Charly_99 posted at 9:55 PM Sat, 19 August 2023 - #4473055

Beautiful image! I like the caustic lighting.  Might I suggest just a little more volumetric misting to simulate particulate matter in the water? While there are places in the world where the water is this clear or even more so, many are not. If this is a sunny day, the lighting strikes me as a little dim, considering how close the surface is.

Let me particularly praise your air bubbles:  most people do not realize that an air bubble racing for the surface is not spherical but becomes flattened and distended much as you've depicted here.  They also tend to shed smaller bubbles around the edges (due to turbulence?) as you've shown. An important detail that most people would not have included as an artist, nor noticed as a viewer.  Did you model the bubble yourself, or did you have a source?  One thing is not clear: is she the source of the bubble, or did something else emit it? I wouldn't think it was her, as she has no scuba gear on.

I also like the touch of the small cloud of sediment from her left hand. Nicely done!

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 5:16 PM Sat, 19 August 2023 - #4473009

Thalek posted at 7:08 AM Sat, 19 August 2023 - #4472936

Even I can (usually) manage to put out constructive criticism without sounding like a belligerent drunk at a strip club.

.... I almost spat my drink on my monitor when reading that comparison LMAO

Ohki, I am pleased to be able to amuse.

When our fan-made Star Trek series, Hidden Frontier, was in active production, we used to receive attacks from a "professional" standin that he claimed were intended as constructive criticism.  While many of his observations were not unjustified (we were, after all, a bunch of amateurs having fun), his method of delivering them were entirely unjustified.  And some of his suggestions, like hiring professionals to replace all of us, were not only impractical, but also missing the point that WE wanted to be the ones having fun.

Not that you need my permission, but keep on doing what you have done so well for so many years.  As for La Femme, I lack the discerning eye to pick out the flaws that better artists have commented on, so she has never disappointed me.  I can't complain about what I don't notice.  :-)

shvrdavid posted at 4:25 PM Sat, 19 August 2023 - #4472999

Shiny skin is a testing trick I use. It makes things like normals/bump map issues stick out like a sore thumb....

Clever idea!

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 7:06 AM Fri, 18 August 2023 - #4472850

Charly_99 posted at 4:22 AM Fri, 18 August 2023 - #4472843

Really? Just a toon figure again? What happened to the legs? Aside from the fact that they look like baseball bats, you can shoot a soccer ball through them. Even I, as an absolute dilletant, would do better with Blender or Z-Brush. Honestly, it may be that some are into such thighs but so far off the path??? What use is the most beautiful skinshader and the coolest wightmapping rig when a figure like this is about to start? Who does this? I would be interested to see the facial expressions of Ali, Vyusur and Erogenesis when they see this doll. Certainly there will be some who will take offense at my criticism, but there will also be those who will agree with me. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that so many are switching to AI. She can do it better! It doesn't surprise me with such a character who is "put on his feet" like this.

You realize the morph tools are right there to give a figure whatever shape you want.

I'm getting tired of this entitled as* attitude here. If you don't like a figure, don't use it, simple as that, don't be rude pr*cks to the people who made it and like it. I don't exist to cater to anyone specifically.

BTW, "What use is the coolest weightmapping rig": basically the greatest use. Shapes are easy as all heck to change, you need the weightmapping and the topology working for you though. Even super easy to transfer the new shape into all the clothing for that figure.

You can go ahead and use AI if you'd wish. But next time you want someone else to do something the way you want, you might consider not sounding your request like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum.

(And what's most hilarious to me is that if I posed her legs closer a bit, she'd look exactly like some of the legs in the photo you've shown. But go off, I guess.)

Well said!

Even I can (usually) manage to put out constructive criticism without sounding like a belligerent drunk at a strip club.

Charly_99 posted at 2:56 PM Sun, 13 August 2023 - #4472499

ghostship2 posted at 2:29 PM Sun, 13 August 2023 - #4472496

Post FX de-noiser and exposure used

Cooool, looks great. I would have the matching drinking glasses ... somewhere on the previous pages of this forum.

