Thanks for the renders Opera - they have great depth. Karl004 doesn't seem to load. Any reason for only having 1 light? 3 point lighting with the shader works well. Granite displacement: This is just a granite node fed into the displament map channel of the texture. It just adds a bit of variation and roughness the the skin - it's pretty much invisible, but you notice it if it's not there. It only renders if you switch displacement on in your render options (you have the option off). I haven't noticed any slow-down in rendertime (but I'm sure you will test it :-) For the face close-ups the granite displacement is sometimes too strong (depends on which texturemaps you are using).

Displacement in P5 is actually very flexible. There is a render in my gallery of a muscle-bound Don - which is all done with Displacement maps. Given my questionable modelling skills, the outcome isn't that good, but it proved the system. The trick is it get the right displacement maps.

OK, there is a lot going on here....A couple of points (all based on my experience, rather than what might actually be factual). 1) If you have displacement bounds (FF setting) set the the displacement value in the mat room, you should get mesh breakage (unless the mat room node for displacement are passing a value of < 0 or > 1). In general, if you've got displacement bounds set correctly, any black spots will be caused by shadowing. 2) Min shadow bias....0 has always resulted in an object self shadowing itself in my renders. 0.3-0.4 seems to be the minimum level I can use to avoid this if I'm using displacement maps. 3) poly smoothing....IMO you should always have this on. It provides a true poly subdivisional surfacing, which should get rid of the sofa edge artifacts shown above. 4) AntoniaTiger....The effect you are getting above demonstrates one of the probs with displacement mapping in general (not specifically with Poser). It is not valid to simply plug white into a displacement map node. You need to build the displacement map in ZBrush, or another similar app - which will compensate for the poly edges in the map. Alternately, using a very low color or displacement value (as the RealSkinShaders does) gets around the issue.

Ahhhhh, Rederosity ate my original msg AGAIN!!!! Anyway, thanks a heap for this info gwhicks. It may contain the breakthru I need, although I've found a workaround by exporting the mesh to another 3d app and fixing the joint there. Time consuming, but very effective (see my latest 2 gallery images). Thanks again - great, detailed info.

Well if you want more realistic skin, check http://www.users.on.net/~pkinnane/RealSkinShaderTutorial.html. Might not cover lighting or background texturing to the level you want.

gwicks, firstly, the 3rd render is nice. A great "red" transitioning between the light and dark side of her thigh. The light side is too yellow IMO, and this is generally due to too much lighting in the scene. Real skin under heavy lighting goes very white, not yellow. Also, have you got the ambience incidence effect plugged in? The dark side of her thigh is too dark. Maybe wind the ambient red up a little. One of the weaknesses of this technique is that there is no ambient red on directly backfacing (to the main light) poly's. Will find a way around this one day.... On to your problem at hand. I had never seen the effects you are getting (although I don't use r/t shadows that often). One thought that comes to mind is that it's being caused by the displacement map. Try switching that off and see if it helps. Seems to be a shadow problem, so try depth-mapped shadows instead of r/t. Also try turning up the shadow min bias.

Hey duanemoody, good to see you got some results using the tutorial. Interesting that her right cheek is yellow. This seems to be a common trait - I think it's caused by too much lighting in the scene. One day I will find a cure. And I assume you haven't plugged in the incident effect? If so, up the ambience - her lower lip is still black, and it should have a slight red glow.

Message edited on: 12/12/2004 04:45

Duanemoody, tkinter provides the interface for setting up the nodes. It's pretty much critical. In theory you could remove the front-end stuff from the script and just run with the defaults, but I doubt it's worth the trouble. Do any of ockham's scripts work on your Mac? Most of them (like the NewLightPanel) use Tkinker. Maybe my script is just using a particular function not support on the Mac which I can look into. I assume you understood that it hadn't been tested on a Mac? IM me if you want the refund. I'll be off the air for 48hrs. Will respond to any questions when I get back.

Quinlor, glad you got something out of the tut. Fresnel Effect....well at one point I had this theory that light reflected a different colour based on the angle it hit the skin (almost like the skin cells bounced back white light straight out, and red light if it hit the side of the cell. If you had a look at any photo taken with a flash, you'll see all the 45 degree skin surfaces are red, and the facing skin is white. So it all sort of made sense and I implemented the fresnel effect. Then I got more into sss and realised that's what was causing the redness, so I removed the fresnel effect, implemented the incident effect, but the renders still lacked a little something. So I added the fresnel again! The fresnel is almost impossible to see, but you notice it if it's not there.

