The passing of Frank Frazetta made me think of something: does anyone have a shader that would be able to mimic to a degree the style of his paintings?

You may need to go with one major light source for deep shadows.  Perhaps more like spot or point lighting than infinite.  If using P8 or PP 2010 with IDL, you may need to either get rid of the AO nodes or figure them into the calculations in PP 2010.

You're not going to get a Frazetta shader using the standard VSS shader. No adjustment of those settings will do it.

Frazetta's treatment of light and shadow was non-photoreal. It accentuates and exaggerates the way light and shadow form. For example, it was very common to have a band of extra darkness just outside the temrinator. This emphasized the boundary between areas that are lit by primary lighting, versus secondary lighting. Also, he included extra saturated splashes of color in unusual and unrealistic ways. I always marveled at how he'd make a guy's chest actually orange or green, not skin colored. Also, there is a bit of a water-colory smearing that isn't found in a realistic shader.

To some extent, you can make a shader that is more Frazetta than a realism shader. But truthfully, Poser's lack of low-level lighting primitves makes it impossible to match it exactly. When I look at his paintings, I can see, mathematically, what he's doing, but there's no way to say it in Poser nodes. The Poser nodes only offer what is called "monotonic" response to light. We would need to get at the low level data - which individual light sources, from which directions. This data is actually available deep in the bowels of the renderer, and the Poser nodes actually use it all to produce diffuse and specular effects. But we only have linear sums of these - the diffuse node combines all the data from all light sources into a single diffuse response curve. I need to have access to the direction, color, and intensity data for every light by itself in order to reproduce what Frazetta did. I need to make a shader respond to a light in areas where the light doesn't reach. This cannot be done with any of the diffuse nodes in Poser.

Interesting.  So basically the poser nodes make calls to the rendering functions but they don't have access to the private data and coding of the function thus they can't look at the lights individually and you would need a totally new diffuse node for shading areas where light doesn't reach. 

Oh well.  It was worth asking about because I'm not really sure what is possible with the poser renderer at this point.  At least I learned something from it.  So at best I might be able to make some kind of imitation?  Maybe it'll give me something more to play with after I'm done with my metal donuts.  And I kinda like what I came up with earlier so maybe I'll further refine that and turn it into a style as well.

Hi
Sometimes post filtering is a better solution for certain
"looks" IMHO
I quickly wipped up this render and used the free version of "postworkShop" for this  Frazzeta style image.

Cheers

You might be able to get something close to a Frazetta look from Olivier's shader packs over at RDNA.