I'm still not seeing any images that are remotely what I would describe as photorealistic. It seems to me that games are managing better characters in real-time (albeit with baked textures), than the best I've seen from Poser. Is Poser simply NEVER going to be capable of it, or are my standards unrealistic? I thought that Cycles + PBR was supposed to be the big secret, but most renders still look like 2010 game figures.

Does anyone have a truly convincing Superfly skin set up that they would care to share? What about eyes - how are you guys handling that? Are there any store products that show off exemplary superfly configuration? TIA.

Ghostship's eyes are very good. They're in a thread somewhere on this forum, I don't remember which but you can download them from the free stuff: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/freestuff/-/86843

Lots of skin experiments if you read through the threads, but good results will depend a lot on the maps you're using. I don't think you'll see store products that really leverage the new P12 functionality until P12 has stabilized.

ChromeStar posted at 6:10PM Sun, 10 January 2021 - #4409878

Ghostship's eyes are very good. They're in a thread somewhere on this forum, I don't remember which but you can download them from the free stuff: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/freestuff/-/86843

Yes, I saw those several years ago thank you.

Lots of skin experiments if you read through the threads, but good results will depend a lot on the maps you're using.

Surely SOMEONE has actually made decent maps by now though?

I don't think you'll see store products that really leverage the new P12 functionality until P12 has stabilized.

What new functionality is there that will improve the skin quality? So far as I can see, the new principled nodes merely simplify what was already there, and people have had what, 5, 7 years of superfly to get it right but still not seeing it.

Those eye shaders were posted in November 2020 and are specifically for Poser 12.

ChromeStar posted at 9:08PM Sun, 10 January 2021 - #4409884

Those eye shaders were posted in November 2020 and are specifically for Poser 12.

Oh fantastic. Thanks. I got Ghost's earlier ones over on SM forum about 5 years ago. Asumed you were talking about those. I'll go get them now.

The lack of good skin shaders for superfly/cycles is mainly because most people more or less was stubborn enough to keep using the old ways and the poserSurface root node even though we had cycles nodes. Now with the new cycles we get most of the nodes we need to start do better skin shaders but peope are still walking in the dark most of the times with that since they've never done it before.

I get decent photo-realistic results with the same tools everybody else here has. You gotta know how to light the scene and know Posers limits.

My two cents?

I was unable to really experiment with Poser a lot until shortly ago. And then last month I got an RTX 3070 GPU and - P11 can't work with it, so I was still rendering slow as heck, which hinders experimentation way too much. And then P12 can take it, but it has some bugs that are being tackled.

I have recently (by that I mean: today) realized I can go around those bugs (I can go around the eyebrow rendering bug by morphing LaFemme's eyebrows away, I can go around the background material bug by using an environment sphere instead). So, I've spent the entirety of today trying to adapt my Anuli's materials to P12.

For the first time, I've made myself gasp a bit. Perhaps it's not a world of perfection, but... I'm loving this. I'm working on her eyes right now:

Give me a bit, I'll set up a face portrait with my newest hairstyle on.

I also feel like there's not much newer content for Poser to really compete with the newer programs either. Dynamic clothing looks so much more realistic but very few users dare tackle into that, so few vendors make it. And I haven't seen a Poser artist tackle things like hand painting skin like they do for realistic games - and mostly because it's way too much work for the revenue for now. Now that Poser is being breathed newer life into, we might see more of that. Personally I've been going neck-deep into making more realistic hair for Poser.

And here, the other render I promised:

(For anyone wondering, the hair is Caio Hair which I should release soon, earring will be a freebie I'm working on.)

As for the materials, there's nothing much here really. I feel like this is a matter of tampering with the numbers and rendering and fine tuning each parameter because things will be different for different textures. I must have rendered some 40 times today to get to this result.

Skin:

Eyes:

Eye surface / cornea (LaFemme's cover her entire eyes, for meshes that ony have a separate cornea you'd need to add highlights to the eye material too):

Tearline is a slight variation of the eye surface:

(Don't mind the node connections, these are for the Firefly root)

I haven't finished up the materials for inside the mouth and for the nails yet so I'm not showing those :P

The fastest easiest way would be to work with scan data. That's what I think a lot of games studios will be doing - much more cost effective. From a Poser POV though, go look at the sort of prices for commercial usage ...

