BTW:

I'm noticing this with several renders that have the eyes looking up: there's too much space between the lower eyelid and the iris. Unless the subject is very surprised, typically the upper eyelid covers a few mm of the top of the iris and the bottom eyelid is at most 2-3mm below the iris. Which means that if you pose the eye looking upwards you need to either use the wince dial to make the lower eyelid follow, or grab the lower eyelid handles and move them up. The distance should be like this at most, but typically almost touching:

Using the Eye Control dials to pose the eye moves both the upper and lower eyelid but if a slight bump up on the Wince (lower eyelid close) dial or pulling up the lower eyelid handles helps. Using the oldskool Poser shortcut of using Point At --> Main Camera with the eyes should definitely be avoided since then the eyelids are not moving at all, only the eyeball.

llynara posted at 6:13AM Mon, 11 February 2019 - #4345805

Haven't had a chance to catch up on this thread, but here's a test I did, with postwork. Still struggling with grain in Superfly. La Femme is gorgeous and worth the effort!

Very nice.

You can get around the grain/slow rendertime by reducing the amount of unnecessary samples in your render.

Keep in mind I am not a technical person, so if anyone wants to correct me or add info by all means, I'm all ears. I achieve results through sheer stubbornness and patience, so my way may not be the best way but this is how I rendered all of my promos. This has no transparency, transmission, etc. SSS and emissives seem to be controlled by the diffuse samples so you will get those. Eyelashes and refract shader eyes will render black. I render my scene like that then bump up settings and re-render the eyes/lashes with high transparent/transmission bounces and caustics turned on using Area Render to draw a small box around the eyes and the immediately adjacent area they will affect with bounced light/shadow.

This brings me to the hair. Even a midrange PC has a lot of cores/processing power available these days - not to mention modern GPUs. However people have been spoiled by making hair for biased (ie: toy) render engines like Firefly and we've reached a point where any sort of optimization has gone out the window. We're stripping figures down to ~20k poly base meshes and then loading ~300k poly transmapped hair with a half dozen 4k maps and thousands of individual transparent strips stacked 20+ layers deep. This is not ideal. After 20 years of development there ideally should be a working strand-based hair engine in Poser, but failing that there should be some attention paid to optimizing hair for a good balance of realism and rendering speed.

In the meantime you can get around this by rendering the scene with the settings above and then going back and Area-Rendering hair with about 6 max transparency bounces (if necessary going back and spot re-rendering any spots that may still remain dark). This is still much much faster than simply turning up all render settings and taking 10 hours to render your entire scene.

But people have been spoiled by using biased rendering engines for years. Remember the mass protests when Poser added Firefly and D|S added Iray, while people were still learning to use them. The Poser 4 rendering engine was an absolute POS, and the only reason it was fast was because it was wildly inaccurate, and both the P4 renderer and Firefly further sped up by 'cheating' due to Poser's small scale: items in the scene were so microscopically tiny that the renderers were discarding a lot of scene information and thus rendering faster. For years I used to squeeze better renders out of them by scaling everything in my scene up to 1000%, with a significant boost in shadow quality but also in rendertime. But quality renders take time -- a high quality ~2000x1500-ish render always took me between 2-10 hours whether it was in Firefly, Iray or Superfly. Good results take time, there is no instant gratification when it comes to indirect lighting.

I'll typically do a few dozen small, grainy preview renders while I tweak lights and pose, use area render to check areas like the eye focus/highlights, feet/hands properly in contact, etc, and then just leave the final render going while I go do something else, watch a movie or sleep. In the final render if something is amiss like a tiny spot of pokethrough I didn't notice in the preview I can fix it and spot-render that little area in a minute.

philebus posted at 5:11PM Sat, 09 February 2019 - #4345714

I'm happy to see a lot of dynamics appearing, as I'm keen to start using those more at the moment - will that red dress in the Blackhearted promo ever enter the store? - that is exactly the sort of thing I would like to put on a book cover.

Yes - I'm working on tweaking it to get it just right and then I'll put it up in Prime or something. I don't like to just rush things in the store.

I'm working on that and a major morph/character pack that I'll have done by the middle of the month.