Good suggestion, but the glasses wouldn't normally be stored with the bottles.  For your suggestion, a couple of bottles on a table with some glasses awaiting might be a slightly better pose.

That's just me nit-picking, though.  Sorry.

TheAnimaGemini posted at 7:37 AM Fri, 4 August 2023 - #4471871

Well, theold city is still beautiful, but like every bigger city in France is going down too. We live in the campange, so here is nice. Unfortunatly we move back to the Capitol in 2 weeks. My MIL has Alzheimer , she can not stay allone anymore, so I will take care of her, since I am the only lazy who did not work in the Family LOL. 

Just 8 months ago we moved here from the Jura..in my past live I was probably a Nomad ...lost count how many times we moved the past 15 years. 

I was caregiver to my wife for four years.  The last six months of her life, she had to go into a skilled nursing facility because it was no longer possible for a single person to take care of her, and I had no assistants.

I wish for you strength and peace for the most loving task you will ever perform for somebody.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 7:12 PM Tue, 25 July 2023 - #4471116

I was given permission to post sneak peeks of LF2 here and there so here, have this.

It's nothing special, just me testing various things (new P13's HDRI support, LF2 Pro included morphs and skin variations, and a pose set for her that I'm working on).

Looks pretty good to me, but admittedly, I am not as sharp-eyed as many others, even when my glasses are up to date. I was not able to spot any problems with the previous version, either, so my endorsement is possibly less useful than some.

shvrdavid posted at 1:55 AM Tue, 25 July 2023 - #4471045

In Cycles and Superfly, half is no displacement. (median) So if your range is 0 to 1, 0.5 is no displacement. 0 is max negative displacement, and 1 in max positive. 

Ahhhh!  I always disliked that about bump mapping, that it started at the surface, and had no option for burrowing in, as the settings in a certain free competitor can. It struck me as losing half the usefulness of the map.

Thank you for bringing an old dilettante up to date again.  Once I get the thing remapped again, I shall certainly try that.  (I spent much of today simply estivating, as my air conditioner is slowly dying, and it was, IMHO, too hot for anything requiring finicky detail, and patience.)

So, if I understand what I read through a now pounding headache, would you use this to reproduce the highly reflective safety stripes on clothing?

nerd posted at 6:51 PM Mon, 24 July 2023 - #4471031

This is fixed and in beta testing. The fix will be in the next service release.

That's good to hear!

Is there an estimate on the release date, or is that still in flux?

DownTown37 posted at 8:22 AM Mon, 24 July 2023 - #4470989

This is a "work in Progress" in combination with the Owl Helmet. The Ork Harpy is a Unimesh single skin Poser figure using own tools to create the gigging until Poser 13 will have them Released.

Standalone Figure Rigged Posed and Rendered in Poser13 "Superfly"

Whoah! Impressive!

ChromeStar posted at 6:38 PM Sun, 23 July 2023 - #4470955

Thalek posted at 7:21 AM Sat, 22 July 2023 - #4470816

I liked the displacement mapping better, as it gave a rougher appearance, but I couldn't figure out how to keep the surfaces from floating above the seams of the object.

The surface might float because there is some positive displacement pushing the surface out. Since you only want negative displacement for the holes, you could use a Math node to subtract some value from your displacement map. I'm not sure how the values map to the gray scale but you should be able to come up with a decent answer with a little trial and error.

May also need some subdivision if you use superfly, but that looks like firefly to me.

Well, almost all of the suggestions the two of you made helped, but also opened another can of worms. Haven't tried the math node yet, as it was my understanding that the displacement range was 0-255, with 0 (black) being the original surface and 255 being a displacement above the original surface. I will try it eventually, though.