Anyway, this is what I could get from P11 back in 2015 with a free head from Ten24 (aka 3dscanstore dot com). The eyes are rough as it's a single mesh item, they aren't separate - image is post processed and eye highlight painted in. I did convert the 8 bit bump to a normal map, but the shader was ridiculously basic (and I wouldn't use it now!).

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 4:24PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409948

I also feel like there's not much newer content for Poser to really compete with the newer programs either. Dynamic clothing looks so much more realistic but very few users dare tackle into that, so few vendors make it. And I haven't seen a Poser artist tackle things like hand painting skin like they do for realistic games - and mostly because it's way too much work for the revenue for now. Now that Poser is being breathed newer life into, we might see more of that. Personally I've been going neck-deep into making more realistic hair for Poser.

And here, the other render I promised:

(For anyone wondering, the hair is Caio Hair which I should release soon, earring will be a freebie I'm working on.)

Wooooow... What an awesome face and expression... I'm in love!

Y-Phil posted at 4:31PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409956

Wooooow... What an awesome face and expression... I'm in love!

I'm glad you like her <3

ghostship2 posted at 5:30PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409924

I get decent photo-realistic results with the same tools everybody else here has.

Ghost you've been doing some of the nicest work I've seen coming out of Poser for years, and I don't mean to shoot you down because I hold you in very high regard; this is nice but it's short of photorealistic. Even the most casual glance reveals it as a render. The skin lacks depth or detail, the hair is clearly trans mapped billboards. And you're one of the BRIGHTEST we have to offer! The only photo in this thread that I consider photorealistic is the image from caisson.

You talk about Poser's limits, but that's exactly my point. It supposedly has a state of the art PBR engine, and I KNOW that Blender is doing true photorealism with almost the same engine, so why aren't we? I understand why casual users are not succeeding, but there are creators here that make hundreds of thousand s of dollars a year from this, and they STILL haven't succeeded? It's frankly incredible, especially as caisson has demonstrated that it IS possible! What's the x factor in HIS model, and the scans taken by other people? Surely that could be recreated by hand?

caisson posted at 5:43PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409955

The fastest easiest way would be to work with scan data. That's what I think a lot of games studios will be doing - much more cost effective. From a Poser POV though, go look at the sort of prices for commercial usage ...

Anyway, this is what I could get from P11 back in 2015 with a free head from Ten24 (aka 3dscanstore dot com). The eyes are rough as it's a single mesh item, they aren't separate - image is post processed and eye highlight painted in. I did convert the 8 bit bump to a normal map, but the shader was ridiculously basic (and I wouldn't use it now!).

That's a great image. You say that the easiest way is to work from scan data, but are not many of the artists working with photographs and scans, even if not 360 degree full body scans? You say your shader is basic, yet the results still looks better than any of the complicated dozens of node textures that I see routinely sold by our best character creators. Looking at the textures, I see nothing crazy that the Renderosity professionals are not able to recreate. Are you a node wizard and your simple set up is performing some dark alchemy, or is it truly that the texture, simple though it looks, is actually conveying more information than the average commercial texture - even the professionally created ones made by DAZ?

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 5:52PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409948

Personally I've been going neck-deep into making more realistic hair for Poser.

Yes, the hair looks pretty good. A cut above the average for sure.

AcePyx posted at 6:19PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409961

but there are creators here that make hundreds of thousand s of dollars a year from this, and they STILL haven't succeeded?

You might be thinking of DS creators there, bud. Poser is just staaaarting to pick up in sales for vendors again. And when that happens more, vendors will accept to pour more hours into making one single character - cause right now hey, I've had comments saying that my two characters are the best ones available for current poser generation and they've sold like 60 copies a pop. So, you know.

