Hi All, I only just caught this thread. Thanks to Richardson for the info above. A couple of points.... 1) operaguy, I'm not sure you would call this "radiosity". The whole thing is built around faking subsurface scattering using some maths. There is a tutorial the concepts in the product readme (which you can download from the product page). This reveals all the secrets. And no, deployment of the product doesn't seem to add significant time to the render. Off the top of my head, maybe 10-20%. 2) duanemoody, good points. Firstly, this isn't a new texturemap. It's doing things to existing texturemaps. However, yes, if everyone uses it with the same settings, similar results will be posted. But hey, it's progress :-) Secondly, the uniform freckles. I absolutely agree with you, and originally I planned to provide a map for freckle intensity. However, I decided instead to add fresnel freckles, which are not uniform. So you can switch off the uniform freckles, and turn up the fresnel freckles and get some interesting effects. All the tech included in the scripts is the results of my testing different concepts over about a 6 month period. I'm sure this can go a lot further. It needs more people experimenting and discovering new techniques. Releasing the script (and the tutorial which I will post in the Poser forum today) is really about getting this in the public domain and hopefully other people will have new ideas about how we can get more realistic renders from P5.

I used Blender a fair bit about 12-18mths ago. I even wrote some python scripts to import poser figures - so it can be done. From memory, the easiest way to get the skeleton in is to export your poser model (with the joints zero'ed) in bvh format - you should be able to import that into blender (or is that what I wrote the script to do? Can't remember). At that stage Blender had a very strange joint rotation and location system which didn't help. Think I gave up once I found out blender wasn't going to have sss for quite a while. If you are just using blender for the modelling, suggest you look at wings3d.

Miss Digital World? Well you learn something every day....Curiousity got the better of me, and I checked this out. And ummm, WOW! The video of the top 3 contestants are fantastic. Personally, Dalila didn't really do it for me, and something that really bugged me in the video was the short focal length, that distorted her face a bit. I dunno about the ip issue, but Kaya is a well know model that will be hard to beat.

I usually use the Diffuse colour node in the mat room and tint the white colour red, brown, whatever to get different hues. I find it easier than fiddling with texturemaps.

Yep Quinlor, tried reloading the obj insted of switching to the MT. Same result. What is happening is that ZB2 is creating a displacement map that assumes the mesh will not be smoothed before rendering, so the displacement map compensates for poly edges - so when you render in P5, the poly edges show in any area that has been displaced. It doesn't happen if you do the displacement map for the smoothed Lvl 0 (instead of the MT), and then export then cage into P5 and displace. But I think I have a workaround - save the smoothed base mesh from ZB2 as a full body morph for Poser, then apply that morph plus the displacement map to the base model (say V3).

Good idea ashes2clay. I just exported the figure minus the head and eyes, but your way is nicer. I noticed your gallery image uses ZB2 - but it's very dark, so difficult to see if you found a solution to the main issue listed above.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1996309

Quinlor, more on the Displacement mapping thing at the link above.

Mmmm, well as someone who has tried to use the misss sub-surface shader to render V3 in Maya, I can assure you it is extremely complex. You basically have to pull V3 apart and put her back together again (which is maybe why he's only rendered her head). But the results from the shader (used properly) are far superiour (IMHO) to what you can get out of P5. So I dissagree that a render of this quality could come from P5. Geoegress, perhaps you could point me to an example of a better render from P5 (and I'm tlaking render quality here, not artistic quality)? And I don't think anyone has commented on his brilliant modelling skills, so I don't think there is any missunderstanding. However...I personally wouldn't post a V3 mesh rendering in Maya on CGTalk. In fact, I don't think I'd ever post an image on cgtalk, because the quality of what is posted is just so damned good!

Yep - done the subtract 0.5 thing. After a bit more playing around I removed all morphs and that improved it, however it still has small artifacts which are not pleasing to the eye. Generated the displacement map using DPix (or whatever the term is) of 3, and Subdivided 3 times, with a 4000x4000 map. I got a slightly better result in Maya, so I suspect its something going on inside Firefly. The fact that I haven't seen anyone successfully render V3 with a displacement map makes me suspicious.

Well damn! I did a big response to Quinlor, and it must have timed-out. The general thrust was... 1) The spots at 45 degrees is to just add noise. I noticed that at 45 degrees, skin pigments seems to be spottier. You fresnel is similar to Riev's on www.cgtalk.com. I experimented with that technique but couldn't get the outcome I was looking for. 3) I assume you are using a ramp to achieve this? I used the ramp for a month or two (it's consistent with the Stahlberg method), but it required too much tweeking for different lighting conditions. I have have a set of nodes which get the dot product between the light angle and the poly angle and add ambient and diffuse red as the angle decreases. 4) This is the area I need to work on most. I was pluging an edgeblend into the blinn node, and got good results in some light conditions, but others looked poor, so I stopped using it. Tell me more about the velvet shader trick..... Displacement mapping: Played around with it a bit more today, and have worked out that the problem is in the concave areas. I thing displacement mapping in general does not work well in this situation. Example attached.

