Okay, it's ridiculously small because it's actually an area render (that nonetheless took a good long time, though I didn't check the clock - probably 15 minutes though, at this size).

That said, I'm very happy with the difference between this and what I had rendered in Poser Pro a couple weeks ago. Here I used one spotlight and one infinite. Render settings were relatively low.. was the time affected by the complexity of the surrounding scene? I dunno if that affects area renders or not....

Top image is a crop of my original Poser Pro render... settings were a lot higher, but render times can't be compared, as it was a full scene. Bottom image is the Poser 8 render with IDL. As you can see, the latter is darker, I've haven't played around enough to get it as bright as it needs to be (I had about 5-6 lights on it for PP).

Granted the difference in brightness (and the fact that the IDL image is a PNG; I had exported my earlier one as a JPEG - but I always export @ 100%)... I have to say that IMO, the realism of the IDL render completely blows the other one out of the water.

Excellent skin tones, much more alive - very nice. 

Thanks, lmckenzie. I agree it's considerably more lifelike. More natural-looking.

Heh. Of course, it's only now - in the middle of a hi-Q render of the full scene - that I notice that I don't have the hair quite wide enough on her left cheekbone. :rolleyes:

Oh, well... I could probably tidy up the back of her hair a bit closer to her neck too.... I'll likely do some adjustments and do another area render after my big render is complete (it's been precalculating for close to an hour now, but it's a complex scene, I've ramped up the quality, and it's got reasonably hefty dimensions).

You're getting nice subtle variations in the skin and I like the way the eye makeup got toned down. The one problem to my untrained eys is that the neck is lost in the shadow and the dark line on her chest. I'm sure when you get the lighting lined out those will go away. I think dark skin is more challenging and you've gotten a very pleasing result. Looking forward to seeing the final version.

Hi...

I'm not altogether sure that lighting is the issue.

Did you use Tone Mapping HSV Exponential for this image? It has nice skin tones, but lacks the detail that you got from the PPro GC render in the darker areas.

Also, I'm wondering about that dark pointed shadow across her right shoulder and collar bone... what's causing that?

No, I wasn't using HSV there, I don't think. I had pretty low settings all around.

I rendered the full-sized image last night. I don't even know how long it took as I had to go to bed; it took about 2 1/2 hours to recalculate the IDL. Mind, the image was 1800x1330 px, and the settings were high. The first thing I noticed is that were all sorts of details in my positioning of objects that were awry and weren't as noticeable in the Poser Pro render. (I have a bad habit of using the main camera to zoom around and check everything; I need to get in the mode of taking advantage of the other cameras.) Note e.g.  that the plant isn't actually behind the couch, so it's floating in midair and casting a shadow on the couch... I didn't pick that up in my Poser Pro render. (One thing I should have noticed was the newspapers, which is floating above the desk.)

For the sake of file size, I've saved these as jpeg, saved at 95% quality to get them into the 500 kb neighbourhood. Click for full size. The cropped facial image, also provided for easy comparison to the above, is small enough to fit here in full, so clicking won't get you anything more.

In order, the pictures below are: (1) my original full image from Poser Pro; (2) last night's full image from Poser 8; and (3) a crop of the girl's face from last night's image.

Wow, I just gotta add, I just went to fix her hair a bit - the new OpenGL preview is WORLDS better. I'll be able to adjust hair so much more easily now... in PP, it's hard to see collisions in preview a lot of the time.

Have a scene I was building a while back, that I hated the shadows using the lights that came with the product. I messed around with the lights to my ability. Still the scene looked flat. I parked the scene and told myself I would come back to it later out of frustration.

As a test I rendered it in P8 with IDL and messed around with the tone mapping a bit and yikes. Now have realistic shadows and a scene I plan to finally finish.

IDL is a major leap for Poser

Yeah it's a very major step forward.  I just wish they'd get the blotch artifact problem improved ASAP.

Yeah, the blotching is bad. Tho not as bad as the AO artifacting I was getting in PP.

thx fr the excellent render, believ.  I like the composition. may i ask a few questions?

1. does any posersurface (e.g couch) have non-zero ambient, alt. diffuse or alt. specular?
2. did you use any render script(s)?
3. any AO nodes or displacement on any posersurface?
4. were DM shadows used?

The lighting works so much better.

Just one thing. Since there is no GC in Poser 8, it might pay to use Tone Mapping HSV Exponential - bagginsbill suggests using a value of 2.0 or 2.2 rather than the default 1.6. This would help to lighten the contrasty shadows, similar to 'proper' Poser Pro GC.