The thing about those super realistic game characters is that they PAINT those textures manually. And I mean albedo, subsurface color, subsurface amount, specular, bump, displacement and normal maps. With lots of resources poured into Substance Painter. Us mortals are here making do with frankensteining photos of models. Because that means we won't pour one entire month's work plus hundreds / thousands of dollars worth of software and resources into one character - that not counting all the higher training required to know HOW to paint that stuff by hand. Believe me, I wish I knew how - and I'm a 2d illustrator too, so I know my fair share of painting techniques.

Okay, here is the age-old issue again. What units are you guys using when creating these skin setups? Both hborre's and Ohki's are unuseably granular in my Poser 12, leading me to the conclusion that my unit of measurement and yours must be entirely different.

Compared to skin ran through EZSkin 3 in Poser 11 and then brought back:

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 8:56PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409964

The thing about those super realistic game characters is that they PAINT those textures manually. And I mean albedo, subsurface color, subsurface amount, specular, bump, displacement and normal maps. With lots of resources poured into Substance Painter. Us mortals are here making do with frankensteining photos of models. Because that means we won't pour one entire month's work plus hundreds / thousands of dollars worth of software and resources into one character - that not counting all the higher training required to know HOW to paint that stuff by hand. Believe me, I wish I knew how - and I'm a 2d illustrator too, so I know my fair share of painting techniques.

I already have Substance painter and all the tools I need. I have the time, the willpower. I just need the know how. I'm guessing the games experts are baking all those maps into their characters.

Incidentally, you said earlier that your 3070 doesn't work with Poser 11 is that correct? That's a massive concern. I'm not ready to give up on Poser 11 for a long time yet, but if that family of cards doesn't work, that throws a real spanner in the works. Poser 12 is not remotely bug -free enough to transition to, and while EZ dome and EZ skin don't work, I'm definitely not willing to say goodbye to P11. Guess that means no new graphics card for me then.

The 2080 worked with Poser 11 (with later updates, not at original release). It's faster in P12 though, since P11 didn't take advantage of the ray-tracing features. It's just the 3000-series that didn't get supported in P11.

AcePyx posted at 11:28PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409961

ghostship2 posted at 5:30PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409924

I get decent photo-realistic results with the same tools everybody else here has.

Ghost you've been doing some of the nicest work I've seen coming out of Poser for years, and I don't mean to shoot you down because I hold you in very high regard; this is nice but it's short of photorealistic. Even the most casual glance reveals it as a render. The skin lacks depth or detail, the hair is clearly trans mapped billboards. And you're one of the BRIGHTEST we have to offer! The only photo in this thread that I consider photorealistic is the image from caisson.

You talk about Poser's limits, but that's exactly my point. It supposedly has a state of the art PBR engine, and I KNOW that Blender is doing true photorealism with almost the same engine, so why aren't we? I understand why casual users are not succeeding, but there are creators here that make hundreds of thousand s of dollars a year from this, and they STILL haven't succeeded? It's frankly incredible, especially as caisson has demonstrated that it IS possible! What's the x factor in HIS model, and the scans taken by other people? Surely that could be recreated by hand?

One of the major issues in my POV for Poser character which you can buy , they all miss good maps. No decent thickness map, or bump or normal. To render photorealistic, you NEED very good texture maps. Most of the Poser character which I bought use 2 maps . Texture and some kind of grey map which is used for all slots. Roughness, bump etc.. The second , good lights and material set up.

Cycles.

But rendered in Blender-Cycles. CPU 6-core Ryzen, rendertime less than 4 Minutes.

caisson posted at 3:09AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409955

The fastest easiest way would be to work with scan data. That's what I think a lot of games studios will be doing - much more cost effective. From a Poser POV though, go look at the sort of prices for commercial usage ...

Anyway, this is what I could get from P11 back in 2015 with a free head from Ten24 (aka 3dscanstore dot com). The eyes are rough as it's a single mesh item, they aren't separate - image is post processed and eye highlight painted in. I did convert the 8 bit bump to a normal map, but the shader was ridiculously basic (and I wouldn't use it now!).