That's the result of a 5 minute dial spin. You can get black eyes by simply spending another minute tweaking the shader - I don't even have time to hit render much less go into this more.

I am not going to morph a 45 year old obese 5' tall Filipino just to prove a point. The reason you do not see more specialized characters in the store is because noone buys them. In my experience even the people who vocally ask for something in the forums don't show up on the buyers list once it's made. Maybe Rendo could set up some sortof 'crowdfunding' thing to get certain non-mainstream products made, where people pre-purchased an item and that was transferred to a vendor on completion: that could motivate some vendors to make things, but again it would be difficult to get the Poser community to even agree on what it wanted.

Scaling works perfectly on LaFemme. You can make a gnome, a dwarf, or a 5'0 tall person easily. But again it will take some dial spins, the dev team cannot possibly create every single scenario for everyone.

The funny thing is we discussed this during development, months ago. We KNEW we'd give people a figure for free and the first thing they'd do is complain that there isn't an Asian, Black, Latino or Albino version. So we made all the base textures and morphs fully redistributable so people could tweak what they like, yet here we are.

ssgbryan posted at 10:54AM Sat, 09 February 2019 - #4345692

As a final observation - If I have to do all of the dial spins, make the skin textures, spend 3 or 4 hours adjusting body proportions - why do I need Poser vendors?

Because if your interests lie outside of the mainstream then it's in your best interest to learn how to tweak content.

Everything to create ethnic morphs is already in the base figure. I even made a specific epicanthic fold morph (EyesAsian) so that Asian eyes would be easy. This is just 5 minutes of dialing some of the included dials, it can be refined much further and combined with the body handles, morph brush, etc.

(not a render, just a workspace screen capture)

This is why I don't understand the 'another Caucasian character' grumbling a few people posted. There are morphs to make other ethnicities and you can get a lot of skin tone variation by just tweaking the existing shaders and/or modifying the existing base texture in Photoshop and it's totally redistributable: so you could put the resulting character in freestuff or even sell it in the marketplace. In fact I'm totally baffled why nobody has done this already O_o

Miki was ok, my problem with her was SM blowing their entire figure dev budget on a baked 4' tall Asian character that you couldn't morph other ethnicities out of for a Poser market that is desperately starved for a pair of quality, flexible base figures.

jartz posted at 5:05AM Sat, 09 February 2019 - #4345658

I'm liking it. I did a rough test of her with a mix of my custom morphs and BH's HD morphs. Textures (except eyes) of face and Kimono made by me. BH and the vendors who made her really did a good job here.

That is badass, and pretty much illustrates every single point I tried to make in my earlier post.

-we need more dev time on dynamic cloth and cloth room improvements, because not only does it open up one clothing item to limitless figures/morphs/poses, but it also just looks much better and more natural.

-people should try tweaking and creating content for themselves, because it's incredibly satisfying and the results are unique and stylish.

-I need to start experimenting with color/pattern more, it really makes that kimono pop. It's awesome when someone uses something you've made/had a hand in making in a way that inspires you.

I make 'pinupwear' because that's the type of art I make, and it's what sells. Now and then, just so my portfolio isn't solely full of 'fit caucasian pinup girls' I try something a little different, and every single time the sales are disappointing. The biggest slap in the face (and I'm not referring to anyone in this thread, just making an observation) is that often the people who most vocally demand that specific item don't even buy it once it's made. I do more than my share of charity work (IRL and 3D) and I actually have bills to pay. If I'm going to spend a month making something I'd rather it be something that I know hundreds of people are going to buy for sure than something that 'maybe' 50 people will buy, but most likely even those asking for it won't.

Poser content is incredibly time-consuming and finicky to make, and it's why there aren't that many vendors still sticking around making high quality content. It's why professionals from the industry come here, try their hand at a Poser item, realize how much work and fiddling and 'Poserizing' it's going to take to make it into an actual marketable item, and then leave. I can make and texture any clothing item in a day... it's going to take me at least a week(s) to get it functioning remotely the way I want it to in Poser, and then a week to package it, write documentation, put it through testing, render promos, etc.

