Answering your question what we 'want': I recently sculpted this character on my own (V4 based), because I wanted it.

Yup, caisson is right. As long as the dots stay white, you are in an acceptable range. Try to keep them in an average size. If you exceed this, they first become yellow (warning) and then even red (alert).

Like caisson said, the outer rim is for specular light, the inner centre for diffuse light, because you can adjust those light components seperately in different ways.

However you must take care to put the meter close to the object, but not in it's shadow. Don't forget you can resize it, so for close distances just scale it down and for large landscape scenes place it where it is most important (or place even two or three of them anywhere) and scale it up so you can still see it in the render.

BB's Gamma Meter is also helpful, working the same way, but the outer rim indicates wether or not you have activated Gamma Coorection in render settings. A red rim indicates your render settings have GC active, a black rim tells you are rendering without GC activated.

Wow, I am impressed, respect.

Now I'm wondering (not asking for anything, just for clarification) how to go about Artists Page, is it allowed too to link to ones external homepage?

Hi Ghostship2,

I agree completely with you that quality settings for renders only make sense if they really enhance the quality, me too I try to keep them as low as necessary. I also use from time to time a depth-z render and do the DOF in Paintshop postwork, just like you.

What I wanted to make very clear (from my personal point of view) was, that the desired quality of the final render should dictate your settings, and not impatience or 'being in a hurry today, but I want to post this anyway'.

Sometimes I am a bit annoyed when people think they have a right to have a perfect image with a single mouseclick, and on top of that it has to come out within a minute, otherwise they abandon... Looking around in the galleries you can find so many posts where people even admit they didn't want to use raytrace or real reflections or IDL because 'it takes so much time'. So they prefer to post a crappy image rather than waiting for a good one. But then they start complaining why others have so great quality images, and they assume that those posting great images must have some secret settings to achieve perfect images within a second...

Some people post that they have been working on their image for an extraordinary loooong time, which is one hour. Heee? If I start a project (I consider each of my images a project) I have a workflow beginning long before I even fire up Poser, and then in Poser I usually work between 2 and 10 hours on an image, to work out all materials in a way I want them, fine tune poses and expressions, lighting, camera settings, and so on. Then, before I post any of my images, I leave them and hide them in some drawer for at least a week or so, to forget about them. Because, seeing the image again after a week, helps to detect immediately the flaws which you could no longer see when working on it initially. So I rework, leave it again hidden in a drawer (just like my traditional paintings and drawings in charcoal or water colors), and only if one day I occasionally pull it out and say by myself 'wow, was it me doing this?? I can find nothing to improve here...', then I am ready to post my image.

Seeing that the thread starter sheedee3d seems to be a newbie, I wanted to share this, and that I don't even fear long render times, if NEEDED for the desired quality. Trying to encourage people to go for quality instead of mass or quick posting ;-)

I like your render- and EZSkin settings, they are very similar to mine. You seem to have a smaller machine though, because of your bucket size, mine is optimized at 32 and even has no speed losses at 64, but then (depending on the images content) sometimes a single bucket can get stuck for long time while the rest of the image is already finished, that's why I remain with 32.

Only I always put my Texture Filter to NONE. I put all efforts in receiving, buying or producing high quality and high resolution textures (like 4000 or 5000x5000), so I really hate when Poser messes around with them. Only for far distance props or figures I can of course activate 'QUALITY' instead and reduce ressources, because the occurring blurring doesn't disturbe in that case. But for closeup skin textures, like the thread starter asked, I always switch texture filter to 'NONE'. (Didn't try the 'CRISP', because I never felt a need for it, maybe its okay, too).

I have a question about your M3 render, do you use Bagginsbills Light Meter? This image seems a bit overexposed to me, which flattens the SSS and reduces saturation in the skin color? Just asking, because that Light Meter really made me understand how the typical 'Poser disease' too much of light (even if Gamma Correction is applied) can somehow destroy the variety in textures. The Light Meter helped me to disciplin myself and I got used to far far lower light intensity settings than I had used all the years before.

1. I always (say again: ALWAYS) use IDL nowadays, long gone are the days where you struggled with AO (trying to fake IDL). And because I build real scenes around the character even for a portrait, which reflects the light in a correct way and gives true reflections where needed, I have completely abandoned IBL as well.

2. I have reduced light powers far below what I had been used to do in former times. I apply an environmental sphere for outdoors, where the image is not plugged to the diffuse at all, but instead to the ambience color of the sphere, ambience value set to 1 or below. Usually in outdoor scenes I have but one single infinite light, adjusted to around 40 to 45 percent, to serve as sun. If your lights are too strong, skin becomes very ugly, SSS does not work properly, and color tints may occur. My standard startup scene in Poser contains Bagginsbills (free) Light Meter and his (free) Gamma Meter, so I can always make sure I don't overlight the scenes. For indoor scenes, if there is a window I also use the environmental sphere outside to cast the diffuse light, which is needed, through the window. I may add an infinite light as sun, if I want the sun to enter the room. If there is only indoor lighting (lamps), I position an appropriate spot or point light exactly where the light props are in the scene. Again turning them WAY DOWN, and again using IDL gives the necessary realistic corner shadows also on skin. Usually I adjust IDL quality to not less than 7 bounces for the final production render.

3. Even if vendors claim to use SSS in their skins, differences in quality are huge, and sometimes you even find very funny constructions in their materials. I have learnt to use Snarlygribbly's (free) EZSkin on any human skin I use, because it gives the best results ever.