@Caisson Like I said before. Good maps are mandatory. Textures XYZ as example is heavily used by prof. and studios. The price is pretty spicy , but the results are awesome. Last year I bought me a course about Character texturing. ( Want to create a character for my personal usage) . It was also referring to the site "Textures XYZ" . Well after I put a cart together, I decide to think a second time about it LOL.

@Rhia: my units are milimeters. Also, as I mentioned before, a whole lot of those numbers depend completely on the colors of the maps - specially as the PhysicalSurface root seems to multiply the diffuse color into the subsurface values. That's why I spent the whole day yesterday tampering with that skin.

@AcePix yes but knowing how is the biggest part of this, yes? The only "MakeArt" button is a punny joke ;) Poser was stuck in time for a while and so we its creators, for lack of incentive to keep up mostly. That's why so many of us are stuck with using skin photos to make diffuse maps and so on.

I plan on testing of Blender's texture painting can handle LF with 4096px textures with a decent enough performance soon. If it does, I plan on purchasing an addon for Blender that lets you make textures in a similar way to substance painter - and then I'll have to find decent video classes on skin.

adp001 posted at 6:32AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409995

Cycles.

But rendered in Blender-Cycles. CPU 6-core Ryzen, rendertime less than 4 Minutes.

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about. Have you tried exactly the same in Poser?

TheAnimaGemini posted at 6:34AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409990

One of the major issues in my POV for Poser character which you can buy , they all miss good maps. No decent thickness map, or bump or normal. To render photorealistic, you NEED very good texture maps. Most of the Poser character which I bought use 2 maps . Texture and some kind of grey map which is used for all slots. Roughness, bump etc.. The second , good lights and material set up.

Have you ever imported those maps from another source and produced a truly photorealistic result in Poser? by thickness map, do you mean sss?

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 6:37AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410006

I plan on testing of Blender's texture painting can handle LF with 4096px textures with a decent enough performance soon. If it does, I plan on purchasing an addon for Blender that lets you make textures in a similar way to substance painter - and then I'll have to find decent video classes on skin.

Good luck. I really hope that pays off!

AcePyx posted at 6:41AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410014

Good luck. I really hope that pays off!

Thank you! I just tested the texture painting performance here and had good results - so I went ahead and purchased the addon. Now to learn how to actuall make those good textures. Should take a while though, I'll keep focusing on hair because I've got that workflow already figured out for me and it's giving me good sales.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 6:47AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410015

AcePyx posted at 6:41AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410014

Thank you! I just tested the texture painting performance here and had good results - so I went ahead and purchased the addon. Now to learn how to actuall make those good textures. Should take a while though, I'll keep focusing on hair because I've got that workflow already figured out for me and it's giving me good sales.

Yeah, always room for more hair! I'd love to see more 1960s/70s male hair. Great thing about that is that it's easy to make multi-figure and even work on Genesis.

Yeah I've been converting some of my hair to DS :) And most of my Poser ones support six different figures too.

AcePyx posted at 7:58AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410012

adp001 posted at 6:32AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409995

Cycles.

But rendered in Blender-Cycles. CPU 6-core Ryzen, rendertime less than 4 Minutes.

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about. Have you tried exactly the same in Poser?

No P12 here. But Superfly should be able to produce a similar result. Some useful shaders are still missed in Superfly, but this is not a showstopper for skin shaders. Speed could be a remarkable difference. But we will see. Someday when P12 is ready.

As mentioned by others, the key is texture. But for a "photorealistic" image one needs more than just a shader and a good texture. The model itself, the (face-) pose and correct scene lighting is important too.

adp001 posted at 8:39AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410028

No P12 here. But Superfly should be able to produce a similar result. Some useful shaders are still missed in Superfly

Yeah - gutted that they still haven't implemented the displacement properly.

but this is not a showstopper for skin shaders. Speed could be a remarkable difference. But we will see. Someday when P12 is ready.

I'll sacrifice speed for quality ANY day of the week.

Is there any chance you could us your cycles node map for the skin please?

AcePyx posted at 10:04AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410029

adp001 posted at 8:39AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410028

No P12 here. But Superfly should be able to produce a similar result. Some useful shaders are still missed in Superfly

Yeah - gutted that they still haven't implemented the displacement properly.

but this is not a showstopper for skin shaders. Speed could be a remarkable difference. But we will see. Someday when P12 is ready.

