Couple of observations -

An 8 bit grayscale map used for displacement has 256 levels of gray - thinking of it in height terms, that's 256 steps from highest point to lowest.

A 16 bit grayscale map has over 65 thousand levels of gray. A lot more steps, so better quality.

Redoing the original test with a 16 bit map would improve the result, though memory would take a hit and I would expect the render to be slower as you'd be adding more data for the renderer to calculate.

The other way in P10+ to improve the render when using displacement would be to add render subD - again, performance would suffer but the end result would be better. I'll post an example of what I mean shortly.

I agree that it can be useful or not depending on the particular situation. For cloth, it may be useful on very tight clothing but not for a looser fitting garment - folds move with the figure underneath. For figures I would also rather have enough mesh density to enable good quality morphs as that would be far more flexible than relying on maps to carry secondary detail like muscles. For skin detail like pores and fine wrinkles, bump or normal maps would be better as the silhouette of the figure is not going to be affected.

Hmmm, don't know how to do that, not tried it. I think it should be possible to do it with a displacement map, not so sure about a normal. I'll try to have a look tomorrow, gotta sleep now :)

ZB does auto-save, so you might find the last few projects under Lightbox. The best backup though would be to save as a ZTool or better still as a Project after generating the normal.

I get a lot of my info from books, ended up buying most of those for Zbrush. Scott Spencer's Character Creation is particularly good.

Great render you posted BTW. Was the hair Poser's dynamic hair or a Fibremesh import?

I personally would like to see a figure covered by a single map - given that Poser can handle up to 8k maps; given that for a lot of renders I do (full body shots at max. 3000 pixels) multiple maps are a waste of memory as that level of detail isn't seen; and given that I am in a minority who use Zbrush with Poser (and ZB is easier to use with a single map). But, like I said I know I'm in a minority!

@ Paul - have you tried using polygroups? In that tab, UV Groups will create polygroups based on the UV tile, so Roxie gets separate groups covering body (inc. nails), head (inc. tongue and inner mouth), eyes and teeth/gums. If you use Auto Groups with UV it'll create groups for each UV shell. So to make a skin map I'd use UV Groups first, then control-shift click on the head to hide it and show the eyes and teeth. Mask the eyes and teeth then Visibility - ShowPt, then invert the mask, then HidePt, then Del Hidden to get rid them. Then I'd use Auto Groups with UV to split the mesh further and hide and delete the inner mouth, tongue and nails. Active Point count for Roxie should now be 19,764. Hit UV Groups again and you have two polygroups, head and body. Subdivide and sculpt - based on 1 poly = 1 pixel, for a 2k map you need min. 4 million polys for each map (4k map = 16 million polys). I can go to 6 subD levels which gives 20 million polys with Roxie, but only 4 in the head and 16 in the body, so if I wanted to paint a detailed skin and make 4k maps I'd have to use HD geo. When you're done then control-click to hide one group, then generate the maps you need from the visible mesh, then do the reverse to create the other map.

If you already use that then ignore me, but it may be useful info for someone!

But to quote Ryan Kingslien "the sculptor with the most polys wins".

Been watching this thread with interest and there are good points from both perspectives.

I'm with JoePublic in this respect though - there is a place for high-res figures where secondary detail can be carried in the mesh. Maps are good for tertiary detail - veins, wrinkles, skin pores. 

Here's the way I'm thinking - every Poser figure is multi-mapped. Rex and Roxie have a head and body map, V4 has body, limbs and head. A good displacement map should be 16 bit (over 65,000 'steps' of gray as compared to 256 for an 8 bit grayscale map) - and the file size increases accordingly. So to carry crisp secondary detail on a figure like Roxie with 26,000 quads will take two 16 bit grayscale displacement maps at something like 2000 pixels square each. That carries a memory overhead.

Worth considering as well that, to paraphrase Scott Spencer, using a displacement map on a low-res mesh is like trying to project detail through a blanket. If you use render subD to get a finer mesh then it's like projecting through silk - but again, that carries a memory hit as each subD level quadruples the mesh plus it doubles again when the render engine triangulates it.

