Miss B posted at 11:04 AM Sun, 11 June 2023 - #4467619

Thanks for the update Thalek.  Much appreciated.

No problemo!

On a whim, I checked the Poser 13 content files at PoserSoftware to see if they had been changed.  They have.

On June 2nd, and June 6th, a total of three files were changed.  P6 James, L'Homme, and La Femme file 1.

As   I hadn't heard anything, I figured no one else had, either.

JanusJsenwark posted at 7:59 AM Mon, 29 May 2023 - #4466656

The carpet again... the HighRes tablecloth... the ball... doesn't look the way I wanted it to, but I'm out of breath now. Maybe later...

Thank's TheAnimaGemini...

That is one versatile carpet!.  And your uses of existing primitives is quite creative, as well.

hornet3d posted at 5:34 AM Sun, 28 May 2023 - #4466591

At my age, to call some that was created around 2017 seems laughable, but I guess the Poser world does not conform to reality.  This is old content that I purchased in 2017 tweaked to take advantage of some of the improvements in Poser 13.

 

That is beautiful, and very detailed.

JanusJsenwark posted at 4:47 AM Sun, 28 May 2023 - #4466589

Lot of VinceBagna shaders in action...

Optix Ultra Caustics - Full denoising,  a bit gamma, contrast and saturation..

Daylight only 0,6 denoiser.

i wish i have the money to build this in reality... Ok :) The lamp a bit higher... 

Ca. 210 seconds to render in Ultra Caustics with the RTX 4070 ti.

Wow, that is beautiful!  And I know my old jalopy ain't gonna do it in 210 seconds.

RedPhantom posted at 4:44 PM Sat, 27 May 2023 - #4466550

I can’t say I’ve ever run into problems using pngs. Maybe the problem was with older versions. I didn’t start until p6. I always assumed the prolific use of jpgs was because they were much smaller files and storage was pricier. 

I've had only minor problems with PNGs.  Ironically, the ones where I noticed that some PNGs don't have alpha channels were thumbnails for some Poser products or freebies. Senosoft's P3DO has a function in its image converter plug-in to repair the problem. And GiMP lets you add alpha channels to images. I think it also offers the chance to save them or not when exporting them, but I never use that feature, so don't quote me.

JPGs dominated partly because they were the first of their kind, and had little competition for a decade or more.  When storage, including memory, was indeed smaller and pricier. But their compression is "lossy", and PNG's isn't.  Or so I'm told. So you apparently can have raw data quality images even with compression.

hborre posted at 10:25 PM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466512

RAMWorks posted at 11:07 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466447

I'm guessing this may be a good way of applying makeup elements as well?  BUT this is for Physical Surface Root Node so how would one do this using Cycles? 

There are 2 methods of doing this with Cycles, depending on the type of image maps you are using, either JPG or PNG.  The PNG format will have an Alpha channel that you can conveniently use as your transparency map in such an arrangement.

To be a bit more precise, a PNG image CAN have an alpha channel, but not every PNG is created with one.  If the PNG image does not have an alpha channel, the JPG style shaders have to be substituted, or the image modified in GiMP or PhotoShop to add an alpha channel.

---

hborre posted at 1:01 PM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466458

The only issue I see in this arrangement is that the intended transparency map is still exhibiting a gamma correction of 2.2.  You should run the color image through a gamma node with a setting of 1, the way a proper transparency map should be.  Someone try making this adjustment and see if it makes any difference in the render.

Okay.  Thanks!

RAMWorks posted at 11:07 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466447

I'm guessing this may be a good way of applying makeup elements as well?  BUT this is for Physical Surface Root Node so how would one do this using Cycles? 

It should work just fine for makeup.  I don't know enough to advise you on using the Cycles Root, but I got the impression it's more powerful, which implies it should be doable.  I'm a dilettante, so I've basically got twenty years of experience as a perpetual newbie.  [wry smile]

ghostship2 posted at 10:37 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466444

Just a handy tip from your uncle Ghostship: You might want to de-saturate and lighten the tattoo so it looks natural and "under" the skin. You can do this in Photoshop or by using a HSV node. On the old shader I used to use I achieved this look by plugging the natural skin map into the Separate RGB node instead of  the map with the tattoo. If you use a seperate tattoo layer something else has to happen. Notice that the colors and blacks are not deep or saturated, you would not expect that from a real tattoo on real skin. Also make sure that the tattoo layer is using the same bump map and values.

