But if you needed to make an material like the one i showed above where its not a uniformed color or the ones you have in your images, which looks nice btw. Wouldn't you have to start mix and added stuff together to get the correct reflection where there are paint and where there are rust for instant?

Are there no way to get refraction in the physical shader? I haven't really tested a lot of glass or water using it, but agree it weird that they haven't added such channel to it.

RorrKonn posted at 11:18PM Mon, 03 April 2017 - #4301440

MSconti Never ever ever wait on a app to get what you want "just ask truespacers" .get the app that already has what you want. If you want animation .the only choices you have are

1 reallusion

2 unity or unreal .need a master degree in Texturing & rigging n animation. fairly high learning curve.

3 main app's like Blender or Maya. Very Very high learning curve ya need a masters degree in main 3D app's. You need a 3D crew along with a 3D studio n a buddget of $300,000.00.

So basically your only animation choice is reallusion.Now you know why 99% of homegrown CGI'ers only render stills.

Im not sure Unity or Unreal are the best choices to do animations in, at least my understanding of them is that these are game engines where you mainly use animations related to whatever game you are making, so it helps you organize and play animations in relation to user input or whatever is going on in the game, but pretty sure the majority of animations are made and imported from other 3D applications.

Blender, Maya, 3ds max, Cinema4D are very well suited for creating animations and most likely the main applications for making such out there, but as you say they have a very high learning curve, especially if you have no knowledge from other 3D applications, not meaning Poser, Daz3d or IClone which are content manipulation software, or what to call them. There are a few similarities from those to the 3D creating applications, but they are very few especially in possibilities and in workflow. But you don't need a Master degree to use them, you do however need a lot of time and commitment. But if you are only interested in doing animations, you could basically just learn how you use those tools and all the others you could pretty much just ignore.

EClark1894 posted at 6:33PM Mon, 03 April 2017 - #4301400

Personally, I have to say that I agree with Wolf. The ship has sailed on Poser's animation tools, although, they might be enough to get someone interested in animation for a beginner. I'm not sure Iclone is where I would be dipping my toes for the first time if I'd never tried animation before either.

But have they ever been there? The walk designer was really nice, however it haven't been working correctly with other characters than those that comes with Poser for a long time as far as I know and its only some of the characters, it doesn't work with the animals i think. What other features in the Poser animation tools have been unique compared to what you could find in other 3d packages, since you believe the ship have sailed in that regard? haven't they always been pretty basic when talking about animation or do you mean that they haven't kept up with the rest of the industry in the last few releases and therefore Poser is not on pair with other software?

wolf359 posted at 4:45PM Mon, 03 April 2017 - #4301386

@MSconti The reality,as I see it, is this: the overwhelming majority of poser users are still image render artists Much Like the Daz studio user base. anyone who is serious about Character animation is already using Iclone or Motionbuilder.(I use Iclone)

If poser is perceived to be "Dying" it is because that still render majority are still basicaly stuck using an 11 year old figure set (Daz V4/M4)

We animators have long since moved on. New & improved animation tools will not revive interest in poser at this point There needs to be New native poser figures that are attractive enough that the user base will largely embrace them and easy to use content dev tools to get content creators excited about developing for poser again.

Looking at the current state of things, I dont really see this happening.

I do agree that most people does still images, but honestly i think the majority of 3D users regardless of software, except those obviously aimed towards animations, does still images. Making animations is really a lot of work compared to just doing a still image. So I would not see that is being Posers animation tools fault, but simply that the majority of people like making stills rather than animations and I don't think that Poser needs to be especially strong in animation, because there are tools out there specifically designed for that, and people that are really into animations and work with it a lot, would be disappointed by Posers or Daz3D tools anyway, they at least to me are just not the first pick when it comes to that, from my own experience they are fine for simple animations etc. But you quickly run into limits, so IClone would probably be a good alternative.