Point taken duanemoody. I was meaning that the tutorial gives it all to you, so anyone can apply the techniques. I don't think this is the end...there is still development of this stuff that can be done - I'm not so sure I'm the person to do that, so I'm posting everything I've found so someone else can take it further. I didn't want all this stuff to die when my harddisk failed :-)

I hate the way rendosity eats your msgs sometimes :-( Opera...Good work on the bump. I've found it's easiest to fine tune bumpmaps by doing close-ups - and make sure you render in production quality - what looks right in draft will look different in prod. As for lots of lights - I wonder if this is done for historical reasons (P4 renderer). I've played with lots of lights, and they just seem to add to the render time. And for human skin, you /want/ highlight [just my opinion]. Khai...Mmmmm, I thought changing the node names might trip someone up - and it has - sorry. I tried to explain what each one was - without changing the names it got extremely confusing. Yes, one of the images in the tut has gone missing which would make it difficult. I've fixed it on the website, and added a couple more details on which P5 nodes to use. Thanks for picking this up.

Mmmmm, maybe a scrollbar on that window would help. Although I could ask what you are doing having more than 5 lights in your scene!

Opera...wow - a film. I've recently been doing a bit of animation in P5 - tried unsuccessfully to use an old version of Motionbuilder I had from a magazine to create bhv's. Anyway, for animations using this script - if your character is walking around the place, the main light direction will change relative to the character, so might give some odd looks. As a very effective workaround, I created a new point light - directly UP (ie. overhead), switched it off, ran the RealSkinShader script, specified the new above light as the main light. Then as the character moves around, the fake sss will come from above, which still looks very good. Anyway....

The reason for the bump map, is because it feeds into the specular node. So divots in the bump won't show any spec, and bumps will shine. Gives an awesome result when you get it right. So no bumpmap, no special sheen. You could probably just convert the colour map into B&W, make sure her lips are white, and that might do. I noticed on the V3 hi-res bumpmaps, the base colour varies between the head and body, which explains why sometimes there is a slight variance in specularity between these two materials.

Posermatic....I've been using the V3 hi-res maps, which have bumpmaps at 4000x3000. I've tried a number of other bump-maps and they all seem to be ok - although give slightly different looks (not better, or worse, just different). If you find you need more specularity, then go into the mat room and tweek the Blinn node for the materials you want to change (rather than changing the bump map). Where I've gone to the (my!) limits on diffuse and ambient, I think there is room for improvement in the way specular works in this system, so experiment and try different things. I don't think I'm allowed to post a 256x256 portion of the V3 hi-res maps due to copyright. As far as the ratio between B&W - you'll notice that the auto-generated noise node (if there is no bumpmap) uses light grey to dark grey, so bump-maps should be the same. Only use pure-black for creases and lines, and pure white for spots, bumps and lips.

Enough rambling from me. Hope I've answered your questions. Feel free to fire any issues my way.

Message edited on: 12/09/2004 02:02

Opera - nice one with a std P5 figure. Since P5 figures don't come with bumpmap (nor does Judy I assume), you don't get the nice specular effects. The script simulates a bump with a noise node, which helps a little. In the images above, you can see the fake sss effect on the bridge of her nose and chin. With face shots you can reduce the amount of fresnel noise, but up the redness in the diffuse incidence (by around 15-20 units). Also in the image, she looks very yellow - use white lights (maybe you've used the default here). For a closer shoot, you may want to up the shading rate to 0.2 (from 0.5) in your FF settings. In this case, there will be a small render performance hit (because of the shading rate, not the nodes). Anyway, I shouldn't be giving up my settings! The idea is for people to use it the best for themselves. Case-in-point is richardson, who has used totally different lighting and settings on the script and got a very different (better) look....dammit.

A couple of things....

1. Check your shading rate (or whatever it's called) in the FireFly render settings. 0.5 should be ok, but .2 is better. This only effects node generated textures (ie. noise etc).

2. Check the maximum file resolution in the FF render settings. 1024 is the default and not bad. Shouldn't be any less.

3. color_math and maths_function look the same, but act differently. color_maths does maths functions on a RBG color (ie 3 components). maths_function only does one component (effectly an alpha). So if you plug a colour texturemap into a maths_function, it will convert it to b&w.

4. I've just posted a tutorial on this at http://www.users.on.net/~pkinnane/RealSkinShaderTutorial.html

Message edited on: 12/08/2004 16:39