4. I always use true reflection on any material, always. Long gone are the days with fake reflection images, to the trained eye they always look wrong and ugly. So I always have raytracing active, sometimes just one bounce is enough, in reflective environments I turn it up to 2 or even 3 according to the number of reflective surfaces being close to each other.

5. I always, always use a python script to set texture filtering to NONE (or at least CRISP) in any texture image in my scene. And I use Gamma Correction, so I make sure for any image (except bump or displacement or transparency maps) to select 'apply render settings' for Gamma Correction of 2.2 and switch Gamma Correction in the render settings.

There are a number of more tweaks possible, don't expect a one click solution. Shader rate and pixel samples.

I never ever complain about render times for my settings. First, during building the scene, I use way reduced pre production settings, which I only change against my final production settings for the final render. Second: Quality always comes at a price. There are hundreds of portrait images posted which are embarrassing in quality, just because people don't want to allow the time for a good quality render. Me, after my scene is set, I start my high quality final render and go to bed. In the morning before I go to work, I save my image, and if I discover it is not even finished I leave the computer alone and save my image after return from work.

Hope I could give some helpful suggestions, cheers from Martin

Anyway, I think a good reason to run this thread can be to encourage vendors to try different products. Is it really a fact that variants in ethnics don't sell?

Me myself I have spent many hours (not only at Rendo's, but also on other markets) to find i.e. hispanic or aboriginal or GOOD (real) african figures. Maybe I am a bit overcritic, having worked and lived in Central-East-Africa for almost a decade. If I see a Poser figure sold as native african, where the vendor has just darkened the skin, I want to cry. There are only 3 or 4 african native characters I ever found at Rendo's which didn't make me cry or laugh. Tempesta3D is a very honorable exception in this. I tried to find some acceptable hispano or south american figure, but up to now I didn't consider any of the offered ones worth the money.

So maybe (and in my oppinion most likely) the problem is not missing clients for these figures, but missing quality of those offered?

I want to apologize if my language may not be politically correct somewhere. English is not my first language, and living in Africa for such a long time makes you relaxed about these things. People there call themselves 'blacks' and even insist being called like this, and the same way I got used to be addressed as 'mzungu' all the time, even calling you from a distance, the (intended) meaning of 'mzungu' is 'white guy', even if the literal meaning in Swahili is different from this. I had to learn not to feel offended, so again my apologies if I chose any wrong words in my comment.

I have no personal interest in this case, not being a vendor, not using any links in signature or elsewhere, so I could just keep quiet and turn away.

But honestly spoken, the critics are right. The paragraph in the current ToS can only be understood to be applicable to Galleries, not to forum posts or other places. If it was not meant this way, then the ToS is a mess here.

As I said, personally I don't care about this specific issue myself. But I do care about people who cannot find the powers to say 'oops, sorry, we reallize the ToS is a bit messed up in this context, we are going to sort it out and update the ToS, because this is how we want it to be handled.' In my 58 years of lifespan I have always deeply respected people who can admit their mistakes, be it in military, at university, as commercial pilot in aviation, and other environments I have experienced. But I never trusted anybody who stubbornly insists on something wrong which is so obvious.

Update: my idea not working. I inserted as line 767 : Alt+Ctrl+X,

but it showed no impact on the menue (the shortcut Alt+Ctrl+X was not indicated for Display: Focus-Distance-Guide), neither did the key combination bring up the focus distance guide :-(

Dang, I took a look into this Poser.xrc, now it even seems to me we can customize key shortcuts there, and even add shortcuts to functions which so far don't have shortcuts??? The file is just an XML container, but is it only used to build up the visual UI, or is it also used to implement the functionallity?

Reason for customization in my case: working with an english Poser version, but on a German keyboard. Some shortcuts are very uncomfortable to reach here, i.e. the colon and semicolon and all kinds of brackets, and so on.

Reason for adding shortcuts to functions which don't have one: Need shortcut for the focus-distance-guide, for bringing up the raytrace-preview, for switching between camera layouts, for object-point-at..., for creating and uncreating groups of objects, and so on.

Okay, I printed my non-physical Quick-Reference-pdf out, which was a pain in the neck, because I could not figure out how Adobe Reader can print single pages from the pdf which has 4 pages in one sideways. So I diverted to enhancing each single page to a maximum on my screen and then make a screenshot jpg, which I could print out as a single page...

Now on the printouts the letters of the shortcuts are REALLY small and blurred (because they are colored in the pdf) #&@?&%$$§...

What do I do now? I'm going to copy BB's above list to a WORD document, adjust textstyle and size to my needs and print it out. Not worrying about ending up with 2 pages, because 2 pages (readable) are better than 1 page (unreadable).

I do have a 'physical' Quick Reference still from my old Poser 5 boxed version, but I couldn't purchase a boxed version in Uganda, delivery would be far to risky. However I don't see why a Download Version cannot at least contain a Quick Reference Guide which is printable (plus readable)?

Maybe I am just too stupid to discover how to print 4 neighboring pages in wide format as single pages in Adobe Reader, somehow I feel too busy to spend more than the 45 minutes when I tried to figure it out... In this case 'mea culpa'.

Otherwise, thank you BB for a printable version.

How I like this image of yours, BB!!

But you forgot to mention the keyboard shortcut for 'Make Art!', haha... Larry Weinberg kept it a secret, so did all developpers up to Smith Micro, and now even you hide it from us ;-)