I knew you'd be able to improve it!  As my original thought was simply to make the new layers available as a series of freebies, sans Shana's artwork, I didn't want to perform any operation that altered the original artwork.  I wouldn't be able to distribute the original artwork as modified, of course.  So, if I was to modify the hundreds of layers (I get shaky thinking of doing that again), I'd probably seize upon your suggestion of the HSV. Uh, will I have to use different HSV settings for different skin colors?

And I will probably deliberately do it the wrong way where bump maps are concerned, at least if I'm distributing as freebies:  if any character texture used a different bump map or different settings, I would then need to make a new layer for that character texture.  As bad as they are now, they are "universal" for a given character geometry. Any V4 layer will cheerfully work on a different V4 character texture. Although I should probably incorporate your comments into a readme file to remind myself that the layers can be further improved with your tweaks.  What I might not want to do for two hundred and fifty layers, I might be willing to do for a specific scene. Especially if it involved closeups where my quick and dirty techniques might become more painfully obvious.

Thanks very much for the observations and advice!

Y-Phil posted at 1:33 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466414

Thalek posted at 12:55 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466412

I cannot remember if I ever posted my final version of the Material Layers overlay I decided upon or not.  It went from elegantly simple to somewhat complex to elegantly simple again, with the aid of @Richard60's logic nodes.  So, while I wait for a demo image to render, here is what I discovered about creating tattoos or "decals".

Excellent! It can be used to add a logo or whatever picture to a cloth, too.

Absolutely.  You can put a slogan on a t-shirt, a flag on a spacecraft, lettering on a sign.  If it needs to be shiny and plastic-like, turn the roughness down. On skin or velvet or non-shiny leather, it needs to be rough.  It appears to be much more versatile than the original technique, wherein Shana used Python scripts to create complex shaders to put tattoos on figures.  My material layers files, of necessity, still attach to specific materials like an .mc6 file, but it might be interesting to see if they can be reworked to be generic shaders like an .mt5 material file.

I don't doubt that someone like BagginsBill or Ghostship could create more sophisticated versions that would be more accurate in simulating a given appearance. But for a number of applications, this technique might work just as well.

I cannot remember if I ever posted my final version of the Material Layers overlay I decided upon or not.  It went from elegantly simple to somewhat complex to elegantly simple again, with the aid of @Richard60's logic nodes.  So, while I wait for a demo image to render, here is what I discovered about creating tattoos or "decals".

On the PhysicalSurface root node,  Color is set to white, Transparency is set to 1.0, TransparencyMode is set to Transparent, and Roughness is set to 1.0.

The image map node is absolutely normal.  Load in your compatible tattoo image on a white background, and plug it into Color.

The magic happens in the Cycles/Conversion/Math node.  This is a binary comparator, with the image map also plugged into Value1, the threshold is controlled by Value 2 and is usually set to 0.5, and Value 3 is 0.0.  The math operation is set to Greater Than.  This creates our transparency map even with colored images.

In the Greater Than operation, it's a comparator. It outputs, for each pixel, either a 1 (pure white) or a 0 (pure black). This is necessary, because any black that is not 0,0,0 in its RGB components makes the image slightly transparent, and even blacks in the tattoo image come out a dark brown instead. The threshold value in Value 2 controls how aggressive the box is at converting the image into a texture map. Any image pixel in the image map that is greater than the threshold gets forced to pure white.  Any pixel that is equal to or below the threshold gets forced to pure black and becomes part of the transparency mask.

