I fought Poser Pro for months because whenever my character had a closed mouth, she ended up with a long black line all along her mouth opening is I used raytraced shadows. Horrible.

My first renders with P8, I didn't pick up on it, because I had the mouth just slightly open. But the problem is still here. See attached image. Keep in mind that the settings for the image below were very high.

Is anyone else experiencing these problems with raytracing? If not, any idea why I would be?

P.S. Please forgive the bump map; it still needs some serious work.

There are more differences - ears, nostrils, eyelid creases, eyewhites.

Did you use material-based AO for the first render?
And did you switch off raytracing for the second one? (I know you said same render settings... just checking!)

Could that be the difference, rather than the type of shadow you are using? Not sure....

Like I said: all other settings are exactly the same. I changed nothing except raytracing > depth-mapped shadows on the lights.

The other artifacts - not so good, but not as glaring as the lips.

I'm just checking something right now though... I think I may have AO on the lips. The shader was originally built on the AO version of VSS. I scrapped it for the skin, but may have forgotten the lips. I'm doing a test render with a non-AO VSS version right now to see what happens.

I don't recall... is AO only a problem with raytracing? It was these problems that led me to abandon raytraced shadows in Poser Pro, but now that I can rid of material AO, maybe I'll be (relatively) okay after all.

Where exactl are your lights and how are they set?  You have several weird things going on, e.g. the nostril has a really sharp transition (probably AO there, turn it off).  The eyebrows also went strange in your last render.

PJZ, in the last image, there is definitely no AO, since I used Bagginsbill's no-AO VSS shader straight out of the box for that render. That's what I was testing, to make sure the problem wasn't material-based AO that I had missed cleaning up.

As far as the eyebrows going strange and the general redness - I didn't adjust anything in the shader or my render settings either. Since BB's shader has GC built in, and I was using HSV, there's a bit of blowout. (That explains the artifact turning red. Well, sort of, but not. I wouldn't have expected the artifacts to change colour to that degree.)

I've got another render going so can't give you details on the lights, but basically they're very simple. I think I've got two, one angled from the left and one from the right. I believe shadow softness is set somewhere around 4 degrees.

Thanks.

Is that sharp line in the nostril painted into the texture?  Those hot spots on the eyes, are those painted in as well or are they coming from a proper reflection (not really to do with your question but I'd like to know)?

Something is wonky with how your lights are set, it appears to me that either you don't have shadows turned on for all lights or you're using depth mapped shadows - at the edge of the ear there is a break in the shadow that really should not be there.  You also don't seem to have shadow min bias turned down low enough as the eyelashes are not casting a shadow, and they should.

I should also add that I have experienced this phenomenon with a wide variety of lighting angles and setups in the past. Again, this is why I had pretty much abandoned RT lighting in Poser Pro. I'm disappointed to see that things really haven't improved in P8 on this front.

Where are your lights?

The settings are as I have said. When I say that I'm using raytracing, that's what I'm using for lights (images 1 and 3). Shadows are on.

The bias issue did occur to me. (IIRC, with the file above, the setting is left at the default 0.8.) However, I had read that going for quality setting with bias actually makes artifacts worse. So I fired up Poser Pro, created a new scene, and tried a raytraced light render with the Shadow Min Bias cranked way up on both lights. The result is much better - tho still bad, and the shading in the ear is terrible. Keep in mind that this is not the same scene, but I can easily reproduce the lip problem in render after render with varying settings, as I noted. This one has two infinites, one set way off to her left the other from a closer angle to her right.

In answer to your question about the eye colour map - there are two relatively small highlights in the irises. I should probably take them out; the larger of them is visible in the renders above (it's to the upper left of the iris).

I'm not sure what you're talking about re sharp line in her nostril, unless you really mean, on the side of her nose just above her nostril. Most of the wonky looking lines you see are from a bad bump map (hence my P.S. in the second post).

Quote - This one has two infinites...