Regarding figures I have to disagree as well, I don't find the IClone character to be particular good, they do a good job as base characters, what i really like and as i mentioned earlier is the way you can modify them, sort of like the face room in Poser, which in my opinion was a great idea and should be extended. Furthermore I don't really think it have anything to do with M4/V4 even though they might be old characters, they are still exceptionally good, both in details and speed.

If you look at this video, its a long one but if everything worked out it should start at the correct time:

Characters

If you look at the variety, it at least to me can't be blamed on the character themselves, they are very well made characters. The content creators might not make the variety needed, but its not the "characters" fault as I see it.

MSconti posted at 3:53PM Mon, 03 April 2017 - #4301379

Hornet3D, thank you, although I'm not sure whether I'm pleased to hear that or not.

I hope Poser is continued. I do love Poser despite it's obvious animation limitations right now. I wonder if the new Smith Micro developers will read this forum? I hope they do, and if they see this, I beg of you, please do something about the animation toolset in Poser. Comparing Poser to iClone, Poser wins in all respects apart from animation. iClone appears to be growing substantially, while Poser appears to be dying if the general consensus is anything to go by. I wonder why? The only thing iClone has over Poser is it's animation toolset, so maybe it's time to smell the roses and put Poser on the animation map, where surely should be!

Poser, THE figure animation tool, right?

Make it so, then take my money!

Im not really sure what you mean with Poser winning in all aspects apart from animation, did you see this presentation video?

Iclone 6 new features

The Poser development team was recently let go and SM are doing a major re-shuffle. They have stated however they are still committed to Poser. I think changes like this will therefore delay any new version of Poser as it seems understandable that the new team will need to get up to speed. That said I am just voicing my personal view based on the information to hand.

Guess that can be both a good or bad thing, it might be good to get some fresh eyes and ideas involved to stir the soup so to speak :D but yeah some knowledge might be lost as well i guess. But think it depends a lot on what background those new developers have as stated earlier, I think programs like Poser have a lot of potential, if you look at Iclone, Daz etc. Have looked at a lot of videos of people using 3D to make comic books, art and what not, even though these people are very skilled at drawing etc, the time and benefits from using 3D in there workflow is so beneficial, always get very inspired looking at these videos.

Without wanting to ruffle any feathers, with the recent changes at Smith Micro, I think it is a fairly solid bet that Poser 12 will not be around any time soon.

What news are you referring to, just curious?

Anthony Appleyard posted at 4:36PM Sat, 01 April 2017 - #4301158

"something you would see on latex etc": I am after an effect of shiny black leather or PVC, not ordinary cloth.

"using a fairly old model": I still usually use the Poser 4 human models.

Here is something you can try maybe if you tweak it a bit.

You can download the bump map from here:

http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials_old/texturing/leather/leather_bump.jpg

Yeah, thats what I mean, maybe we don't really disagree that much :D

And I understand you argument that its nice to know what happening under the hood, for me its more the theory behind it that interest me. For instant in the tutorial if you haven't seen it, I think the first part is very good, because he explain the theory and how it works etc. And then he moves to how he builds it with all these nodes which really don't interest me, just show me the shader if you know what i mean, and it was quite difficult to concentrate after the theory because i wanted to test it with the PhysicalSurface:D

To me and maybe Im wrong it just seems that cycles and mixing all these things together are for people that are very interested in the more technical parts and those that ain't are just interested in the end result.

But you have all these software solutions today that can paint these maps for you all in one go and you just hook them up, so they help move the workload from the technical side towards the more artistic side or what to say.

This is from Substance painter which i use and its a base shader that you can then modify etc. and once you are done you are left with X amount of maps that you can just plugin to the PBR node that you use, that being Iray, Superfly whatever.

To me this looks very nice as a starting point and its easy to hook up and so on. Now if you should make the same one using cycles, wouldn't you end up needing these maps anyway and still have to add and mix all the things together to get the correct shader?

And these programs are not exactly unpayable, Substance painter cost 150$ 3D-coat is 99$ so to me it just seems like a lot of problems and headache having to go through these cycles setup compared to doing it in these programs and make a setup that a non technical person can understand....but again as I said, I don't really think i understand the benefits of the CyclesSurface node, because you can still use all the cycle nodes with the physicalSurface node.

