I haven't used poser in a while and was contemplating using it again. I know that I need to at least upgrade to Poser 8, but what if any value would be added by getting Poser 2010?

I could currently buy Poser 8 and upgrade it to 2010 for less than buying 2010, but the time is limited for that deal to work.

A summarized feature comparison is the first place to understand the differences.

It is here: http://poser.smithmicro.com/comparison.html

Each person will find some things worth more or less than others. And, you may or may not have the hardware and OS assets needed to take full advantage. So as always, your mileage may vary.

The key things that generally get interest are background rendering (you can keep editing while rendering), 64-bit support (bigger scenes, more stuff in one render), and gamma correction. For those with multiple computers, network rendering is a big deal - 3 computers? Triple the rendering speed.

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If you have a 32 bit OS, I would recommend Poser 8, unless you need to export to high-end applications. Main reason for me to stay with P8 is because it uses less memory then PP2010 does and P8 renders faster. If you're on a 64 bit OS. then of course, PP2010 is the way to go.

Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722

Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk

Quote - A summarized feature comparison is the first place to understand the differences. The key things that generally get interest are... gamma correction.

Gamma Correction is now available in Poser 8, via Script/Partners/ShaderWorks/Postwork Manager. A new window will open up. Gamma Correction is a check box near the bottom, with a user-defined dialog box to set the value.

That's not true gamma correction. Postwork GC has several common failings.

1) It desaturates color in non-linear ways. While you can also use the postwork saturation increase, it doesn't come out the same.

2) It doesn't come up with the correct values because the incoming data (images and color chips) are not anti-gamma corrected. Poser Pro does both incoming gamma and outgoing gamma compensation, resulting in linear calculations in the middle. There are plenty of cases where you get wildly different outcomes.

3) Dark data is lost, and cannot be recovered in postwork. I can demonstrate if you don't believe it.

4) Subtle gradients are lost and get quantized - the artifact produced is called banding.

Of course, if you're not interested in that last 5% of quality, none of this matters so you don't need the "Pro" version.

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Quote - That's not true gamma correction.

Oh.

Quote - Postwork GC has several common failings.

I was unaware of that. Thank you for clarifying.

Quote - Of course, if you're not interested in that last 5% of quality, none of this matters so you don't need the "Pro" version.

I think it's really a question of how high-quality one wants their renders to appear. I'm just a hobbyist, and wouldn't be able to tell one way or the other whether a render had GC - postwork or otherwise - without knowing what to look for. I learned how to create dynamic cloth the other day, and ran a few cloth tests using GC on Andy. They looked pretty good to me.

is dark data lost in poser 8 when rendering with HSV exp 1.67 and gain 1.33?
I've got a feeling it is, but I dunno how to find out (don't have PP2010).

Not lost so much with those settings. The response curve of HSV ETM isn't the same as GC, but it has sufficient similarities to get you partway there. And if you combine that with a little shader GC, or just a touch of postwork GC, it looks pretty close.

The big difference is all the faffing about with shaders and postwork, versus just turning it on in Poser Pro.

Oh - and the big problem is if you also want to use IDL. The bounced light from incoming textures is wrong wrong wrong. They are too bright and the IDL gets thrown off.

The only way to get accurate lighting in P8 with IDL is to use shader incoming anti-GC, producing linear colors. Then let the renderer do its thing with IDL, and then do a teeny bit of outgoing GC in the shader, followed by HSV ETM. This will look within 5% of what Pro does automatically. it's a lot of work. For those who have more time than money, it can be done.

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Just to clarify my reply, according to the tests I ran, the difference between GC and non-GC is quite noticeable. How accurate P8's GC is I have no idea. I would need to see a side-by-side comparison of the two types to really understand them.

Ok. Here is a demonstration. Click for full size.

Note how the whites-gray-blacks are about the same, but anything with color is messed up.

Compare the subtle color variations in the foot - the postwork GC has lost them. And the skin hue has shifted more towards yellow.

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Ok, yeah, definitely see what you mean. That is remarkable.