The reason for adding a threshold control is that a lot of tattoo art contains colors, some of them pastels or light greys.  If you want them to show up, you need to set the threshold higher so that those parts of the tattoo DO NOT become transparent, as they would normally. (Some of the tattoos I "converted" had greys so light, I didn't see them because they looked white.  Assuming that the artist wanted them visible, even though I couldn't originally see they were there, I cranked the threshold up. And some had pastel colors, which made it easier to tell that parts of the tattoo had gone missing.)

The only flaw to this method is if you need the edges of the mask to be softer or blurrier; this technique results in sharp edges. If you have a way of processing the image that will soften and blur the edges using only black, that would work.  Anti-aliasing, which would create shades of grey, won't work.

And the jet engine whine of my fans appears to have quit, so my render is now available.  After all, it's supposed to be mostly about rendering in Poser 13.  (Everyone get their notice that a new update has been posted?)

The outfit was intended as a compromise between maximum available skin to show tattoos, and still preserve a modicum of modesty.  Using multiple material layer overlays, I added about thirteen tattoos to the sides we could see, without a single line of Python code. The tattoos can even overlap if that is desirable for some reason. Make certain that the one you want most visible in that area is the last tattoo you install; lower layers can be seen with some difficulty through the upper layers, according to the experiments I've done so far.

wimvdb posted at 12:25 AM Tue, 23 May 2023 - #4466202

PDB has stopped working for me a few years ago. I tried to contact Rocketship at that time, but the company had disappeared and email to support gave no reply. It was a very nice search tool for Poser runtimes. 

I have gone back to Poser Search, which is pretty fast and with the exclude option (- preceding the exclusion) is pretty usable now.

I don't know if I'd be able to help you if you wanted to try again or not.  I have all of my old correspondence, and I wrote up some of it up in an all too brief troubleshooting guide for when I forget what I did last time. I should probably wait until I've gotten my own problem fixed before offering help, lest I succeed in fixing an old problem only for the latest one to crop up in their catalog.  I should also probably stop posting this stuff here, as it has little to do with Poser 13 renders save as an explanation as to why I haven't done any lately. The topic occupants have been quite tolerant of my off-topic posts---so far.

I should look into Poser Search as a backup plan, though.

hborre posted at 1:00 PM Mon, 22 May 2023 - #4466133

"Try setting back the Windows compatibility one or two versions and see if that corrects the issue.  That should bypass any Windows 10 update that may be interfering."

Tried Windows 8 and Windows 7 without good results.

I revived a zombie thread about PzDB problems a day or two back, in faint hope that I can stop clogging this one and get an answer.  (Would anyone be offended, should I get a useful answer, if I shared a link to that post here, just to keep anyone interested in the loop?)

JanusJsenwark posted at 9:45 AM Tue, 23 May 2023 - #4466221

Es ist wunderbar zu wissen, das es Menschen wie dich auf diesem Planeten gibt....

You honor me.  I know several people whose opinion of me is not nearly as favorable as your.  [wry smile]

I hate to summon the lightning and spark some life into a zombie topic, but this is the most recent one I can find, and it is faintly related to my current problem.  At least, to the extent that PzDB has abruptly stopped working for me.

Looking about the 'net for MS Access, I see hints that a Windows 10 update might be at fault.  PzDB runs, and lets me look at my database, do searches, drag and drop things in Poser as usual.  I can add and remove keywords from a character. What it won't let me do is update even a single record, let alone a catalog. When I try, it tells me that perhaps I didn't specify a database on the command line because it can't find it. Then it crashes and disappears.

I've done all the standard fixes and troubleshooting: use of the Compression/Repair program, backing up my files and  re-installing PzDB, formally uninstalling PzDB and re-installing it, formally uninstalling it, editing the registry to remove the entries, and re-installing it, and even installing it on a different hard drive. I've tried unsuccessfully to roll back the latest Windows update, and even, at one person's suggestion, tried running it in compatibility mode for Windows 8.

I haven't heard from my friend at Rocketship for a few years, and I have exceeded my level of technical expertise, and all of the helpful suggestions he's made over the years.

Now it's time to ask everyone else, as I've exhausted my resources, and I'm developing tunnel vision, unable to think of new possibilities to try.