Whatever the next figure is, I hope they center the eyes in their sockets a bit better. La Femme's eye balls are too close together. I was starting to work with her today and spotted that immediately. So if a guy is in the works, be aware of his eye placement! :D

Ah. That makes sense. Ok. The things you forget over time, lol. Thanks! caisson posted at 9:32AM Wed, 28 August 2019 - #4360491

@Teyon - I find I have to disable AO in Painter if I've baked it as it's applied in the viewport shader. The other thing (I am speculating but I think it could be relevant) is that real time rendering is straight to monitor which will be sRGB while Poser renders using a different gamma curve that isn't as contrasty. If you pop the Poser render into an editor and add a bit of contrast with a Curves adjustment, I think you should find that the result then matches the real time displays. So your original roughness export may be correct ;)

Hi Caisson (and thanks for the kind words). Eric, Thanks. Caisson is correct, about how roughness works. @ Caisson, I'm still fiddling with his skin in general. I found a roughness level I can live with. Now I'm going to go back in and refine his actual color and maybe give him a beard. I'm texturing him in substance painter so I can work on each aspect of his texture separately without involving other textures (I just turn his base color off entirely when mucking around with roughness). I'm also working with a yellow tinted light in Poser so that will kick things more yellow regardless. Not really caring about his skin color too much in Poser right now, just trying to get his roughness and sub surface right. I find it interesting I have to pump the roughness map so much in Poser compared to a real time engine like Toolbag. To answer your other question, yes the skin is entirely hand sculpted using brushes in Zbrush.

Now that I'm happy with the roughness and general subsurface look I'm going to go back in and alter his skin color so it has more variation, some blemishes with color, color up his veins and maybe add some eyebrows that make sense, lol. This has been a cool little re-education for me. Thanks for this thread gang. Been a while since I've used Poser.

Please ignore the place holder eyes. They are crap. So now I've pushed the texture too far into the sweaty area and need to tone it down a little bit but it's getting there.

The skin looks dry because I'm still working on the roughness but good on you for pointing it out. While it will have a little more oil to it, I'm not going for a super glossy look because he's not meant to be sweating a lot. So I have to play around with the texture in Substance to get the effect I want. Also need to get rid of those eyebrows. Super messy looking. Yes, the brighter areas on the scatter map are meant to allow more of the effect in that area. I may need to darken the grey a bit while leaving the white areas white but again, this is all early stages still. I find the biggest thing that helps skin look realistic though is pores that have direction as opposed to just a simple noise. That's what really sells the look.

sure thing. As I said, I'm still working on his textures and trying to find a nice sweet spot of saturation and roughness but here ya go.

Still perfecting his skin textures in Substance. Figured I'd do a test render in Poser just for kicks. Rendered in Poser. Didn't do the node thing, just 4 maps plugged directly into the root. Thoughts welcome.

Well I'd cut down on the number of materials used. I know the user base likes them but they actually make things more difficult to setup and they often stand out when rendered as being separate. I'd also (and this isn't a La Femme thing but a Poser thing) Improve weight mapping in general and implement a muscle system to lessen the need for some joint/pose correction morphs in figures. It'd also be cool to see more skin movement in facial expression and phoneme morphs and just more form in her default face (creases in the lower and upper lids could be deeper, there's no nasolabial fold to speak of, that sort of thing). It would be cool to be able to tie sculptural changes to poses the way we had wanted to do but couldn't. You know, to add skin folds and wrinkles where it'd make sense for a pose. It's one of the things that I really regret we didn't get to do with the figures I made (besides the eye and finger thickness not being right and the just generic feel I was asked to do). She has plenty of character things like the look of the shoulder to chest area when the arms are down using the Arms Up-Down dial and how thin her fingers are other things I'd want to tweak. There was a guy at ILM who used our figures and would always complain that the fingers were too thin, making fists look really unrealistic. That is something she suffers from too. Again though, she's far better overall than the characters I did. Even compared to Miki 3 and 4, both of which went over pretty well. Rendo has a good character to build from with her. I hope she does well for Poser.

" Using Miki makes sense; I believe they're basically the same model."

They are not. How I wish they were but no, they are not. Lords, those models (rex,roxie, paul,pauline) from back then were so bad. So many things I would do differently given no pressure and less cooks in the soup. La Femme seems to be a much better model overall. Still some things I'd change but that's more to do with Poser and the communities desires and less to do with the figure itself. If you can use her, I'd say use her.

randym77 posted at 6:18PM Mon, 27 May 2019 - #4352302

I got a question. What is causing the white rings around the irises here?