Clearly the 'GC in Postwork' demo is inferior. Don't know how it was arrived at, but one can get closer to the look of the 'Render GC in Poser Pro 2010' demo with postwork (on the No GC image). Just need to experiment. Though having PP 2010 do it seems worth it to me, so I plan to get it when the sidegrade goes on sale again.

> Quote - Clearly the 'GC in Postwork' demo is inferior. Don't know how it was arrived at,

I used the Postwork Manager script as suggested earlier. Enable GC, set to 2.2.

I also got exactly the same results from Picasa "Fill Light", but in Picasa you have to guess the value because the slider has no numeric readout.

I also get exactly the same results from Photoshop "Levels".

Quote - but one can get closer to the look of the 'Render GC in Poser Pro 2010' demo with postwork (on the No GC image). Just need to experiment.

You're welcome to experiment, but I know the math of GC, and it's impossible to postwork it the same. The information about what actually came in (the incoming textures) is gone and can't be recovered from the final output. Proper GC is a calculation involving both the incoming material and the outgoing final color.

For example, consider that a pixel in the render is RGB 5, 10, 15. Was that because the original color on the object was 50, 100, 150 and the light level is 10% or is that the actual color of the object and the light level is 100%? You can't tell. And if you don't know which is the case, then you can't produce the right color in postwork.

If you care to try, I'm attaching the original no-GC image.

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Here's another much simpler test case - a box with diffuse color 50, 100, 150 and no specular.

This is with render GC.

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Quote - I used the Postwork Manager script as suggested earlier. Enable GC, set to 2.2.

Why 2.2? The default is 1.6.

Here it is without GC. Try to postwork it to look like the render GC case.

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Quote - > Quote - I used the Postwork Manager script as suggested earlier. Enable GC, set to 2.2.

Why 2.2? The default is 1.6.

Because we're talking about accurate representation of luminance levels. The gamma of your monitor, your camera, your scanner, your printer, and every other device that deals with digital images is 2.2, not 1.6 or any other number. Unless you have an older Mac (which was 1.8).

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Here is postwork of the box at 1.6. Even at 1.6 the blue is too pale. And the white is too dark.

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Here is postwork at 2.2. Now the white floor is correct, but the blue is all wrong.

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Quote - The gamma of your monitor, your camera, your scanner, your printer, and every other device that deals with digital images is 2.2, not 1.6 or any other number.

Ah.

Quote - Unless you have an older Mac

I'm on a home-built 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a 22" Acer.

Another demo of the postwork GC failure is here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3652928&ebot_calc_page#message_3652928

I show the banding and zero-data problems in that thread. You have to look at the images full size to see the difference, but it's really obvious on any decent monitor.

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OK, here's some quick postwork done to the image. I did say one could get closer, getting it exactly the same would be too much work! I agree info is lost, tho if the no GC image was lit somewhat brighter, not as bright as the PP 2010 render, but somewhere in between, that would've helped. Here's what I did in Photoshop CS3, added 3 adjustment layers, top to bottom... Hue/Sat layer, Master: Hue -3, Sat +19, Lightness +10 Color Balance, midtones -4 0 0, shadows 0 +2 +3 Levels ch. rgb 0 1.42 224, red 1 1.06 255 also used unsharp mask filter on image: amount 38% radius 2.2 Could experiment more and get closer but this will do. Granted, it did help speed things up to have the PP 2010 render to aim for!

Thanks for the link to the other thread, and again for the info and examples. I understand the differences now.

But, until money starts growing on trees or tax season gets moved up several months, I'll have to stick with Poser 8 for now.

With the GC box and the non GC box, I would light the non GC box brighter and then do postwork. I think the best compromise if you don't have PP 2010 for GC, and you don't want to do GC in shaders/scripts etc. with Poser 8, or 7, is to light the scene where the image looks somewhat between the brighter looking PP 2010 GC renders and darker no GC renders, and then do postwork to enhance it. But not with levels gamma to 2.2. A mix of some levels and saturation adjustments like I showed above should do it (a lot of the time). That said, I'm sold on PP 2010's GC feature. I plan to get it. It is a benefit, and will cut down on postwork. Of course it's $250 today, so I'm holding out til it's on sale again for $200. (I'm talking about the sidegrade.)

