We have seen this befor and I think it was AO on those areas. Baggins would know better though.

Don

Quote - Hi - just popping in for a minute.

Your questions are valid but it's like wanting to know what each key on a calculator is for. The + key is to add, but you want to know why you would add, or in other words how do you use addition in practice. The answers are, of course, innumerable.

Case in point is your question about the subtract node. You rendered without it to see what happens - nothing. That's because I was anticipating a boundary case that you're not running into at the moment.

If, however, you were to push the bump depth up quite a bit, for whatever reason, you'd start to see artifacts around the folds of the eyelids unless you have the subtract .5 in there. When people use a bump depth of 1 millionth of an inch, it doesn't matter much that mid gray is actually the zero-point, and you're getting two millionths of an inch of bump. However, if you increase the bump 5/100ths of an inch, and then you double it because of the Poser Black=0 phenomenon, well you'd see the problem. Then you'd wonder why my shader doesn't show artifacts and yours does.

I've thought about writing a definitive Poser shader book. I keep vacillating between thinking I can best serve the community with instructions, versus I can best serve the community by just doing the work.

Frankly, I'd love to write the book. Would be cool to be an author.

Reminds me of the story about giving a fish or teaching someone to fish. Poser isn't nearly so important of course. Many don't have the time or inclination to learn all there is to learn. Guess that's why we have mac n cheese in a box.... lol I suspect a book would be very helpful to some but most want to push some buttons and produce an image of reasonable quailty. And you know, that’s ok because this is a hobby and supposed to be fun right?

High end renderers come with all kinds of shader networks and GI etc. to do that stuff in large part for us but are just out of reach for most financially. I guess what I'm saying is Bill, finish VSS and as many shaders as you can and if you still have time then by all means write that book.

My two cents,
Don

P.S. I really appreciate what you have done so far, thanks Bill :)

Now were talkin. People friendly AND a single package containing both. Now thats a solution. Now I'm really excited.

Don

VSS is an excellent tool for sure but in my mind we need a people friendly version of Matmatic. Without the shaders to begin with VSS isn't of much help.

Don

Quote - Thank you, Don... obviously still a bit unclear on what does what, but I think it will all gel once I have a decent play with each of the tools... and I'll have a look at the Vargas shader first (on RuntimeDNA, right?)...

Everything you need is here:
http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/matmatic

Quote - > Quote - I have already tried Matmatic in Poser 7 on V3 without any modification to the script at all.  It runs fine, at least, with those settings. 

I suppose that it would have been smarter of me to recreate the conditions - installing Poser 6, installing V3, etc - and then running stuff just to get a feel for how it all works before trying to do mods and using non-supported figures. This I will do. I think I have enough room on my drive for that - I'll just install the bare-minimum Poser 6 with only V3 in the runtime.

Quote - The concept of VSS came in after Matmatic and has been under development for quite some time.  If you want to do node manipulation then VSS is the way to go until the Pro version is released.

So, from what you are telling me, VSS can be used as a shader development tool of the sort I've outlined above. What I think I'm reading here - correct me if I'm wrong - is that VSS is the more polished, task-focused skin-shader tool, where Matmatic is more of a lets-have-a-play-with-making-shaders-by-writing-code sort of tool... I think.

Quote - The problem with the Basic Ultra Shader for Matmatic is that it lacks the necessary nodes to control AO, texture shades, etc.  For the stark realism you see in Face_Off's product, you will see in VSS.  Reading closely the posts, if you were inclined to, you could strip out the node arrangement from Face_Off and apply it in VSS.

 
I am studying the product of applying face_off's Realism Kit (ignoring Occlusion Master, since that is by definition going to be highly light-specific) but the challenge is to determine which nodes are the most generic and hence applicable for my purposes.

Yikes!!! This thread has gone way way off course. Let me see if I can straighten it out.

1.) Matmatic is character specific.   NO matmatic can be used on ANY object (yes including characters like V3, V4, M3, and any other character)

2.) Poser 6 and 7 versions are different only because Poser 7 uses a slightly different Python language.

3.) VSS is a shader development tool and more powerful than matmatic. NO again. VSS is used to propagate any shader including those created by Matmatic over an object or objects. VSS DOES NOT make shaders.

Face-offs Occlusion master is specific to a scene light like His realism kit is. NO. Occlusion master simply allows for AO to be applied to part or all of any object and has a couple of adjustments built in.

4.) you are hung up on creating a character collection. Try down-loading the Vargas shader for Matmatic, it is very simple and a good place to start with Matmatic for characters.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

Don

I understand what your saying. It's complicated for sure. If you look at most character mats they have shadows already in the texture and specularity is a real can of worms because you don't know what kind of lights will be used. It seems to me that in a proper environment you wouldn't need spec maps. except maybe in areas we know to be more shiny and then only sparingly. I didn't mean to suggest that vendors don't care but as you said don't know.

