In preview mode, my Sydney G2 has thick lush black eyelashes. When rendered, they are all but invisible. Very fine, very light brown, and only if you look closely. What must I do to make them show up more clearly? Sorry if this is a clueless question, but I would really appreciate some help.

IMVHO they don't look lush and thick when I preview them (texture shaded).  they look somewhat sparse, but they render the same as they preview. post screenshot of render settings. 

But I would first make sure to switch off texture filtering for the eyelash image maps - it would normally be switched on by default. That should give a fair improvement. You could also try increasing pixel samples to reduce aliasing, and reduce your render minimum shading rate - but be prepared for longer render times.

The attached load-and-render (almost) pic is with texture filtering off (I always switch it off for my complete scene before rendering), min shading rate of 0.5 and pixel samples = 6. Are you getting anything like this?

Yes I also experimented with turning off the texture filtering and I get a very slight improvement. Strangely, when I render with the Poser 4 engine, the eyelashes look great, but the skin looks horrible. I looked at some of the characters I bought for Sydney. Most use the defaul lash transparency map and the lashes hardly show. One or two figures have a different transparency map that gives considerably better results. In the material room, Sydney's lashes are coloured black. I don't know why they appear light brown. Perhaps the transparency map is key.

I had not tried doing anything with the render settings yet, apart from changing the engine. I'll give that a go. Thanks for the tip.

You're right, they are black; I guess they tend to pick up the background colour where they are semi-transparent, as you suggested.

I had a similiar issue with V4, the lashes came out looking sparse and "jagged" looking and I someone replied with [I have written down in my trusty book...because I can't remember squat]
Using a Min shade rate of .2 then set pixel sample to 5, then change max texture size to 1k-4k and after changing make sure to check reload textures if you have keep textures loaded turned on.

It does make your rendering go a little slower but it does "fill in the blanks" on the lashes.

If that doesn't help, it might be too your map for the lashes? Try some merchant resources to bulk up your lashes, by blending several together? 

Oh thank you, this has been most helpful. I like the minimum makeup look, but not the no-lashes look. I may even try drawing some transparency maps. The characters from 3D-Arena have different maps and they look a lot better when rendered than the default lashes. I am using Poser Pro, so I must turn the Anti-Gamma correction off. I had no idea what it did.

Update: the render settings make a huge improvement. This information should really be in the documentation somewhere, but I could not find it.

Nanette - just to clarify this: trust me, you still really need render gamma correction. Please don't turn that off, because you will find it much more difficult to realistically light your scenes and figures. 2.2 is the optimal setting to use.

But in Poser Pro the gamma correction should be set to a custom value of 1.0 (i.e. switched off) individually for any transparency maps you are using. If you don't know how to do this, I can post a screenshot.

By the way, this also applies to any bump map and displacement map images -- as long as they are not just the diffuse colour maps that are also being used for bump/displacement, in which case the texture gamma should not be changed, it should use the render setting.

Izi

Indeed there is, raven, but it doesn't work for me. The setting "All of the above" never changes anything. Does this work for you?

Even if it does work, some misguided vendors use their diffuse colour maps as the basis for bump, and this script disables the anti-gamma for that image wherever it is used.

Yes it does, for me. I'm on a pc, are you on a Mac, IsaoShi? I ask because of a comment by marianner in this old thread at CP ( http://www.contentparadise.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9660 ) about the script not working on a Mac and there being an updated version on the updates page at SM, but I can't see it on the page there anymore. I vaguely remember it being on the pc updates page too at one time. Maybe they put the newer version of the script into the SR2 pack.

Hi raven.. thanks for coming back on this. Yes, I'm on Mac. There was an updated script in SR1, but it only seemed to correct the text on one of the windows. Maybe there's another version out there somewhere. I'm on Poser Pro Base, so the SR1.2 update does not apply to me.

Hey I just looked back at what you wrote. Is there a P Pro SR2? Going to look now.... I'll be back!

Wow I am following all of this and learning a lot. Thank you.

Speaking of Poser7 and PoserPro, is PoserPro a better product than Poser7? Kind of like Poser 7.5?  I'm working with Poser 6 and I'm half tempted to purchase the upgrade since the price has come down, but now there is PoserPro to wonder about. Is PoserPro a much better product to work with than Poser7 and I should set my sights on that? Or is PoserPro only just slightly better than Poser7 and not worth the extra hundred or so dollars? 

It has more features than Poser 7.

For me, the main reason for buying Poser Pro was gamma correction. I was gradually learning about this when I had Poser 7, and it dawned on me that to get proper gamma correction using Poser 7 I would have to convert every single shader that I used. Poser Pro has gamma correction built in. You still need to learn about it, but it's much easier with Poser Pro.

The second main reason was the Background rendering and the Queue Manager.

With Background rendering I can start a render within Poser (say to check certain aspects of a scene, or a partial scene) and then continue to work on other parts of the scene while it is rendering.

The Queue Manager is a batch render manager. You can send a render to the Queue Manager, and it saves a 'snapshot' of your complete scene and then renders it outside of Poser. This means you can close Poser down and do other stuff, like go to bed maybe, or open up another scene file. The Queue Manager can also manage a small 'render farm' of several computers rendering one scene.

Poser Pro also has the option to use a 64-bit Firefly render engine, if your computer and OS are 64 bit. It's quicker than the 32-bit Firefly engine.

I went for the Poser Pro Base version. It's cheaper and I do not need the advanced Poserfusion interfaces and import/export facilities that the full version gives.

those desiring gamma correction in poser 7 (non-pro) may use bill's "artistic lens" to correct the items in the scene.  it's actually rather helpful with posersurfaces like sydney, jessi et al.  I dunno if bill's lens works in P6.

Lens works in P5+

Sweet all good to know information here. Thanks to those who answered :) I've been tempted with Poser 7 but I held off and now Poser Pro is out so didn't know if the difference between the two was little or huge. I've seen a lot of great images being produced with Daz's Studio program and I'm half tempted to try and understand that one. My one draw back is all of my models and textures etc are based in my Poser folder. I have a new computer coming and I'm tempted to create a folder for my items where I can use either Poser or D|S and have a central location for the items needed. Would that be possible? This way I don't have duplicate items hording hard drive space.

When I first tried DS I knew very little (i.e. a bit less than I do now!) but I remember there was an option to specify an existing Poser library as a content source.

The DS-specific files, such as materials, can be installed in the same library file alongside the Poser ones, I believe. But to be honest I have not used DS for ages.