Tone Mapping won't add anything to your render time (at least, I have noticed no difference on my renders).

Thanks, Miss Nancy. I actually set up this scene a few weeks ago, so I'd have to go through the scene to determine some of that. I probably did have DM shadows in the original Poser Pro render to avoid artifacting, but I redid the lighting for IDL, obviously, so no DM now.

No displacement or render scripts. I'd have to check as far as alt diffuse and alt spec, but I pretty much always use VSS, and off the top of my head, I think it does use those.

I'd have to look at the couch again... but it's the most glaringly in need of improvement (not sure why it's not interacting better shadow-wise with the guy sitting on it either).

Thanks, IsaoShi. These overnight renders did use HSV (at 2.2); it was just the first cropped image at the beginning of the thread that I had lower settings.

I'm still trying to find my way around, though (I just installed P8 last night, and I don't consider myself expert with PP by any means)... so further hints are certainly welcome.

Another Poser 8 re-render.

Quote - Another Poser 8 re-render.

Outstanding. New realism issues move to the top. Needs a bump map, not just some cheat, but a really good one. The speculars are too smooth.

I'm assuming the skin is VSS. Turn down the SSS. Because this is not GC'd, the redness comes on too strong. HSV Exponential (I'm assuming) does a little too good a job of preserving the red hue.

Hair shadows are a bit gritty and shadows overall are too sharp.  Nothing says CG like razor sharp vacuum shadows.

BB, yeah, I thought I had the skin redness issue looked after (it started out too red, as you may recall), but it's reappearing with P8. I'll turn the red values down a bit further in the shader... I thought I had already mellowed the SSS by making it a bit less red, but that may have been with another character.

I do indeed have more work to do on the bump map.

PJZ - you're right, I'm not satisfied with the hair at all.

Any suggestions on how to deal with the too-sharpness? Just more IDL passes? (I think this had two passes of raytracing; I didn't use the advanced script. IDL quality was set to 5, I think.)

Thanks to both of you. After hearing an "outstanding" from Bagginsbill (even with the further critique), I think I need to get a jack to prop my jaw up off the floor. :)

You likely have blur radius on the light(s) set to zero, which means no blur.  I like 5 degrees but that's not for any scientific reason, it just seems okay to me.

Mm... I thought the blur settings are only on DM shadows? how do I set them for RT? Or are those dials on the properties palette just indented badly, and apply to either DM or RT?

Edit: The key light was at 0, but I did have the rim light set at 2.6, but I didn't think it was doing anything... and anyway, the rim light isn't providing a whole lot of that light, just trying to get something going on the left side of her face and in her hair. Tho, it didn't work for the hair... can't quite seem to get the angle right for what I want.

Gah, my first crash. I've seen it reported elsewhere: selected V4, flipped to the Material Room, and I was gone.

The number is tracked differently depending on which radio button is pressed (Raytraced or Depth Mapped).  You need to set the shadow type first, and then you can change the blur radius.  Shadow Min Bias also matters when you have very small geometry, imo 0.1 is a good working number.  Bagginsbill also suggested turning up the Pixel Samples setting in another thread to improve the smoothness of raytraced shadows through transparency.

Thanks, I have turned up samples - I used to only render at 2-3, to be honest.

Weird that they have the blur option indented in that way. Makes it look like the option isn't available to raytraced lights.

Just crashed again when trying to enter the material room, this time with something other than V4 selected. I'm not a happy camper about that. Edit: three straight times. I cannot enter the material room.

During testing, the mat room crashed a lot more. Something is stuck or uninitialized.

One way I found to unstick it during beta was this.

Don't open the scene that crashes.

Open a new scene. Go into the material room. Leave.

Now load your scene. Go into mat room - should work.

Please report this to SM. All beta testers had this problem early on, and by release nobody could reproduce it with any scene anybody had.

SAVE YOUR SCENE. You may need to send it to SM for debugging. Please report this to SM.

support.smithmicro.com

Open a new incident report.

Thanks. Actually, I just sent an incident report to Smith Micro.

I did notice that it only has occurred (so far) with previous scenes. I can create a new scene and load a figure (V4, in fact) and go to the Material Room without any problems so far.

I'd be interested to hear what happens if you have an old scene that you haven't opened in P8 and try to go into the MAT room, whether you'll crash again... I wonder if the reduction of crashes during beta was directly due to the fact that eventually people were just working with scenes created in P8, not before. (Just a question.)

Good to know that I should be able to go into my old scene again. I just spent this time working on the shader to tone down the redness both in the diffuse and the SSS. Will see what kind of colouring I get this time.

