Rather than painting the nostrils, giving them their own material zone is preferable, so that they can be toned down appropriately in a render.

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

The skin does not have uniform oil and perspiration glands.  If the skin is entirely covered in unmussed makeup of a uniform nature, then specular is not needed.  But if you want truly natural, then the oily spots need more specular, as does the neck and forehead for perspiration  And don't forget the elbows of an office worker who sits in an armed chair with rough fabric.  These things are subtle, but the difference between real and not quite right is delicate in the visual processing center of the brain.

Poser/DS users are so accustomed to the representational look that they don't see the divergence from reality like the average person on the street.  I have often seen Poser/DS users ask someone for feedback, and the praise they expect often doesn't come for these minute reasons.  It just depends on your audience.  If you're going to show Poser/DS users, you don't need the fine details that you need for those who are not constantly evaluating 3D renderings and only have reality as a point of comparison.

Don't get me started on grayscaling the diffusion maps to make bump, displacement, and specularity maps.  I've been fussing about that for fifteen years.  Not that it's done any good.

"Low to no understanding of computer chip manufacturing processes."

That leaves me out, I'm overqualified.

Quote - Fringewood,

And if we are talking hair, it might very well take MORE time in the non-Poser high-level tool. The reason is that is not possible to export and reuse the hair from Poser (or Daz for that matter) with the same quality as you have in Poser. So you have to remake the hair, and that is not a trivial task no matter what application we are talking about.

I have found that adapting trans map hair for modo doesn't take much effort, and I get better results in terms of luster and sheen.

Quote - Occasionally you see stunning renders in max or Maya but the people in the Poser forum says, "that is professional tools you cannot expect performance like that from little Poser, a hobbyist tool!" It is soo satisfying to see a Poser user demonstrate that the tool is not at fault.

There are definite differences in the rendering engines between Poser/DS and the industrial standards.  This is not to say that good renderings are not possible in Poser/DS, but they require so much more work in the ways of texturing and lighting to achieve.  It's not all a matter of artistic ability, the tools do play a part in the difference.

I've seen enough rendering of what Dawn is.  I want to see what Dawn can become.  Bring on the character morphs!

Bending the wrist back that far on a human causes the skin to bunch and wrinkle.  A mesh won't do that without a morph specifically designed for that type of extreme bend, because the mesh is a hollow shell, not layers of flesh and bone.  If anything is wrong with Dawn's wrists, it can be adjusted simply with weight mapping, so that it bulges slightly instead of indents.  It's a rigging issue, not a modeling issue, and it's certainly not the first rigging issue we've experienced in Poser/DS.  Over all, I applaud Dawn's rigging.  It's better than any I've seen thus far.

And for users, use a magnet if you're to make those sort of extreme bends.

Quote - Oooh I stopped getting alerts from teh thread! and here i was thinking, "what,e veryone so partied out they didn't post??" LOL

 

And HI REDMYSTIC!!!! waves welcome to party :)

I am.  I slept all day, and my fingers hurt from playing music for too long.

Gen 4 and Genesis 1&2, all came out of modo.

Be warned:  No matter which parts of modo in which one specializes, it's flat out addictive.

The best figures, like the best rigging, do not follow the physical models found in real life.  Meshes are hollow, human bodies are relatively solid.  (A little squishy in places, but not hollow.)

Rigging in the places where human joints exist seldom create the best joints.  To mimic a solid body at the skin level with just a skin, the joints have to be closer to the outer bend, even with weight mapping.  If you place the joint where it exists in a human, you get less than optimal joints.  This has long been a problem in 3D, people thinking that the joints need to match the location in the human body.  The same principle applies to morphs.

So a realistic skin on a base figure is not going to be optimal for rigging or morphing.  It is easier to expand the vertices than it it is to shrink them and maintain the best mechanics of the figure.  So a base figure should be on the skinny side, a little anorexic, a little athletic, for the sake of mechanics.  

