@Rorr:

A reminder, don't have any contests with your mesh XD

My perspective on what snuffed the flames for myself.

I was excited about Dawn on her release, as it was a new figure to work with. I had my reservations about the HW3D crew, but pushed that aside.

Upon her release, I only had Poser 7, which I was taking her into Daz setting up the scene and exporting it back to poser as obj, applying textures in poser for rendering, and making dynamic clothing for.

They had my support until they extended their big contest. It may sound petty to some of you. But from my perspective, when I work hard on something with a very limited computer and spend money on content in which I normally don't need, and modelled out my own stuff for Dawn for the images I made, by the deadline of the contest using what was available and making it work. Which is what I am guessing was the "challenge" in the first place. Using a dino pc from 2002, Poser 7, Daz Studio 4.whatever version # at the time (which I had to take the time to figure out certain things), wings3d, I didn't get Poser 10 until I had 3 images left for the contest entry limit, which 3 were allowed for each site holding entries.

When they extended the contest, their reasoning was for mainly because the quality of the works already submitted, people wanted to use the morphs that were initially part of the prize pack and weren't even created yet. I am sure there was more reasonings that I am forgetting, but those were the two that miffed me.

The way I see it, is I just spent the past 2 months of my life doing this contest in the spare time I had, with my at then limited resources,when I could have been doing more productive things. and now upon the deadline the contest extending it because the above mentioned reasoning.

Also when stating the discontent with the situation to be met by responces which were in my eyes lacklusters from the vendors and the reps from HW3D. To pretty much getting torn apart by the supporters of the extenion because I expressed an opinion that conflicted their interest. And trust I was being as nice as my claws were allowing me to be.

Sure could have went with the fact that I could do more work for an extended number of entries per site holding the contest. Sure I could have, but why? At that point was when they lost my support on using their figure, any vendor which got snippy at me for posting my disatisfaction over the extenion, lost any future sale from myself.

I could have seen an extenion by a week or two, but not the whole cycle of the contest. The reasoning behind their extenion was weak in my opinion. It made me feel they didn't do as they expected in content sales for the contest, which I get the have  a contest boosts sales angle, but if it doesn't pan out the way you dreamt up, learn from that mistake, but honor your initial conviction. The way it went showed me that their hype they were all about when trying to get Dawn popular was just a marketing angle to try and dethrone a past entity which they may have soured issues with. That single action speaks louder than the empty words of forum posts about patching a warring community. As many others have stated, their $ eyes were too big.

Who knows maybe I am the one wrong. Because how dare I speak my mind. But to give insight as from my perspective, that is why I don't use dawn at all, and is why I don't buy anything for Dawn or buy anything from their site. And is my reasoning to why Dawn's flame has been snuffed out of my content folders. Take it or leave it, it is just my perspective from my experience, and is not everyone's common experience.

Thank you for explaining this to me. And thank you for screen shots and example renders. I will try this out tonight and post results.

@BagginsBill Your images are awesome. Again thank you for teaching me something and taking the time to explain.

Thank you again BagginsBill for your time and responce.

Now question. If you are using a lightdome such as the one in I13's IDL studio could that count as an environment to bounce the light back for the refractions so as to get the same effects without having to have other objects in the scene, so it can render out a base image to use as a png resource for a realistic gem, so when it is saved, it won't have to be edited in gimp or photoshop to remove say the counter tile like it is in your scene. This might be a dumb question but if I set up the scene as you have, then remove it from being viewed in the camera during raytracing would it give the same effect?

I often do this type of rendering for things I create for tubes, but haven't really needed to do anything more than basic setup and rendering for character pngs. I am new with use of refractions, but am interested in doing more with it.

Sorry, yes ray tracing was enabled, I also set the lights and made sure that they were raytrace instead of shadow mapped. Ok guessing the formless void is the problem, then since there wasn't anything around it. It was a test image, Ok will try it again with more items around it. Thank you for the time and responce.

One thing I noticed using the gem shaders is with the initial setup of the shader for the ruby, which I did in the above image a few posts back, my first renders were solid black. To fix this I made a 2048x2048 @ 300 dpi image of just the color color picked from an image of a cut ruby. I then applied it in the diffuse channel and highlight channel in the mat room. I also made the diffuse color from black to white.

My question is if I were to retry the shader as I did before I made the diffuse map. How would I get the model to render out the object at the color instead of pure black.

For my scene I had a heart jewel I made in wings3d. I used I13's IDL studio, Base for all around lighting. As for the lighting in the scene I am using a hard light setting which came in the Render Studio Bundle from RDNA.

Settings are

5 raytrace bounces

100 irradiance cache

idl quality 7

pixel samples 10

Shading rate .1

Forgive me if I don't post all the settings I have I am on my alt pc at the moment and won't be able to get to the better one for hours.

With the above settings it rendered black without the image map for the diffuse channel. Same with the sea horse image.

Would that be a lighting issue or a goof on my part setting up the scene.

I saw that but it's last update I believe was 2003 if I saw that correctly, and it didn't export the mats well from the limitations it gave on the site the plugin was posted at.

Ok one more thing which would be awesome but I have no idea if plausable. Since Renderman is becoming more usable by the public in the near future, It would be cool if Poser could export to it for rendering. Tall order though. But definately a new interest of mine, since hearing it is producing a non commercial format, and is priced to where it is more obtainable for some.

Above is my first attempt at doing a ruby material on a seahorse in my wife's content collection.

Figured I would add this link to IOR refrences. I am playing around with the water portion right now, and found this refrence to the Index of refractions for certain solid, liquid and gaseous components.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refractive_indices

May be helpful, may not...

Glad to hear you are doing better, and within hopes the meds which are improving your health be available when the trial expires. And cheers to many more years of well being.

Oh one more thing I forgot before which would be awesome, liquid effects.  Might be considered a particle effect, but where you would have water in a pool splash when collided with. Or set a point of entry to where the particle would drip, like a leaky faucet that holds dynamic abilities, so that when it hit the sink it would follow the mesh towards the drain or collect in a space until it could follow to lower areas  Would be great for rivers and rain, or flood simulations. Also would be cool if you could use the force object to make it rain at angles. So if you have a downpoor of rain particles it would follow the force, to give imagery of a strong wind.

was completely unaware of that trick, will try it out. Thanks.