I try for a certain level of photorealism and then often post-work the heck out of my render. My thought is that getting 90% of the way to photorealism gives me the scene, and then using filters, and sometimes overpainting, gives me the look I want. So I use ray-tracing, SSS, and either AO or full-fledged IBL. (I use AO when I'm doing portraits a lot.) But I often add unrealistic lights to highlight something, or composite elements, and I usually use linear fall-off on my lights, because it feels closer to what we perceive.

I almost never use depth-of-field, since I find DOF makes it actually look like a photo, instead of what we actually perceive. (So I use DOF when I want it to explicitly look like it is a photo.) I almost always Gamma-Correct, because it makes the lighting a lot simpler, but I've sometimes turned it off if I want really sharp contrasts.

I do always move to the newest version of Poser, but primarily because they're always adding the features that I really want. 

 A couple of reasons. One, I'm pretty lazy and don't want to convert clothes to new figures, or mess around with DSON. Two, about 75% of my renders involve characters I've played in table-top RPGs, and making a picture with one of them is a little like getting to play them again in a game. Most of these figures I've developed V3 and/or V4, M3 and/or M4 versions of. I'd much rather spend my time building a picture rather than rejiggering a figure.

 Also, particularly with some of the fix morphs (and the couple of times I've tried weight-maps) they bend well-enough for me, since I tend to use portraits of clothed figures. I've also avoided DAZ Studio (although I am tempted now, with the integration of IRAY, and the improvements to G3) because I understand Poser, and I don't want to have to go back and download all the DAZ Studio versions of my content.

I also find that I'm not nearly as much into photo-realism as I was. 

IIRC, out-of-touch had a couple as well for some of Hongyu's outfits. (Cheongsam, Cop-girl, and one of the corsets.)

Quote - "Oh everything was sluggish. I closed it."

When you run Poser, open task manager and change the priority of the process to "below normal". When you render, the FFE renderer will inherit that priority. Then, unless you are really choking on memory, Poser shouldn't slow anything else down.

Quote - Probably the most important feature of David was the scaling so he's shorter than the standard M4. DAZ didn't release a product to scale M4 like Stephanie 4. I did make a product at DAZ for M4 named Santo International that includes scaling m4 to the size of David 3 (using the same method as Stephanie 4), which works in both Poser and DS. It has some custom body shapes that would require you to use copy the morphs into the clothing though. It uses ExP tech to add custom channels to M4, so you can use scaling or the body shapes with any other M4 morph.

You just made a sale with me. I almost never use any part of S4 other than the scaling. Having the same sort of quality scaling for M4 is great.

You can also just edit the pose file.

I think that there was one called "Miriam" at DAZ that was pretty good as well.

Quote - You're right.  I use an unseen prop with very high ambient to function as an emitter, and give the visible prop -laptop monitor for example- a gentle ambient of 2/3 to 1.

How do you make the prop unseen? Do you hide it inside the visible prop and then make the visible prop invisible to ray-tracing?

Are these new figures, or based on existing figures. If they are new figures, I would recommend separating the base morph (halfling) and the character morph (roy) to allow flexibility by the user, but including poses which set both morphs to 1. Why?

I might want to have a halfling figure which is part Roy, part Ray (the halfling), a smidge of Jay the goblin, and some additional dial spinning. If you include the halfling morphs in Roy and Ray, you could end up with something with the halfling base morph dialed past one, which tends to end up being really aweful. (Try setting limits off with A4, and dialing her up to 2 for an example.)

I might also want to mix packages, such as goblin and halfling (making a kobold perhaps).

Also, if Roy includes existing morphs for Chunk, (for example, pudgy dialed up to 0.7), you may want to have the Roy dial only address the newly added unique morphs. That way we can have a skinny Roy, and it makes clothes fitting much easier.

Quote - I have Poser Pro 2014 running on an i7 quad core with 16 GB of RAM. Yesterday, I started a render with two characters and DOF. 14 hours later, it's about halfway through precalculating subsurface scattering . . .

I hate long renders, too. But in this case, I really wanted DOF 'cause it makes the scene look better. I'll be leaving for work soon, so my computer will be rendering all day long.

If you have Photoshop, you can do Depth-of-field in postwork if you output a z-map. The only trick is you want to turn off the post-filtering (or minimize it), otherwise there will be "haloing" around the figures since the z-map (or depth-map) isn't filtered.

You need pleated skirts for Japanese school uniforms - no fashion report. :)

I would really love someone to make a complete school uniform set. (Roogna comes close, because most of his outfits have the same waistline, so you can combine the shirts from one with the shorts/skirts from another.)

Whether based on the traditional fuku (sailor suit) or the more modern blazer/cardigan look, it would be great to have both summer and winter outfits, plus athletic and swimwear. Also, many schools have multiple uniform variations, such as a polo shirt.

Quote - My goodness, I see the anatomy experts have arrived.

kitteh grabs popcorn and gets comfortable

So I think a good set of morphs would be:

Wrist thickness

Palm width

Palm length

finger length

finger thickness

Quote - to be fair.. we tried a 'realistic' shaped poser figure.  the community at large was profoundly un interested.  This project isn't a community welfare project its a commercial endeavor and they cant afford to try and change their customer.  They need to give the customer base something they will be willing to spend money on.  

Do I know real people with waists and hips as small as thin as dawns may appear.  Yes. one.  She is in her early 20s.  She is narrower in the shoulder though as well and has skinnier legs.  She makes everyone insanely jealous, unless your feeling spiteful you have to admit that he doesn't look unhealthy or annorexic she just has a very slight frame and a leanly athletic form....  of course now she is pregnant so... HA  good luck with that sista!!  ((oops did I say that alooud?!)

I actually don't mind if the base figure is on the more slender side. Dynamic clothing works a lot better fitting to a character which is morphed to be wider than one which is morphed to be thinner, and a lot of conforming clothing works better that way as well.

Quote - > Quote - Have you found 2014 to be worth the upgrade?

 

Yes definitely, haven't got around to playing with bullet physics yet but the above feature and the Fitting Room were worth it for me. Poser is my main program so I tend to upgrade it regularly.

Ditto. In fact, the improvement to the morph brush obviates the need for using various other tools for injecting missing morphs into clothes.

Undo now works well when undoing applications of poses from the library.

Library works much better now as well.

They do make use of Tkinter. Most of them are not compiled, but are from vendors which have disapeared, or are old freebies.