They all look nice i think, but as a choice I would say the first or the third one from the left, leaning towards the third one the most, the specularity seems more natural to me. But I think you would have to render them as four separate images with the character placed exactly the same in all of them. If you compare the first girl to the last girl, she have rotated, which will change the lighting and shadows on each of the characters.

Really nice tutorial lots of good information and very well explained. However im not a Blender user so all the stuff about grouping and so forth etc. is probably very useful for those that use it. :D

However after watching the tutorial, I decided to check whether fresnel effect was in the PhysicalSurface node, so I downloaded your materials and they are very nice and really like the way you have organized them.

But i made a test scene to compare things to see the difference. So I took your car paint and tried to recreate it with the PhysicalSurface node to see if I could see a difference with the fresnel.

Here are the two images that I rendered one is using the cycle material and the other is using the PhysicalSurface node, which obviously got me wondering....

There is no difference in them as far as I can see.

However this is what the materials for each of them look like and don't get me wrong I know a lots of yours is because you can change color and material.

Cycles

PhysicalSurface

Im pretty sure all the materials could be made using 4 texture maps for each material when using the PhysicalSurface and don't misunderstand me, because im doing these comparisons and test because I want to learn, but it seems like a very complicated process with all these nodes and adding and mixing things together when using cycles, it seems like most of these things are build into the PhysicalSurface node already and more convenient to simply build on that.

What exactly is the benefit of using cycles? I could imagine that skin might be easier to make with cycles, but i really don't get why this cycle node is so fantastic and i really would like to know, I feel like im missing something with this node somewhere.

It seems like you are using a fairly old model, so getting it very realistic is not easy I think. If you are talking about cloth mesh it self and you have access to changing it, it looks a bit to bulky at the top around the upper arm and shoulders. Also simply by adding textures to the cloth maybe just a uniformed black fabric could help, you can find some just by doing a search on black fabric on google. Also the highlights on the cloth is only something you would see on latex etc, so i if it should be cotton or something you have to remove it.

If you have access to Poser cloth room, I can make you a pair of pants and jacket which you can then simulate if you want?

Its a complicated topic, I wouldn't go as far as to say that Poser is dying, I would rather say that they have to be careful and that i think they should consider changing strategy.

Some things I at least would consider if I were in their shoes would be to only release one version of Poser, drop the Pro version and game versions etc. release one product at a reasonable low price.

Instead what they could do is to release Poser optimized characters, that works with the face room and could even extend it so its more like Iclone where you can shape the body as well. I know you do this through morphs etc. But I always liked the idea of the face room that you could drag around the mesh of character to shape them and so forth, think there is a lot of lost potential in it and if they ain't going to use it in the future then remove it, don't leave such thing in the program. If they could create characters with a single good rig, so content could be used for all these characters and maybe get automatic conformed within reasonable limits. Much like you can conform cloth to a character now lets say they make a character called Brenda and you can change her body and the cloth follows etc, But cloth made for her, would also fit a character called Tris and Rachel etc. Sort of like the fitting room but it just need to be more streamlined and I think they could do that if they made and sold such characters themselves. And obvious these characters would have to be high quality!!

Another thing would be to give the dynamic hair an overhaul, it would be a great selling point if it were good. Upgrade the dynamic cloth room, so you have more and better options, for instant so you could select a fabric type and save custom fabric types etc.

I think they should kill off Firefly and put all effort into Superfly and stop with trying to make everything work together, take the best solution and make it even better. Get rid of all the old materials they are a nightmare and not needed anymore.

This is Cracked dry mud....Really? who would ever make a material like that today!!

So get rid off all these materials and add PBR materials instead.

I like the comic outline renders you can do, so that should be improved as well, maybe with cell shading setting.

