I'm thinking that somebody should take these four notes and give them their own topic, lol. NOW FOR THE MOST CRITICAL REASON YOU NEED RENDEROSITY OR A RENDEROSITY-FAKER.

It was touched on above. Your renderer sees the LACK OF LIGHT as pure black. When it mixes some light with no light...the result is seen in terms of grayscale shadows. Anytime, which is way too often...anytime you see grayscale to black shadows on the skin of a character...then there's not enough light, not enough ambient light, not enough fill.

This may be corrected with global lighting or AO or IBL or rendersity solutions, or by simply adding a fill light...as they would do on stage or in film.

I don't want downplay some of the truly great pictures I have seen using AO or IBL or software renderosity calculations but simply remember, you can spend two days looking for the right IBL image, or getting the right AO settings, or calculating a truly realistic rendersity solution...or  in a couple of minutes you can add and adjust a fill light. Sometimes that's not the right solution - but most of the time it should do just fine.

I find the best thing about AO and IBL is watching artists use them for specific non-realistic effects, as in the establishment of a non-realistic rendering style. That's a whole other world - Aery Soul, for example, has a relatively complex rendering style which, like or dislike, is absolutely identifiable as their own. Using software to develop that kind of stuff, interests me much more than realism....and yet...  And yet, it's the pursuit of realism that's helped me understand what all these techniques do - and is very much like learning to draw realistically before jumping to cubism. You can make the jump without it, but doing realistic work - meeting the eye's expectations for "realism" - is always going to be the most technically difficult.

Sorry if I bored you all...

I'm sorry, for the sake of newbies, I have to add this since there are so many products out there associated with it...

"Global Lighting" is just another renderosity faker...and I am talking about any kind of lighting which involves the obligatory 800-lights-on-a-sphere-all-set-to-level 2 routine. The low levels of light are meant to simulate the bounce of light from other sources, like walls, oceans, etc.

Sooo...if you're using AO or IBL or renderosity calculations...YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO NEED GLOBAL LIGHTING AT THE SAME TIME. Supposedly, the other mechanisms will replace it.

(Offered just cuz you're not going to find this stuff explained anywhere else...)

Your software may have "Global Lighting" (also known as "Global Illumination") built in. These are usual renderosity calculators - and may involve additonal routines for the artist-creator to help the software identify more-and-less reflective materials to take into consideration when calculating renderosity.

Renderosity calculation is complex. Faking renderosity is sooooooooo much quicker and easier. Which is also its downfall. Misapplied IBL or AO is no more realistic or effective than any other badly managed lighting or other artistic technique - just using them is not a guarantee of a better result. In fact, it's more difficult to create dramatic scenes while faking reality than it is to just light it the way you want it.

That bears repeating. IT'S MORE DIFFICULT TO CREATE DRAMATIC SCENES WHILE FAKING REALITY THAN IT IS TO JUST LIGHT IT THE WAY YOU WANT IT.

It used to be said about college that diplomas are nailed to the wall not grades - i.e. the result is more important than the mechanism. I don't think that's always true in RL....but I do believe it's always true in the pictorials arts. We don't see how ya got there...we only see the 'there." So if you need to add some ambience to a material which wouldn't normally have ambience... or fake renderosity by adding a totally unrealistic light somewhere ... or by doing some grotesque manipulation in post...DO IT. Unless you're a scientist studying this stuff. But if you 're an artist, do what you need to get your result - no other artist is going to think less of  you for it.

 A little bit more. IBL and AO are renderosity poseurs - in the most general and basic terms, they were designed to fake renderosity - which in simulation eats up tons of render cycles. Raytracing delivers hard shadows, it doesn't know how to do anything else...ergo, ever since the invention of raytracing, the (t)race has been on to either a) push renderosity algorithms forward to make the software "soften" the result, or b) find newer and better ways to fake renderosity.

Since definitions are really hard to come by in this field, for newbies, offered with respect, "renderosity" is the generation and mixing of reflected and spilled light, i.e. ambient light. As in a flashlight pointed at a surface painted a light color will generally reflect that light, say, to a nearby chair - even though the chair is not in the main line of the flashlight. In real life, light off of walls, often white, will usually generate a ton of reflected light even at night, say from a window where there are street lamps outside. And the car headlights from the highway. And the extra light from the candle down the hallway will brighten the wall's doorway just a bit. These are all "ambient" lighting effects...i.e., renderosity.

