hopeandlove posted at 6:20PM Mon, 15 February 2016 - #4255158

It's a shame that we have lost some members. We're trying everything we can to make this a GREAT and FUN place to be. Some members visit constantly day after day and some just come here from time-to-time. But, the members that come sporadic still LOVE Renderosity - no matter what anyone says! If they didn't, they wouldn't want to come here whatsoever. Am I right?

Thank you for being dedicated members to our site!

No.

I still love a couple of exclusive vendors, and check every day to see if they've released anything new. (I don't use email alerts). The site itself -- not at all. If those vendors went somewhere else, I'd feel no need to come here at all. Sorry.

Skinny girls with huge, unnaturally perky boobs look as weird to me as they would if their hands or feet were way too big. BUT... I'm a girl, and most of the naked women I see are in the locker room and showers at the gym, in real life. :D However, I do notice the occasional boob job, and for someone who's been 'enhanced', your model looks just fine in that regard. Better than V4, actually, whose chest and shoulders seem way too narrow to accommodate really big breasts. (V4's upper arms always seem to intersect oddly with big boobs, and she needs 3rd party morphs to correct this. To me, your model looks good.)

[Yes, heterosexual women do subtly check each other out/notice each other in the locker room. As long as there's no staring, no one's bothered. Shy/modest (usually younger) girls will change in a cubicle and shower in a swim suit. Or they have perfected a way to undress/get dressed while wrapped in a towel. Older women and/or actual athletes generally couldn't give a damn. And some enhanced women seem to like showing off what they paid for. :D Unless it was reconstruction after mastectomy... but this is getting way OT. LOL.]

I have a few things that don't show up. I bought them in bundles. Vendor "gifts" -- as in some BOGO sales, also don't appear. But then they also don't appear in the purchase history, either because, well, they weren't actually purchased. Other than that, I've never noticed a problem, except during those "grab bag" sales.

hornet3d posted at 7:18PM Sat, 06 February 2016 - #4253054

I now use Dawn SE as my go to figure and very rarely do I use V4 but I do on occasions. That does not mean I not interested in Project E, I have been for some time know.

Converting V4 clothes for use with Dawn is no real problem, especially with some of the products on sale to help the process. That has not stopped me buying new content made with Dawn in mind, especially the dynamic clothing that has been produced and I don't really see this being different with Project E. It is not the fact that the old clothing can be converted that limits sales, **it is the lack of variety in the clothing that limits. **

Exactly!

Do a search in the Renderosity MP for "Viking". (Yes, I know there are products available elsewhere; I bought them.) WTF? Thousands of miniskirts and bikinis, but not a single viking outfit except one for Apollo Max. It's not as though Vikings are that niche of a genre. They're pretty central to a lot of contemporary fantasy art and literature.

Anyway, V4 does a lot of stuff, but her "fixes" are far from perfect and often incompatible with each other or with popular body morphs. And her expressions have always been extremely disappointing.

Plus, erogenesis has a very rare quality as a 3d modeller: he seems to know what young female humans actually look like. Whether he knows with the same detail what middle-aged women look like is anyone's guess. But should he decide to make some more mature morphs, I suppose he could go cruising for cougars, if necessary, you know.... for the art.

I look forward to the release of PE. And I don't think promo renders are going to be a problem when it comes to marketing. Wow... the man can really, well and truly POSE his figures

Another tip for any kind of postwork: Export from Poser as an HDR file. You get a 32 bit image, which has a LOT more data to play with in a graphics program. Or for photographs, set camera to save photos to a raw format, rather than JPG. (Depending on your camera, you can get ~16 bit raw files, rather than 8 bits, which lets you adjust a much wider range of exposures and color.)

If you're getting color banding with brushes and gradients when working with an 8 bit image, just changing it to 16 bit and working in a 16 bit color space will eliminate most of those issues. You won't be adding any data to the original image, but your brushwork and gradients will have access to a much wider range of color. Do as much post work as you can in a 16 bit environment rather than limiting yourself to a mere 8 bits of data.

