Note that the pupil size is NOT changing. The shape of the cornea and resulting distortion from refraction is making it seem larger/smaller. The number underneath them is the setting of my 'Optics' dial. The default, 0 is totally parallel. I have no clue which is 'correct' and don't really have the time to test it at different angles/scenarios.

Here's an animated .gif hosted offsite since for some reason .gifs posted on Rosity don't animate... Cornea Shape

In an ideal world the cornea should be bulging outwards from the eye, but in 3D this is a problem since then the eye is nonspherical and clips through the eyelid in any eye pose other than 'wide-eyed looking directly at the camera'. I don't see eyelid:cornea collision detection becoming a thing anytime soon so this is the best compromise I think.

I remember spending an entire day trying to set up a transparent plastic item in Firefly eons ago and I could never get it to look even remotely right. It took me about 5 minutes to get glass looking right in Superfly by just hooking up the GlassBDSF shader and setting the IOR to the real-world equivalent.

Give me a few min and I'll render out a comparison for you.

I'm not even sure Firefly supports proper refraction ? TBH after using Superfly exclusively for the last half year or so, there is no way I'd ever go back to Firefly.

-50 or +50 is way too much - are you looking at the wireframe from the side to see what's going on when you turn the dial?

Optics moves the INNER surface, since moving the outer surface of the lens will intersect the outer surface of the eye.

-1.4 is pretty much the limit, since at that point it's so convex that the inner surface is nearly touching the outer.

+2 makes a huge convex lens

-50 has the inner convex lens surface protruding 2" out from her head O_o

I'm not a fan of setting limits on dials (especially on experimental stuff like this) because I figure that someone out there may want to use something in a way I didn't foresee.

operaguy posted at 1:27PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344757

Thanks to Blackhearted and Glitterati3D for guidance on rendering with Superfly. I already had a failure! Reproduced Glitterati3D's lights/settings exactly, and it looks awful. I am doing something wrong. I don't want to hijack this thread, so if I continue my attempt to figure out SF, I'll start a new topic here.

:: og ::

I made a Basic area light setup similar to how I usually render all my images. There's also a 4-sided backdrop in there. The floor is slightly reflective, you can easily change it to just a flat color/grey, or apply a clouds shader to it to give it the look of a traditional backdrop:

Superfly Area Light Setup

I move the lights around depending on the camera angle and pose doing lots of fast preview renders until I get a nice flattering lighting setup, then I render the large final render, after which I'll go over and Area Render any problem areas or eyes, etc.

Really there's no mystery, all you need to get great renders out of Superfly is practice and patience. I don't just click a light setup and hit render, I'll tweak the lights and move them around sometimes rendering upwards of 50 preview renders until the light falls exactly the way I want it to. And I'm not even a very technical guy, just stubborn and persistent and I'll poke and prod at things until the results are the way I want them to be. Incidentally every single thing I used in my promos I made available in my store, from the exact lights to the exact poses. The presets in Superfly Studio are my gallery render lights saved as a preset. The props and things I plan on putting in freestuff.

The cool thing about Superfly and area lights is that you can apply most traditional photography principles to it, and vice versa - if you don't typically pay attention to lighting during RL photography you certainly will after spending time setting up lighting in Superfly. If you just google for any softbox tutorial you can apply that exact same knowledge to a Superfly render setup and get predictable results.

BlackTalonArts posted at 12:06PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344746

I had asked in another thread about the skin texture you’re using Blackhearted, is it something you will be releasing or is it based on the default La Femme’s texture from Rhiannon?

I’m definitely in hopes more vendors come out to support her as she’s the best looking stand alone figure for poser I’ve seen to date especially with BH’s HD morphs. Well done, I hope she finds success.

Thanks. And yes - I'll be releasing a texture/character set but I'm taking my time with it to make sure I get it right.

As for the HD Morphs - I never actually considered this until a few people asked me in PMs about it: there's no 'preset' character included because I figured that this time around I'd give everyone the flexibility to create something to their own tastes. So if you don't like the muscular quadriceps, for example, then simply don't load them or turn the dial down to a lower strength. So for anyone wondering, virtually all of my renders are all of the HD Morphs set to 1.0, and usually the MegaLashes and BreastsFlat morphs as well. Ladies with small boobs need representation too ?

ReggieKowalski posted at 11:37AM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344242

Imagine my drop from joy to disappointment on realising that the Fitting Room is only available in Poser 11 Pro!!

I guess I could upgrade but that seems a bit OTT.

AFAIK standard Poser 11 has cloth and bullet physics... if it's a simple leotard why not just set it up as dynamic? The results can potentially be far better than with a conforming item.

3D-Mobster posted at 10:39AM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344735

But all in all a very good character which is well needed for Poser :) And again really hope they fix the fingers and add a high dense mesh as well, as it would make her a lot better.

So congrats to those that made her, really well done. :D

Thanks!

A higher density mesh would defeat the whole purpose, and would pretty much nuke all existing content. That is precisely why there are levels of subdivision in poser, an HD morph capability, normal maps, etc. There's absolutely no reason to have a higher resolution base mesh when it's literally one click away. I ordered a mic so I don't have to use my laptop's tinny built-in mic, when it gets here I'll do a tut on making HD morphs.