Sooooo...you can see how complicated generating and mixing all this ambient light might be, and yet how necessary it is to do so to get a "real" look in 3D pictures.

That's why it becomes important to understand the principles involved in your software's AO/IBL/renderosity features - so you can work with and adapt them as the need arises. And you need to understand that the lighting model you have in Poser, for example, is not the lighting model in Bryce or Carrera or C4D or tS or Rhino. But the principles are the same even if the mechanisms differ. But no one writes about the principles, we only get tracts on specific software (and, even then, little on theory as it applies to a particular software).

If you search a bit online, you can quickly stumble, and be completely, lost in the mathematics of renderosity theory and lighting, and IBL/AO/renderosity methods. Most of us do not want to be there, lol. It's ugly, it's confusing, and artist-creators can't actually do anything with it.  We need the end result in our software. So trying to find principles of lighting online is really difficult, too. You can find stage lighting and film lighting principles in books, magazines, and online - and they are helpful --- but they are not the same as understanding how 3D mechanisms generate light and shadow, and how other mechanisms (IBL/AO/renderosity algorithms) modify it.

I don't know if they still have it, but the Hash Animation manual used to have a knockout chapter on the principles and problems of z-buffer lighting (soft shader - like Poser's soft shadow lights). Somebody should get their permission to reprint that sucker everywhere. (Completely aside, it used to have a great section of film aspect ratios, too). And we should find an expert on raytracing to write a similar piece on the basic trials and tribulations of raytracing. Newbies could learn in six months what it now takes them three years of fumbling to find out - and I am certain there are old-timers whose artwork would improve 30-50 percent.

It's like trying to paint without color theory. The state of information distribution for 3D art is just horrible...

A little bit on rendering and lights. Light rays in a renderer are not like light rays from the sun. Light rays from a renderer do not stop at anything WITHIN THEIR RANGE. That's why they often light up the inside of objects, like nostrils, which would normally be dark. The light continues along the ray and brightens everything in its path...it does not get stopped buy such silly little things as skulls and walls and clothes and hair - even if the hair is hard and not a transparent object.

Ergo, if you have a renderer in which the lights have distance controls, you may use those to cut off the light at a particular distance you decide. For animations- with things in motion; or still pics - with small and hard to identify areas (like nostrils, AGAIN), distance control can still be a real nightmare. For still pictures, you can always touch up in post what you can't control in the render; animators have to find better and more inventive lighting tricks to obtain their goals. Some packages, not Poser, allow for lights to be assigned to specific objects and blocked from specific objects allowing some great freedoms in bringing lighting under artistic control.

Anyway, just remember that renderer rays are vicious. They stop at nothing except a direct command (where the software allows)...pretty much like attack dogs.

 Sorry I'm late but I did leave an apple on your desk.  I was gonna leave an old Motorola video chip but figured that was too hard on the teeth.

Why is the Poser floor beneath ground 0 and the Poser shadow above ground 0?  I SUSPECT if you spoke with the guys who created the program they would say that they did not want geometry conflicts between their ground plane and a user-created ground plane (one can think of a half dozen reasons why that would be so). Similarly, if the user were to create/import their own ground prop at y0.0, then one would want shadows to display above it.

Jus' a guess...

(Or, in trying to catch up, did I miss words to this effect?)

(If you understand the whys of something then you will rarely forget the whats.)

 Geep - couldn't agree more, lol, the perfect example of the time-honored art of yanking an entire groups' chain...with the following proviso...

Poser software has been in bad need of clean-up for ages. I like the program, I've learned to live with its foibles, but I still swear at it on a regular basis. Like virtually all 3D softwares out there, there are way too many things that have been left uncorrected and unimproved while jamming it/them full of still new "features." 

As for C4D, I bought R9 4-1/2 years ago, the top of the line version, for approx. $3000. Now it would cost me $3000 to upgrade to R11. I don't have that kind of pocket change, lol. And for "professional" software C4D's documentation is as lacking as any I've seen from Hash, trueSpace, Bryce, or Poser. I was reading just yesterday in the Carrara forum, and they seem to have their own collection of software issues.