I'll sacrifice speed for quality ANY day of the week.

Is there any chance you could us your cycles node map for the skin please?

There is nothing special in this nodemap. Just a Principled BSDF shader. And those (partly handcrafted) diffuse-/specular-/normal-/bump-maps.

The parameters for a good skin-shader must be adjusted specifically for each set of texture-maps. "One for all" does not really work. Or better: It may work only for the typical, usual flat, uniform and exchangable Poser textures.

The Caio Hair looks very nice.

Mostly, I don't care for how hair renders in Superfly. It never looks as good as the skin. For some reason it ends up either too flat or too rough. But that Caio hair looks great.

Rhia, that first render looks like you found a way to add beard stubble to any texture! ?

Yeah, including the forehead. :)

IIRC, Bagginsbill had a post back in RDNA's Node Cult where he demonstrated how to create realistic skin renders using James and his default hand-painted textures. Unfortunately, that post disappeared into the internet void like much other helpful information.

@Rhia: I use inches as my unit of measure. Also, I just discovered recently that not all textures will render well depending on your selection of Cycles nodes. In one instance, I used the PrincipledBSDF for a new set of texture shaders and got horrendous results. I switched it for the PhysicalSurface Root and the problem disappeared. I need to look into this further, maybe it's a one-time thing but I need to see if it's repeatable.

AcePyx posted at 1:02AM Wed, 13 January 2021 - #4410013

TheAnimaGemini posted at 6:34AM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409990

One of the major issues in my POV for Poser character which you can buy , they all miss good maps. No decent thickness map, or bump or normal. To render photorealistic, you NEED very good texture maps. Most of the Poser character which I bought use 2 maps . Texture and some kind of grey map which is used for all slots. Roughness, bump etc.. The second , good lights and material set up.

Have you ever imported those maps from another source and produced a truly photorealistic result in Poser? by thickness map, do you mean sss?

Yes, With good maps and good materiel set up you can render in Poser Photo-realistic too. But good, detailed maps are essential to have really great results.

bagginsbill posted at 10:32AM Wed, 13 January 2021 - #4348768

operaguy posted at 9:12AM Mon, 25 March 2019 - #4348633

I guess BB's post adds up to "deploy the diffuse map and drive roughness, glint, wetness and height with procedural." Is that correct?

No, I certainly used the bump map and it is the key to the realism. What I didn't use or bother with (and never have, on skin) is a specular or roughness map. IMO the specularity differences are minute, and the roughness differences are not mandatory nor desirable. Oily skin areas are something people avoid and use makeup to eliminate when doing portrait photography.

Here is a specular-only render, showing the super-important contribution of the bump map.

This bump map is decidedly NOTHING to do with a derivative of the diffuse color map, and it is why the results are so fantastic. Bump is like the #1 thing. Color is important but far less important, and roughness (modulation) is not important at all, as far as I can tell.

WITH roughness :)

adp001 posted at 3:04AM Thu, 14 January 2021 - #4410188

WITH roughness :)

I can't place it, but I think that figure looks familiar and it's driving me crazy. Is it a model exported from a game?

JohnDoe641 posted at 4:46AM Thu, 14 January 2021 - #4410243

I can't place it, but I think that figure looks familiar and it's driving me crazy. Is it a model exported from a game?

Yes! :) But with some additional work.

Here's another free scan head (ten24 again, and there is a sample scan on their store website if you want to experiment), this time rendered in P12 Superfly. Below is a screenshot of the geometry and the final render with post processing. I'll put a screenshot of the shader in the next post.

Two area lights at 600% scale (scale up for softer shadows), one in front, one behind. Poser Ground has black material applied so no bounced light to speak of.

The shader is very simple. Using the Cycles root plus Principled BSDF means no preview, but the results are more than worth it in my opinion. I had a thread with a bunch of examples, but that seems to have disappeared, so I’ll add my notes here (note that I am perfectly capable of making mistakes!). First, there were only the two maps with this sample, which is why I’m using a normal map (bump is easier to make, set up and adjust).

