ive had a bit of time today, so i figured i would post a texture comparison of the textures i currently own. i think i have a few more, but i have to search my poser texture folders - if i find any ill add them. these are rendered on vicky2 with the cleo power hair by hmann. the lighting, pose, etc are identical on each image - the only things that were changed were the textures, bump maps and trans maps. the lighting is the p4 default lighting, all i did is move two of the lights around a little. if a texture didnt include a bump map, none was loaded. if it didnt include an eyelash trans map, then i used the 'vicky non-clump lashes' from renderosity freestuff. all that i ask of you is to please do not post any replies to this thread until i am finished uploading all of the images, and after that i ask you to PLEASE comment :) i will post at the end when i am done uploading the pics. thank you.

carly by dalinese.

davin by bytemeok

vicky2 light high res tex by daz3d

noa by stefyzz

asia by stefyzz

lucie by daz3d

hallie by handspan studios

sara by catharina przezak

anna by catharina przezak

anna-maria by catharina przezak

anna-maria-vampyre by catharina przezak

and thats all for now folks. working with the textures, ive noticed a few things. hallie - good for medium-distant renders, but close-up lacks detail davin - lacks detail in extreme closeups, a little too 'perfect' carly - same as above - the lip texture seems extremely large to me lucie - same as above - but there are so few afro-american textures vicky2 light high res - a little too 'perfect' for my taste, its a great texture but the insanely high resolution seems unjustified to me, considering the lack of 'blemishes' that would make use of it. asia - one of the best, but it needs editing in photoshop to remove the 'yellowness'. it also has some strong highlights on the cheeks, the lip texture is a little unrealistic, and the skin is too 'leathery' for extreme closeups noa - far too strong highlights on this tex, you always get almost the same face no matter what morphs you use on vicky. its also very 'green', which you notice more in full body shots. i think her lips are much better than asia's. sara - great tex, but the lip texture is a little misalighed (spills over). nothing a little photoshop cant fix though. anna-maria-vampyre - this set is great, i think im going to use this as my staple texture from now on. the face, especially the eye area, is really realistic. the one problem with it is that the lip texture is misaligned (too small). this can be fixed in photoshop quite easily though if it bothers you. great in close-ups, and also very nice in full-body shots. hope this helps people in choosing the right tex. there is no postwork on ANY of the images. cheers, gabriel

forgot to mention - the anna-maria-vampyre textures by catharina are no longer available here it seems. you can get them on her site at www.renderocity.com - in fact they seem to be the best deal since for $19.99 you get a 3 month membership to her site and you can download ALL of her marketplace textures, including the new kain, tomy, dj, and all of her vicky textures, models, poses, etc.

I have carly,noa,asia and lucie.lucie is in my opion too dark. carly is the one i use most, and its because the overall look and color hits my taste most!!!

VERY interesting comparison! I think I like Anna-Maria by Catharina Przezak best.

Well, erm... let me add my opinions :-) Carly - Otherwise beautiful texture, but I just can't stand her lips. They're too... too white! They look unnatural. Davin - very beautiful, I would like to use that one too one day. Vicky2 light - just another very.. basic texture. Doesn't have anything particularly good or bad about it. Noa and Asia - very realistic. However, I don't like the highlights on the texture and I also don't like the lips in either one of them. The lips look so dry they might crack any second. Sara - absolutely lovely. I think I'll get her one day. Especially her lips are beautiful! Anna, Anna-Maria, vampire - They are all great textures. The only thing I don't like about them is that Anna's eyebrows are too high, in my opinion. I edited the texture in Photoshop and now I'm perfectly happy with it.

Oh btw, has anyone figured out how to fix that annoying eyelashes problem? That they're not really even touching the upper eyelid... sigh

yes - its called postwork :) you can do it in a few seconds by just drawing in the last few lashes in any photo editing program with a single pixel airbrush and dark color set at about 45% opacity.

I really like Magnet's textures "Sweet Emily" and "Emmanuelle."

Does anyone have a solution to Catherina's too-white nose? I've tried lighting but still find that it glows.

rain, maybe you could simply edit it in Photoshop and darken the nose a bit? You could try either airbrushing it or the burn tool... I think...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=58927

Well, I like the Asia texture best. At least with the Poser render engine. The link goes to a image I did some time ago with Povray. The textures are of the dark Daz3d highres variant and the highlights come from the render engine and not from the texture itself.

