My purpose for Poser: to illustrate training materials and make my new website (which I hope to upload soon) more interesting. Learning to use it was much more difficult than I thought it would be, but the challenge keeps me going. Now I find that I have fallen into a trap: As I gain a bit more skill, I try to strive for more realism. It is senseless and stupid, because most of the pictures will be printed or rendered small. I have spent a lot of money on good textures and fiddled endlessly with lighting, eyelashes and eye reflections The high-res textures and figures makes my system slow, and the realism I keep trying for is always just out of reach.

Now I am having a reality moment. Look at Dr Geep's tutorial illustrations. Not realistic. Effective, clear, humorous and everybody loves them. Dr Geep is using Poser effectively and not trying to turn it into a camera. I should use those lower-res figures more and stop fretting about minor imperfections that nobody will see in the final product.

But realism is just so seductive....

Yep, it's good to stretch your knowledge and push the limits of what you can achieve but not at the expense of what you ultimately want to produce.

Looks like you'll have to divide your Poser work between your training work and "just for fun", with the "fun" part being more technically demanding. 

You are right Sam. Part of the problem is I think, my rather limited creativity. Even when drawing I always found it easier to draw realistically once I got the hang of it, but producing anything stylized or abstract was much more difficult for me.

Quote - ... Now I am having a reality moment. Look at Dr Geep's tutorial illustrations. Not realistic. Effective, clear, humorous and everybody loves them. Dr Geep is using Poser effectively and not trying to turn it into a camera. I should use those lower-res figures more and stop fretting about minor imperfections that nobody will see in the final product.

But realism is just so seductive....

:blushing: Thank you Nanette.

You are correct about too many people trying to use Poser with all it's capabilities, figures, lighting, shaders, etc., to create a realistic image when all they need to do is use a digital camera ...

"Click" and ... Walla! ... A beautiful completely realistic image in a split second ...
=OR=
One can spend hours and hours tweaking all of the finer parameters in Poser to try and get it "just right."

The bottom line is (IMVHO) ...that life is too short ... So ...

If you want realism? ... use a digital camera.
But ...
If you want to have fun? ... use Poser. :biggrin:

Again, thank you for the accolades.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Thank you for responding Dr Geep!

One of my professors was fond of saying: "Self-flaggellation went out of style a long time ago". If you have a lurking tendency for perfectionism, Poser will bring it right out. I have a perfectly good digital camera, mostly used to take pictures to turn into textures for Poser.

I think I need to step back. SamTherapy indicates that what you ultimately want to produce should be key. While still exploring the program and its capabilities, I often do not have a  clear idea of what the ultimate product should be, or I lose sight of it. Then it is so much easier to start fiddling and tweaking.

I should explore the fun side more. So what if the image I produce could have been done just as well in Poser 4? I never had Poser 4. Just because the magic features are there doesn't mean I have to use them all.

"Efficiency with Poser". Contradiction in terms?

I use almost exclusively my remapped versions of Posette & Dork.  Just by applying modern textures to these figures does a lot to make them look more realistic.  Not picture perfect by any means, but enough to boost the verisimilitude to acceptable levels.  I'll use the P4 conforming clothing, but put matmatic cloth shaders on them, I'll use various poser primitives for my scene sets, but texture them using a variety of MAT shaders and nodes.  I'll load various props into UV Mapper Pro, and remap it to my purposes.  You can see the results in my Gallery here, in my Firelight series.
dph

I love your Firelight scenes, dphoadley. I take my hat off to you for the re-mapping. That it exactly the kind of detail work I want to avoid. I have some very nice textures for Posette, almost all of them light-skinned. I find that Posette does not do African faces very well, and I need good African faces. Posette's mouth is somehow  "stiff"and I can't get it to look African using the dials. I have done some hand-made morphs for her, but that is another realism trap, since it takes hours.

I got my hands on Judy for the first time on Wednesday. What an ugly little thing she is. I bought Eternal Judy who is quite pretty, but I then found out she is not face-room compatible, and the original Judy is. Yesterday I did a render using the Brown Sugar skin for V2 on Judy, after running it through the face room. What came out was a spitting image of Caster Semenya, the controversial South African athlete. I need to work on getting Judy to look more like a girl. Or on the other hand, I could just accept her. Not everybody is soft and pretty.

I need to work around the limitations of the low-res figures because I often have to have several figures in the scene

Lo-Res Alyson - or Alisha - works well, but there aren't many skins for her. Poser 6 Jessi is faceroom compatible, but whatever you do, she always looks like Jessi! You just can't get away from that head shape.  Victoria 2 and 3 both have Lo-Res versions and their morphs work well. I have good skins for Victoria 3 but not enough for Victoria 2.   Support for her has dwindled, and now that she is free (morphs and all) I would like to use her more.