Quote - no, i'm not contradicting myself.  face_off's  skin realism kits took into account lights.  Matmatic generated materials can also do this.  they are not automatically light independent.   if you are using equations to generate any lighting effects like SSS, you could find your setup is light dependent as well. 

if you use Matmatic to generate a light specific effect (as opposed to something like wood grain or fabric texture), you need to actually go through your initial suppositions and then test to make sure that your effect is not light specific.   and gives results that are just better and worse, not accurate and inaccurate.

for instance, let's say you have some sort of shader involving AO.  you're going to make some equations involving distance and  position.  if you're not careful, your initial equations describing the relationship among items might not be general enough.  when you're setting up those equations and imagining the variables, you have to make sure you're not taking something important for granted.

the point being, using Matmatic does not mean you don't have to think about your materials being light independent.  you actually have to think about it more , because you are determining the material.  

I think were talking in circles here. Yes a shader, if specific enough, needs to then look at the specific lights used. However that is not what is being done in this discussion. She simply wants to give her customers a better looking character and is trying to use matmatic to help her do that. It's a great idea and I wish all vendors were as thoughtful.

Don

Quote - > Quote -

Face-off would not work for you anyway as it is dependant on the main light in the scene for it's calculations. You would have no way of knowing where a user may put the lights. Matmatic doesn't have this limitation and should do what you want :)

that's inaccurate.  face_off's script was more specific than Matmatic, that's all.  Matmatic is just a programmatic interface.  it is entirely possible to make light specific shaders with Matmatic.  if one isn't careful about one's initial suppositions, one could easily find oneself making completely light specific shaders.  face_off knew his shaders were light specific, and made a script to account for that.  anyone else will have to do rigorous testing to make sure their shaders are not actually light dependent.  just by eyeballing, i'd say most i've used are, and either work in very light settings, very dark settings, or very extreme settings.  very, very, very few actually work independent of lighting.

anyway, when you're defining relationships in your initial equations, you have to be careful that you're defining them generally enough.

sure you can distribute the results, but you couldn't distribute your own realism kit. face_off's realism kits worked on any texture and bump map.  that's very different than your own V4 material.  or room material for that matter.

Your contradicting yourself. Matmatic is NOT light specific and Face-off skin realism kit IS. Now could an image be better or worse under different liughting conditions? YES of course but matmatic does NOT depend on a light being set a specific way to work.

For the perposes of this thread VSS is of limited value anyway.

Don

Quote - To be honest, what started this was texturing Charlotte with just the skin textures and being very unhappy with the resulting render - so I realized skin shaders was what was going to make Charlotte more appealing.
I had purchased face_off's tools (Real Skin Shader bought on Daz and Occlusion Master here) but understand that the product of applying these tools cannot be distributed, so I thought I'd have a play with other tools out there - one that don't have that restriction - to see if I could put something together that would be better than what I had. Not a hope in hell of reproducing what face_off did, but at least gain a better understanding of shaders and the material room and all that.
I have no intention of distributing any part of Matmatic or VSS with my content. However, my understanding is from what he wrote in his Conditions of use is that the product of running Matmatic - the resultant shaders - can be distributed. Does that hold true for VSS as well?

My understanding like your is yes you can. Again VSS is NOT a shader but a way of applying shaders if that makes sense. I now see what you want to do and it makes perfect sense to me. Face-off would not work for you anyway as it is dependant on the main light in the scene for it's calculations. You would have no way of knowing where a user may put the lights. Matmatic doesn't have this limitation and should do what you want :) VSS can and is used in conjunction with matmatic. I have a Vargas shader that is compiled with matmatic and then loaded into the VSS probe and it works great.

So if I understand what you want to do is, creat a shader network for your character by using matmatic and then distribute it along with your character in final form? This should be ok to do and a great idea btw :)

Don

Quote - > Quote - You load your matmatic file in the material room so it must be in the materials path right?

Don

Ah! The great light goes on. lol

Um, Don, what I do is this: I have the additional path
scan :runtime:libraries:Pose:!Robynsveil*
in my config.txt as an additional path. I go into the material room to run compile.py. So, you're saying the additional path should be to
scan :runtime:libraries:Materials:!Robynsveil*

k... I'll do that and see if it makes a difference.

Still don't know what that reference to Poser 6 shows up, tho....

Hmmmm I wonder if you did what I did when I realised I needed it for Poser 7 and didn't remove 6 completely first? I had to remove everything and then just install 7.

Don

I don't think anyone is trying to talk you out of doing what you want ( I hope not anyway). As I understand matmatic it aloows you to create a complex shader network and it can then be applied to one or more materials in your scene. Either you can define each material manually in your mm.txt file or you can apply it to several material groups at once by creatin a collection.

Don

You load your matmatic file in the material room so it must be in the materials path right?

Don

Quote - > Quote - Also your paths are different than mine.

Matmatic runtime/python/matmatic

and the txt file and compile is runtime/library/material/matmatic demo

respectively

I'm not following what you mean with respect to paths... I'm running version Poser 7 of Matmatic. In the error, there is a reference to a file in Poser 6. I do not have Poser 6 installed, so that path is invalid - indeed, that statement is invalid for my version of Poser. For the Poser 7 version, the right place for the Matmatic files is :runtime:Python:Matmatic... or so I thought. I might be mistaken.

Yes you are correct and your text file goes in the 2nd path as I satated.

Don

Also your paths are different than mine.

Matmatic runtime/python/matmatic

and the txt file and compile is runtime/library/material/matmatic demo

respectively