That is really great and helpful too. A setup that is well worth storing for those moments where you need to adapt something fast.

Thank you!

Thanks Red Phantom.
For some reason the file locker link you provided isn't working.

Now I don't want you to feel any pressure or anything but some of my Daz and Poser figures cannot put on any clothes now the velvety texture is missing because it's just so unsightly. Thus they're going around in the nude. 

The setup would be great, thank you

Oh I was meaning to ask about Superfly velvet settings. You see, a lot of Daz clothing has a very, slight velvet touch to it.

Unfortunately my attempts at replicating that
using velvet BDSF and the like failed abysmally. My result always came out far too strong, when the Daz original only really has a light sprinkling of noise.

Actually never mind. Stuffed it all into the main node and it worked.

Sorry for the wait, it was my Birthday yesterday and I was a wee bit indisposed.

Here is a... let's call it a quandry.

Cycles surface, using the anisotropic bdsf on an older bit of Sci-Fi clothing converted to the lovely La Femme. Except it's coming out all black even though all
the nodes before are relatively ok. What am I doing wrong? (you can see the original colour on the neck and in the textures of the nodes)

Again, I see some more limitations of my Poser 12. Hmmm well one day I will upgrade but for now I have to live with those or work around them.

By the way, I was meaning to ask. Do any of you know of a bug in Poser 12 when you drag and drop multiple images into the material room, in order to set up a PBR set?

You see, every 10th attempt to do so results in a peculiar bug where the images don't land in the room and I get that unsightly +whatever number of images I wanted to drop.
I expect that bug will have been alleviated in P13 but I just thought I'd ask if I'm alone in that with P12 or if there is some workaround.

Slightly off topic... Anyone else miss RuntimeDNA?..... Ignore that and do go on, I love learning tricks and whatnot...

hbore, you've caught me with a bit of sloppyness there wit the Bump...


As for the AO map... it's explained in this thread https://www.renderosity.com/forums/threads/2954649/principled-bsdf-some-examples

Ahhhh thanks everyone for posting. Really helpful although the offending AO node, may not be what you thought it was.,

In Scooby Dooh fashion, I fear I must now unmask the offender.
It was mr AO Map!
You see Mr AO Map was in a sneaky relationship with Diffuse Map via the Mix Node.
(thanks to a very interesting albeit less theatrical post from caisson in the BSDF thread)

That method from Caisson is something I always do if my texture set comes with an AO map simply because I don't like maps going to waste. It'd really be superfluous otherwise but you can use it to add to you diffuse map.

I habitually set the diffuse map gamma to 2.2 and the others to 1. It's become a bit engrained  to be honest but it's also because I like to get rid of issues before they happen rather than go back and look for a culprit.

shvrdavid you really have got that cling film to look good there.

Certainly making progress and taking your advice to heart., Step by step.
Making use of one or two really useful nodes. In this case, I had found a rather nice cling film texture from texturecan for a piece of clothing but the opacity map was too transparent for the look I was going for. So I thought I'd look for a node to pop inbetween to make the opacity map brighter and thus make the thing less transparent.

Thanks again.
That shader tree will be a great help because time is my single biggest problem the 3D hobby and any time-saver is worth it's weight in gold.

As far as Poser 13 is concerned, you're preaching to the converted. Meaning if I could, I would.

Trouble is, I treated myself to a deal on Poser 12 this Christmas to finally give Physically Based rendering a go, now that I also have a suitable rig. Going to have to wait a while with a further Poser 13 investment.

Will need some time to build that node tree because those functions are indeed very useful. (or will be once I know which bit does what)

Have found that with a lot of Blender Tutorials, there is a trend to do a youtube "Look at how fast I can do XYZ with sprinkles on" which no sane human can follow without
getting a mental stress fracture.

Interested in the dome you mentioned. Is that to be found in the Poser12 Content or can you turn the background into a dome? I mean, if I use EZDome, it also doesn't display in the preview either so..

On the whole, I am taking to Poser 12 despite the fact that it is time consuming to get to grips with Superfly. I was relatively adept with Firefly and its Daz equivalent 3Delight and have seen a lot of Physically Based Renders using Iray that were extremely underwhelming in comparison. Might be just my impression but in a lot of cases, the pictures had really boring lighting and complete absence of effects.
Since my preference is for Fantasy and Sci-Fi type stuff, I do have a love of light and effects. Think there used to be a product (discontinued) for Tenebroso Lighting for Daz, which would have been right up my street. Equally, I love volumetrics and so far, Superfly still feels a bit sterile in comparison but that will change I expect.

But Poser 12 has certainly gained my interest, even though most of the scenes and products made for Superfly seemed to be targeted at the IKEA Catalogue side of 3D Art, whereas my element is more in the realms of Prae's Hairs and things that remind me of indipendent music and UK Rpg scene of the 1980s.

Well I've used sIBLEdit to farbicate my own SIBLs from HDRs but that's as far as I've come.

And there are indeed few Sibls to be had out there.

Did make use of your example of course.

EzDome in it's EnvHemisphere variant with a pure-Sky SIBL made from the "BelfastSun" Hdri. Felt it needed a cracking bit of floor too so... took it literally.

Thanks.

In fact, I had already explored HDRs but seeing as the background never actually resulted in a dome, I felt them unsatisfying. Then I tried out Snarrly's EZDome but found almost no SIBLs. Not being ready to give up, I then installed an app (and very good it is too) to make those SIBLs myself but only partially felt I knew what I was doing.

In most cases, I was never really happy because the HDRI method always proved too bright and awful for any scene where I would want to use Emissive textures. For example, if you check out Polyhaven and the nighttime HDRI, you'll find most are not really nighttime but actually look like dawn-light.

So I went back to regular ground and skydomes, merely modifying the material to provide Emissive light from the dome.

And building Cycles shaders from the ground up.... Hmmmm... As hborre mentioned, Cycles is tricky and I'm in for what seems to be an immense learning curve.
Very daunting all in all.