Quote - I'm sold on PP 2010's GC feature.

Oh, I'm definitely sold on it, too. I just don't have $500. Yet.

Unsubscribing , I really don't see why every thread that even mention GC has to be turned into a in depth GC one? I hope the OP is helped by all this information.

Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722

Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk

Quote - > Quote - I'm sold on PP 2010's GC feature.

Oh, I'm definitely sold on it, too. I just don't have $500. Yet.

If you have Poser 8, or 7, you can get the sidegrade to PP 2010 for $250. And it's been on sale at various times for $200. That's what I'm waiting for to happen again :)

Quote - If you have Poser 8, or 7, you can get the sidegrade to PP 2010 for $250.

I have Poser 8. I e-mailed SM about that earlier today. They wrote back that I need both Poser 8 and Poser Pro to qualify for the sidegrade to Poser Pro 2010.

Quote - And it's been on sale at various times for $200. That's what I'm waiting for to happen again :)

Nice! Hopefully I'll be able to catch that sometime. :D

Quote - Unsubscribing , I really don't see why every thread that even mention GC has to be turned into a in depth GC one?

It turned into one because I was under the mistaken impression that Poser 8's postwork GC is the same as what's available in Poser Pro 2010. When Bill corrected me on that point, I asked him to clarify. His explanation confused me, so I asked him for more info and a few side-by-side comparisons. He obliged, and now I understand.

And now I want to upgrade to Poser Pro 2010.

;)

Quote - I hope the OP is helped by all this information.

So do I.

:)

There is a difference between the "Update" for about 250$ and the "Sidegrade" for people who have PP and P8. for about $70. I did not check the prices yet, so I they may not be exactly true but it should be close. P8 alone is good for an update, but not for a sidegrade, IMHO

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

Quote - There is a difference between the "Update" for about 250$ and the "Sidegrade"...

:: double checks SM's site ::

Ah! So there is! It's the first ad for PP 2010 under the Upgrade Now banner. Sidegrade from Poser for $249.

Thanks! :D

Attached Link: poser.smithmicro.com/upgrade.html

Just to be clear. If you own poser pro or poser pro base, you can 'upgrade' to PP 2010 for $199.99 If you own poser 6, 7, or 8, you can 'sidegrade' to PP 2010 for $249.99 If you own poser pro and poser 8, you can 'upgrade' to PP 2010 for $70. When PP 2010 was released, upgrades and sidegrades were at a lesser price: $179.99 for upgrade, $199.99 for sidegrade. Sometime during the latter of May 2010, these prices were in effect again for a few days. I missed it by like a day cause they never gave a sales end date specific, and I unwisely just assumed it would last through May 31st! Anyway, that's what I'm waiting for. Maybe it'll happen again, maybe not. I'm still going to wait it out for awhile.

I just re-did my budget for the month and am downloading the sidegrade for Poser Pro 2010 now.

hehehe

Quote - That's not true gamma correction. Postwork GC has several common failings.

1) It desaturates color in non-linear ways. While you can also use the postwork saturation increase, it doesn't come out the same.

2) It doesn't come up with the correct values because the incoming data (images and color chips) are not anti-gamma corrected. Poser Pro does both incoming gamma and outgoing gamma compensation, resulting in linear calculations in the middle. There are plenty of cases where you get wildly different outcomes.

3) Dark data is lost, and cannot be recovered in postwork. I can demonstrate if you don't believe it.

4) Subtle gradients are lost and get quantized - the artifact produced is called banding.

Of course, if you're not interested in that last 5% of quality, none of this matters so you don't need the "Pro" version.

Does this apply to the "artistic lens" method you posted a while back? I like the fact that Poser Pro will perform the incomming gamma correction, since one usually doesn't have gamma corrected materials (and it seems like a real pain to work with mixes.) I'm putting off getting Pro 2010 mostly because of the rendering speed issues, but it will probably be the first software I buy when I replace my current machine.