WtB.... 1) The "what" and "why"....Well even with high-end renderers they haven't worked out how to do "real" skin, but there are tons of theories and experiments on what works and what doesn't on www.cgtalk.com. Steve Stahlberg is the "real" expert, and I've really only just implemented his stuff using the P5 node system. 2) The mat room node system....I thought it was reasonably straightforward, and I guess if you come from a programming background it will be easy to learn. If not then it could be a big learning curve. Start with the manual, and then start playing in the mat room with a cube. Dr Geep might have some tuts too. As for colour_math nodes, they are the same of math nodes, but operate in RGB instead of a single number from 0-1. If you want to brighten your skin texture, plug the texturemap into the first plug on a color_maths node, and enter 0.5 in the second slot. Select the "add" operation. Then plug that into your diffuse channel. I mainly use the colour maths nodes for added spots and stuff to a texturemap. Another example - plug a texturemap and a spots node into a colour_maths node and add them together. Make the spots REALLY dark (ie. Dark brown on a black background). Make the spot size around 0.05 and about .5 softness. Plug the colour_maths into the Diffuse colour. Bingo - you've just added noise to your skin texture. Real skin has bits of red specs in it - plus blue veins. They can all be added thru the mat room to your texturemaps using nodes.

Mmmm, for some reason I became unsubscribed to this thread and missed out on a bunch of stuff.... Spanki - that render looks very very good. Looks like the left light is blue, and the right is red - by the spec colours...would be good to see the render using plain white lights. Also, IMHO there needs to be more detail on her skin. As for you node set-up....interesting. Firstly, from all the testing I have done, translucent appears to be IDENTICAL in every way to ambient. If anyone can demonstrate a rendered difference, let me know. Secondly, that is the first reasonable render I've seen using the skin node. Which makes me think how good it could be if you didn't use it! Thirdly, have you tried blue in the spec colour? And plug the bump map into it the blinn colour input. I also wonder if you could simply it a heap by just adding a touch of red into the ambient plug (since that is effectly what you are doing by pluging the skin coloured texturemap in). Quinlor....My current node setup is now way more complex than that posted above. I suspect it's got to a point of being too complex to be any use to anyone else. The highlights are: 1) A fresnel effect (adds spots to poly's that are at about 45 degrees to the camera) 2) Large and smalls spots are added to the texturemaps 3) Poly's that are 90 degrees from the main light have red added to the ambient and diffuse channels to simulate sub-subface scattering. This is probably the most critical, yet most frustraiting bit. It /almost/ works, but in certain light and with certain poses it gives odd results. 4) I've simplified the specular a bit - not it's just the bump map pluged into the blinn colour, into the alt-spec. 5) I plug a little Granite into the displacement channel. I've written a neat python script to set all this up for each head and body material. You select the "main" light from the python screen and it does the rest. There are 25 nodes per material. And no, I can't/won't release the python script. And Quinlor, I loved your work on ZB2 and displacement mapping, but I was damned if I could get it to work for V3's torso materials.

A couple of points... 1)WtB - nice effect you have there, although I'm not quite sure how you achieved it. Is it just with lights? Maybe a blue light out left and a couple of red fillers? I haven't tried to get GI effects with lights, since it would require a lot of fine tuning to get the right effect. I just use 3 white lights (usually only 1 with shadows), and tweak the hell out of the texture nodes. 2) GI - my understanding of this term is that light comes from all sources and directions. This really only works for outdoor images. WtB, you image above looks more indoor - bright light to the left (from a window?), and a filler light from the camera flash - so not sure that I would call it GI. Also, with GI you should have dark areas near the floor (eg: her left calf on the image above should be darker). 3) ronstuff - I had a play with the skin and velvet nodes and couldn't get anything like the effect of using other techniques. 4) IMHO, the 2 things standing in the way of getting more realism out of P5 is a) subsurface scattering - which can be simulated, but it's a bit clunky (see my image Passport to Insanity - back of her arms and legs glow red), and b) true GI (like Final Gather in Maya), where light has trouble getting into the nooks and crannies - like underarms (notice in Passport to Insanity her underarms are quit bright - which is very unrealistic - similarly on the image above - between her ears and hair, between her fingers, etc). WtB, maybe you could be more specific on what info you want on the nodes.

Well I'm not familiar with David, however a good texturemap should NOT have any specular in it - it /should/ be straight diffuse. To make it less plasticy, add some procedural noise (use a colour add, with the texturemap and a spots map plugged in). Set the normal spec to 0 and plug a blinn node into the alt_spec, colour it slightly blue. You may not need a spec map - just plug the blump map into the input colour of the blinn. My gallery has a bunch of experimental piccies using these sorts of techniques. I have over 30 nodes which make up each skin material now - so it can get complex!

Displacement maps seem to work pretty well in FF - as long as you get good texturemaps. Don't use "normal map" textures (these have separate r/g/b values for x/y/z). You can also plug negative values into the displacement map to get incuts rather than bulges. And make sure your displacement maps are "smooth" (ie. don't go directly from black to white). To smooth, blur them.