@ockham, You are right, it was a mild case of "I expect reality to be different than it actually is", probably having to do with "learning how to see" artist talk about, I lack that lol. Thank you.

@bagginsbill, thank you! I played with the options but for whatever reason it didn't occur to me to untick volume, that did the trick and like you say, it's almost free.

Thank you everyone.

I know why people did it, I started out with Poser 4 and Poser Pro Pack which didn't have a material library, what I don't know is why people still do it. It's not like materials now days would be compatible with Poser 4 anyway. 

Also, I hate prefixes in folder names like "!!!! MAT FOOBAR" or whatever other character, it adds one more step to a product install process, renaming the folders...

Can't do without it, it creates morphs FAST, unlike wardrobe wizard that comes with Poser, speed is the one reason I use Morphing Clothes.

As far as I know, there are two ways,

1. Apply AO on each material of every figure and prop (usually with a script to automate that), leaving out the hair materials.

2. Set AO on the lights, which is easier and faster, and turn off "Visible in Raytracing" for the hair. However, if you use raytrace shadows, this means the hair won't cast shadows which might be a problem. If you use depth mapped shadows, I would go with this option though.

I exported V4 to Blender, then tweaked the vertices to follow V4 body shape, added polygons here and there if needed, and then applied subdivision to make it smooth. After that I exported it back to Poser and riged it for V4, this step I don't remember that much, I just followed one of the many clothing tutorials out there.

Because Sheeva's clothing is simple, it didn't really take long, it's just a matter of practice inside Blender to move vertices and polygons around.

I did this with Sheeva a while back, it takes a lot of work but it's quite possible. Have a look: http://foulfiends.deviantart.com/art/Sheeva-335761961

Quote - Zbrush painting is assigning colour to the vertices of the mesh, so the rough rule of thumb is 1 poly = 1 pixel. So a 4096 x 4096 pixel map = over 16 million polys. Then factor in how much of the UV space the model occupies - if it's 60% then your minimum poly count would need to be in the region of 10 million. (This is based on advice from Zbrush Central docs and Scott Spencer's book.)

V4 for example has three main maps covering head and body - to paint and generate a detailed 4k set of maps would take more polys than my system can handle (32Gb RAM) so I would have to use HD geometry. The advantage is poly count into the tens if not hundreds of millions but you then lose the ability to paint using layers and can only paint smaller areas of the mesh at once.

So the map size and way that the mesh is UV'd will indicate the resolution needed to get good maps. The advantage to vertex painting is that you don't need UV's until you want to turn the paint into a texture map; the disadvantage is system resources required for larger map sizes.

As usual, different apps and workflows have their own pros and cons.

You guys lost me there, is it possible to create a 4k texture in ZBrush for a Poser figure with less than 32Gb of RAM?

Yes, ZBrush is way out of my price range, but I was curious if it was used for that purpose.

The company I work for does have ZBrush licenses at the design department so I could play with it for a while. I know it does have a learning curve though.

How good is ZBrush for texturing? do professionals use it for that purpose?

And wow, quixel looks amazing, I had never heard of it before.

Quote - Have a look at this one. Never tried it my self since I use zbrush, but from what I've heard it's really good.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/blacksmith3d-pro-v5/102454/

That looks interesting, thanks fot the link!

Good question, I don't remeber the exact versions, they were trials I tried about two years ago, including the Photoshop 3D painting (CS4), which I found rather slow in performance, loading a Poser figure, even a few body parts, would leave the scene slowing down a lot, making the canvas unresponsive.

Has Photoshop improved the 3D preview since CS4?

I'm willing to learn a new software package that would help me improve my experience texturing poser figures, so I'd like to hear opinions about what people here have tried or are working with.

I guess something that bridges with Photoshop, exposing all it's brushes and tools would be ideal.

Can't speak for others but, for me, what makes me choose Daz figures over others is the Morphs, Morph++ offers a huge arrange of possibilities.

Also, despite not having fantasy figures in my gallery, I render a lot of Orcs, Trolls, Goblins, werecreatures and the like, and V4/M4 offer a wide variety of morphs and products for that that I don't see in any other figures.

I'd switch to Genesis, I would even go through the process of converting V4 clothing to Genesis, but despite the DSON plugin, I'm not happy with how Genesis works inside Poser.

So, I'm staying with V4/M4 for now.

Thank you.

How many IDL bounces should I be using?

Interesting, thanks for the info.

I figured you could export to some compatible format from Qmarion.

What would really be interesting is a direct interface between poser and the figure, via python maybe? This interface could account for the differences in the bone setup, which is quite different from figure to figure.

If I read correctly, the software costs 19.000 Yen, isn't that like 200$? 

I guess you're right about animations, since I don't do animations, I find this great.

Also, even if I could motion capture myself, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of poses I would like to attemp, that my body is not prepared to do (yoga, gymnastics, etc).

Wasn't there a video of how to hook the kinec with Poser somewhere?