In the pursuit of perfection, one forgets what realism is.
Just remember: Realism is perfectly flawed.

JV

Two words: Just Enough.

I once did one.(think it was with Judy, the P5 Lady.)

And the Whaws overshadowd the message.

Went back to basics after that, and used highly morphed Poser4 Lo Res figures.

All clothing was morphed into the basic figure shape, and the rest was in the texture.

As the P4 Lo Res  does not come with face morpfs, I made those too...

Was a fun project, learned a lot.

Worked like a charm..

Curently I am reworking the PoserPro figures.

That are High Res, Lo Res figures..... Got it?

It probably depends on what you're doing training materials for.
If it's a non-Poser tutorial, you probably could get by with stock characters, clothing, etc.
If it's art-related, you have to strike a balance between production and time.
In the end, it's your project, so whatever you feel good with.

Use one of the general cardinal rules in  3D animation and you should be fine. At all costs avoid the chasam of near reality.. If your trying to reach true 3D realism, you must reach this goal in all aspects of the animation (or in your case the image), or the viewer is caught in the chasam between reality and "cartoon". The message is lost because of the internal confusion created by the animation (image). This simple rule is why Beowulf failed at the box office and Avatar was a smashing success (with Avater  the animation and 3D is very real - but in an obvious fantasy world where things can be a bit different than our reality).

This same theory is why Dr. Geeps turorials are so effective. The characters and supporting props are obviously not real, just 3D representations. The message is easily understood because our minds aren't dealing with subconsious conflicts induced by having very realistic and obviously unrealistic elements in the same image. Plus, he's just exteremely talented and creative!

@ Dustrider: I love it - "the chasm of near reality!" My son, who is doing his doctorate on artificial intelligence (I am a proud mommy), explained the concept of  "uncanny valley" to me.

The message for me seems to be - keep your attempts at realism private, or share them with other people who are striving for the same thing and  know how difficult it is.

Nanette - Wow, small world. My oldest son started on his doctorate in AI, then changed to FPGA's (Field  Programable Gate Arrays - or for us laymen, programmable microprocessors). You should be proud, AI is a real mind bender! I can't take full credit for "the chasam of reality", it came from a conversation with my oldest son about 3D animation (for fun he is taking a 2 semester undergrad 3D animation studio), his professor for the studio calls it the "black hole of near reality".

I try to achieve near realism in my renders, but there are so many things that need to be just right, true realism still alludes me. One of the reasons I like using G4 is the latitude it gives me. Her obvious "toon" characteristics give a great deal more flexibility than V4 regarding realism. As long as the lighting is good, the image seems more believable even when all the elements don't exactly match for realism.

From what you describe you want to do, it seems that something similar to what Dr. Geep does may work better for you. I understand completely why you would want to make the images look like real photos. If I were to do something similar to what you are doing, I would be very difficult for me to not try to go the realism route - until crunch time came and the renders took way to long.

Maybe someone who has devised a workable near reality strategy will add to the discussion.

Dr Geep has much to teach us, and not only about the technical workings of the program, but about getting things done with Poser, and engaging the audience. So does Ockham, with his retro, toony style. A little humour goes a long way and I have always been too serious.

I looked at the "Art Charts" on this site and the most popular images on this site tend to be fantasy, done in a style that borders on realism in its attention to detail, but depicting topics that are clearly not real. The same approach as the Avatar movie. Adrie, who must be the most consistently popular artist posting here, almost always does fantasy. I have noticed that some people who earnestly strive towards realism and "high art" using poser have been scathing about the popular images and artists, sometimes turning downright nasty. They seem to miss the point that Adrie and other artists in that genre have grasped what Poser and Daz studio can do successfully.

The images I need to do are of humans, not fairies or fantasy heroes. The settings are offices and city scenes. Naturally that pulls me towards realism. It is going to take some experimenting to get the right style for me. Perhaps I should try the toony characters, or use a sketch render. I have never tried to use The Girl or the Freak, male or female....

Funny how this seems to be a recurring topic in recent months.  It's something I went through - and am still working at - a while back.

The simple answer is to do what gives you the most artistic fulfilment, or at least makes you happy with what you achieve. 

I can't just do what makes me happy, because I need to use the images for work. I was rather taken aback when I showed people some images I felt quite proud of and I got reactions like: "It's really good, but her eyes are disturbing" or "that girl looks really scary". And that must be because I was trying for realism, and getting close, and falling right into the uncanny valley. It is a weird thing. If you can't get it perfectly right, your efforts backfire.