One point that needs to be looked at with making both poser and d/s versions of things for Dawn will be pricing.

Because no matter how you look at it, there will be at least twice as much work. I say "at least" because while we may be comfortable in our software of choice, to make something in a software that we are not so familiar with will be a job and a half to say the least.

So people may have to brace themself that prices for things will likely have to be decently higher to cover all the extra work....and this means the extra time in producing the work. Afterall, that is the main expense in product production. So to pay for all the extra time, the prices will be higher. It is not simply a matter of releasing a poser version for one price and a d/s version seperatly for its own price and hope that will pay off. Because there simply isnt enough people buying sets to balance that off. Plus people will (and they do all the time) complain if they have to buy the "same" set twice for different figures....and lets face it, the d/s dawn is a different figure than the poser dawn. They may have the same mesh, but the development for them will be entirely different and unique to each.

So people should start to brace themselves that the insanely low prices they may have become comfortable with may not work out so well for Dawn if they want dual support.

Just something to keep in mind.

Rawn

Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

A spec map is quite important if you want to achieve "realism"..and you said you are a "realist.

You have to remember, that what we are working with are not "real lights" and a 3d model is not a "real person"......in order to achieve a realistic look, we have to tell the renderer what to do and how to do it. That is where the value of the maps come in to play.

With the maps we are giving the renderer the specific information it requires to make a real looking render. The reason these programs have all these different nodes is so that we can add the elements needed to bring as much realism as we can. To intentionally NOT use the nodes does not make for a better render, in fact it is giving the renderer less information to work with and as such the quality of the end product will be that much less.

All we can do is "simulate" realism with these programs..and to do that we need to give them as much information as we can.

Quote - So I tried to photoshop out the specular on the eyes.  I'm not sure if the light 'ring' effect on the bule iris is specualr or coloration of the iris.  Do these look accptable as eye textures?

The light ring on the eye could be an indication of poor circulation in the body of the person whose eye was photographed. It is usually a sign of too much salt intake affecting the body.

Yes...I took iridology back in the 90's when all those alternative healing trends were so popular :P

Quote - > Quote - I love the mesh, the joints and the modelling but why has she got red legs when the rest of her is not so red. I have looked at many a leg in my time and I have never seen a person's legs so red compared with the rest of the body. This is pet peeve of mine and I would prefer to have a more realistic skin from the get go.

Otherwise she is bang on. Good job.

The red legs come from the model reference not properly prepared for the photoshoot. If you walk around all day the blood is going to circulate down in your legs. So the red is actually realistic if she was walking around prior to the shoot. If the model does not do a lot of movement before the shoot, then you will not see this and will get references without the blood flow. However since most reference models come from 3d.sk and the way they get their models... well we won't get into that... but this is in a lot of their references, so if you don't want the red, you'lll have to do texture surgery or replace it with a different reference.

Or do some colour correction in photoshop...we do have that technology ;)  LOL

My fingers only reach past my brows and no where near my hairline...........unfortunatly my hairline is no where near where it should be anymore either :P

Rawn

Dwarven

Hulkish

Some morphs from me

Heroic

Quote - > Quote - There's a lot of pressure out there for  women to be "perfect" despite the varying definitions of it.

Yup.  In social currency, men are supposed to have wealth and power, women youth and attractiveness.

So thats where I went wrong....I was just born too pretty to make it in this world.

Looks amazing Etujedi!

Ideally you should set up the materials in each program individually....things just never transfer over well either way

Quote - I actually think that it is probably harder to create the displacement after the diffuse maps maybe someone like Rawn(who is a master of displacement could give us insight into whether he creates them first or further down the track...

Still sounds like it was a great seminar...pity I missed it.

cheers

 Pen

Hah...I dont know about master...but lord knows I made my fair share of them.

I actually do about 90% of all my texture work in photoshop, then I bring it into other programs like bodypaint to touch up things like seams.

I find photoshop leaves me with cleaner, crisper maps than what comes out of programs that paint directly on the object. But thats just me, I have seen others get great results from different programs. I am just very old-school.

Displacment maps, diffuse maps and all my other maps are all individually made. When I make my maps I usually have many different effect layers in photoshop (20 to 30 at times), and I may use one effect on the to displace things on the displacment layer, which I may also bring over to the texture layer at a much lower percentage just to give an extra hint of colour/depth to the texture. I may also bring that in to the spec layer to adjust it slightly too.

Since all the maps have to play together I make them all at the same time, so I can see how they interact and that lets me decide on which map I should bump things up or tone them down till I get the final effect I am looking for.

Achieving realism in a render is vastly different than achieving realism in the real world. No matter how we set up our scene with lighting, and no matter what effect nodes we apply, in the end we will only end up with a poor simulation of reality. The node set-up tries to emulate life, but it will always fall short. That is where a texture artist has to know what they are doing and build the texture maps accordingly to help overcome the shortcomings of this digital set-up.

So even the most photo-real texture sources will never simply give the same photoreal look renders. As texture artists we have to play with the medium and massage it in many different ways to try to give the appearance of something believably real.

Rawn

Quote - > Quote - Bet he has a horrible time buying clothing to fit off the rack.

I would hope that accounts for his present state of, um, disarray. But these days? Who knows... :)

I think he could clean up well with the right clothes:

http://gruuvy.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/despicable-me-gru.jpg

Rawn

In a world of vastly different body shapes...who can really comment on what is "realism".....

I mean really!!!

Quote - paganeagle2001 your a genius

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kb3uC1nY7Q

Your video explains it quite well...the line you have to pay attention to is "at render time"  (around 2:04 mins in)

Because at render time is where the information of the displacement map comes into play. It doesnt change the mesh, just the render information