Specular in Superfly is base reflectance, or direct reflection, or f0; with this node 0-2 are mapped to to 0-16%. Using 0.25 here means 2% base reflectance which seems to work well. I’ve never used a spec map in Superfly yet, they aren’t needed. (NB. with the PBR Metal/Rough workflow as used in apps like Substance Painter and many others, the default would be 0.5 which would be 4% for all non-metals.)

As bagginsbill says, with a good bump a roughness map doesn’t really seem to matter that much (not the case with most materials though, they are important as they define surface relief at a smaller scale than bump or normal maps).

The various SSS controls all affect each other, and I have been adjusting them in the order here. The Subsurface value is the overall amount or scale of the SSS effect (I don’t believe that the values in this node are affected by what units are set in the preferences), and changing the SSS Method to random walk uses more accurate volumetric calculations (so should be used with a closed mesh). The Subsurface Radius values control the depth that Red, Green and Blue light will penetrate and scatter back. Subsurface Colour affects the Base colour which will be more or less noticeable depending on the scale as set by the Subsurface value.

Illustration of the relationship between Radius, Subsurface colour and Base colour, with Blue light set to penetrate to a greater depth and therefore scatter more and give a blue tint to the thinner parts of the mesh:

I typically drive a texture map through a CombineRGB node using its red channel into the Subsurface Color. That lowers the Surface value to approximately 0.01 for light skin and 0.03 for dark skin. But just the same, your simplified illustrations are pretty clear cut and in keeping with what I've seen. Thank you for your demonstrations.

I think that some folks are not happy about the fact that the best renders use very simple shaders. No need to reach into the magic box of special tricks.

It's going to kill some people's business. Making serious texturemaps isn't as easy as copying complicated shader arrangements from somewhere.

Simple shaders that give great results are what the software should deliver. All that complexity was there to fix problems.

caisson posted at 1:07PM Fri, 15 January 2021 - #4410320

The shader is very simple. Using the Cycles root plus Principled BSDF means no preview, but the results are more than worth it in my opinion. I had a thread with a bunch of examples, but that seems to have disappeared, so I’ll add my notes here (note that I am perfectly capable of making mistakes!).

Where did that thread go? It was great.

But regarding Cycles plus PrincipledBSDF, that has some advantages if you want to layer or mask different shaders, create two-sided materials, etc. But you aren't doing any of those things here. In a really simple case like the one you just showed, is there any advantage of Cycles plus PrincipledBSDF vs PhysicalSurface? The PhysicalSurface root node seems to have the same functionality, plus the preview actually works.

caisson posted at 3:32AM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410320

The shader is very simple. Using the Cycles root plus Principled BSDF means no preview, but the results are more than worth it in my opinion. I had a thread with a bunch of examples, but that seems to have disappeared, so I’ll add my notes here (note that I am perfectly capable of making mistakes!). First, there were only the two maps with this sample, which is why I’m using a normal map (bump is easier to make, set up and adjust).

Specular in Superfly is base reflectance, or direct reflection, or f0; with this node 0-2 are mapped to to 0-16%. Using 0.25 here means 2% base reflectance which seems to work well. I’ve never used a spec map in Superfly yet, they aren’t needed. (NB. with the PBR Metal/Rough workflow as used in apps like Substance Painter and many others, the default would be 0.5 which would be 4% for all non-metals.)

As bagginsbill says, with a good bump a roughness map doesn’t really seem to matter that much (not the case with most materials though, they are important as they define surface relief at a smaller scale than bump or normal maps).

That is great, but now do it on Poser figures. Copy those shaders to the Poser figures and replace the texture maps with the figures' textures. Use the same lights and render setting. All those chopped off model-heads are nice and impressive, but we need results for Poser figures.

Nevertrumper posted at 4:52AM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410433

That is great, but now do it on Poser figures. Copy those shaders to the Poser figures and replace the texture maps with the figures' textures. Use the same lights and render setting. All those chopped off model-heads are nice and impressive, but we need results for Poser figures.

The entire point here is that the textures make or break the realism...