Ockham, thought you should know that given Mac file names often (and in my case do) contain spaces, I've had to amend the line ~~~EdPath=Parts[1] to read ~~~EdPath=" ".join(Parts[1:]) which puts the remainder of the list of space-separated substrings back into a single file path. Other than that, it works, provided I remember to put a colon in front of Runtime:prefs:Poser Prefs in the normpath line ;-)

Great! Thanks for the hint ockham. P5 on Mac uses ":Runtime:prefs:Poser Prefs" rather than poser.ini, but it looks like it has the same contents. Mine has PYTHON_EDITOR_PATH "Sirius:Applications:BBEdit Lite 6.1:BBEdit Lite 6.1" Your code fragment is exactly what I need to extract this file path. Cheers!

OK. More stuff learned the hard way. Without being finished with my testing and still not getting what I expect from displacement maps, I appear to be getting somewhat closer to the answers I need. Since my scene is all scaled up by 10 times (everything parented to a single room figure), it appears I have to multiply my displacement limits by 10 times as well! I do not have the Global Coordinates check boxes set on my displacement shader nodes, but I've had to set my minimum displacement limit to 10.0 with comparably large values on individual objects in order to render the round sofa with polygon smoothing and without the displacement clipping render artifacts. I still can't see any effect from the displacement shader itself yet, so I'm going to try boosting the scale of that next. This is getting painful. Flexible, I'll grant you, but painful nevertheless :-)

AntoniaTiger, I have no doubt that is anatomically correct, but in the Poser realm bent knee shin side-side is better (less mesh break up at the knee) represented by thigh twist IMHO. For example, if the shin bend is 90, the side-side bend zones don't affect enough of the parent thigh to avoid strange mesh effects. Whereas twisting the thigh rotates the bent shin child without any distortion while distributing the twist along the length of the thigh smoothly. Anyway, (pp.) "They're more guidelines than rules" and YMMV, but I've seen enough extreme knee bend poses with large shin side-side components leaving the calf muscle in impossible positions to want to try for something better :-).

I've taken to copying my post text to a text editor before I click any browser buttons so as not to lose what I've typed. It's seriously disconcerting to have to recreate a chain of thought or revisit a stream of consciousness to redo a swallowed message. Oh, and I abhor the fact that IK posing ignores the zeroed twist and side-side limits when turned off. GRRRR!! I'm NOT paranoid, I'm PERSECUTED !!! ;-(

Here's the other strange example of visible displacement in a reflection but not directly on the unsmoothed round sofa. The clarity is poor as the reflection is not full strength, but if you zoom in, the displacement artifacts in the specular regions of the sofa are obvious in the reflection but totally absent in the direct view. Wierd!

According to what I read in the P5 Manual, the minimum displacement bound should define the offset of an expanded bounding box [sic] beyond which displaced vertices are clipped, potentially leaving holes in the mesh. I've set mine to 1.0 and it doesn't seem to have made the black spots go away, so I'm trying increasing the shadow bias of the lights and reducing their intensity as suggested by face_off and ynsaen. I was seeing an extreme example on lilflame's round sofa until I turned off polygon smoothing for it. There may be something similar happening on the figures. The sofa also has a displacement map, but interestingly its effect is only visible in the reflections of the sofa, rather than the direct path to camera view.

Ah! Thanks face_off and ynsaen! I decided to do a bit of RTFM. Unfortunately, as usual, the P5 documentation is nothing more than a tease, hinting at answers but failing to provide them or a rational way of deducing them short of tedious trial and error. Can someone tell me what the value the render option "minimum displacement bounds" actually does. The manual implies it's measured in pixels, but that seems illogical. Mine seems to default to 0.000. I have "use displacement maps" checked (having tried disconnecting then reconnecting all the granite nodes from the displacement option in the root node for V3's material zones. Doing a test render now (tap foot. look at watch. repeat ad nauseam) with min displace bound set to 1.000! Will muck with shadow bias next render if that doesn't help. I already have my scene scaled up 10 times. I'll try 100 after that, lol. As far as the yellow tinge to the skin tones goes, I'll try setting the lights back to colourless greys.

And the biggest wish... That Curious Labs would find the wherewithall to extract their appendages from their orifices and rewrite Poser for the Mac to use MachO binaries rather than CFM so it can work with a version of Python that supports Tkinter, GRRRR!!!! NOT holding my breath.:-(

I should probably also mention a couple of rules of thumb I have learnt, abandoned to try something different, and then relearnt along the way.

