P6? ;) Kai

As far as I can tell, the new textures by StefyZZ and Catherine H. all show veins, bidy hair and a hint of bone. Check them out, they are very lifelike.

I don't know about radial bones, but if you want body hair on your Poser people, that's when you need a skin texture. Kaibach wrote, "also we have many wonderful textures.. but remember.. the one thing thats almost universally missing.. veins! yup veins! I've not seen any texture yet that has them.." What do you think those blue lines are on the Poser people's arms and legs? Veins are visible even when the figure's skin is white (Chalk in the Apple Color Picker). I've even seen "veins" on the sleeves of Posette's dress shirt, although they don't belong there.

BWAHAHAHA...

Rendered in Cinema 4D, hair created with Hair Department.

lemmie clarify lol with the hair, just having it painted on is not enough .. see how the hair on your arm catches the light? how it fuzzes the edge of your arm as you look at it? painted hair won't do that... with the bones, I mean when the hand or foot is extended or compressed.. again a bump/texture won't be right.. for a real effect you need the mesh in that area.. hmm with the veins, I've not seen any in my collection as yet.. specially with the bodybuilder ones where veins should really stand out.. but I can keep looking ;)

Yuri thats damn close lol!

Yep, the hair in my picture is real geometry, not a texture. This is a 15 min job, with some more trial-n-error and the Chanlum shader (Sub Surface Scattering fake) I can come pretty close to the real thing.

Body hair may be subtle at a distance on light-haired woman and children, but on the rest of us it's a pretty obvious, even at a distance. And yes, it's definitely under-represented, especially on the female models. The reason it's missing from poser figures is mostly a technological limitation. To create fine hair with geometry would take too much RAM, and you'd need a finer scale modelling system (finer than the number of significant digitis in a poser OBJ allows). For the hair to look truly real, it can't just be in a texture map either, even if the map is really hi-res (higher than Poser allows) because texture mapped hair does not cast shadows or have any profile when you look at the edges of the hairy object. it looks 'flat'. hands and feet.. see the radial bones? one thing I've never see in any poser figure... I think the extensor tendons are the most visible thing in the back of hands and feet that are notably absent in the millennium figures. They are especially visible in leaner people. I think they are missing from Poser models because of lack of mesh resolution necessary to bump up the tendons with geometry. That and the fact that they would have to be more visible in some hand and foot positions than others, making them best applied with a morph target. also we have many wonderful textures.. but remember.. the one thing thats almost universally missing.. veins! yup veins! I've not seen any texture yet that has them.. The hi-res stephanie texture has some visible veins. But I agree you, most texture maps do not have enough, and most don't address the larger veins in the matching bump maps. think on these points.. got a feeling that they won't be in P5.. maybe P6? ;) I bet that Vick 3.0 texture has veins, the one that Anton was showing off. It looks super realistic, well beyond anything we've seen to date (StefyZZ's included). -Adam

Well heck - while we're at it, how about some "cottage cheese" bumps/morphs for fat folk? Varicose vein props for old folk? These and more can be done now, and are quite possible... thing is, you'll have to make 'em yerself :) /P

Actually, I've seen some Mike figures with realistic body hair, rendered in Bryce. FFabris has some freebie transparency maps in freestuff here that are used for this. It takes 2 Mikes for each figure - the actual figure and a second one, just a tiny bit larger, which is transparent except for the hair. Of course having to use 2 full meshes for each figures really eats RAM, but it results in very real looking body hair. (I have no idea how it could be done within Poser.) As far as veins are concerned, I've seen a number of Mike textures with those too, mostly on pics posted over at 'rotica.

Two reasons for not adding veins to standard figures: 1. Veins are highly random, even between the two sides of one human. To make them realistic would require some kind of fractal "growing" mechanism. Otherwise the effect of identical veins would be more disturbing (though perhaps subliminal) than the lack of any veins! 2. Veins show when the arm or leg is down, and disappear when raised. Realism would require some mechanism to account for gravity. Textures can't do this. Generally, it's better to leave something out of a representation, or to suggest it vaguely, than to put it in with too much rigid realism. But I do agree that extensor tendons would be a good addition, and would be easy enough to control mathematically.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=827840#5

Check out this recent post from Anton. Not only is he showing off a new texture, but note that the tendons are there as well. They don't look like they are done with geometry though, their shadows appear "baked on" in a specific direction. Note the bilateral symmetry of the tendon shadows, even though the hands are facing different directions. That's the subtle giveaway that the shadow is in the texture. -Adam

Getting proper veins in textures and to a lesser extent bump maps has always been a personal challenge. There are very little references to go on for the vascular system near the surface of the skin. (If anyone has seen a decent medical book detailing visible veins then Im all ears) My notion has been to have multi-texture effects outside of poser where the skin has varying layers of transparency. Starting with a textured oily surface, then a layer for pigmentation like freckles, then vascularity. Depending on the brightness of the lights the more visible the deeper layers. Using Specular layers with a multi channel texture map set up as the lower layer. This would help give the effect of visible freckles in full sunlight. My personal results arent quite what Ive hoped for, but I heard a similar technique was used in the Shrek production.

hmm well the ultimate medical reference book is 'Grey's Anatomy'.. I'd suggest getting a copy of that...

Thanks for the reference Kaibach. Grey's doesn't cut it for texture work. Many medical books and journals just aren't very good for textures. They tend to save pictures for medical problems rather than normal organs and tissues. Took me about four months of research just to find a few good iris shots after searching dozens of optometrist reference books. Even here I had a hard time finding pictures of visible sclera veins.

Attached Link: An Introduction to Iridology

Perhaps you could increase your researching by using Google's and other "image" search engines? I found this document (ref: link) by using "sclera veins" as the search phrase on Google's image search, in 0.23 seconds. :0)

Thanks CyberStretch. Would you believe that Ive already been to that site before? Actually done doing work on the eye (it was a project from about 2 years ago). And did use Iridology sites for many detailed pictures. For the detail I want, might be better off hanging around some medical students taking gross anatomy.

one million swiss franks in the box with poser, that's whats missing!!!!!!

Nah, I think they forgot to add the "fetch snack" function for those of us who sit at the computer so long that we miss lunch and have to go "huh? what? dinner already? where did the time go?" g