Yes - the artistic lens is actually postwork. It's just postwork using Poser. So it suffers with the hue/saturation shifts.

However, it does not exhibit the zero-data problem or the banding problem. It has full access to the floating point color values. It is not constrained by an 8-bit quantized representation.

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)

Where is a detailed list of the differences between Poser 7 and Poser 8?

Does Poser 8 still have a rendering option for Poser 4 type rendering?

Attached Link: http://poser.smithmicro.com/comparison.html

Here is a comparison chart listing the differences.

The P4 render engine is gone in Poser 8 and Pro 2010.
But:
Firefly is now A LOT faster than it used to be, so I defnitely don't miss the P4 renderer.
(And I used it a lot)

I actually saw the render banding in poser 8 once. haven't been able to duplicate but it
may have been a case where lites were way too bright. it looks like jpeg banding, which
is an artifact one gets when saving as jpeg and gradients have no noise in them. but
it was strange to see it in an uncompressed render.

Quote - Where is a detailed list of the differences between Poser 7 and Poser 8?

Anthony, when you started a new thread without reading this one, I pointed you here because the answer to your question was here, in the first reply, by me.

Now you asked it again, WITHOUT READING THIS THREAD FIRST.

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hi everybody,
i got ppro2010 some days ago,
what do i like from ppro2010 vs p8

Rendering is really faster except i dont use IDL ON
(well IDL isnt a solution for every render or do i guess wrong? )
Network Rendering, (to give some old computers some work, but i discovered that the results are sometimes different in comparison of rendering on mainpc vs rendering on a network pc)
Backgroud rendering (well nice but prefer network rendering)

and the GC Question ,,, OMG
the more i read in the forums, the more i get confused about the GC feaure of ppro 2010.
hmm, dont remember default settigings, but my result is

if turn GC on in the rendersettigs Page (value of 2.20), my images looks washed out.
if i turn it off, my images looks a lot better.
well heard that ppro 2010 handles the incomig textures different to P8 ....

i wish somebody would describe clearly , (in easy words) whats about with that GC in PPro2010.
(the only one i could imagine to do that would be BB :))

greetigs
GC desperated xuu4u

Xuu4u, I would recommend that you google gamma correction in general and understand how it applies to the real world and computer 3D graphics applications. Start with wikipedia. Once you have a rudimentary understanding, follow up your education by perusing the threads concerning Gc, especially those involving bagginsbill. It would be pointless to steer you to specific threads which could lead to further confusion and misunderstanding.

BTW, the reason your scene looks washed out with Gc, too much lighting.

thank you hborre for your tips.
i read already some rosity threads and googlepages of GC. (some time ago)
Working in former times with P7 / P8 and VSS (reading bb's threads too)
i head resultst that was understandable.
With PPro2010, it looks like all has changed.
I reduced my lights down for 50% or more and the image still looks washed out :(

does PPro2010 gc the input if i turn Rendersettings gc off and so on ...
arrrgl that drives me mad ...
srry if i complain, but the poser docu about gc is, to say in this way "very thin"

xuu4u - Is everything washed out or is it just figures that have VSS on? Because VSS applies shader GC, and if the renderer is handling it, then adding shader GC on top ruins it. It's like you run a levels adjustment twice. Once is the right amount. Twice is too much. When you use VSS with render GC, you have to change the gamma value in the shader to 1, instead of 2.2.

I only recently figured out how to make shaders do that for you automatically. When I have time, I will publish a new set of VSS shaders that are compatible with render GC or no render GC automatically.

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If you need screencaps for where to make the changes in VSS, ask. I do have several images sitting on my hard drive which were used before to visually illustrate the locations.

In a quiet minute, i restarted that GC theme, tried to make it easy. So PP2010, linear rendering, GC On:, GC correction of incoming texture maps, GC correction again immediatly after the redering. so fine so good.