That would be your problem.  Do you have two suns in the scene lighting your character?  Use spotlights or point lights.  I don't think infinite raytraced shadows work with blur.  Infinite lights imo really should be used for just one thing in a render: simulating very distant, very large light sources like the sun.

Thanks!

Duh. I don't usually have two infinites (at least, not anymore; I'm sure I did numerous times before I got more specific with lighting) when I create a real scene. But Poser loads three infinites by default, and when I'm doing character work I don't play much with lights, usually.

Am going to turn one of these into a spot and see what happens.

(BTW: I turned min bias way down to 0 just to see what would happen. Ouch.)

If this is indoor, you shouldn't have ANY infinite lights.

You can set up lights, render settings, default scene contents however you care to, and in Edit -> General Preferences you can "Set Preferred State", and that will be your new default.

edit: just to make something perfectly clear, what you're seeing is not an "artifact", it's simply a shadow.

Mind you, this is a Poser Pro render... so still crossing my fingers it's fixed in Poser 8.

Never thought about resetting my prefs. That's a good idea.

But on your claim that's not an artifact, but a shadow.. sorry, I'm not buying. It's a shadow in the same way that the nasty blotches in other darkened places are shadows, sure. But if they are that bad of shadows at high Q settings, I'd call them artifacts. There is no way a shadow should be a solid line like that. Not on an organic surface like the lips. It looks very bad. I could draw in a shadow like that with a permanent marker. (And note, I have a shadow blur radius of close to 5 on both lights in the render I just posted.)

I'm beginning to think that my problem is quite unique, however. I'm sure you would know what I was talking about it you had experienced this, and I don't see similar complaints from elsewhere.

Hm. I better doublecheck my subversion too. Edit: No, that can't be the problem, as I'm getting it in P8, too, and I'm obviously up to date (incl. hotfix).

I'm stumped. And I can't figure out why I seem to be the only one with this problem.

It's a shadow.  Really. 

You saw it above. It is impossible for a shadow - at least, of any quality whatsoever - to be generated like that when the lights are directly in front of the face. Or anywhere else for that matter. And it looks just this ugly, like drawn by a big felt marker, no matter how soft the shadows are set in the lights. And it doesn't happen with DM shadows. If it was a reasonable RT shadow, it would be the same general placement as the DM shadows. But the DM shadow is minimal, nothing like that at all.

 Don't do 0 for shadow bias, that won't work. Try 0.1 or 0.05, then things should look a lot better.

Thanks, Stewer. This happens whether shadow bias is at the default 0.8 or wherever I seem to adjust to. I'll try those settings though.

I should add: none of the renders shown here were of min bias at 0. That one was creating other sorts of artifacts (lines in the skin); I didn't bother posting it.

It's a mystery to me why lights load a .8 min bias by default. Wish there was a way to set that in General Preferences. (I do now have the lights in Preferred State set at .05, but that doesn't look after any new lights I add to a new scene.)

Quote - Here's the very same image and render settings with depth-mapped shadows. No problem at all (and rendered in 2/3 the time, consistent with results elsewhere; not really a surprise).

Is anyone else experiencing these problems with raytracing? If not, any idea why I would be?

P.S. Please forgive the bump map; it still needs some serious work.

no problem at all in that render?

my dear friend you have:
a) no shadows. that would explain why i dont see any shadows
b) small shadow map. this would explain why i dont see any shadow map . is its to smal lthen it gets so blury that you dont see it.

whats important with shadows is that the closer something is to an object the more sharper the shadow gets. this is why raytraced shadows are physical correct. of course with RT spotlights we can not do very soft shadows. to bad.

I always have shadows on. Sure, the depth maps were small. But if the proper render was a line at the lips like that, you still woud have seen it with DM shadows.

