You can plug anything into the diffuse - here I'm using the standard figure texture.

The Alternate_Diffuse-Edge_blend-Fastscatter creates the effect of backlight scattering through the surface. And the glossy is pretty self explanatory.

Try playing around with the Glossy Ks - values lower or higher may look better. How you arrange your lights really matters here. Make sure you have at least one light behind the figure. You can also adjust the edge_blend Attenuation to alter the backlight scatter effect.

I've seen this done in Blender. I don't know how to do it exactly, but I've watched a video tutorial. It involves marking edges as "seams" and then using the "LSCM Unwrap" feature built into blender. By marking seams, you are telling it exactly what you described above, i.e. where to "cut" the mesh before attempting to unwrap it. Then the "LSCM Unwrap" attempts to heuristically unwrap the mesh in such a way as to maximize the coverage on the texture map, while minimizing the distortion of angles in the unwrapped mesh. If you haven't heard of it, blender is a powerful and fast open-source 3d modeling program. It takes a while to learn it. It has about a bazillion tricky functions - and folks who know blender really well invoke them all with hot keys. If there is some easier tool, by all means, don't start learning blender just for this. But if all else fails, give it a try. At least it's free!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2408902

Oh My - noob, lazy, or don't know about the "Search" link? ;-)
Fed Up With Lights - Seeking Help by Invidia on 10/12/05
Problem with "delete lights" script in P6 by linkdink on 7/13/05
Delete all the lights by MaskEdit on 2/14/04
to name a few.

I see what you mean, she needs bulging, colored veins. The geometry morph isn't completely convincing without them.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1083023&Start=1&Artist=bagginsbill&ByArtist=Yes

Neverthless, I think Poser's IBL is pretty good. As you can see in this montage, the IBL is contributing most of the total illumination and IMHO is very believable as in the lower right. If I swap the overall ratio to raise the spot and lower the IBL, it just doesn't look as believable. I've collected dozens of indoor photos and the light falloff is much more realistic with IBL. I can't post any of them because that would be a copyright problem.

My problem now is only that to finish the believability we need AO to go with the IBL.

Failing that, I'd like to try the HDRShop conversion of the IBL to a set of infinites as you suggest. But I too ran into the bad link for the plugin.

Sigh.
Even if I get HDRshop working, won't I still need AO to darken the tight spots? I'd still have the same problem with the crappy AO, right? Even in your nice pictures where you demo Occlusion Master, I can see some of the AO dirt. I tried somethings else. I made a shadow-only render to get the AO information and then I softened it in photoshop then multiplied the result back to the original unshadowed image. It improves the results a lot, but I'm trying to find a way around that onerous workflow.

Now that the weekend is upon us, I think I'll just give this a rest and start partying. No more Poser till Monday.

Thanks for all your help!!!!!

Message edited on: 10/21/2005 10:08

I started with IBL all white. Rendered the ball. Saved the render and attached it to the IBL.

Rendered again (feedback) and saved.
Rendered again (feedback) and saved.
Rendered again and saved final you see here.

This is poor man's radiosity!

I used specular on the ball to pick up the spot light and spread that light around the room while keeping the highlight strong.

The settings for AO are:
Strength: .2
Max Distance: .7
Bias: .01
Num Samples: 5

I totally get how OM works and why I'd want to use it. But my problem here is I can't find any set of values that works for the thigh. Just the thigh. If I had OM, I'd still have to type in the three values for the thigh and none of them work. Aaarrrgh! Also, I'm a professional python programmer. I can make these scripts myself. But if there is no value for AO options that works for this thigh, then it doesn't matter whether I'm setting them manually or through a script. :)

The thigh material area is showing two kinds of problems simultaneously. To fix one, you must raise bias. To fix the other, you must lower bias. Can't do both at the same time on the thighs, right?

I think the AO is crap. Look at all the splotches. And why is there so much shadow on her shoulders. In terms of percentage of occlusion of the hemisphere that lights those areas, it seems totally wrong.

Face_off, I know you said to put AO on individual materials. Can you point to some examples?

BTW: Face_off, I did what you said about the mirror ball. I made it teeny tiny and set the camera focal length to around 15000 mm. Works great! I didn't think poser would do the math for such a tiny object and such extreme focal length correctly but it did. So this lets the camera stay close to the mirror ball.

Here is the render with the spotlight shadows turned on and the AO at 20%. I'm using 20 samples on the AO. The AO shadow is dirty. I'm not able to figure out any good settings at all.

Here is a test render I did for the tutorial I'm working on. It finished in about 3 minutes. What do ya'll think about this one?