That said, it's not a bad idea market for up and coming vendors to try. If I was a baker and moved into a town where there were already ten established bakeries and donut shops, rather than open an eleventh maybe I'd open a waffle house instead and be the only one in town. If you are looking to make a name for yourself then it's a viable strategy to cater to a smaller, specialized market than to drop another product into the sea of existing mainstream products.

I would (and often do) happily help people... the problem is that the Poser community is notorious for not helping themselves. Everything has to be spoonfed. I've lost count of all the times that someone has posted in the forums that they'd really like something, and I've taken a day of my own time to make it for them for free... and then they're like 'but aren't you going to conform it? I don't know how to use the cloth room' or 'thanks but it doesn't fit the breast morphs from this add-on'. I modeled a complex set to help someone a while back and they wouldn't even take the time to learn how to apply an emissive shader to it, they just said 'it doesn't work'.

When I started out I was a total Poser noob. I started making transparency maps for existing clothing items to make 'shredded' textures, then started improving skin textures, then making my own.. morphing figures.. modeling.. etc. It started out tweaking content for my own use, then creating content for my own use, and when people started asking for that content I gave it away, and when I thought it was good enough I eventually started selling it. There's totally free software (Blender, Krita, etc) and built-in tools available nowadays that blow away what was available back then.

Just the Morphing Tool in Poser has the ability to solve about 90% of Poser problems. Reshape figures/clothes, fit clothing, fix joints, flex muscles, reverse deformation, tweak morphs, make complex expressions, etc. I've been using ZBrush since it was released, but I'm hitting the GoZ button pretty rarely these days because I find the morph brush can fix things faster, and seamlessly right inside poser (and mirror in 1 click). I used to refer to it as a 'ghetto Zbrush in Poser', but it's not so ghetto anymore. If I asked for a show of hands of how many people used the morph brush in just this thread alone I suspect it would be a small minority.

As a community, people need to collectively push SM to overhaul the cloth room. The current cloth engine is 15 years old. It's 2019, dynamic cloth should work (nearly) real-time and seamlessly and intuitively in Poser. It would solve most Poser problems right away. There would be no 'Steampunk Dress for Sheila v3.2 (fits for 3 FBMs included)'. There would just be a 'Steampunk Dress'. Period. You could fit it to any figure past present and future, including any morphs, and it would drape like proper clothing should drape. You would see a much wider variety of clothing and people would take more risks regarding content.

In the meantime, the tools and shared knowledge are already out there for people to take their Poser art to the next level. There are helpful, knowledgeable people in this community that are always willing to lend a hand or at least point you in the right direction. It's just that very few people are willing to make the effort.

Not even sure why I'm replying since that is not base V4. How about listing all of the add-ons and joint hacks you had to load?

The image I posted is base, out of the box LaFemme with some quick and dirty poses. I didn't even render it, just capped the workspace.

Even still, if you truly don't see the difference between those two images, then nothing on earth I post here is ever going to have any effect, so lets just agree to disagree.

I've been using Poser and the various Vickies for nearly 20 years now. I'm well aware of exactly what Vicky 4 can and can't do, even after a decade of fixes and add-ons by vendors and freestuff providers (myself included).

I'm getting tired of the 'V4 can be anything' spiel. V4 - even the 4.2 version - can't be anything except a bizarre puffed up male body out of the box. She doesn't even come with nipples, you have to buy them separately - both the morphs and texture. Currently V4 is $30 ($50 for the interactive version which still doesn't even come close to the freedom of the basic LaFemme license) and comes with nothing but a 'demo' texture and a puffy male morph with a female face that not one person has ever used in over 10 years. Add $30 for the base texture (non-redistributable) and $30 for base morphs (again non-redistributable).

V4 has had over 10 years of polishing by mostly third-party vendors and freestuff providers (myself included), LaFemme has been out for one week. Even still, with all the $$ 'joint fixes' in the world (that nuke conforming clothing) V4 can not do this:

Part of the reason LaFemme came about is because I was sick and tired of constantly having to fix V4's joints. Half my V4 workflow was joint fixing. V4's bending is very obsolete, and anyone that is not aware of that has not used the recent Genesis figures for comparison or is looking at V4 through some seriously rose-colored glasses. I've used V4 as much as anyone here, and while there is a lot you can do with morphs and textures there are some problems that are simply not addressable with tweaks and 'fixes'. The archaic spherical falloff rigging, a 70k poly mesh full of poles that is not at all ideal for subdivision or HD morphing, etc.