And like I said, Poser and DS do not have rendering engines powerful enough to touch realism.  They can get moderately close, but they aren't going to touch the top dollar rendering engines that can truly achieve realism that suspends visual disbelief.  Their strong point is representational art.  (If you're looking for realism, go spend some money on software instead of content.)

(And yes, Jan, modo is the best thing that happened to 3D, IMO.  It takes a while to learn, because it is different, but different for a very good reason.  It was no small coincidence that it was used to model Dawn.)

I'm going to party with a bunch of friends today, play music and sing a lot, eat good food, stuff like that.

I have started dealing with making HDR Light Studio merge with modo to produce a bunch of environmental EXR files for IBL/GI.  Had it for over a year, but that is a long story, with all sorts of major interruptions.  Downloading a few gigs worth of hdr files when I get tired of making custom photo studio arrangements to use on Dawn.

There's aways something to do while waiting.  Learning curve never stops.  Neither does life.

Quote - I've never given a release date for Dawn, the only people with that info are the HiveWire3D team.

I've beta tested before for months on various projects, so I do know how long it takes, and know about NDA's.

Steve or someone else from the team will give info as and where they deem it necessary.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

And as I said, I don't presume to speak for the dev team.  I'm just addressing those who expect to have Dawn to play with on this coming Monday, warning that it's probably not in their best interest to expect it that soon.  (Went and wrote the S word.  Slap my face.)

Quote - No ads here as it's the free section, only the HiveWire3D team can give a release date.

All the best.

Great Uncle LROG

As I stated, it is my opinion, nothing official.

I was referring to the store site, not here in the R'osity forum.  Not only are there no ads there yet, there's no site yet. Dawn and the Hivewire site is an enormous undertaking.  It takes an enormous amount of labor to bring a release like this all together.

My point is that with distribution to the content creators taking place now, the public release is still logically a ways off.  Yes, the public release could be timed illogically and happen tomorrow, but I wouldn't bet on it, because there is too much experience in this production crew to act that illogically.  The logical thing to do is to time the release of the figure just prior to the release of a wave of supporting items.

Let's look at what has to happen.  First, you want to get your store ready to roll for the release.  That means the I's dotted and the T's crossed technically, not 100% perfect, but good enough not to cause customer riots and sour grapes when it opens.  Then you need to get your content creators all on the same page, orientation on what to expect from the store, the submission process, NDA's, etc.  Since not all the content creators are present at any given time, this is staggered and takes some time.  Questions have to be answered for a certain comfort level to be reached and submissions to begin.

Then you want a certain level of items at the point of release, created by the core team, followed by a certain level of additional support in short order.  You need that flow to keep up the enthusiasm of the community.  So a certain number of third party (CA) of products need to be ready or close to ready to sell when the public event takes place.

And you need to throw in a few days off for the crew so they don't burn out before it all begins.

All this takes time, weeks at a minimum.

Yes, this is my projection, not the official word.  Personally, I'm not holding my breath until mid-month, at the earliest.  Maybe even later, depending on what I see in the weeks ahead.

Realistically, and avoiding the dreaded S word, I don't expect Dawn's public release for a few weeks yet.  A moderately complex package for a figure, including QA, takes about a month to six weeks from start to release, if things go smoothly.  They probably won't wait the entire time for a full barrage release, but they also don't want too much lag between initial release and a substancial wave of support.

As much as I dislike advising this, "Have some patience."  I dislike advising it because the attention span of this community is generally four days, optimum.  That means don't announce a release more than four days ahead of time, or the enthusiasm will begin to wane before the release arrives.  Many sellers in this community have not learned this.

Now in Dawn's case, the announcement was made to draw support from the content makers more than it was to draw public attention.  You can tell this as there are yet no ads out about the release.

So users, be patient, go do some renders, get off your pins and needles.  There is obviously still a lot of work to be done before Dawn finds your runtime.