Added a gamma correction node, added an HSV desaturation node, and used subdivision . It was the subdivision that opened the can of worms, as the cuboctahedron looked more like a sphere even with just one level of subdivision . So I added a small chamfer to round all of the edges a little. This not only made subdivision behave better, it looked more like the original.

It also wiped out my original unfolded UV mapping, so I now have to do that over with the somewhat more complicated geometry. (Took the original 14 poly object to something like 300 polys. ) But the subdivision made the displacement map look pretty good.

Thank the deities for incremental saves, so the new modified geometry is saved,  and I only have to fuss with the remapping aspects.

Thanks!  I'll try looking into both of those possibilities. It seems to me to be very likely that the gamma is incorrect., as I didn't bother checking it. And I haven't played with subdivision at all yet.

"Are you going on a long voyage?  I mean a REALLY long voyage, like traveling to another galaxy? And your ship cannot possibly hold enough supplies to keep 400  crewmenbers fed for 100 years?  You don't have a personnel problem, you have a storage problem.

"Do you have a remote colony that hasn't received its annual shipment of vital supplies, and you're worried you might have to kill off half the colonists to keep the other half alive?  You don't have a logistics problem, you have a storage problem.

"Do you just plain come from an overly large family and want some space and alone time for yourself?  Well, you DO have family problem, but you ALSO have a storage problem.

"We at the Andromeda Cuboctahedron company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kelvan empire, have developed a technology that allows us to compact down any living thing into these attractive, but unfortuantely slightly fragile cuboctahedra, with a nearly unlimited shelf life. Let us solve your storage problems by helping your store your surplus population in a volume of less than 1,000 cubic centimeters at a fraction of the cost of keeping them supplied with necessities, until such time as they are needed again.  And if it turns out they are never needed again, the cuboctahedra readily crush into a fine bio-degradable powder."

"Act now, and your galaxy can join the Kelvan Empire for free as a protected client state that can, in a few thousand years, earn a full citizenship in the Empire."

Combination reference and texture photo, from the TrekCore media site:

I liked the displacement mapping better, as it gave a rougher appearance, but I couldn't figure out how to keep the surfaces from floating above the seams of the object.

And I had repeated incidents where somehow, the normals of some faces got reversed, a fact I usually discovered after saving the object and trying to bring it into Poser.  I quickly found that Hexagon has a feature/bug, where if you change the normal of a single face, all of the faces of the object lose their material definitions. (At least the actual material definitions survived, but all of the list storing the actual polygon/material assignments emptied itself.)

At least the over all UV mapping stayed intact, but even there, the UV map image saved to disk, while LOOKING like the UV map in the program,  had the actual mapped locations flipped vertically. In order for the texture map and the UV map to work together, I had to flip the texture map vertically.  And realizing that I was going to have an unknown period of further study to try and duplicate the achievements in Blender, which had already taken far too many DAYS, not hours, in Hexagon, I decided to temporarily stick to Hexagon to finish this ridiculously easy (in theory) project, instead of changing horses in midstream.

That said, I have only one more modeling project to accomplish in life, and I have to convince myself that it's worth teaching myself Blender, and how to accomplish the same things I learned to do with Hexagon in Blender's far superior environment, for just one last project.

I knew I was not particularly skilled in 3D modeling (which is why I will be using Joe Quick's supersuit developer kits for suits, gloves, and boots and then reshaping them), but this experienced with the cuboctahedron was downright humiliating. It makes me wonder if I've always been an idiot, or whether these things are a sign of slowly developing cognitive impairment.

Which is probably too much drama and TMI for everyone else here.  I'm an over-sharer; sorry about that.

Y-Phil posted at 2:43 PM Thu, 20 July 2023 - #4470672

I stumbled upon a series of Maddelirium's Vic4's and some of them are quite gorgeous, such as Clarisse and her Steampunk style  I know that her hair isn't 100% correctly set with the hat but that pleases me as is.

Is that the famous Borg collective member, 7 of 1899?