Not claiming this as great art -- LOL -- but it's an example of the sort of stuff you can play with. Just a quick, um, impressionistic experiment with a bunch of new brushes. Definitely needs A LOT more attention paid to brush strokes.... but cheaper, less messy, and less smelly than traditional media, in any case. Though, I miss the pungent scent of linseed oil, my hubby cannot stand it.

Combine with FilterForge filters -- I paint over the filtered render. This is more the sort of stuff I like to do: Gun wielding zombie superhero (WIP)...

Cool! I always wanted to see a more active discussion of postworking renders. There are thousands of different techniques and tips. And even something as simple as loading a render into GImp or Photoshop and adjusting the contrast/levels or curves will improve many renders dramatically. :)

Alas, much of my postworking relies on a series of PS plugins. Everything they do can be accomplished by playing around with layer styles, channel mixing, color selection, and curves adjustment and so on -- which is what I used to do. But it's so much faster to use a plugin, and most probably wouldn't care to experiment for 20 hours on a single image, creating 100 different adjustment layers to test various effects.

Anyway, I will share this: The Photoshop mixer brush (right click brush icon, and it's the last in the dropdown list). With a 0% load (and the clean brush after load option on) and sample all layers checked, you can transfer samples from an underlying layer to a new one. When combined with different brush shapes and different levels of "wetness", this basically lets you "paint" over your render on a transparent layer, and automatically samples the colors from the render below. You can get all sorts of painterly effects this way, and the result does not look like a tacky computer generated painting filter because the brush strokes are created by a human -- you.

You can also use this technique with low levels of wetness and a simple round brush to fix small errors or to smooth out artifacts in skin tone, etc. And because you're painting on a separate layer, you can adjust the opacity to your needs or erase errant strokes without messing up your render. :)

Ah, found a thread that deals with the question of "power of 2" texture sizing.

paraphrased from @4185701 -- if you use a texture with a resolution of 4000px by 2000 px, Poser will use the same memory as for a 4096 x 2048.

I assume, it would be same for a texture of 3000 by 1500. It would still use 4086 x 2048, so you'd be wasting a fair bit of memory. For 4k texture maps, maybe not such a big deal, but why waste any memory?

(More of that thread deals with whether or not square maps are necessary, due to the way GPUs process mipmaps -- at least that's my take on it. But M4/V4 textures are square, so no need to worry about that here, at least.)

Also, I learned during my search that just increasing the size of your texture map by resampling would not increase its resolution. So to keep purists happy, I guess, a 4096px texture size would be preferable to a 4000px one.

Disclaimer: That's what I got out of my quick skim of previous forum posts. If I'm off base somewhere, some please feel free to correct me. :)

I believe that you will "look" professional if the quality of your texture maps is professional. I have tons of textures for gen4 characters that are 4k x 4k, and I judge them by quality, not size. :D Many are truly excellent.

If you really feel you need a texture map to be power of 2 (and Bagginsbill has posts about this in this forum... somewhere, I think, that suggests this isn't just an old myth when it comes to Poser, but I'll be darned if I can find them, but RorrKonn may be right about the sizing being a good idea), resizing a 4000 px map to 2048 is easy. Enlarging from 4000px to 4096px might cause a slight juggling of pixel data as the program you use resamples, but it's such a small change that I doubt it would be really noticeable in an actual render.

Edit: In any case, as for resolution ratio of different maps, I'd go by the templates. If the templates use the same resolution for head and body, but half that resolution for limbs, for example, then that's the ratio I would use. (And I'd probably use power of 2 sizes cuz, well, why not?)

That render looks great! Though I think maybe the OP wants the reaching arm to be a bit lower -- unless she's reaching out to a very big wolf. Otherwise, I think it's awesome. Dynamic cloth is definitely a plus here!

Anyway, I think this is a great idea for a thread: Render Requests.

