Meh. I thought this problem was solved with P8, but not.

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.

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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.

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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....

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

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.

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Hm, nope, that didn't work. The artifact became redder, but it's still there. So it's not an AO issue, it's a raytracing issue.

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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.

My Freebies

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.

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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.

My Freebies

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.

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Where are your lights?

My Freebies

As I noted, I'm doing a render in P8 right now, so I can't give you specifics on light locations. I gave you general answers above, but now that you make the point about the eye highlights, perhaps I've got the locations wrong in my description; the renders do look like I've got a light right in front. (I don't dare open up the scene in Poser Pro, as it has IDL settings and I'm wary that may cause a crash of both PP and P8.)

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).

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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).

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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.

My Freebies

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.)

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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.

My Freebies

Hm. Setting one light to spot doesn't work either, though it's noticeably better than with two infinites, to be sure.

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

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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.)

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Here's a good illustration it's not a shadow. I turned both lights into spotlights, put them directly in front of my figure's face, and pointed them both at the lower jaw. Do you think that would cause a lip shadow remotely like this?

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).

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Well, so much for my morphing theory above. I get the same problem with default V4 rendered with VSS (ignore the crazy turbulence; my only interest here was seeing whether I'd get the lip line - I also got it with absolutely default V4, no VSS).

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

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It's a shadow. Really.

My Freebies

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.

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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.

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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.

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Thanks again for your recommendation, Stewer. It's still not perfect, but .05 is worlds better than the raytraced renders above. Pardon the colorization; I know what's wrong there. The interest here is the line where the lips join.

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.)

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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.

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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?)

Here's demonstration. Depth mapped lights, with shadow maps at 1024, min bias back up to the default of 0.8. No hint of the unsightly line.

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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.

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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)?

My Freebies

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.

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

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.

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Here is a test setup. There is a Poser Ground. There is a back wall (scaled box). There is a Cylinder. There is one infinite light. No shadows on the light, no AO, no IBL, no IDL.

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.

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)

Here the light elevation is 0 degrees - it is coming in parallel to the ground, and perpendicular to the back wall.

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.

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Yep, the very top of this curved surface is black. Which means as long as my light is out front, this will be black. Shadows on or off, blurred or not, all not relevant.

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)

Based on that knowledge, I predict that a pair of touching cylinders, kind of like a pair of lips, will be totally black in the area where they touch.

Yep.

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Turning on shadows, nothing changes on the cylinders, because nothing is in front of these cylinders to block the light and cast a shadow. The cylinders cast shadows on the wall behind. Not interesting or relevant, though.

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I raised the elevation of my light to 20 degrees. With shadows on, the upper cylinder is now casting some shadow on the lower cylinder, enhancing the blackness of the crevice where they meet. Not a surprise, really.

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Light source now elevated 45 degrees. Observe the crevice.

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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.

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(Following...)

"If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn't like to be half of what I should be."
Mr Otsuka, the old black tomcat in Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

I load an IBL with a probe from an interior, where the ceiling is bright, and the floor is a warm wood color. Note my 3D ground is not that color.

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.

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I turned on AO on my IBL. I intentionally set up a ray bias of .5 inch. That means any points closer than .5 inch don't count for occlusion. Why do we do this? Because there is a bad thing that can happen with a REYES render called self shadowing. It creates artifacts.

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.

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I switch to my Aux camera here, set it to 150mm and zoom in for a more detailed rendering of the area of interest.

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Ray bias is now .2 inches. Still I have a gap in the AO within a crevice. In fact, in theory I'll have a gap until I go to 0 inches, but let's see how it actually works.

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Ray bias .1 inch.

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.

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Ray bias .05 inch.

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Ray bias .02 inch. I still have an AO gap, or sometimes I call it shadow breakaway. Anyway, I'm already into territory where Poser 6 would have produced self-shadowing artifacts pretty much everywhere.

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

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Ray bias .01 inch. The gap you see is only a hundredth of an inch wide, but it matters. And these are ten inch diameter cylinders. What happens with a pair of lips? LOL

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Ray bias .001 inch, or 1/1000 of an inch. I still see gaps, but that's probably because I'm using draft render settings, for speed. If you want to continue the experiment, you do it. I think I've shown that IBL+AO is going to color the crevice black.

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.

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This discussion reminds me of exterior architectural renders, where people wonder why all the interiors beyond the windows look black or very dark. It's how things are, but the brain "thinks" it should look just as lit as the exterior.

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Now I reduced the AO strength to .3 - it was .7.

What changes? A theory might be the intensity of the mid-point of the shadow gradient is affected by "strength", not the most or least occluded, but what is half-occluded. !!!!

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Strength = .1. I still have black, it's just very small.

I conclude that there is no way to get any light into the point of contact if AO is turned on and properly configured to operate all the way into the deepest part of the crack.

In fact, from my understanding of physics, this is correct behavior. In this geometrical situation, no light can reach the point of contact between the two cylinders. Very small amounts can reach very close, but the point of contact gets no direct or bounced light.

Real lips have SSS, so the light can reach the point of contact from under the surface, entering on the front, not the point of contact.

This is why we need SSS.

I could continue this experiment with IDL instead of IBL+AO, but I suspect it will result in the same. There is no direct way to get light into the crevice.

My wife insists I must go work for her now. Hehehe.

