I have found a great resource for textures but I am a little confused about what the different maps for each texture are used for, I would be grateful if someone could fill in the blanks for me, particularly in relation to their use in the Poser material room.

The basic image file, I get it, its the 2d texture image.

The diffuse map, used instead of the bump map in some 3d apps?

The bump map, best for poser? but how to apply? (i will search for tutorial next)

The Normal map, also used in some 3d apps to actauly change the position of the local/normal verticies?

The SpecStrength map ???

The SpecExponent map???

For those interested, heres the link to the resource.

http://www.filterforge.com/filters.html

OOps, found another

Metallic map??

Attached Link: http://www.filterforge.com/filters

I think this link works better.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Remember ... "With Poser, all things are possible, and poseable!"

cheers,

dr geep ... :o]

edited 10/5/2019

In Poser the material room  shows the nodes used for the material. The root node has all the diffuse, bump, specular channels. You can attach an image map to any of these channels to have the image control that channel. The image coordinates are the UV coordinates of the object.

I think the normals map is Displacement map in Poser. The actual geometry is changed by the map.

At the expense of over-simplifying, our vision is sort of the result of diffuse reflection. So your diffuse map would be a flat (non-glossy) 2d image map.

Bump maps are greyscale and can be applied into the bump channel of the main material node. A normal map is a 3 colored (RGB) bump map (I'm not sure what the advantages are but they're used a lot in games). A normal map doesn't replace displacements since normal maps don't perturb a surface's silouette.

Phong shaders tend to have specular strength and exponent parameters. Strength (obviously) affects specular strength while exponent affects the specular falloff.

Metallic maps used to be used (prior to P5) to fake reflections.

Hmm. Some slight misinformation going on here. But rather than paraphrase the correct answers, I tried google and came up with this:

http://www.filterforge.com/more/help/MainWindow/RenderMapsMenu.html

All you need to know about those maps. Well, except how to use them in the Poser material room.

 The metallic map is tricky. To use it effectively, you have to understand the difference between a dialectric and a metal. The two main differences (simplified answer here of course, otherwise we're going to need physics book) are:

A dialectric produces specular reflections in the same color as the light source, while a metal colors the speculars just like the diffuse reflections. In other words, on yellow plastic (a dialectric) a specular reflection is usually white, while on yellow gold it is yellow.

A dialectric usually has a fairly low index of refraction, while metals are often in the hundreds. This means that for a dialectric, the Fresnel effect is really important, while for a metal it is not. The Fresnel effect, basically, is that a material facing the camera reflects less than one that faces sideways.

To implement these effects you have to use nodes - there is no simple PoserSurface input for metallic versus dialectric.

If you really have a Filter Forge material that actually produces this map, show me and I'll build a Poser shader for it, so you see how its done.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

If my verbal description was gobbledygook, here is a Poser render demonstrating the difference with some highly accurate shaders I built. (Click for full size)

One candlestick (and matching ball) is a dialectric, and one is a metal. They have exactly the same diffuse color. I have no doubt you can tell which is which.

The middle ball is the same dialectric material, but the diffuse color is black. I added that so you can see how reflections behave on a dialectric easily.

The table is also a dialectric, as are the candles.

When you look at a metal, almost 100% of what you see is colored reflections of the environment. That's why I think environment spheres (as I've used here) are so important.

If you are using a set of maps that describe a material that has both dialectric areas and metal areas, then the metallic map would be very important. For these objects, which are all of one material, I don't need a metallic map.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

More excellent info (with pictures!) is here.

http://www.filterforge.com/more/help/Components/ServiceComponents/Result.html

Read all of this page. It is wonderful.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

The Specular Exponent map is also going to need special handling. A couple nodes will take care of it. There are two issues:

1. A Phong Specular Exponent is a number much bigger than 1. But an image only stores 0 to 1. So this map uses some math to transform numbers from one range to another to fit in 0 to 1. We have to decode that and reverse it to get back to a Phong exponent.

2. The resulting value is only appropriate for the Phong node. To use the information on a Specular, Blinn, Glossy, or Anisotropic node, we need a very different representation. For example, a Phong Exponent of 1000 (very sharp reflection) would turn into some very tiny number for Specular Roughness.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)