As a query... there are a number of entries in this contest which are labelled as "2D", even though they are clearly postworked images of a 3d render (I can recognise some of the Poser models used in the images).

I think a number of people are entering under the impression that working on the image, and turning it into a charcoal drawing, in an image manipulation program such as Krita, GIMP or Photoshop would make it a 2D entry, while the rules seem to state that only those images which are drawn by hand should be considered thus.

Can we get some clarification on this rules point, please?

Sorry to raise a long-dead thread from the grave, but - did you ever get as far as updating the leather shaders, bagginsbill?

Great prop :-) my only critique would be, that in the YouTube clip, you've got the roller going the wrong way.

The saddest part is, I didn't realise EXACTLY what you were doing until I was actually typing it - I worked it through that there were fifty iterations of the script, and then my brain worked out that (25,25,25) was a grey colour - and that's when it hit me.

Looks to me like it's a script that sets the diffuse colour to shift through... oh gods...

50 shades of grey.

ummm...?

JonTheCelt

The key question about this is, what do you want to do with your program? Vue is great for creating landscapes and backgrounds for your characaters to appear in, and has a great lighting model. Carrara, on the other hand, has terrain modeling tools, and is a modeler, as well, so you could use it to create your own props, clothing, figures, whatever.

Of course, if you just want to use it to drop your Poser figures in, set the lights, and render, then I'd say try both and decide which you prefer. But then you'd be missing out on the biggest part of what each program has to offer...

JonTheCelt

Quote - You need to go into the Materials Room and select the material surface that has the problem, using the small document window and/or the drop-down selectors at the top of the materials window.

In the advanced material settings, there will be an Image_Map shader (it may have another name) pointing to the texture file, plugged into the Diffuse colour node on the main shader. The bottom-most setting on the image_map shader is the texture filtering. Change it from Quality to None, then go back to the Pose Room and try rendering. It should be better now.

If there is more that one material surface causing problems, you have to do this for each surface.

Sorry I can't post a screenshot right now, 'cos I'm at work!

Well, that's not really adressing the problem. The better way to do this is to lower your minimum shading rate in your render settings - set it to about 0.02, and those textures should clear up pretty quickly.

JonTheCelt

I think it would help to give advice if we could see some screen caps of the problem and item you're trying to work on - I'm having difficulty visualising it.

JonTheCelt

Poser doesn't have Sub-D's, it uses Reyes subdivision for smoothing, rather than Catmull-Clark.

JonTheCelt

Would it not be better, in this instance, to make the part which you want inflexible a prop, and parent it to the relevant bodypart?

JonTheCelt

Latest prices from my local garage, down the bottom of the road...

Unleaded - 119.9p per litre = 2.337USD per litre = 10.619USD per gallon

Diesel - 132.9p per litre = 2.59USD per litre = 11.768USD per gallon

and there's no sign of it slowing any time soon.

Me, I'm not so concerned - I mostly use public transpot or carshare.

JonTheCelt

I would recommend doing such fine details as this with bum por displacement mapping, rather than trying to actually model it.

JonTheCelt

There's also a fact that is often overlooked in fora.

PoserPro was not aimed at the Poser hobbyist who wanted the next version of their favourite program - that'll be Poser 8, whenver it comes out. PoserPro was aimed at helping professional, high-end users of 3d programs who wish to use Poser figures within their own workflow.  Now, whether its acheived its aim or not is debatable - but that is what the intended aim of the program was.

Implicit in PoserPro's workflow of "pose in render, export to program of choice for rendering and so on", is the fact the base functionality of Poser is not going to change and become higher-end. The only way Poser is going to go 'high-end' is for you to take your Poser work into another program and finish it there, in other words.

As other posters have said, high polycount isn't the key to great realism. The ideal weould be a low poly character, with high levels of SD at render time, with a great material setup - much lighter on resources, able to be used within the UI of the program in its 'naked' state very quickly due to its low resource overhead. This is not something that's going to happen in Poser until they change their method of smoothing and subdivision (not likely in my opinion).

JonTheCelt

Also, whilst an animation seems to be a long arudous process, bear in mind that you are asking it to create 235 or so completely separate renders. If one frame render of that image takes 1 1/2 minutes, then you're looking at a total render time of 352 1/2 minutes, or almost 6 hours. Even if you're doing an incredibly basic scne, with minimal lighting, an it only take 30 seconds per frame, that's still 2 hours total time - which seems like a lot when you're used to rendering out single frames.

The best bet for rendering animations is to do it at a time when you're not going to need the computer for anything else - when asleep, for example, or at work, or cooking dinner. This way you're not tempted to keep coming back and checking how it's doing, it gets on with its job, and when you do finally get back to your computer, you have (hopefully) a lovely little surprise waiting for you...

... at which point you realise that you've forgotten to conform one piece of clothing, and it just sits there in the middle of the damned thing doing nothing, nad oyuhave to render the whole thing again (not that this has EVER happened to me, obviously!!)

JonTheCelt