So when a high level of detail is required from a figure, it would seem a lot simpler to just start with a base resolution that can support that goal. One size fits all is an approach that just doesn't work in practice, and based on what I have seen and done in Poser and Zbrush, my opinion is that ultimately mesh detail beats map detail.

PP2012 was the first version I used where I found render DoF to be usable in terms of render time, before that I found it so slow as to be unusable in practice.

On my old machine with PP2010 I got problems on occasion with canceling renders (with separate process being used, but only 4Gb RAM) depending on the scene - I frequently reduced the bucket size to 16 or 8, which did help it respond better.

The difference between P8 and PP2014 is pretty big in terms of render speed and the quality that can be achieved.

No change in PP2014 unfortunately. There are a few things I'd like to see added next time round, and this would be one of them.

bagginsbill posted a node setup to extract a mask by comparing two maps from within the materials room, so might be worth doing a search under his user name with the term 'difference detector' in case that's any use.

Poser supports 16-bit displacement maps, and map resolutions of up to 8196 pixels (which would consume a lot of RAM) ....

I believe viewing distance is affected by the hither and yon dials on the cameras ....

Poser was designed for posing and rendering human figures though, so massive landscapes will be challenging! The most basic version of Vue would be better for landscapes as it was designed specifically for that purpose.

Thanks for clarifying - I should have explained what I meant better!

Eyes are like cameras in the same way that brains are like computers; that is to say, they are completely dissimilar things. It may be useful sometimes to draw rough analogies between them, but it can be misleading. For example, in the center of your vision, all the time, there is a blind spot about the size of a lemon, one for each eye (due to the optic nerve at the back of the retina). The brain seamlessly fills in this blind spot so you never notice it - eyes and brains work together to interpret the visual environment.

Back when I was learning photography in the pre-digital age, it seemed to be generally held that the most commonly used lens (in the 35mm format) for photojournalism was 35mm as it came closest to approximating the human field of view, but for portraiture it was 85mm as it was the best approximation of our perception of perspective.

P10/PP2014 implements Pixar's OpenSubDiv, which is open source (they want to establish it as a standard in the 3d industry). Pixar know their stuff :)

Out of curiosity - are you using IDL in Poser? I ask because my understanding (someone can correct me if I'm wrong!) is that IDL has a built-in occlusion effect that is better that AO as it reacts to scene lighting - so I'm wondering if the AO is really needed at all?

Look in my free stuff, snag the pdf's - demonstrates one way of approaching lighting, there are others. Hopefully others can post their setups & recommendations too.

Lighting hasn't changed between P9 to P10, but P9 improved lighting over previous versions.

I'm not aware that 32bit vector displacement support is in either version - I'd be very happy to be wrong but I reckon I'd have noticed, it's a feature I'd love to see myself ....

Attached Link: Stonemason's site

Both bump and displace maps do the same thing, they encode height information as grayscale data - each pixel has a value between 0 (black) and 255 (white). Both can be used for different effects at the same time if needed. Poser reads displacement as black = none and white = maximum (so to get gray as none, black as negative and white as positive involves the use of a math node as covered by a lot of other threads here). One of the main considerations will be whether you need to affect the silhouette of whatever you're texturing - as lesbentley shows a displacement map will alter the surface of the mesh while a bump map won't. Bit depth can be a consideration - an 8 bit grayscale map will have 256 levels between the extremes, so 256 steps from highest to lowest points. A 16 bit grayscale map however will have over 65,000 steps so is much higher quality but costs more in memory terms.

A straight grayscale conversion of a colour map is unlikely to give ideal results by itself but could make a good starting point. Bear in mind that reds tend to convert to lighter gray tones than blues, so altering the colours in the original map can have a big impact on the conversion (Photoshop's conversion dialog gives sliders for the different colour ranges). Then apart from altering the tonal balance with stuff like levels, contrast etc you could also paint onto the image, use light blurring to soften details and prevent artifacts, combine other textures - plus you can use Poser's procedural nodes like fbm, turbulence etc either by themselves or in combination with image maps.