I've bought dozens and dozens of characters over the years and there are very few that have properly produced bump and specular maps. By that I mean that they are designed from the ground up for their purpose, not cack-handed derivatives of the main (colour) diffuse texture map.

The procedural stuff that EZSkin produces is preferable to 99% of what the vendors here and elsewhere produce.

If you want to see how it should be done, this product's bump / spec maps are in the 1% that are (IMO) better than EZSkin's procedurals.

I can hardly believe the whole Gamma Correction thing is being dragged out again, but it has been quite a while since we had a good ding-dong about it, so here are some factoids to bear in mind when considering whether to adopt a linear workflow (aka using Gamma Correction).

Poser (and as far as I'm aware all other 3D apps) does not read the tags and embedded profiles that images may or may not have encoded in their headers. If they did, they would be 'CMS aware' (CMS = Color Management System). Instead, they assume that images are encoded as sRGB, which has been the de facto industry standard for general purpose imaging for almost 20 years.

"Gamma" is convenient shorthand to denote "the straight-line portion of a tonal response curve". If you don't know what the hell that means, type 'sensitometry' into your favourite search engine.

The only image file formats that use a gamma of 1 (one) for encoding image data are things like .HDR and .EXR. A gamma of one = linear encoding.

All the others use non-linear encoding, mostly 2.2 but occasionally 1.8, for sound technical reasons.

Apple abandoned their gamma = 1.8 years and years ago, and though the AppleRGB color space still uses that value, it's a fact that most images are in sRGB or AdobeRGB (both have a gamma of 2.2). Incidentally, the reason for that was that gamma = 1.8 is supposedly close to the gamma of things when they're printed. It was wrong back then and even wronger now.

Although sRGB and AdobeRGB use the same gamma value, they map color values very differently: if you're preparing images to use as textures and you work in AdobeRGB, you must convert the images to sRGB, otherwise colors will be over-saturated, particularly the reds. Don't forget, Poser expects images to be in sRGB and isn't smart enough to treat them as anything else.

The sRGB specification mandates a gamma value of 2.2. ... therefore the only correct GC value to use in Poser is 2.2, right?

Well, not necessarily, because sRGB uses 2 curves that interact with each other: for most images (correctly exposed and lit) the end value of the interplay of those 2 curves = 2.2 (approximately). In very dimly lit / underexposed and over-lit / over-exposed scenes sRGB's gamma value will vary, and could be anwhere between 1.0 and 4.0 - going from memory here - the precise value for a given image depending on too many factors to go into here.

When apps open (for example) a JPEG image like the hundreds you have in your runtime folders, they can use either the complex method (dealt with very superficially above) to apply the gamma curve or the simple one (which is a straightforward gamma = 2.2 and no fancy shenanigans). Guess which one Poser uses? That's right, the simple one.

So, GC = 2.2 really is the one to use in Poser after all... isn't it?

Technically, it's the best choice for well lit scenes, and is the only starting point that makes sense.

Artistically, you might want to experiment with quite low gamma values for low-key (dark and dingy) scenes and high values for high-key scenes (e.g. a snowscape in bright sunlight), but make a note that you're going off-piste here as far as Linear Workflow is concerned and you may have to fart about with your lighting and shaders to get things right.

I was just reading that on the BBC website and it is a great shock.

I've bumped into him a few times; it's a terrible cliche to say that he's a thoroughly nice guy (but true). On those few occasions, I found him easy and engaging to talk to and much more generous than he needed to be with his time. Devastating news that he seems to have so little of it left.

Is it just me, or the perspective, or is that a really big toilet?

Yep, this is a lot better.

They still need to weed out some of the crap from the top - so much wasted space.

By all means make the site cool and trendy, but in its current form it's really hard to spend much time in it.

EDIT: who is putting this new look together? I know it's a work in progress but there are fundamental design errors that shouldn't have made it to the first draft, let alone being published on a live site.

I hate being negative and I've looked really hard for something to be positive about, but I can't... this is a dreadful mess.

This is what you need.

Learn to think in PIXELS. The file sizes you're giving are meaningless, they only tell you how much disc space they occupy, not how many pixels they contain.

What is your screen resolution in pixels? Let's say it's 1600 x 1200. Guess how many pixels your render needs to be to fill the screen?

Also, don't save as JPEG directly from Poser, it's not well implemented. Save as TIFF or PSD.

Here we have, from top left and working right and down:

No GC, no TM

No GC, TM HSV Exp 1.6

No GC, TM Exp 1.6

GC on (2.2), no TM

GC on, TM Exp 2.4

GC on, TM HSV Exp 3.6

(Sorry about the render artifacts, render settings are designed for speed).

The only time I use Tone Mapping in conjunction with GC is for this type of scene, where I want to lift the overall light levels without increasing light intensity, which could blow out highlight details near each light. In this scene all lights have their falloff set to inverse square, and I've made no adjustments to light settings whatsoever between renders.

As for filtering, I'd use Sinc=2 for this scene; when I'm doing close-ups on figures I normally choose Gaussian = 3 as the results aren't as harsh.

I use both Wardrobe Wizard and Dimension3D's Morphing Clothes. I bought the latter after finding DAZ's Clothing MorphKit a bit clunky and long-winded, and you can use it on practically any figure. 

Quote - The bottom line is HOW do I  magnetize clothes, Is there a special button somewhere? Thanks PS I used Poser Pro 2012 SR3.

There is no button, it's a pose - or a set of poses - that was suppled with V4. I never use them because it's a bit clunky.

You get them same end result with the D3D script I linked to above. You can use it in 2 ways:

1. Select the figure to which clothing is conformed and run the script; it will apply deformers to ("magnetize") all conforming clothes, and you don't have to worry about which numbered magnetize pose you should use.

2. Select a clothing item which is already conformed to a figure and run the script; it will magnetize that item of clothing only.

Another advantage of the D3D script is that you can use it on other figures such as M4, Kids4, Miki, any of the figures supplied with Poser... it can certainly help clothes stay in place when limbs are in extreme positions.

Give it a go. It's FREE.

Save yourself a lot of hassle and use this.

I liked the way this one turned out so I turned it into my avatar.

Coincidentally, this has popped up in freestuff - should be easy enough to adapt.

You can (sort of) do it with Semidieu's Advanced Shaders, if you can get your head round it. I don't use it often enough to be fluent with it, but it certainly allows you to save parts of a shader setup - but in its own file format, not one of Poser's.

It's free, so well worth a look.