As for more professional software doing this? The ability to handle Poser content (or D/S for that matter) is only part of the issue ... apparently no else's software does all the things that Poser does. Contrary, there are things I can do in Bryce and Vue that Poser can't touch; I've never seen a better solid modeler than C4D's and it's got a billion little piece-of-crud errors in it.  The sculpture-based modelers are supposed to be wonderful, but I am always reading about the end results being converted to .OBJ and being shipped to a better renderer or someplace/something else for this-that-or-the-other final touch up.

I don't think there's a perfect 3D software in existence ... Guess I will just have to win the lottery and try them all.

It is not uncommon for morphing clothes to have bits and pieces that do NOT conform. And the more distant a clothing model is from the base figure, in terms of geometry, the increased chance that there will be, in one or more poses,  problems with it conforming. Understand that the basis for the entire conforming procedure is to project the joint controls of the body part onto its associated piece of clothing.
     Where the geometry is not identical, problems arise. But, even when the geometry is virtually identical, the spatial relationship between vertices will never be identical ... and any variance in morphs applied to either the body part or to the part of clothing can/may/will compound the problem.
     If enough polygons are employed in the models, lol, sooner or later there will be enough close matches between the vertices of the two objects (body part and clothing part) to make the process more workable - which is a major reason why models and conforming clothes are often created with a quadragazillion faces (aside from the extra good looks those faces might impart to a render or the ease with which the additonial geometry may be used to create new morphs).
     And if you pay attention to such things as DAZ-created clothing for V2 and V3 being based on the characters' body geometries, you understand how that can lead to more 1-to-1 vertex matches when they start to make the clothes conform.
     "Magnetizing," if by chance you haven't caught on, has everything to do with creating vertex matches for conforming clothes. Some of this may sound strange, but you'll learn it, I have no doubts. You're asking the right questions.
     Experienced users (and, specifically, those also NOT interested in animations - which have another set of nightmare problems) don't struggle with such minor adjustments. They just find a clothing morph that will fill the need (i.e., enlarge the right bust of the blouse to compensate for a minor poke-through - or, opposite, make the breast the teeniest bit smaller) or when those don't work to their tastes, they create a Poser magnet to create a temporary or permanent  morph fix.
     When clothes are solid and cover the entire body part, there's no reason not turn the body part off - no body part, no conflict, ... not to mention that that will result in many fewer faces for the software to contend with come render time.
     The new point morphing tool in P7 allows you to create morphs vertex-by-vertex to fix a minor issue, but could be somewhat daunting to use for larger problems (which would better fixed in a complete 3D modeler).
     So.....If you can't simply adjust an existing morph to correct a problem, learn to use those magnets - FIRST AND FOREMOST. They're actually a minor miracle for many things beyond repair - and you'll discover them with experience.

By the way, in all the ideas you've read in the forum above, consider this: You don't want everything magnetized. Things like flowing skirts and blouse-y sleeves need their freedom to move along the gross lines of  the body without being glued into place, whereas something tight benefits from the magnetizing process. A tight tee-shirt should almost always be magnetized for example...a loose bedroom gown, virtually never. There are, of course, exceptions to everything. A logical future enhancement would be magnetization by body part - so we can, for example, glue that skirt to the buns and still let it flounce around the knees. But, right now it's all or nothing. "Magnetization" is usually in addition to conforming procedures...so don't be afraid to conform a breezy blouse but leave it unmagnetized. The worst that can happen is you'll decide to magnetize it later.

 SamTherapy - Thx for the referral to 3D.SK - never saw the site before and it was quite an experience.

Artemis: Ty. You weren't interested, by any chance, in sharing the names of those you use?

Cyberscape - Ty. will take a look at that. Is it fair to assume that a seamless piece of skin and reflectonless eyes are a part of the Alpha II package?

The reference to reflectionless eyes reminds me that textures are about texture and not shading. One of the horrifying things to discover about the package I had purchased was that shading and highlights had been added to the base tex. I mean, this thing was rookie all the way...

