That atmosphere stuff does work, but is fiddly. Disable visibility on your model and back wall and then experiment with spotlights etc to get it working. Another trick is to use a background colour of whatever glow colour you want, and then make the wall and floor progressively more transparent. If you map the V variable into the floor transparency, it will gradually allow more background colour thru as it goes back away from the camera.

I don't know of any tutorials, but I would guess the tough part of realistic hair would be the uv mapping and texturemaps, not the modeling. I haven't had much luck uv mapping with Wings - I normally use uvmapper.

Awesome thread so far.... 1) P5 often locks after I save. To rescue from a lock-up on XP, hit Ctl-Alt-Del and load the task manager. That should bring P5 back to life. Close the task manager. 2) Plug your bump map into the spec colour on human skin, and tint the spec colour blue. Add a hint of red ambient helps too. 3) The Python Scripts window. A horrible buggy little thing, but useful. If it's not responding to clicks, click the title-bar of the Python Scripts window. If the button dissappear, click the very bottom of the Python Scripts window. If a python script dies that is running in a tcl window, go to the windows task bar, right click the tcl button and close it. P5 should return back to life. 4) Cloth room. Once you've got your clothing draped, export the clothing items to an obj file. Then you can delete the clothing items from the scene and reload via the obj file. That way the settings don't get lost when you now restart P5 and reload the scene. 5) If you are doing a custom skin on V3, there are heaps of duplicated materials for the body and head. Solution 1, modify the V3 obj file to combine the materials into 1 for the body and 1 for the skin (tricky to do - needs to be done outside poser), or (not as good a solution) save the skin material you are using in the mat room for one part of the body, and then apply it to the other body parts. 6) Dynamic hair. This really only works for black hair. You actually don't need a huge amount of hair to render well - IF you render with shadows. The hair will cast a shadow on the head, meaning the light doesn't hit the scalp. [I didn't explain that too well!] 7) Use the hole material on wings3d when making dynamic clothing.

Couple of things I've found on lips..... 1) If the lips are /slightly/ appart, make the gums and teeth transparent. That stops any rendering artifacts appearing. See my Agghhh image for a bad example of this. 2) Create a transmap for the lips (use the head bumpmap as the base). Make the lips white, and everything else black. Play around with fluzzying the border b/n black and white. Use this transmap as a mask for glossiness (or ansiotopic) specularity. To do this, plug the transmap into the spec colour of the glossiness node, and plug the glossiness node into the alt spec slot. There are a few examples of this around, and the result is outstanding. See my "Something on her mind" gallery image for a close-up.

Nomuse, my understanding is that the edge_blend is effectively a fresnel, with the point of reference being the camera (rather that say a light). You can achieve a fresnel effect from a light in P5, but it is very complex - my New Skin Shader gallery image does this.

I'm not quite sure what you are asking here.....if the question is "if I have a poser model of a red blood cell, can I shade it to look like the above photo above", then the answer is "maybe". To me, the above image look like polys are shaded black if they face the camera, and white if they are parallel to the camera. So a simple edge_blend might do the trick. Experiment by plugging it into the ambient colour.

It says in the manual somewhere....I think the group name has to be identical to the bone name. Then Poser will match them up.

Well I've successfully downloaded PoseRay now and run it with POV-Ray. All I can say is....outstanding. Took a while to find the PoserMaterials button :-) Will post some renders once I get it humming. I'll be interested to see how the render quality compares to Firefly.

Maxxxmodelz, I agree totally with you. Nebula, the node configuration looks something like the image above. I haven't expanded the nodes, because a) they wouldn't fit on the picture, and b) it's very WIP, and I'd hate to say this is the solution, when in reality every render I currently do experiments with something new. The node setup from top to bottom is.... First 2 colour maths subtracts from the texturemap the combined spots and the fresnel effect. The next colour maths combines the following two spots - one for larger black spots, and the other for almost undetectable small spots. The next maths function multiplies to edge_blends to form the fresnel effect. The colour_ramp add various reds and blue to the ambient. The final 4 nodes make up the specular. This is a simplification on Stahlbergs method but achieves a similar effect, although a lot more work is need here. The bump map plugs into the colour of the blinn. The edge_blend effect the eccentricity. The maths function just add a little to the bump and probably should be ignored. And yes, I did write a python script to create this. The setup screen is on the right. It is very WIP at the moment. At one stage I thought it would be worth releasing, however the more I delve into this area, the more it seems we don't know! So I'm not really sure if it will ever be ready. And I don't know if it is a "one solution fit all" issue.

I tried downloading the install from your site flyerx, but the .zip file is corrupt!

Well I've spent a huge amount of effort trying to achieve realistic skin in P5, and had some success and some difficulties. Some points....

1. Textures are of very little importance. The image above was done using the standard V3 hi-res maps. Most of the texture packs I've seen give worse results than V3 standard maps.

2. Lighting is also relatively unimportant for skin realism (but critical for the image as a whole). If you use 1 spotlight, the image will render like a photo that was taken with a flash. If you use one of the many GI light sets, the image will look like a photo taken outside. As a rule, I use 1 main light (like in the image above) and a filler light. There are good websites describing 3 point lighting which is useful.

3. I played around with the skin node in P5 (stewer's suggestion), but couldn't get any decent results with it.

4. The secret to realistic skin from 3d apps (IMHO) lies in the tinting of colour of the skin depending on the angle of the camera. There are huge discussions on the topic at www.cgtalk.com (see Steve Stahlberg's theories) - but implementing them in P5 is challenging. The other facet is getting the specular light right. There are all sorts of tricks for this, but I find the neatest is to use Blinn specular, with the bump map plugged into the input colour. Another neat trick is to set ambient value to 1, and set the ambient colour to (r=20, G=0, B=0). This makes the skin glow a touch in the darker areas - adding to the realism.

Message edited on: 09/08/2004 09:09

My take on the high-end apps... 3ds - Complete package - lots of features. Difficult to learn. The most complete set of bi-ped modeling tools. For me (playing with V3 models) was buggy as hell. Kept crashing, so I flicked it. Probably very good for lower poly stuff. Maya - For me, was a lot me stable than max. Lots of features, but they seemed easier to use than max (ie. the physics system is awesome). Cimema 4d - Loved it (although didn't get to use it for long). Much easier to learn then the top 2. Material room is great. Not as complete as max or maya (doesn't have cloth or hair).

I like dynamic clothing when you've got the time to get it 'right'. But sometimes it's not easy - I find often dynamic clothing setting get corrupted when you save and re-load, and you need to go back and set-up the sims again. And if the dynamic clothing doesn't fit your model well - it can get tricky. Check out http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=736586 for an example of using Choregraphed Groups (I seldon used feature I suspect). Joey's skirt has 2 vertices choreographed to a placement where her hands are at frame 10. More experimenting required I think....

Well in theory you could, although my script is very specific to what I need - would probably be better to start from scratch. I think that ockham's NewLightPanel uses a similar technique although with lights intead of mats (although I haven't actaully checked out his code yet).

Agghhhh, the Hole material. Of course! Why didn't I think of that! I've been looking for a soln to this problem for ages. Thanks a heap ynsaen. You've just made my day.