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As much as I oppose piracy, I also don't agree with inflating numbers to influence lawmakers or misrepresent the reality of what is going on.

http://www.myce.com/news/copyright-groups-inflate-piracy-numbers-30992/

When you look at the story you referenced, you'll find that they're talking about something else:

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Professors warn that piracy lost revenue figures are inflated

The "lost revenue" numbers may well be inflated -- they assume that each illegal download would otherwise have been purchased.

But the [i]extent[/i] of piracy has not been inflated.

Does piracy have an effect on media revenues? It certainly looks that way. Consider the top selling record albums of all time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_worldwide

Big selling records basically disappear in the 2000s, and piracy grows.

We know that for media types where piracy is difficult (first run movies, in the theatre, for example), spending has increased most years, even during this terrible economy, Avatar broke all records.

Nothing that's piratable is breaking any records. .  .

Quote - I guess I could look this up, but how successful was RIAA? I don't hear much about lawsuits anymore...so...was it a successful campaign to stop MP3 downloads?

Roughly %95 of digital music is pirated-- so not so succesful. data from IFPI (**International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

The single success has been with the torrents, where "sharers" are advertising their IP address. The RIAA has been able to identify a bunch of users -- or rather IPs-- and has made this mode of sharing risky for people in the US and a few other places.

There is an effort underway to attack the direct downloaders, but they're a much tougher target. Ultimately, that's where the solution lies-- Rapidshare and the others are not small fry, they're eating up a lot of bandwidth.

For 3d artists, you should know that at this point the film and tv industry is also very concerned about this, and their lawyers are working to get the same sites closed that are bugging you. You've got to figure that Disney lawyers are not dumb about this sort of thing, nor do they sit on their hands. Its just a hard problem-- back in the day, Napster was easy, they hosted stolen content on their servers in the US.

Now, you've got a web bulletin board with a link to a file on a server in some third country. Not at all an easy problem

**

JMO, but the 3D layer in photoshop CS3 was terribly implented, hardly worth the trouble.

Poser meshes are generally massive, and so if you do manage to load it, will make the whole thing painfully unresponsive.

all in all,  not worth the trouble. I gather  3d layer works better in newer versions of photoshop . . . but if you want to manipulate giant meshes and paint on them, Zbrush or Mudbox is much, much friendlier. Deep paint is an older application, used for this too.

Are you using Poser?

Have you tried the "sketch render" option?

What application is your render coming from?

Pretty much all applications have some toon shader.

They're not perfect, but they get you started.

In photoshop itself, you'll do better doing some basic work by hand.

First, identify a style you want to match. People often say "i want it to look like a cartoon" -- without really knowing what it is that they want.Is it a halftone (dots) or something continuous?

Attached Link: Ajax's ambient occlusion node dirt shader

i'm guessing that you're trying to "dirty up" poser scenes.

 a great quicjk trick for this is to use an ambient occusion pass to put dirt in the deep crevices (folds in clothing, for example).

This is easier to do in 3D studio, lightwave, or anything else that lets you"bake" an ambient occusion pass, but on the Poser board here, Ajax figured out how to use the Poser shaders to do this-- you might check out this old thread.

Attached Link: Text to shape knock out tutorial

but instead of "excluding" the knock outs, you'll want to use them . . . as they'll be the parts of letters that cover other letters.

That's the general idea. The Style will remain editable, but once you convert the text to shapes, they're no longer editable as text.

Google "Photoshop 3D texturing tutorial" -- there are tons of them . . . or just load a textured object and start texturing.

Once you have a UV mapped 3D model, you work in an image to build the texture map.

Do you have the "regular" or the "extended" edition of Photoshop?

If you have the extended edition, you can create a 3D layer from a Uv-mapped model, and start painting right in the texture map, and you can see the results very quickly.

There are lots of ways to go about it, but a common method is to use pattern stamp to clone some photographic source to your texture map.

Its worth spending a little time to learn how to get a good glow effect-- then you can tweak it precisely to your situation. 

The most obvious glow tool you have are the Layer Styles. What's great about them is that they remain "live" and editable at all times-- with a plugin, you apply it, you alter the pixels, and then you've got what you've got . . . if you decide that its not quite right, you have to go back and do it again.

Quote - Much of the trouble is you will never simulate this surface with a grayscale height map, whether with bump or with displacement.  The best you can hope for is a cratered surface, and on close inspection it will fail.  The cavities in the surface of a real sponge are very frequently going to be the same X/Y coordinates but have overlapping and different Z surfaces (relative to a given polygon).  Not a math wiz but I don't see any possible way to represent this with a grayscale map of any kind.  I think the Cellular node can probably represent this kind of surface mathematically, but the problem then is how do you shade that onto a 2d surface of polygons?

This is precisely what normal maps are for . . . They can't capture the overlap, but they do produce a much more complex (and realistic) geometry for this kind of situation.

Poser Pro supports normal maps, but I don't think Poser 8 does . . .

Ouch! Sharp edges there, YngPhoenix!

Bevel them, turn down the bump, use diffuse lighting, and you'll get something much more acceptable. Remember, sponges should have no specular highlights, no sharp light/shadow divides.

There's a teddy bear in one of the Poser freebie installs that came with a very clever falloff map driven texture that's pretty close.

this is one of those things where you're better off breaking up the problem. People often look at renders and think that the whole thing was rendered as one pass-- this is just the kind of scene where that will make you pull your hair out (and push your render times to the moon.)

for

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Something like the light from a fire reflecting on walls or characters

. . . don't use a real light. Use some stock footage of a fire as a reflection map (Poser supports animated maps).  Much, much, much faster, and will give you a more predictable result.

There's a big difference between fire a a reflection, and fire as diffuse lighting-- the diffuse lighting needs a real light, the reflection doesn't

the easy solution to this is to load new items, shutdown Poser, and restart. Then it sees the new goods. I'm on a Mac, so ymmv, but I find that trying to have Poser 8 detect and register the newly added stuff without a restart often results in a crash.

Its a minor annoyance, compared to the much faster library system, and the search function

Render dimension command is Ctrl-Alt-D on the PC

@Wolf359

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But you must remember that most of the third party render engine use their Own shader Language.
try telling poser users they have to Dump ALL of their many texture Sets for V-Chick and redo everything from scratch using Vray or mental ray shaders and watch the reaction.

Ah, this is the beauty part. Poser textures are incredibly simple, even if they're expressed in an awkward way (eg, transmaps have the unique property that no matter how many time you invert them, they're always wrong)

A Poser texture is rarely anything more than

1. transparency
2. texture
3. bump

Those three maps cover %99 of what I've ever bought from Rosity or Daz.  There is no complex BDRF, no emitters, very rare use of SSS . . . basically a Poser texture set converts easily, so long as it "plays nice" . Maybe there are a few folks doing exotic things with complex procedurals in the Materials tab, but that's very rare.

There is no renderer that has any trouble with a bump, a texture, and transmap, so long as they're output correctly-- which is what an API does, so with a decent API, there's no problem of texture conversion, in fact that's the whole point of the thing.