No such luck. I crashed again. Unless it only works if I close the previous scene while in the Material Room (I was there, but was in the pose window before I closed).

Hmmm. I'm just about stumped.

Try this. Open the old scene. Don't go into the mat room.

Save it under a new name.

Exit Poser. Start it again.

Open the new file. Now try going into the mat room.

No, that didn't work. I didn't think it would, as the first thing I did when I opened the two old files was rename them. I'm always nervous about corrupting a good file when opening in a new version of software.

Quote - During testing, the mat room crashed a lot more. Something is stuck or uninitialized.

I hadn't got any crashes in the materials room but it certainly has something wrong with it, even with a very very basic material (say something with one node) it behaves noticeably much slower from previous versions when dragging nodes around.

Two things that have worked for me when I get a scene "stuck" with the material room crash:

1.  Open the scene, move something in the preview window.  Select a light.  Use the advanced materials properties button on the properties palette to guide you into the material room.  Make your changes and save.

2.  Open a new scene, import your stuck scene.

3.  The problem seems to generate from the GUI.  Save a good UI memory dot.  Make sure the dot is selected before going into the material room.  (haven't had a crash since I've been doing that faithfully.... but it is random, so I don't have high hopes.)

For one fleeting second once I saw an error from Poser before the crash that Poser was unable to read the .pmd file.   Doesn't make any sense since I think the problem with the GUI, but I don't pretend to know much.  :)

Indi.

My hard drive was very close to full and Poser 8 was bogging down my machine something nasty last night. This a.m. I deleted a bunch of files, uninstalled a bunch of programs, including P8, then reinstalled Poser 8. I honestly don't know if I've got a rendering problem - the scene (a new one with Alyson) that bogged down P8 last night still won't render (I left it to render when I went to work this a.m., and got back and it was still supposed precalculating light - but it wasn't a complex scene, and the settings weren't high; P8 was frozen).

But on the other hand, when I open up the problem files I was crashing with yesterday, and then go into the material room, I don't crash. So hopefully, that problem is solved.

As for the P8 scene, it still functions other than on render, and other than the character, the scene is pretty simple, so I think I'll just save her to the library and recreate in a new file and try again.

But first I'll try yet another rerender of the last Sharon image I linked above, this time with a bit less red in the shader, and some softer shadows. PJZ mentioned 5%... what do you tend to use, BB? And what are the recommendations for bias for a scene like that? I don't have any particular small geometry there, will probably just set it at .3 or so for this particular render.

I will be doing more bump and spec map work for this character, as eventually I hope to make her a product... but not for this render. I wanna see P8 go thru the paces on the reinstall and see what happens.

Ray bias is not a performance issue - it only has to do with whether you get artifacts or not. Too high, and shadows break away from small crevices. Too low, and you get black spots or visible lines along polygon boundaries. I usually use .1 inch.

The shadow blur, for raytraced, is I think in degrees. I usually use 3 degrees for a small light source and 6 to 10 degrees for larger. By that I mean, is it a tiny spotlight, or a big one with a shade.

The long render times are usually caused by transmapped hair. I can get a high quality IDL render of a figure in 30 minutes without hair or other significant transparency. With hair, or with the visor on her helmet (used in SM promo renders) it went 7 1/2 hours.

Of course my laptop is lame. People with lots of cores on high-end current machines get renders 20 times faster.

Sometimes I skip a bump map altogether and just let VSS supply bump via the Turbulence node. I think we discussed this months ago. Unless you're doing an extreme closeup, the Turbulence pattern is very good, better than most bump maps. It's also more consistent, because bump map pixel density varies from one body part to another. The node produces uniform scale tiny features automatically.

Thanks, BB. No, I didn't think ray bias was a performance issue; I was harkening back to earlier in the thread with realism. I think I played with it a wee bit when I first started using Poser, but then I thought those settings were only for DM, and I stopped looking at them altogether.

I guess I had the blur thing backward... though I thought I got the impression from Birn's Digital Lighting & Rendering, but maybe not. It was my understanding that you want the softer shadows on the smaller light source (or shall I say, the lower intensity source), so that the effect is more subtle.

I can certainly see using Turbulence for more distant shots. But for close up, I like to have a map to help define lines, wrinkles etc, especially since I'm mostly working with  more midlife characters. I'm kinda looking it as my niche to develop for the moment. I don't think there's really much out there for 35-45ish women, in particular. (Probably not much market either, but oh well.)

Anyway, Poser 8 doesn't look like it's choked on my re-render of Sharon, though I upped the quality settings (finally went into that D3D python window for special settings). I don't expect it to get rendered in less than 3-4 hours... but I'm starting to breathe a little more easily.