This figure project started off with a group of Poser veterans realizing that Genesis is never coming natively to Poser, and Poser users are still stuck using a 15 year old figure that's starting to show its age. So we set out to build something from the ground up that uses modern rigging and all of the features available in Poser 11. This was back in Feb 2018, and everyone was working on the project for free with the intention of making this a free figure with a very redistribution-friendly license. Then last fall Smith Micro and Rendo took interest in the project and offered a little money to help move the project along. Not counting the months of free work earlier, this was about enough money for us to buy lunch and keep the lights on for the time everyone spent working on her. Everyone involved busted their ass and ended up working some crazy hours to get it finished in time for it's release. None of us make a cent on LaFemme 'purchases', our names are just on there as credit.

I was gone: I had completely uninstalled Poser and was off in D|S and doing modeling for games. This project got me back in Poser and creating for it again, and its fun.. except the part where I log in here every morning to read the latest bash post.

This is a BASE figure. A blank canvas. It's been out for one week: if you want something changed then be a little patient and someone will step up and do it, or learn new skills and try to change it yourself - it's easier than ever. The new Poser Morphing Tool is amazing, I find myself going to Zbrush less and less. The morphs and textures that come with LaFemme are completely redistributable so you can even make new characters/makeups/textures and put them in freestuff or sell them.

Most of the 'issues' being nitpicked about are actually already solved in the base figure. There are several morphs included that can fatten her fingers up, and scaling works perfectly so you can scale body parts up/down. Thigh gap? There's a post a few posts back with that addressed. You simply pose her out of her T-Pose and load the 'ThighsThicken' morph. I even uploaded a new default pose that does that for you.

Time permitting I'll gladly help provide tweaks and content, but if people want the variety of content that's available for V4 then they're going to have to be a little patient. A lot of vendors are working on new morphs and clothing and characters but creating quality Poser content is actually time-consuming as hell so the equivalent of 15 years of V4 content isn't going to appear overnight.

(doh, forgot the nudity tag)

Cool.

I tried getting some MAT zones merged (notably the lips:skinhead, and making some masks for shader combinations), but the reaction from all texturers was 'WTF!' so that's likely not going to happen yet, people are too used to the separate zones.

The base shaders can always use some improvement, none of us are shader gurus. If the community develops some better shaders and they are OK with it we can either merge them into an upcoming update as a new shader folder, or even replace one of the base shaders. Some of the new morphs and things like the corneas will probably make it in, if only into a 'Bonus Content' folder.

Just keep in mind that user-friendliness is also a big consideration. For example the refracted eyes are significantly better than the default shaders, and I use them in most of my renders, however they load in as beady white 'Marilyn Manson eyes' and if someone doesn't have the proper render settings enabled then they will render like shiny black demon eyes. So they don't really work as the 'default'.

bantha posted at 12:55PM Mon, 04 February 2019 - #4345257

This is my body interface for Hampelmann. You can select actors with the click of a button, you can move or translate actors as well. Hampelmann is here in Free Stuff, I will do an interface for the head as well. Anyone interested?

Looks neat... what's a Hampelmann? O_o

The gap may also be due to shoulder fwd/back and twist. Are you using the arms down pose dial on the body, or moving them manually?

There's a lot you can do with joints by moving not just the primary actor (in this case the shoulder) but also the supporting actors like the collars.. or in the case of the neck/head by distributing twists and bends between them instead of cranking the head around 90 degrees, for example.

With 3D figures there's always gotta be a compromise somewhere: I would have happily made 100 JCMs, but then every single clothing creator would have to match each of those JCMs in clothing. It's a fine line :(

DalekSupreme posted at 8:22AM Mon, 04 February 2019 - #4345219

I have not had 50 posts on any topic in total here and have not posted in years due to fabricating trolls arguing the toss. Most comments I did make were in response to some tedious "Poser is crap" rubbish nothing to do with the merits of a figure I cannot use.

A civil conversations with you is impossible as evidenced by your behavior in this thread.

