Is there any way to trick Bullet Physics into making poses for a human figure? That too is what I want physics for... posing figures not bouncing props around. Could hands and feet be parented to props somehow to marrionet the figure? There was an old trick to simulate gravity on body parts using "Point To" but I can't recall how it worked. There was also an amazing scipt that posed figures using limits and a target prop that gave beautiful results but taxed the CPU I had at the time. What was that script? I guess you could use very low values of Bullet Physics to simmulate sag on fleshy parts of body but for me since I only do still single-frame stuff the Photoshop Fluid brush is easier.

My two-bits here:

Lips integral to face since if they are a group it is the easiest thing in the world for a user to break them out onto a new map if they need more detail. I like a face and ears only map with back of head and neck on the body. Most figures wear hair and don't need scalp detail and the face seam hides better at the neck then the neck seam does at the body. The thing too is to have a set proportion between head and body scale for texturing... say 4:1 or such.

and

Should not the nude have a bigger "package" lump? Big enough to hide the genitals? Then there would be a proper bulge. I always have to magnet the pants on males to give a package to make the figure look plausible. Otherwise it looks like the pants on a man who is tucking and taping his genitals between their buttocks or however they do it. Even the F2M transmen I know pack thier jeans with a silicone flacid penis and testicals so thier pants "look right". I know for a fact that all the straight women I know check the package by reflex no matter what a troll or gramps it is they are looking at.

Attached Link: Film Look

I different test it would seem to me is to see if the effect is generational. People our age are well trained to accept B&W photographs... maybe younger people are not. In my experience people my age find standard video very cheap and fake looking compared to film. TV networks spend a great deal of money having video post-processed to simulate film with grain, motion blur, frame-rate and dynamic range but most young people I know seem litteraly incapable of distinguishing standard consumer video from 35mm film (E.G. soap opera from feature film). I must say though that I am finding it harder these days to distinguish high end digital from tradional film on very expensive productions.

A B&W render egine is such an interesting thought. Can't see it ever happening but it is interesting. I sure regret that B&W motions pictures have been so much abandonded. Some of those movies were so intensly beautifull - even some of the cheap B movies. When my wife was away for a couple days once I turned the color off on the TV to see if I would miss anything... of course the quality was not like you would find with actual B&W cinematography but in fact I really didn't miss the color. Often the color is sloppy anyway.

Yep. I use distortions like pincushion or slight fish eye perspective and focus vigetting when I want to suggest something to look more photographic or optical or emotional since Poser creates a flat plane 'scientific perspective' without those distortions. As for HDRI that is a lot of work and one application of the Highlights/Shadows filter can often simulate the effect adequately enough.

That's nice but a bit posh for North America. I have not seen that finish before IRW. I was thinking just plain old generic semi-gloss or eggshell latex paint. The Poser interior sets I buy never really have convincing wall paint... I don't actually know why they don't look right but they don't. I tried the clay node and some subtle reflection over a very very subtle noise displacement and with soft cloud displacement so the walls don't seem un-naturally flat. I have tried these stategies (plus false shading to simulate light drop-off) but I have not hit on the "perfect" wall paint. BTW the noise is used to simulate the 'tooth' texture created by paint rollers.

OT: For years I shot B&W on my 35mm Stereo-Realist (available light even indoors using high-speed B&W film and split-developer) and I liked them more than my color since they seemed more like historic stereograms. For use in a backlit viewer I even made B&W reversals. They seemed to suffer the 'cardboard effect' (apearance of flat layers) more than color stereograms though. Does anyone make a true B&W digital camera?

Just less of what isn't realistic - color and subtle color reflection/transmition. Boost the noise for "grain" and push the contrast and it takes the look further. Plus we are trained to accept the stylization of photographs. that is why my question about realism is always "Do you mean optical realism or photorealism". That is my take.

Thank you for the link.

Made the Dolly Camera visible and been working with it today... been going well. Stupidly I had been using the face camera and pulling back.

Thank you JoePublic. I had no idea WardrobeWizard could be used that way. Just recently I moved to a crappy $250 laptop after several years running Poser on a tiny Dell Mini netbook! I got in the habit of re-sampling my textures way down right in the texture folder. I use all my renders as a base for digital painting or to sketch from so I have never been a power-user in terms of renders. Thank you for all the info... Even though I am a dope about this stuff I have a strong desire to have some grasp of what is going on under the hood. Seriously... I wish there was a PoserPro 2012 version of that old consumer product Poser Artist. I have never been as productive with Poser as I was back with Poser 3 and 4. I could stand things like a limit to only three lights and anti-aliased 'render ' of the Preview only (with shadows and transparency) if it meant I could have a stripped down no-brainier version of Poser. But given Poser is somewhere between consumer toy and expert software I do want to at least try to understand it as much as I can. My kids used to have an game where you could assemble imaginary animals from parts and pose them and run them through dance animation loops... A human version of that would be cool. A game like City of Heroes or whatever where you customize characters from mix and match and scaling but then you could pose them in various scenes for painting from. Second Life or whatever but with decent anatomy. I guess that is what Poser 3 with Canoma sets was like when I started with this.

I would happy to give a try. I have been a successful vendor and I am a regular tester at an other Poser site store. There is certainly no issue using other peoples renders for promo in my experience but you know... Dimension3D and others have sold utilities with no renders in the promo at all. Fancy renders are just a matter of the vendor wanting to promoting sales as much as possible. A simple single image promo is fine so long as it don't misrepresent the product. I have seen heavily post-worked renders in the Marketplace identified as "artistic renders" and I have seen other promo images that are just a logo and/or screencap of the script/utility dialog box. Any one render in this thread would be sufficient if your objective is only to get this distributed via the store - fancy promo renders are mainly about "product differentiation" to use a Marist term... getting lots of people to buy your generic dial-spin character or generic sexy outfit or hair for V4. Your product will sell to people who understand it and want to work with it rather then as an impulse purchase by people struck by a shiny promo render. One option would be to rely on the linked Gallery renders that are posted once the product is up... I for one always check the "Gallery" tab on a product..

Note: my computer is such crap I have often converted morphed and posed figures into props to conserve memory in PZ3s before rendering! Again... Wish that was a built-in feature of Poser. I have upgraded Poser and I now miss the texture resolution on-the-fly down-sampling of Max Texture Resolution that was in the poser 5 Render Settings. It was great not having to make my own lower-resolution texture maps for everything my self... Could test render with low max texture resolution and then final render with the full texture with no extra work in Poser 5. Please remember in all this that I am not at all a sophisticated user. I come at this from traditional media and have a c.1995 understanding of computers. I liked my old WinDOS OS.

I have been away from the forums for a while. I just heard of EZskin for the first time yesterday in the JoePublic light set thread! All this weight mapping is new to me too. I have not actually used the PMD yet... do you need to REM them to save resources once you build your character as you do with Daz INJ channels? I wish spawning a single character FBM from dialed characters and deleting the source and unused channels was a basic feature of Poser!

Thank you for the info. I do wonder why PMD isn't more popular... the requirement to make pre-existing channels is a pain sometimes. I really don't like INJ/REM which is an other reason I still use Daz 2 and Daz 3 Reduced Resolution whenever possible. I just wish I had more modern and fancier textures for them. I fixed face_off's skin scripts to work with the older and other figures though which is a big help.

It is a personal taste thing but as an oil painter I like the shading (shadow) on the higher IBL render shown on our right.