I try to show what i mean with "washed out".
The inlcuded Pic based on a szene with V3, some cloth BB's Fullbody Lights (NO VSS Prop used)
Above Picture : GC in Rendersettings OFF
Lower Picture : GC in Rendersettings 2.2
To much lights ?, well i tried Reducing the lights a lot, but it doenst matter what i do to the lights
the result looks always better with GC in Renderesetting off.

Loosing of details with GC on, could be avoided, by GC Settig of 1 for Displacment and Normal
Maps via manual correction (Texture Manager) or the changegamma script.
But this alone wont solve my problem.

My best results in other szenes are with:
GC in Rendersettings off, Using VSS_PR3_NoAO, or VSS_PR3_AO depending
on usage of AO via Lights or via VSS. (GC Values unchanged in the VSS Prop, means 2.2)

What are your light settings? You neglected to mention that information in your post.

@hborre
The ligts used are "BB's FullBody lights". (and it think this information is in my above post)

Are these BB's original light sets he published with his original VSSProp? If so, those light sets are much hotter than they were intended to run. This means light level intensities must be turned down considerably. My recommendation would be to create your own lights, 1 infinite, 1 IBL each with RGB diffuse color 255, 255, 255. Infinite light, 75% intensity, raytrace shadows;
IBL 10 - 15% variable with AO activated, default settings. Try that combination first, then make adjustments as needed.

Here is another Example. Same scene rendered with PP2010 lightset Studio_RembrandtAO. The lights are untouched. The figure is "centered" ,only hip ytrans adjusted to be on the floor. Pic Above GC OFF Pic Down GC 2.2 + My Rendersettings (with GC Off when made screenshot) I tested with a lot of other light sets, mostly the same results. When i turn GC in the renderssettings ON (2.2) the image "looses" a lot and looks somehow washed out.

@hborre
the lights are the original BB lights from the VSSProp.
i will try to create a new light set with your suggestions. thanks

The effect you are seeing is perfectly normal, that is how Gc should work. You lights are still too bright in your second render with Gc, if you are looking to duplicate the image on the top. Is there any material Gc present and did your render exactly the same as above, Gc off at render and Gc on for materials?

I think the 'BB's FullBody lights' were meant to work for the old VSS prop as hborre mentioned. You should work with BB's 'VSS Indoor' or 'VSS Outdoor' lights instead.

And xuu3, BB already advised to change the GC in the VSS prop via Material Room in the 'Template Skin'. Also reduce the shine to 0.4 and the SS to 0.3 as in the image.

@hborre

Quote - The effect you are seeing is perfectly normal, that is how Gc should work. You lights are still too bright in your second render with Gc, if you are looking to duplicate the image on the top. Is there any material Gc present and did your render exactly the same as above, Gc off at render and Gc on for materials?

The scene contains no material gc.
The differenc between the post is only the Lights used.
In the first one BB's Full Body Lights was used. In the second on the pp2010 light set
Studio_RembrandtAO was used.
The rendersettings are saved in the .pzz and was not modified, except settig GC ON (2.2)
and OFF for the two different render results.

@mackis3D
thank you for your advice i will use it when i use vss again.
But the images i posted here are not based on VSS. There is no VSS Prop in the scene
(not yet)
I was using BBs Lights and the other LightSet just to show my problem.

Conclusions:
(Pls feel free to correct me, when something is wrong)
"My" lights are to bright, if i reduce them i well get result like the above pics.
(still scepticism) but i will try hardly.

Hmm, so PP2010 offers us a Firefly render egine with linear rendering
plus the nice feature of Scene Wide GC (with easy turning on and off) to get
correct rendered images,
but they dont offer us light sets , considering the usage of the GC feature .

if i use one of pp2010's light sets and turn GC On with 2.2, i have to adjust the lights.
funny
is wish there would at last one setting, that considers GC ON.

You have to understand that over-bright lights represent one (indirect) approach to gamma *compensation*. Gamma *correction* is a direct approach. If you combine compensation with correction, you get overcompensation.

