Folks, I'm not at my Poser PC on weekends so I can't post the mat. But be aware some of the things that look black aren't black and some that look white aren't white. A few are pink and a few are really dark gray. Why don't they show the RGB values in the UI so we can exchange screenshots of nodes easily??????!? The color_math in the file in post # 31 above, for example, seems to be set to black on the second channel. If you leave it like that, you won't get any of the frontal pinking. I'll post an update on Monday with all the colors. Glad you find this interesting. I didn't know the a material file was just ASCII text. I'd have uploaded before instead of using screenshots. Can I just do Attach File for any post? If so I'll put materials up from now on. I thought the forum Attached file was only for pictures. If I can post materials and light sets, that would be great. I find people trying out my materials don't get what I do because the lights they use are very different.

Attached Link: http://www.povray.org/community/hof/mouille.php

Oh Face_off - forgot to tell you. In this picture, my back light was getting shadow from one figure to another. So I cheated and turned it to no shadows so I could get the Blinn highlight on all four figures. Of course with her left hand over her thigh, it shouldn't glow like that, nor would it if I had the shadows turned on for it. Also, I really wasn't working closely with Jessi. Her texture sucks, as we've both pointed out before. I just threw her in to show the improvement, while never promising that the result for Jessi was acceptable. However, I think V3 is looking more believable. Still not photo realistic. But the improvement over the original is clear, right? Personally, I don't think that Firefly *** can *** render photorealistically. I've played with POV-Ray a lot in the past and radiosity has IBL and AO beat hands down. I've done a couple renders of poser scenes in pov - the workflow is a pain. I'm trying to find ways to make Firefly generate believable images. After all, it is a lot faster to try out ideas with Poser/Firefly alone. Plus I like the challenge. One of these days I may take these figures into POV-Ray, work out all the tedious conversions of textures, and let the thing chug away for 8 to 10 hours. I bet the results would, indeed, be nearly photographic.

Diolma - I'm using edge blend and am very familiar with it. The reason I'm talking about clay is that the poser model for diffusion is too simplistic and doesn't work for skin. You need a way to control how much light fades as the surface shifts away from the camera. I understand edge blend is directly related to the surface-camera angle, but it doesn't take into account the suface-light angle. The diffuse and clay nodes use BOTH the surface-camera and surface-light angles. If I had a node that ONLY did surface-light angles, it would be great. In any case, I didn't want to do something altogether different that diffuse lighting - its just that I didn't think the falloff was accurate. BTW: It may be that I could use ONLY the clay node. But the controls were very hard to get what I was looking for.

Glad you all find this interesting.

Face_Off - Lost your fabulous detailed response did you? I've done that too. That's why I now prepare what I'm going to say in textpad away from the browser. THEN I refresh the page and paste in my reply. There is some kind of timeout on rendo that prevents replying more than some amount of time after you read the post.

Anyways... I understand that you think the colorramp should not add red to middle - should add red to shadows right? But remember my experiment with "microscopic" skin model a week ago or so? There was MORE red in the middle, not less, according to that model. Is it realistic? Not sure. But lots of ppl are responding to that skin so I think its at least some kind of improvemnt.

Now I noticed a while ago that all your shaders were heavy on the red in the shadows and edges. In particular, in all your pics, the deepest shadows are never "gray", they are clearly red. I added that to my shader a different way. The edge_blend_3 - see that pink on outer_color? That DARKENS the edges to be more red like your shaders. Frankly, I've been carefully studying lots of people in real life and lots of photos - I think the "red shift" of shadows is an artifact of FILM AND LIGHTS, not real life. I have never seen a real person whose "dark side" was red shifted. But film seems to do that and that's what we are used to seeing.

That's my theory - what do you think?

Also, please try my shader with the red color ramp turned off (i.e. set the color_math addere value_2 to black). Do two figures in same light like I've done here. Tell me what you think. I think the red shift up for surfaces TOWARD camera and red shift DOWN for surfaces AWAY from camera is producing more realism that either alone.

Thanks, kirwyn. You made my day. Thanks, diolma, I'll be more careful next time. Thank you Little Dragon - just what I needed.

I guess that's true, stewer. Also forget what I said in #14 - I didn't know what the two checkboxes for Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult were doing. If you turn them off, the reflections are realistic. I have to say, thought, that I can't imagine why those are defaulting to an unrealistic setting, nor why they aren't on the Reflect node itself instead of the root node.

Ahhh - doh - (slinking away with shame)

Message edited on: 09/22/2005 13:17

You can put an image directly. Go to the Material room. Using the pulldown menu in the middle of the material window caption bar, select "Background". Now you are editing the background material. Point the Color value to an image node - load your image. There may be a problem though. If the render is not the same aspect ratio as the background, it will be stretched to fill the render, which may distort it a lot. If you really need the background undistorted, then put a square in your scene and set its texture to be the desired image. Place it behind your scene so that it fills the render. Just like using a painted backdrop - much more control.

Thank you templargfx - you got it. I just learned something even worse. I'm going put a new post in the forum about it. The Reflection_Color input is being multipied by the value of the internal diffuse node of the Diffuse_Color input. This means that reflections are TOTALLY INCORRECT. Look for the post at top level.

In other words, the names of the inputs mean nothing. A few are wired to internal nodes. The rest should just be called AUX1, AUX2, AUX3, etc.

The render is the same!

In the next post I will make the same picture but will hook the material nodes to all the wrong inputs. Yet, the render will be the same!

Tastiger -

Do you know the following about the root material inputs?

The Diffuse_Color/Value internally includes a Diffuse node.
The Specular_Color/Value internally includes a Specular node.
The Reflection_Color/Value internally includes a Diffuse node.
The Alternate_Diffuse is just a passthrough. (Nothing internal)
The Alternate_Specular is just a passthrough. (Nothing internal)

I point this out because moving a node from Diffuse_Color to Alternate_Diffuse will lose any shading of the figure unless you hook a Diffuse node in series. This may not be what you intended.

I will post some pictures to demonstrate.