Here are a couple of mine, with notes on techniques:

Wet Nurse http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1843351&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

Use transparency based on bump map. I rendered the picture with several levels of transparency on the dress, and postworked them. (Techniques described in test of render.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1798141&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

Took existing transparency and ran it through a map node (power?) to heighten the contrast. Removed nearly all the specular from the light to give a better underwater look.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1794569&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

As for the previous. Normally I remove "visible in ray-tracing" for stockings to avoid the sort of artifcat you see here (a result of having to large a setting on minimum ray bias), but it works really well for underwater, looking like air trapped in the panty hose. (Works just as well for above water, with water trapped.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1657400&user_id=445066&page=6&member&np and

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1657401&user_id=445066&page=5&member&np

are a sequence. You can see how I increased the density on the dynamic clothing as it got wet, and increased the shine. (If it hand't been black I would have darkened it as well.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1597520

Heavy use of dynamic clothes, and playing with transparency nodes.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1572546&user_id=445066&page=7&member&np

Lighting isn't very good, but this illustrates a nice technique. I used the diffuse input, inverted it, and turned it into a transparency map so that the patterns on her dress remain opaque.

I've posted a couple times on this topic in the past couple of years, so you might want to look for my posts. (I don't have time to dig them up myself.)

If you have a 64-bit machine with 8GB or more RAM, I strongly recommend going with Poser Pro 2012. The increase in memory accessable is phenomanal. You should be able to easily render scenes with about five times as much stuff in them as your previous version of Poser choked to death on.

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - If you have IDL available (Poser 7 doesn't, for example) than you don't really need to use IBL. However, if you have image based light kits, you're allowed to use them. I would not go to the trouble of using GenIBL to capture your world as an image for IBL, because you have IDL - IDL does that directly - uses the light from your world.

The one case I can think of why you might still want to do it is if you have a lot of geometry located "off-camera" that you want to affect the scene. I can think, for example, of one of Stonemason's urban settings, which you might want to have reflected off a polished chrome prop.

Please clarify your reference to "might still want to do this". Do what? Make an IBL of your scene using GenIBL?

Making an IBL will not do anything for your reflections. Having an environment full of objects (or a sphere faking it) will. GenIBL doesn't do that - it fakes the light, not the scene. EnvSphere can fake the scene if you want reflections and provide the light if you enable IDL.

If you're talking about photographing the actual Stonemason set as an environment, using GenIBL, and then using HDRShop to convert it to some other format such as EnvSphere Equirectangular, then you could use the photo as a stand-in for the set. But GenIBL alone will not do all those steps. It only gets you ready to use an IBL to light your scene.

You got it right what I was thinking of doing. Now that you explained that the IBL won't show up in reflections, then I can see that there is no point to do so. Thanks for saving me a lot of pointless troubleshooting.

Quote - If you have IDL available (Poser 7 doesn't, for example) than you don't really need to use IBL. However, if you have image based light kits, you're allowed to use them. I would not go to the trouble of using GenIBL to capture your world as an image for IBL, because you have IDL - IDL does that directly - uses the light from your world.

The one case I can think of why you might still want to do it is if you have a lot of geometry located "off-camera" that you want to affect the scene. I can think, for example, of one of Stonemason's urban settings, which you might want to have reflected off a polished chrome prop.

Quote - does absinthe knock one out like they say in old literature?.

Not unless you drink a lot of it. It's usually about 80 proof.

Quote - ashley.. it's all about what you want to get out of your renders.  you hit the nail on the head for some people.  what is it worth to you to increase the quality of your renders.  i spent years working with poser before switching over to daz studio for a variety of reasons.  i've had some firefly renders go overnight also.

The advantage to a Lux render that goes all night is that if Microsoft reboots your machine, you can just resume the render.

Quote - Well I started to play with Reality last night, I say play because I have yet to read the manual past the installation instructions.  The first render I tried had V4 in the scene and while the clothe textures were exported correctly the skin tone appears to be greyscale.