We get so many requests for models that would take months, if not longer, to create. But renders can be done sometimes in less than an hour. And very specific requests like this one are challenging, but fun, too. I'd certainly be willing to take on projects like this, when I can't think of what to render (which is frequently the case). I used to post "stock" renders on DeviantArt, and it was great to see what the photo manipulating artists would make of them. :)

PS To the OP, there are a lot of "stock" 2D assets on DeviantArt that are free to use (the artist's restrictions are usually posted with the image or on their main page). Some such images are photographs of human models; others are renders; and some may even be drawings or paintings. Lots of great stuff there.

I don't know which version of Poser you're using, but in PP2014, there's an icon above the top right of the preview screen that looks like a sphere. (There are seven icons; this is fourth from the left.] When you click it, your current camera will go into orbit selected mode [the icon will change into a sphere with an arrow around it) and it will revolve around the center of the object or figure that you have selected.

I don't recall which version this feature first appeared in, however. So you may not have it.

Ah ha! A couple of weeks ago I was exporting some assets as obj and wondering why on import they were curving in odd ways. Set crease angle to 0, and ta da! Forgot all about that.

On the smooth polys, if I need them on an asset, I'll turn them off on everything in the scene and then turn them back on the items that need it. Thankfully, scenefixer does this in one shot. Generally, though, I find I only really need smoothing on things like tree branches and so on. But this is going to depend heavily on what sort of assets you're rendering, I think. A sci-fi scene full of precisely modelled architectural elements is going to need a lot more love and care than an old stone ruin where you can go crazy with bump and displacement.

wolf359 posted at 10:27AM Tue, 19 January 2016 - #4250127

"In Poser, we do have other figures to choose from than just V4. I have yet to see what g3f adds to the table other than a FAT CHICK myself. There certainly isn't much in the way of character variety"

---

I try not to address people directly but this juvenile term "Fat chick" that you are using to try to discredit Daz is getting beyond My ability to ignore.

Here is a simple click& load screen cap of the genesi 3 Female with no morphs applied I gather from your oft repeated remark that you are a typical North America white male who thinks that any female whos back side does not look like a poorly feed 11 year old boy qualifies as "Fat"

It is due to congnitavely dissonent Standards Like yours that mental disorders Like Anorexia are Rampant in your American society.

Wolf, I frequently disagree with your posts, but.... man, I love this one.

ssgbryan, I frequently agree with your posts, but enough with the "fat chick" stuff. I doubt that most of us has any idea what you're talking about anyway. The Genesis 3 female base? That would be ridiculous, as Wolf points out above. Bethany 7? Sure, she's no stick insect, but still well below the average size for all but far east Asian females. If that equals "fat" in your estimation, you may want a bit of a perspective adjustment. I realize that most CGI users are young and male, but the range of male desire is wide enough to encompass a lot more than skeletal to seriously underfed. And you, yourself, keep telling us how much you value diversity in figures. Well, apparently you're not the only one, only some of us also value diversity in, ya know, body type as well.

And finally, not everyone is interested in rendering their sexual fantasy or the prevailing Western ideal of it. Some might even want to render people who look kinda like they do. I doubt the Poser/Daz community is made up of gaunt runway models and chemically enhanced professional athletes, so....

Edit: Also, using a physical attribute as a pejorative is just plain bad manners. I learned that in Kindergarten.

Sharp edges used to be a big problem for me. It no longer is.

For close-ups, where the edges will be noticeable, I use models with the aboveformentioned edge loops. But it's not always possible. Bump maps, displacement maps, specular maps, plus a little experimenting with the blend nodes seems to fix things for me. I always render with IDL and gamma correction turned on, and I rarely bother with smooth polygons. And that's something to watch out for with your non-color maps: a higher than 1.0 gamma setting on them can cause all sorts of artifacts if you render with GC on. But if you experiment a bit in the mat room, you can usually get a decent enough compromise.