A vendor, an admin, a customer.. you could be the Pope -- it makes no difference to me. Everyone is accountable for their behavior. If you jump in swinging, then don't expect to be coddled.

Other than to re-emerge to bash LaFemme, your only activity in the past 7 years was to bash Victoria 7, with basically the exact same passive-aggressive statements you are re-posting here, each one starting with a 'I'm sure she's fantastic', 'I wish her well', etc ?

Unfortunately I should have taken this advice:

LaFemme BH Default

also the V4 hair fit is now in Freestuff.

DalekSupreme posted at 4:37AM Mon, 04 February 2019 - #4345205

Blackhearted posted at 9:18PM Mon, 04 February 2019 - #4345170

"For someone who 'wishes her well' you're going far out of your way to systematically bash her in at least two forums now. Virtually your entire post history consists of bashing new figures and extolling the virtues of V4. We get it, you like V4 and think that it's the pinnacle of Poser figure development: feel free to use her forever. Fortunately not everyone agrees."

Actually as someone who has not posted for over 4 years due to the constant trolling and negative feedback when someone states an opinion on this site your comment about my "entire post history" is both uninformed rubbish and rude.

Yes I find her both ugly about the legs and hard work to use, and yet I hoped she would be successful. I hoped to be wrong and I did wish her well.

What I was referring to about V4 was her ease of use and commerciality. No she is not perfect. Otherwise we would not be desperately looking to replace her. If you can't take feedback about how what made V4 a success and apply it to your own creation well good luck to you.

Now I hope you enjoy spending the money I have pumped into her accessories and your products, and when you get feedback I hope you have the ability to take it on board without being rude. In the mean time good luck with your figure.

Please don't worry... I won't be buying any more of your products and I will now delete La Femme from my runtime so you wont have any more issues with me commenting in future.

My products may be for sale but I am not. I'm not going to sit here quietly while you bash them with unfounded criticism thinly veiled behind 'I wish it well'. A question posted across forums is someone looking for an answer: a complaint reposted simultaneously in several forums is someone trying to stir the pot. You have around 50 posts bashing Victoria 7 in the exact same way -- I don't use DS or Genesis much, but saying that Victoria 7 brings nothing to the table over Victoria 4 is totally absurd.

I'm here to help and have already done my best to fix some features that people requested. You're literally complaining that there are 'too many features' and thus it's 'too complicated', yet there is nothing forcing anyone to use those features. You don't need to pose her toes or extra bones or touch her body handles if you don't want to, but they're there if those who spend more than '10 seconds' on their art want that option. Some people complain about the stagnation in Poser and that they want something better than V4 but when anything comes along they complain that 'it's different than V4' and 'it doesn't automatically use my existing hoard of V4 content'.

Hey, I love V4 and I did my best to squeeze what I could out of her. But for the last decade I've been fighting with crippling V4 joint issues that all the 3rd party 'joint fix' add-ons in the world don't come close to fixing.

My typical V4 workflow is something like:

-load V4
-load 3rd party textures/shaders
-load 3rd party morphs
-pose figure trying my best to avoid any arms up or thighside poses
-Figure - Skinning Method - Unimesh, set subdivision to 1
-GoZ and start fixing joints in Zbrush, trying to avoid all the poles in her mesh

She's virtually unusable in her default state and has had over a decade of third-party support (myself included) to build her up to what she is today. But aside from a small handful of vendors people are abandoning V4 and - as a result - Poser in droves because there's only so much you can do with a 10 year old figure.

Certain people are looking at V4 with some seriously rose-colored glasses. Here is a simple workspace capture of what they look like without any 3rd party content. And I'm being nice: V4 by default loads looking like a sexless cabbage in a pixellated purple painted-on bikini. I had to go through about 20 material zones to change the teal default color that Daz loads to adjust her texture's color saturation.

^that's with simply moving her arms and legs down and 'nipples' and 'thighsthicken' on (AFAIK V4 doesn't even come with nipples for $30, you have to buy them separately). I wanted that as the default but for technical reasons it was decided that a zeroed t-pose was better (I'll zip it up and put it in my filelocker for anyone that wants a modified base pose).

There's no reason to abandon V4, but if the Poser community doesn't start being more open-minded towards change and new features it's pretty much doomed.