I'm triggering some sort of bug with raytraced lights. Only using a narrow window of min bias works to get rid of it, as demonstrated already in my previous post. If that ugly black line was "normal," improving the quality of the min bias wouldn't virtually get rid of it. It's not simply ugly. It's not normal. It is not physically correct. It's not correct in any sense. It's a glitch.

 The lips are completely closed in your render, right? What happens if you open them juuuust a smidgeon? I have a feeling it's some self-shadowing thing going on here. Not sure, but as you say, your problem is unique.

Then again I'm not sure there's really a problem here... I mean.. I just looked at my own mouth in a mirror and the line between my lips are definitely BLACK. And that was in a fairly shadowless environment (overcast and only natural light)

Also what does it look like if you render her with only indirect light? (from a lightbox or similar?)

TrekkieGrrrl, sure your lip join is black. But it's not abrupt, nor is it a big thick line. It's a thin dark line, with gradient shadow going toward it.

In most of the renders, the mouth was absolutely closed. I've had the same thing with it just slightly open, as well.

Quote - Here's demonstration. Depth mapped lights, with shadow maps at 1024, min bias back up to the default of 0.8.

With min bias set that high, it is likely that the lip geometry just isn't casting a shadow there any more. 

Quote - It is not physically correct.

Poser's shadows are not anything close to physically correct even under the absolute best circumstances.

Do you have a 100% spotlight shining directly into the character's face, maybe 1 foot above the character's head?  If not, where are your lights (screenshot would be nice)?

Well, it may be no consolation, but I've just done some testing with base V4.2, in Poser Pro. Exactly the same results as you are getting. I've always used RT shadows, but I've just never noticed this before with my own lighting.

But I don't really attempt close-up realistic portraits; I find it just too difficult with Poser. At best it's a complex and time-consuming mixture of different techniques, and at worst an unsatisfactory compromise between conflicting needs.

In my tests, reducing the shadow min bias to 0.05 eliminated the problem with the lips, but introduced artifacts elsewhere on the face, particularly around the eyes.

The point at which you guys are at here is where I was a while back, quite a few times. My expectations were occasionally violated - I see stuff I don't expect. My mental mental model suggests what should happen instead, and my model is wrong, but I persist in believing it is the software that is wrong.

I have always found success in correcting my mental model, my understanding of the situation. Usually this requires getting back to basics  - and NOT rendering complicated multi-light scenarios with a high polygon figure.

The most important tools we have in Poser are the primitives. No joke. Not for creating scenes, but for becoming an expert at shaders and lighting, the primitives are worth $1000, yet we get them for free.

Let me show you how I understand what happens in a pair of lips, with the kind of lighting you're using.

This will take a few postings, and I'm doing the work in real time.

The light is angled at 45 degrees elevation.

Observe how the bottom of the cylinder is black. This is not technically a shadow, because that surface is pointing away from the light. It is black because it isn't facing the light at all.

I say that is not a shadow because it will stay black no matter what else I do in the scene with other props, and also because shadows are not even turned on.

What is the luminance of the ground? Zero - nada, black.

Hmmm. A surface parallel to the light source is black. Add that to our mental model.

Well I suppose that the very top and bottom of this cylinder, where the normals are straight up and down, are also black.

Yep.

So, now we understand this geometry and a directional light source - you cannot light the crevice at all with a directional light source. All you can do is increase the blackness, you can never decrease it. It is a simple fact of the geometry.

Let's tackle IBL next.

(Following...)

No AO is enabled. Observe how upward facing parts of cylinders reflect the IBL ceiling, while downward facing parts reflect the IBL floor.

The crevice is lit well, but wrong.

So we usually want to adjust the ray bias as small as possible until we get all the detail of the scene without introducing artifacts.

You can probably notice by now that we're heading for a totally black crevice.

This, despite the fact that the AO strength is .7, not 1.0. We'll investigate that later.

But I can keep going here with ray bias in Poser 8.

Everybody with me?

For this type of crevice, a directional light colors it black, and so does IBL+AO.

Any combination of the two will still be black.