There are several morphs included that can adjust the hand shape. The hands can be curled a lot more than existing figures because of the metacarpals. Once you start using the metacarpals you'll wonder why figures haven't had them until now.
Subdivision slightly reduces the diameter of the fingers, but I think that people have been looking at V4's horrifically sausageous fingers for too long. Looking at V4's hand is like looking at a bunch of bananas:

Cutaway render of the mesh corneas:

The optics morph affects the shape: Default is parallel, dialed into positives it increases thickness and makes it a convex lens, dialed into negatives it makes it concave. It's more or less parallel but if you want to play with the optics - which dramatically affects the refraction - then go for it. My first prototype cornea was a slight lens shape and when I rendered it the effect was way too pronounced so I made these adjustable.

According to https://pixelandpoly.com/ior.html the index of refraction should be around 1.38

[operaguy]

Lit with white primitives with ambient turned on and a dome overhead. No lights at all.

The primitives + ambient works, but in most situations there's no need to do that anymore with area lights giving you far more control and less noise for the same amount of samples.

Superfly is great, you just need to learn to tweak the settings properly. The default lighting is absolute garbage. I'm not really a fan of IBL so I can't offer any advice there, but area lights work excellent in Superfly. You can follow just about any real-world photographic tutorial and replicate the lighting in Superfly and get similar results.

Softbox Lighting Tutorial

Delete all the lights in the scene. Start with one area light (which is basically a softbox), set the render to a small size (400x400), low samples, and disable advanced raytracing like caustics/volume/transmission and even transparency, and just move the light around (in the beginning you can use point at -> and point it at your figure's head) and do quick 1-minute test renders until you get the lighting the way you want it. Then you can add a fill light.

I'm not going to lie, a quality render takes hours, but it did so in Firefly as well except with (technically) inferior results, and it does so in Iray as well. Preview renders at low settings are the key: I'll spend time in a small preview mode rendering a dozen quick grainy renders until I get the lighting exactly the way I want it, then when I know what the results will be like I'll bump up the settings and let the render run for hours while I watch a movie or sleep. You should never be 'experimenting' with large renders at high settings: your preview renders should already give you a very good idea of exactly what they're going to come out like.

Progressive rendering is great because you can let it run and see the render taking shape, and stop it if you notice any problems.

Also you should be abusing the hell out of the Area Render tool. There's no need to render a 2000x2000 image with caustics and 16 transparency bounces. You can render a scene at relatively low settings and then go back and render complex parts like eyes with a higher setting. Same goes for if you screw up and have a foot off the ground, or a spot of pokethrough or other problem: just render that small area. In older versions of poser you could see a line around where the Area Render rendered something, but now it blends it seamlessly into whatever render you have selected when you use Area Render.

I've been rendering my images at very low settings, typically like this:

Preview:

Render:

Area Render (Eyes, troublesome hair spots, etc):

It may be slower running the render with your CPU instead of a GPU, but that can be tweaked as well and on modern processors shouldn't take too much longer. If you do have a sluggish computer or laptop then you can set things up via quick preview renders, then before you go to sleep hit the render button... and wake up to a finished render.

So these are very experimental, definitely not ready to be rolled into the base. Something for the shader gurus to play with.

..but here's a set of mesh corneas for LaFemme. They smart prop to the eyes automatically. There's an 'Optics' morph in them that adjusts the lens concave/convex -- by default they should be pretty parallel. There was a small black ring around the edge when rendering. Making the edge of the lens sharper, disabling smoothing, subdivision, etc didnt solve the problem so I sunk them a little into the sclera and they render perfect.

LaFemme Experimental Corneas

I don't really have time to render these out fully since it's past 3am and I'm about to fall out of my chair. cheers!!

duanemoody: Here is a flat iris morph injection for you:

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/rrfilelock/download.php?fileid=53163&key=2202

The reason that virtually everyone models the iris concave is because that's what renders well in the typical user's hands. A flat iris usually looks awful when rendered.
For example the LaFemme eye shaders with refraction look best by far, but if you load them in with typical Superfly settings they're going to look awful. Now imagine eyes with corneal lenses being rendered at the default 3 bounces - they're just going to render black. So there's a reason things are the way they are.

That said, I'm happy to experiment with this stuff -- hang on a few more minutes ?

DreaminGirl posted at 12:33PM Tue, 29 January 2019 - #4344533

Hey Blackhearted, since you are here, can you tell us if there are any plans for a male figure of the same caliber? What I need most of all is a decent male

Male figures are an iffy market. Ideally there should be a matched pair of figures, but when male products reach 10% of the market of female ones it's natural that a female figure is first out the door. Ladies first ?

Khai-J-Bach posted at 12:09PM Tue, 29 January 2019 - #4344499

DreaminGirl posted at 4:15PM Tue, 29 January 2019 - #4344497

Well, colour me surprised, Rendo decided to make their own figure instead of supporting PE. Looks promising so far, and with decent vendor support. Now I guess all bets are off..

really? hope this ain't another Renda....

I was one of the people badly burned by the Renda thing (I ended up making a GND style addon for a base figure that poofed the next day). I guarantee this is not another Renda.