Take a look at the original Poser shaders. Some of the advanced shaders (particularly ones based on Bagginsbill's work) don't use the diffuse input. If the skin texture isn't plugged into diffuse, Reality won't find it.

Quote - I haven't yet seen a character render in lux that is that much better than I can get in poser alone with much shorter render times. ex - this was 3 years ago and rendered in (poser only) 30 mins.

I personally don't think that Luxrender does a much better job on facial portraits than Poser Pro 2012 with the appropriate shaders and IDL. That said, I think it does better than Firefly on scenes where realistic lighting is important, especially those with reflections, or lots of metalics, glass, liquids etc.

Great reply monkeycloud. In general the only time I've used DOF is when I deliberately want a photographic look. Which is probably about in about 1/4 of my images.

Actually, a lot of the more modern hairs can look like that if you get rid of the transmaps and apply flat shaders to them. (Or, for similar looks, just get rid of the transmaps.) You can also run the transmaps through some math nodes until they become just black and white (I think the exponent node with a small exponent?) would also work.

One trick if you, like me, start with the figures and their poses, and work in the buildings later:

Once you've gotten the figures in, and posed, use parenting. Suppose I want to have someone on a motorcycle stopped at a light staring and two people wrestling on the ground while a dog is busy eating the sandwhich one of the wrestlers has dropped. I would get to the point where I had the figures clothed and posed, and textures adjusted. Then I would want to bring in an urban set (such as one of Stonemason's wonderful scenes), and want to move everyone to a convenient corner.

So, here is what I would do. I would parent the driver to the motorcycle (or vice versa), so that I could make adjustments of the two together (by adjusting the parent.) I would parent the sandwhich to the dog, so that if I moved the dog, the sandwhich would move. I would then bring in a primitive, such as the cube, and parent the cycle, dog, and the two wrestlers to the cube.

Next I would load the urban scene in. I could then move the cube around (using the translation dials) and everyone would move together. (I could also scale all of them by scaling the cube.) I could use the rotation on the cube to line them up with the road. I would probably use y-translation on the cube to make sure the wrestlers were on the ground, then on the dog to make sure it was, then on the motorcycle.

That's my workflow, anyway.

Most of Hongyu's V4 outfits with stockings have that morph. They also have morphs on the stockings for them being pulled up by the garters.

Now I'm just waiting for someone to create a hybrid dynamic garter belt. (So that the straps don't cling to the figure when the thigh is bent. The dynamic straps would have to be attached at both ends. You could then shrink them in the y-axis to make them straight.)

Quote - Just some added thoughts:

...

1. Don't forget Depth of Field! We are not Superman and we aren't The Who - We can't see for miles and miles, without losing any perception. Our focus extends to a very, very narrow part of our vision and, at that, only within a certain range of depths. Use Depth of Field wisely and realistically in order to help produce the best, most realistic, renders.

I disagree on Depth of Field. DOF is vital to getting photorealism, where it looks like a photo. However, if you are trying to make it look like a real scene, DOF forces our attention to what is in focus. It is true that our eyes have a limited DOF, but when we are looking at a real scene, we can choose what to focus on. When I'm standing by my home office window, I can focus on the window, or on the tree outside, or on the hills in the background. Whichever of those I don't focus on is blurred, but the important thing is that whatever I am concentrating on ends up in focus. Filmmakers exploit this when they change the focal plane from the foreground to the background (for example), or use a camera with a great depth of field in order to "flatten the image".

This, BTW, is a major problem I had with Avatar. Since most of the environment was CGI, I was frustrated by the fact that my attention was constantly being forced to the actors, rather than being allowed to wander to the world. Contrast this to "Monsters Inc.", which didn't use forced DOF.

Go with Poser Pro 2012. I used to routinely have problems rendering more than three or four fully-dressed figures in a room full of props using Poser 8, but when I went to Poser Pro 2010 on a 64-bit machine (with 24 GB RAM and six-physical/12-virtual cores) I was able to manage about 20 figures with no problem. (Although the pose room was very slow.) Poser Pro 2012 is even a little better on the memory management.