[Disengage egg-sucking tutorial mode] ;-)

I always zero and lock side-side and twist rotations of the forearm and shin. This avoids nasty broken knees and elbows but makes IK generated poses an imperial sceptre up the backside. The desired pose can still be achieved by rotations of the hand(+shoulder) and foot(+thigh), since their deformation zones only affect the wrist and ankle, not the whole forearm or shin.

V3's Buttock/Thigh bends take on strange appearances if limits are not adhered to . I find the least objectionable way to bring the knee to the chest is bending the thigh alone to its limit of 65, then adding buttock bend to its limit of 30 before resuming thigh bend the rest of the way.

Unfortunately, any buttock bend deforms the groin area of the hip, resulting in even more compression of the already limited mesh in this area. I have had some success compensating for this with magnets centred at the y,z buttock bend coordinates bringing the pubic region forward as the buttocks bend. It's by no means perfect, but third party genitals can retain their shape and recognisability ;-)

And the final rule of thumb...

If in doubt, throw magnets at the problem ;-) (I wish Santa would bring me a real modelling tool...)

If anyone's interested, I'll see about bundling up the morphs into injectors.

Prefix-GeoffIX-Suffix

Message edited on: 12/12/2004 04:16

I have a bunch of multiple magnet created, joint controlled morphs that have exactly the delayed onset you're looking for. The concept has been discussed in a few tech forums. There are some excellent tutorials and I should always mention the debt we all owe to Stephen Stahlberg... The hardest part when having one limb deform another (shoulder-chest, upper arm-forearm, thigh-shin) is how to spawn the morphs without including effects of any existing JCM already on the figure. In all the JCM cases I have seen, none have any deforming effect when the figure is in its zero pose. The simplest way around this is to duplicate the magnet parented to one body part onto the other body part sharing the effect. The caveat, of course, is to have the magnet base scales identical (which they won't be by default on different body parts being derived from the size of that part). That way the to magnets will apply the same amount of deformation to the adjoining parts. Once the magnets are successfully placed to achieve the desired deformation in the maximum joint bend position, the figure can be returned to its zero pose and the morphs spawned without interference from any existing JCM. To delay onset of morphs and scale their effects, you can use a dummy (no deltas) morph with a negative initial value (the offset) depending on the actual joint rotation. The other morphs have their limits set and depend on the dummy. As the joint bends, the morph limits prevent them taking effect until the dummy offset is accounted for, then the morphs commence their deformation. In the attached sample image, (Delenhoure GND-orion1167, NB Bikini-...) the morphs include: Buttock GluteBendFix - uses Buttock xrot ThighBulge Thigh KneeBendCtrl - the dummy control morph using Shin xrot ThighBulge KneeBulge KneeCrease CalfSquash Shin KneeBulge CalfSquash Each morph was created from up to three separate magnets per body part. I have other examples of extreme joint bends on R'otica in the Main Gallery as GeoffIX

I should add that to reduce the reflection interface and transparency speckling effects that Poser's tiny coordinate system and Firefly number rounding imposes, all objects in my scene, including the lights, are parented to the room figure which is then scaled up 10 times.

I have attached my body skin material file in case it will help solve my problem. The file is probably only useful to other Mac users who can't run face_off's Python Shader Setup script, but it would have to be modified manually to change the texture, bump and the normalised light vector components to suit someone else's scene. Message2040202.txt needs to be renamed to RealSkinBody.mt5 to be recognised by P5.

Please scream at me if this is a no-no and I'll pull this post. :-)

Prefix-GeoffIX-Suffix

Message edited on: 12/11/2004 23:18

As a comparison, I disabled ray tracing for this render. Consequently, shadows are lost as they were raytraced, but so are the black spots. The skin shading appears identical in the illuminated, unshadowed areas. Can anyone suggest where I should look next? I can't find any glaringly obvious errors in my shader node setup. I'll post the material file specific to my main light direction if that's useful.

This and the previous sample are P5 production Firefly renders with raytracing on. The first has smooth polygons and texture filtering on, while the one in this post has those two options off. The change moves the spots about, so I'm not sure whether they're raytrace artifacts alone or some problem with my shader nodes.

Being on a Mac running P5 in OS X, I don't have the ability to run Python scripts that use Tkinter due to the painful CFM vs MachO python binaries issue. That said, I wish to express my extreme gratitude to face_off for making his Real Skin Shader Tutorial available for free (I would have bought the Python configuration tool in a flash if it would work on my system).

I'm having a bit of a problem though, I'm illuminating my scene with a couple of 180 (limits edited) intense (200%) spotlights inside a reflecting cube. I have recreated the Real Skin Shader manually following the tutorial, but I'm getting strange black spots around what I assume are polys almost parallel to the incident light. (See examples above and below - Nudity checked but probably not required)