They appear in the character promo renders, as well as in the library thumbnails, so I assume they are intentional, or at least built into the textures. Is there anything I can do to minimize them? I'm not sure what part of the eye that is.

It looks like it's probably built into the eye unfortunately. You could try creating a morph to smooth/relax that area.

The argument that it's always been this way is not a valid argument. I can go to other stores like gumroad and if an item is free, get said item at no additional cost. The idea Ita always been this way sounds more like a refusal to adapt than anything else. Don't refuse to adapt. Especially since there's no credit card fees involved in a free digital sale. Are you charging for the item and then refunding the money at POS? If not, there's no reason a credit card should be required and if so, well then, why the extra 3.50 that would be covered in the initial purchase anyway?so no. The idea it's always been this way is not a good one. Didn't work for slavery, doesn't work in this case either. A bad practice is a bad practice. She goes off sale tomorrow, I will pick her up then. I want to show support to Renderosity and to the Poser community. I just don't want to do it while supporting bad practices. I did that my entire time at Smith Micro and refuse to do it again. Anyway, I appreciate the response. I understand that the store is currently set up this way. I also understand there are better ways. I hope someday, the store here adapts.

@Raven you may want to go in and add some wrinkling on that old man's throat. It looks really weird that his face is the age of a 60-70 year old and his neck still looks like he's in his 20's. Also not sure what's up with his ears but as it's not the focus, I guess it's ok. It's a cool render though. Just needs to be pushed a bit. If you have time, definitely revisit it.

This isn't going to make me wildly popular (not in the good way). In my opinion, as far as characters are concerned, the only things needed to make a good figure are:

1. Give the artist time. Separate the figure from the software release, that way, they aren't trying to build a new figure with broken or incomplete tech.

2. Keep it simple. Don't over complicate the mesh rigging and don't try to utilize every new bell and whistle in the application because you're mandated to (again, see above).

3. Ignore the community. Sorry folks, we can't please you. Any of you, as long as we actually try to listen to you because you all want different things from a figure. The only thing you all agree on is that you want a figure that looks good and bends well but what looks good and what bends well seems to vary from user to user when you see what you compare stuff to. Trying to please you all while trying to make a "generic" figure is not the way to go. Also, many of you wouldn't know a real person if one came up and slapped you in the face. I legit posted a scan of a woman's head during the creation process of the last figures in a private forum and was told by testers that it didn't look realistic enough. So...yeah.

4. As mentioned above, avoid the "generic" figure approach. Don't try to make an everyman/woman again. Obviously that's not what the user base wants, so make a figure that has character. It not only will make the character interesting to look at (and thus desirable to use) but it will allow the artist to care a bit more about the work. Hard to get excited about working on a generic figure whose sole purpose is to be morphed into anything OTHER than what you originally made.

5. Don't release the figure until you have in not only clothing from the artist and 3 to 5 vendors done but also 5 or 6 vendors lined up for follow up clothing. Ensure that any content made after that figures release is to scale with the figure, so that there is supporting content beyond just clothing. AVOID THE SKIMPY CLOTHING. I get it, most of you like attractive people, that's great but it's not terribly useful and won't make Poser terribly useful outside certain circles, ultimately leading to its demise. So get over your fetishes or at least, don't be too upset if the character doesn't come with a lot that supports your fetishes. Poser is a joke in the wider CG community not because the app is weak or the figures suck but because its user base tends to make soft porn. Real talk.

Last thing and I'm out: You guys are the hearts blood of the community. If you band together to make something work, it will. You have to understand going in that nothing is going to be perfect for everyone. That's an impossibility. Vicky wasn't, the new Daz figures aren't and sure as hell the Poser figures aren't, so I don't know why you are holding to some standard that it must be all things to all people as thought the first thing you all want isn't a morph to change it from the base appearance anyway. Instead, start a gofundme page, pool together some cash and pay an artist to make a figure for the community. Make the only requirements that the mesh be dense enough to morph without the need for subdivision, that it has topology that supports animation and that it's visually appealing TO THE ARTIST. Not the community. This will be a sure fire way to end up with what you all actually want. Too many cooks spoil the soup. We've seen that already. I lived through it and thankfully came out the other side unscathed - relatively. As long as the mesh topo holds up to animation, the eyes and lips have thickness and the base textures are decent without a lot of baked in light, you'll have a figure you can use to do what you want. So don't wait for Smith Micro to do it. Be the change you want to see.

ok, that's it from the peanut gallery. Gonna go back to making games now. Peace out and if I offended anyone I'm sorry for that. I'm just being honest with you guys like I always try to be.

No need to use Blender if you already have Maya and it can fix the problem. Import it into Maya as FBX, let Maya do it's thing and then export it from Maya.