 "Yeah, Brass Goggles is some fun, but some of them take themselves a wee bit too seriously...;)"

Unlike Poser folks. 

:)

 Re "being interested in Japanese freebies." It had been a long time since I had wandered the Japanese sites - and it's rare when I don't find some model or another of interest. I remember obtaining the P4 set of characters that Yamato (sp?) had created back in those days and which not only lasted very nicely well into V2's lifetime but are available on other sites even today.

That and Mr. Bat's first work with fetish outfits - all available at no charge and of superior workmanship.

Then there were the ISO/ISOP maid uniform, the wedding gowns, the other school and nurse uniforms - I built and rebuilt the maid alone on several occasions. In those days, there was a premium on flexibility and most outfits could be broken or re-cast by materials or parts in a variety of ways.

Those new to Poser and D/S today would be amazed at the kind of work that came of out of Japan then compared to most American products. And 3rd-party modelers today have learned there's little to be gained in such flexibility - not when they can earn more by releasing subsequent outfits instead. And, as far as I am concerned, it's only in V4's recent time that American textures have begun to equal those that were being created in Japan in P4/V1/V2 times. IMHO.

So if Japanese freebies are a double-edged sword, given the past, I am usually willing to walk on one edge or the other.

BTW, for V3 users unaware of Japanese content, some these outfits are still available (like the maid) for V3. Am not certain that all were upgraded as I never much liked V3 and did little work with her, ergo - didn't do much searching for outfits and such. For A3 users (still superior to A4 for my tastes), ditto - a number of these outfits, including some quite gorgeous ones, are still available on the Japanese sites.

AND to find all this stuff, usually takes a willingness to SURF somewhat blindly - finding a link page at one site that leads, for example, to many others. If you know Japanese or your translator is decent - you'll be ahead of the game. But beware the translators, lol, there are real anomalies that get created with them.

And if  you hadn't noticed with the pictures posted here, the overall renderings/galleries in Japan tend to be on the excellent side. Just be ready for a lot of adolescent-looking models (mostly clothed), it is a kind of culture shock.

Mark

 Well, those pictures ARE the add-on morph faces. Like rsg (above) I am in waiting mode. BTW, I simply explained that I had had my leg amputated and have been in and out of the hospital with problems for some time (all true), that I had not had an opportunity to obtain the original morph, and then asked if it were still possible to obtain that morph.

At the time I sent the email, I hadn't thought to post here.

Mark

 I remember a few years ago, when Adobe 6 was being introduced, reading a letter from a man who was still using version 2 or 3 and had been for five years. His attitude was that he still hadn't learned everything he wanted to learn from the version he was using and, therefore, saw no point in upgrading.

It's rare for me to upgrade to each new version. I wasn't pleased with many problems I had with Poser 6, not the least of which was constricted memory - and I did jump to 7. But I still haven't left C4D 9 (with upgrades at $3500 a pop). And I just recently moved from Adobe 6 to CS4; there was a huge leap, lol.  The point is, these are increasing complicated and feature-rich pieces of software...it's downright silly to abandon what I've just begun to explore.

At one time, software updates were released when major major changes were introduced - and users were supported with patches in meantime. New features were often introduced by patch and tested with users before being integrated into the next version. Now, way too often, updates are released to give developers something to sell - with less than stunning changes. Virtually every company is releasing it's annual "new version."

I understand the business model, but the solution to screw the customer one more time is a sad one.

And I also think we have to keep the  DAZ merger in mind here, and remember that DAZ has other things to keep themselves busy - like realigning staff. I don't think they're thinking in terms of the best support they can provide, they're thinking in terms of what's the minimum they can get away with because they just don't WANNA. This ain't new, most major businesses adopted that model in the early to mid-nineties.

And I LIKE DAZ, been a customer of theirs for years, lol. Doesn't mean I'm always happy with them or any other self-serving corporation..

 FYI - there's a big demand for fairly adolescent characters in Japan (think Thorne-like fairies without the ears) - one of the reasons I was interested in these Ruru add-ons is that they add a few years to the character and are still cute.

 Easy to do...and there's a RUKA character (also cute, also by VOLT) which is NOT Ruru, lol.

 Have dropped a line to the site, will post here if I find out anything about obtaining the file.

Mark