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Quote - > 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.

I think you're missing the point. I was showing that even at lower quality settings, the DM shadow is better than the RT shadow on this point, until I get the RT settings way down in the Min Bias. I can set the Min Bias on the DM wherever I bloody want - the DM will never ever ever make a blotch like that.

Quote - > Quote - It is not physically correct.

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

I was responding to ice-boy's insinuation that the ugly black mark was correct.

Quote -
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)?

Pardon my frustration, but how many times do I have to say this? I have these results with a huge variety of angles. I showed several with the spotlights directly in front of the face. Not 1 foot above. Directly in front. Others, with various angles. (I can't show screen shots now, because I've changed the scene for every test. I'd have to recreate everything.)

Bagginsbill, your tests are interesting - but other than some of the weird things that AO is doing (perhaps because I don't fully understand AO) - and as you can see from the thread, I shut AO off first in the render settings, then in the materials but got the same problem - but as I say, other than some of the things AO is doing, your results are pretty much what I would expect. They are not the same thing as what is going on with my renders at the lips. Sure, the black is very black. That is not the issue. In every case, you're showing renders where there is a transition. Mine is a felt marker-like line, AO or no AO. That cannot be right and is impossible to be right. What you're showing is that the point of contact is completely black. But the point of contact between upper and lower lip is not 1/4"-1/2" thick. You can reference any photograph or mirror you want. You'll never see this, ever.

Moreover, my problem results are not reproduced by DM. Okay, poorer quality setup; fine. They're also not reproduced by RT at .05 settings. They're not reproduced by DAZ Studio with raytracing.

This isn't simply a violation of an erroneous mental preconception. It's a bad render.

My solution is simple. I keep the Min Bias much lower (hoping the other artifacting doesn't get too bad... I think I could probably get away with a 1 setting if necessary). But it's frustrating that I don't know a way to set up the default new light with my preferred settings. It's easy to overlook changing stuff like that until you've already rendered, plus, it's just a PITA.

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3

I may have greatly misunderstood Bagginsbill's posts, but they appear to boil down to, "It's a shadow." The ones where he's demonstrating AO behavior don't have to do with your specific complaint, which is about raytraced shadows - which he covered here:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2779249&page=2#message_3501830

My Freebies

Thanks. I understand his observations completely. But he's not reproducing what's happening. (And anyway, he has the light source above the objects there.) And as I said again, were it accurate, reducing Min Bias to .05 would (EDIT: would NOT) make it pretty much go away.

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3

sorry, but i don't see the problem myself.
http://seedmagazine.com/images/uploads/attractive_article.jpg
http://img1.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire3/b244c4602bfe518343314db046afffef1224361421_full.jpg

depth-mapped shadows are just wrong, and with a small map size (especially without out zooming) they really don't shadow crevices on a face properly. even 1024 wouldn't necessarily be enough if the shadow cam covers a whole scene or even the whole figure. basically, you can't use them as your comparison, because physically, they're just completely wrong.

it sounds like what you're fighting with is spread or blur. what's your shadow blur on your raytraced shadows? when you use AO (if at all), what's your distance? imho, Poser's raytraced shadows do have a problem with being too differentially blurry. while they can blur nicely at a distance, the close shadows (like on the lips) are too sharp at almost any setting. but that's just to my eyes; i haven't actually done tests to match photos.

also, since you haven't mentioned it, i'm assuming these are all at the same blurring amount. even if it's not at 0, you might try turning it up.

the more important problem i've encountered with ray-traced shadows and blur is grain. stewer, is there any chance of getting light shadow sample control, the way we have for AO, in SP1 - or SP 3 or 4 for that matter - or Pro? if not, would it be possible (without revealing secrets or taking up tons of your time), to explain why this is difficult?

I find myself repeating myself.

I've had these problems with no blur.

I've had them with plenty of blur.

(Blur makes no sense whatsoever as an explanation, anyway, since there is no blur there, regardless - just a solid black [or red, in the case of the overexposed images] mark.)

I don't have them with DM lights no matter what the settings are. I don't have them in DAZ Studio with raytracing.

And yet again, if the hard ugly mark were right, it would still be there at .05 min bias on RT lights.

I find myself shocked that anyone can look at those images and think the lip mark is normal. No decent quality photo reference will give you that, never mind real life. Even the image you linked, although a very poor quality image (35 kb), isn't as extreme. You can still see a bit of a gradient as you approach the dark line, even though I'm certain the image has been postworked for high contrast (which would make the issue worse).

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3

I prefer the dark shadow over the glowing nostrils in the shadow mapped version

What I would do without going into rocket science math nodes etc, would be:

Render two versions, one with shadow maps, one with raytraced shadows

And take the best part of both as postwork in the Gimp, Photoshop, etc etc.

Easier.
Faster.
Less frustrating.

So maybe it is perceptually wrong. Maybe it is physically-mathematically-etc correct. Who knows. But meanwhile, you get an image as you like it.

still hooked to real life and enjoying the siesta!
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I'm already getting images as I like them, now, since following Stewer's advice to try .05 Min Bias. If I do get other artifacts, I'll experiment with how far I can edge it up and still have the lips acceptable. I did one angled render that suggested to me .1 may be okay, though not as good as .05.

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: lip artifacting still present with raytraced shadows