Another common compensation is found in shaders. For example, many have screwy settings to produce what looks like a decent skin, but when GC is turned on, they produce ugliness. A typical one is that specular highlights are made broader than they should be, because they appear to fade out too quickly. But with GC, they don't, and end up producing exactly what we see in your GC render. The highlights smear out and they make everything look washed out.

So in addition to turning lights down, you have to stop using messed up shaders.

And it isn't as though setting up a couple lights for a portrait is hard. Here are two spotlights. On the left it is white at 75% intensity. On the right it is white at 30% intensity. I rendered with GC and IDL. This looks great to me.

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The simplest things work great with GC turned on.

Added a third spotlight from behind and it is colored a light red, 30% intensity.

I made the main light a slight yellow, and the side light blue.

Andy's shader here is just a Blinn node. He looks metallic. This doesn't looked washed out at all. That's because it has simple shaders that don't try to compensate.

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This is the same without GC. This is wrong. There is a lot of light here, but it doesn't look like it. What do light set designers do in this case? They make everything brighter.

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This is what most people did before or without Poser Pro. They add more light.

This is still rendered without GC, but I added a 4th light - a white IBL at 40%. I also increased my main light to 100%, and increased the blue and red from 30% to 60%.

It looks pretty good. But I got here by compensating for the unnatural darkness produced by monitor gamma. I had to futz with all my lights and add another one. And if I had funky shaders, they would probably be going nuts about now.

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Now if I flip on GC, it looks washed out - lacking contrast. That's because there is too much light. The light isn't motivated by the type of scene I want, but rather by the fact that I had to add a lot to get it to look right. Now that it isn't unnaturally dark via GC, I should not be adding so much light.

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Here's a single white spotlight at 10% without GC. Nobody would use a single 10% light as the only light source in the scene. This looks dumb. You'll never find this in a published light set, even if it's supposed to be "moody". It's too dark.

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But flip on GC, so the values are displayed as they really are. What a difference.

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@BB
oh yeah, da Teacher has spoken.
Great thanks. rebuilt your andy scene and got good results wit GC 2.2 and IDL
The only thing i couldnt get right was the metallic look of andy with the blinn node .
(post of that simple shader conifg would help, dont laugh about the shadernoob =me)

This comes due to lack of my shader knowledge.
But its not that easy. i think i can read and understand english well.
i can express myself in english so that everbody (maybe with a little smile)
knows what i mean. But when it goes to shaders , it gets more tecnical and complicated for me. Did you ever try to translate expressions like "ambient" "specular", "diffuse" "AO" ... to german. hah, you need to get a feeling for this translated words.
Didnt find yet good german tut's that explains basic shaders.

think too, it was a good idea to throw my old GC knowldege away and start from scratch.
I said in one of my former postings, that pp2010 docu about gc is thin. Thats not right,
the manual explains well, what happens with GC in pp2010. (well it doesnt explain GC in dephts, but that is not the task of the manual.)
funny , now when things getting to work for me, i remember "the red ball" with Simon and the artisctic lens, "Your lights are to bright". (was my startig point of GC)

@hborre,
following your suggestions with ligths, id did get good results.
thank you very much

ok, so here i show one of my results. This is the "BB AndyScene" rebuilt ( 2 simple white spot lights) with my little Heroine Cat. Using VSS, pp2010 GC at 2.2 & IDL. (no more washed out :))

Very much thanks goes to Acadia for her linkthread, which made it possible for me to improve
the apperance of the hair.

This image holds also my first "shader accident". connected to refraction instead reflection (in the stockings) gives a nice effect that i like. well the value is still to high.

think i am using this (empty) "Andy scene" as a reference for upcomig projects
"what you see is what you get for GC On"

Now i can fix the rest of the materials, then i can proceed to my planned Dr. Parnassus series.
Like BB said: "you have to stop using messed up shaders".
Mostly i use materials out of a collection from Tabala , Mapps and ajax that was built under
P5 / P6. Will try to fix them if it appears to me that they need a fix.

That looks terrific! Well done. You're on your way to being a Poser expert.