Create better integration with other software solutions, PoserFusion is really nice but could be improved, maybe so you could select which objects in the scene you wish to send over, make it so as you import object that you can setup how they are imported so these settings are saved each time you choose to update. Basically get Poser more integrated into the other packages a lot of people that are using these could greatly benefit from using Poser I think.

Change the unit system so it better follows other software solutions.

So at least to me I think they need to focus more on whats important for the users and what the majority is using Poser for, I mean the addition of the bullet system was a nice idea, but was it really worth it? How many people really use it, its not like the forum is filled with bullet animations. To me it seems like they try to add to many things where some are of very little interest to most people, but by doing this they loose quality both in new features that are important, but also old ones that have a lot of potential and some of which people uses a lot. For instant instead of the bullet system, why not add a particle system instead, which could be used in still shots as well or add photometric lights etc. They really need to get to terms with the saying "Kill your darlings" i think. There is much potential they just need to focus on the right things.

stewer posted at 8:56PM Fri, 31 March 2017 - #4301053

how do you control how soft shadows are with a spot light using Superfly?

Change the scale of the spot light. Like in real life, the shadow softness in SuperFly correlates with the size of the light source.

That is excellent, dont know why i didn't think of that. Thanks :D

jura11 posted at 10:27AM Thu, 30 March 2017 - #4300864

Hi there

I'm pretty sure SuperFly can be used only with Gamma Correction and Gamma Correction is what we are see and is correct way how to render,same can apply for FireFly and IDL,you should render with IDL and gamma correction is well worth it

in yours case I would suggest,did you used BB EnvSphere or EZDome,if not I would use this and regarding the weird hotspot,this is what I found out few months and few days back again

I would suggest to use area light and try aim light on floor or use -90 and use large scale for light,usually is big as ceiling or you can try to use other lights,but with spot light or any other light you will see this hot spot,but same can apply for area light as well,other option is to use mesh lights

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

This weren't meant as exercise in how to light a scene, but to simply solve a problem of light being wrong, so I wanted to keep the scene as simple as possible to avoid having to troubleshoot several things at the same time. If you compare the last image rendered in Poser with the one rendered in 3ds max using the same intensity, they look very similar, which to me indicate that the problem is not the lights themselves but actually the gamma settings of the materials, which is crucial or very important i think. Because you might end up adding a lot of lights that ain't needed or might try to change a lot of Superfly render settings in order to solve some issues which have nothing to do with these things. The last image is rendered at only 15 pixel samples which ain't that much, but even at this setting the amount of noise compared to the 10% render with wrong gamma is a lot less, especially if you compare the noise in the highlights and this is also the case even if I render the image at the same 10 pixel samples settings as the other one.

Which is why i think its very important information to be aware of, because if you render an image and you see noise here and there, but are not really aware of this issue, you might look at the obvious solution of simply increasing the pixel sample to 40 or something in hope that it will solve it, but it wont as the noise is added due to the materials being wrong which in the end will affect the whole scene regardless of the amount of pixel samples. Besides that, being able to work at low pixel samples will greatly increase render speed, which everyone likes :D

Im a huge fan of the PhysicalSurface root node, because its so easy to work with, some people are very good at creating all these shaders, with multiply, blending and all these different things you can add together, which i have never really been that good at, I can make some basic things, but don't find it very easy to make them and get the effects i want. The PhysicalSurface node works very much like other PBR render engines does in other applications like 3ds max, substance painter etc. simply by using these Metallic/Roughness settings.

This is the render settings from 3ds max, its even simpler than the Superfly settings, at least to get started you just crank up the slider :

Here you have a simple glass, no crazy things with nodes all over the place trying to fake this and that, its just very simple settings, so at least to me this is a huge benefit.

(Sorry the quality is bad, i grabbed it from a youtube video :D)

But as shown in the image from 3ds max that i rendered above with the Gamma/lut enabled, it doesn't matter how much you increase the render quality, it still looks wrong if the materials applied to the objects are incorrect. And agree with you that setting up light you could use all these HDR maps, domes and so forth to make the lighting cool, but this will help little if the materials are screwed i think. Anyway this post is getting rather long :D