Well, this is quite interesting. First IDL render with soft shadows turned on and the quality cranked a bit. It took six hours; mind you, I was using my computer for other stuff, including having Morphing Clothes and Poser Pro running much of the time.

A big improvement, but I still don't like the hair. And now I'm getting some visibility with what the bump map is doing and where I need to make some fixes (that gash on the cheek, in particular). But I've solved the redness, at any rate, and I think the shadows look more natural.

When you say "soft shadows" do you mean depth-mapped shadows?  I ask because that render shows one of the common problems of depth-mapped shadows, at the hair, where there are parts of the character's skin that did not get any shadow applied.  You can improve that by reducing shadow min bias, maybe to the point where it isn't visible any more at your chosen camera angle, but you can never really get rid of it (taking Jeremy Birn's word for that).  Depth-mapped shadows have another conceptual problem in that they don't do blurred shadows very convincingly; no setting will work around that, it's fundamental to depth-mapped shadows (at least the way Poser and most other apps implement them).

The bright line on the cheek maky be another aspect of the light leak problem (depth-mapped shadows).

Yep - the things you worked on are clearly better.

Realism is like whack-a-mole. Something else always pops up as the new "biggest departure".

The geometry of the figure itself is now starting to bother me. The shape of the space between the knuckles is jumping out at me. I may be a bit more fat than this pretty girl, but I don't have deep creases between my knuckles (first set, the part you punch with). Take a jab at that with the morph brush.

I have never seen a trans-mapped hair that can match the realism you've got on the figure now. Good luck with that.

The part of the bra being pulled away looks CG. It doesn't fold and curl like real cloth.

The textures on the chair and curtain look blurry. Texture filtering? Also, they need some bump.

Keep going.

Also there's that bright rim lighting around the character's left profile (most obvious at the nose and left corner of the mouth) that appears to come from nowhere.  Is that a light in the upper right rear that has shadows turned off?

Quote - Also there's that bright rim lighting around the character's left profile (most obvious at the nose and left corner of the mouth) that appears to come from nowhere.  Is that a light in the upper right rear that has shadows turned off?

A lamp behind the chair (off screen) would do that in real life.

Sure, but it would also throw shadows through the hair and probably be occluded in at least a couple of spots (I'm thinking the mouth).

Here's a photo I took of a friend while we were messing around with the Nikon creative lighting system. (Two flashes, one on camera, one positioned as a rim light from behind left of the "figure". LOL)

Look at what the rim light does to the hair.

Thanks, guys.

PJZ: I'm using raytraced lights only, and shadows. I'm sure texture filtering is off.

BB, this is the issue I referenced earlier with the rim lighting... it just doesn't seem to be working with the hair as I was attempting. Still not sure how to solve it. Part of the problem with the lack of occlusion from the rim light is that I have the shadow settings too soft? (They're not THAT high, tho - about 7%, IIRC.)

If I'm understanding you right, I think the creases you're seeing on the fingers is misplaced knuckle lines on my bump - they never really showed up until I got this level of render quality.

Oh, and my present issues with the hair are not general realism, but blotchy shadows in a couple places. They were always bugging me, but are even more noticeable now that the other shadows are getting so nice.

Blur radius 7 could cause individual hairs to not appear to cast a shadow but they wouldn't in real life either, if you have a big lamp with lampshade close by.

Attached images shows the crease I'm talking about.

Looks like it is too low resolution and that there are JPEG artifacts from it being over compressed.

Let's face it. The new IDL sucks.

The following image looks a lot better.

Quote - Let's face it. The new IDL sucks.

The following image looks a lot better.

Sigh. I disagree completely.

IDL doesn't suck. And that image is clearly inferior to the other one.

I wouldn't say it sucks, I think it can give really excellent results if you push the settings high enough.  The problem with that though is the speed is terrible when the settings are pushed that high.  I'm sure this will improve as Stefan puts more work into the renderer.

The thing with the hair is probably that it is set to be exempt from raytracing, a lot of vendors do that with hair to make it render faster.  This means that it will cast shadows with depth-mapped shadows, but not with raytraced shadows.  I've seen a whole lot of hair items that have wonky specular settings as well (black specular color e.g.).

Quote - While I'm posting photos, just for reference here is a 100% crop showing the importance of bump to make the specular look like skin. The smooth stuff we see in all these Poser renders is - lame.

but without SSS the skin looks dry .
i think if we dont use SSS then we have to be very careful how bump we use. to much bump on a skin shader without SSS and it will look to dry. plus i think the bump should not be to sharp.