I'll be back in a bit to show you the "cheap metal" shader. It's only one node.

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I agree with BB, a much better improvement. Once you get to understand how shader nodes influence your final outcome, you will be scrutinizing your content a little close and correcting those faulty connections which shouldn't be there in the first place.

Here is the "cheap metal" material. By cheap, I mean it doesn't cost a lot of computer power to use it. It's only for metals with a soft finish. Shiny metal needs reflection.

I said it would be only one node, and it is, but I added another node to control color. In metals, the specular color is the same as the diffuse color (generally). For a gray metal, we make the color white, but make the diffuse reflectivity very low. It is .02 here. I will show you others.

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For gold, you use something like RGB 255, 236, 64. And increase the Diffuse_Value to .2.

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This is not a polished gold and really is more like brass. For polished gold you want reflections.

Anyway, this is Andy with that material. Lights are 75% white spot, 30% light blue spot, and plain white (no image) IBL at 10%, IBL Contrast = 1. I use IBL for quick test renders.

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For a more interesting, more realistic finish, add a Granite node, like this, connected to the Specular_Value of the two specular effects. On the Blinn this is called Reflectivity. Set the Balance on it up or down as you like. I used .7.

Use of nodes like Granite is always good to increase realism. The utter perfection of perfect specularity is always disturbing. I always add little variations to a shader. Look closely at the stairs and you'll see they are not perfectly smooth.

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It renders like this.

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For a hammered look, use a Cellular node connected to the Bump channel. Different props need different scales on this, so you have to experiment. My Bump units are inches.

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Try different sizes and colors. Instead of a hammered look, here I'm going for a more subtle unevenness that is barely perceptible to the eye, but makes the surface more real.

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Here's how that looks on Andy.

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Full body with that material.

This time I turned off the IBL and rendered with IDL.

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Disconnect the light blue Simple_Color from the two Specular_Colors so they are just white again. This makes a convincing gun metal - use it on weapons.

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Andy with friends - celebrating Andy's Shader Day :)

So is it safe to say it's worth the extra $120 to cross grade to Pro 2010 rather than 8 from 6? The GC alone looks like it might add years back to my life spent compensating for underexposed lights.

As already mentioned with Poser 2010 it has 64 bit program and render support, background render, supports a slightly better range of import/export stability with files, better alpha-masking, better texture filtering. In addition the Pro versions of Poser generally feature a slightly up-modded render engine, with richer and better lighting and faster ray tracing. Another great feature is the Queue Manager, only available with Poser Pro - and it's not just for networks, despite what you may have heard; With the Queue Manager you can batch render multiple jobs in sequence, or render off animations while continuing to work in Poser (background render is limited to a single frame from a single job). Also, to my knowledge, Poser 2010 Pro also features more content.

I haven't really had a chance to fully test it, I hate the Poser 8 style interface and library also used by 2010(it's hit or miss from my understanding, you either love it or hate it), so I am still doing a lot of work in Poser Pro 7.

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This is all great info about gamma correction, though from the title of the thread I was hoping for more practical details from those who have done the upgrade about whether Poser Pro 2010 is worth the $200-$250 over Poser 8.

Re: GC... BB mentioned screwy shaders in commercial skin materials. That may be so, but what can we do about it if we want to use GC with such characters? Have you seen the sheer number of nodes some vendors use to make a skin shader? I am nowhere close to knowledgeable enough to fiddle with all those nodes to remove the over-correction built into them. Better to just delete them altogether? Which ones?

See the dilemma? I think this is why a lot of people just throw their hands up and turn off GC. They use as their lighting baseline what makes the skin look good, everything else follows that criteria. Because turning off GC is one controll vs. minutely adjusting 10-15 nodes in the skin shader.

I'm guessing vendors are making skin look good for the lowest common denominator, which right now would be users of P7 and earlier. So vendors fiddle the skin shader nodes from here to Tuesday to make skin look OK in standard P6-P7 lighting with no IDL or GC. Leaves those who want to use solutions like GC in a bit of a pickle.

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Poser 2010 vs Poser 8?