Here's what I would do about the highlights rather than the burn tool...use the eyedropper to get the overall color of the skin, especially around the nose area (where there are no highlights. Make a separate layer and paint over the highlighted areas. Use a layer style like "Color" or "Soft Light". That way, you won't have to undo anything (like the burn tool) and you can tweak it by taking the eraser at a low setting and erase around the edges of what you painted to blend it in to the rest of the texture. I find the burn tool too harsh and rather blotchy. It's really hard to get it just right unless you are doing it on a flat color. :) Laurie

Hmmmm. Yes, listen to Laurie and not me! :) She obviously knows what she's talking about whereas I was just suggesting something and trying to sound smart :D I might actually try what she suggested as well, cos I'm not too fond of the nose either :)

Eowyn and Laurie, thanks for the tips! I'll have to dig out those textures and give it a try :-)

hmmm... I use DAvin and shiloh quite a bit, they are my favorites frankly. I may have to get Carly she is imho the best one up there. I really don't like either of the steffyzz textures. They DO look like they need chapstick, skin is too yellow for my taste and she needs a deep cleansing pore reducing mask, The second one has an oily skin look to it. Lucie is very dark, but I think she looks great, great brows and perfect lips. catharina's textures made the model look in her forties, while the carly one looks in her late 20's to mid 30's so they are out for me too.

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I am very interested to see some textures by Magnet. My most used is the light high res tex by DAZ. Mazak

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me to.. I'd like to see some large renders (as above) of some of Magnets textures :) especially the darker skin tone (can't remember her name) I've been looking at her lately.. Thanks

Don't worry Eowyn...I'm sure I don't know any more about Photoshop than you do ;). It's just that the burn tool might make the tip of her nose a funky color and not the color of the surrounding skin. If you want to do that, you are going to have to overlay it with the same color :). The burn tool works much better on midtones and shadows than it does highlights (it darkens to more of a gray version of the color it's burning - if that color is almost white, it will turn out grayish. Blah!). :D Laurie

Okay, here's a render of magnet's Alex. She's the only texture by magnet which I own.. and I adore her.

Mira by angielyn (Updated version) Mazak

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I like angielyn's textures I use Mira and Zoe a lot :) I also like a few others I have, but I tend to go back to Mira and Zoe :)

Poser 9 SR3  and 8 sr3
=================
Processor Type:  AMD Phenom II 830 Quad-Core
2.80GHz, 4000MHz System Bus, 2MB L2 Cache + 6MB Shared L3 Cache
Hard Drive Size:  1TB
Processor - Clock Speed:  2.8 GHz
Operating System:  Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 
Graphics Type:  ATI Radeon HD 4200
•ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics 
System Ram:  8GB 

I like angielyn's textures I use Mira and Zoe a lot :) I also like a few others I have, but I tend to go back to Mira and Zoe :)

Poser 9 SR3  and 8 sr3
=================
Processor Type:  AMD Phenom II 830 Quad-Core
2.80GHz, 4000MHz System Bus, 2MB L2 Cache + 6MB Shared L3 Cache
Hard Drive Size:  1TB
Processor - Clock Speed:  2.8 GHz
Operating System:  Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 
Graphics Type:  ATI Radeon HD 4200
•ATI Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics 
System Ram:  8GB 

This is Magnet's Sweet Emily. The texture comes with a great many options for lip color, eyeshadow color and eye color.. also three overall skin tones, light, medium and dark. This is Light Emily.

I have also just done this with all the textures I own but I don't have a webpage set up for the comparison yet. Hopefully I can get around to it soon. Good work, you have many textures I don't. :o)

And this is Emily's dark texture.

to fix the noses on Catharina's textures, I like to use the clone tool in photoshop, using a round soft brush, set the pressure to around 50% (depending on how bad it is) and then gently clone the white spots of with a cloned spot from nearby. Doing it this way give a perfect effect for me. I also fix other areas the same way, such as the lips, but with the lips I use a sharper brush with super soft pressure and slowly brush over the parts I need to fix. The clone tool in photoshop is perfect for fixing almost anything on textures, you just need to learn how soft or hard to press, give it a try :)

fyi on Steffyzz's textures... some people mentioned a greenish hue to them, thats easilly fixed without post work or altering the texture, set her ambient skin color to 25 red 0 green 0 blue...should be really dark almost black red...it totally changes the look of them in a good way :)!...

I like altering the ambient skin colors (a trick I picked up from Dmentia's Bobby Sue texture, and her image in the galleries - I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head though), you can get some interesting tone variations.

Thanks eowyn and fauve.. they look great...

One of my fav textures Destiny by Predator2k

You're welcome... I like the non-photoreal look of Magnet's Emily and the Handspan Studios stuff, because I think photorealism is a chimera that too many 3D artists chase for no good reason. Most of my stuff aims more toward natural media than being photoreal. That said, as soon I looked over these comparisons, I rushed right out and got Anna-Maria from Catherina Harders' site... :-> Interesting notes about the ambient lights, the underlying material color, etc. Does anyone else do what I do, and alter, merge and piece together textures? Most of the ones I use are a combination of three or four different store-bought or freestuff textures, plus there's a lot of my own tone changes, hand-painted details, etc thrown in. I don't think I've ever just used a texture right out of the box... I always change it to suit me first.

My fav's and now on my buy list Alex by magnet and Rayme by byte-me-ok

Here is Shelby - I will post some others with this lighting and camera andgle. it's the Wonder wedge of course and Anton's lights.

This is Anya, my newest purchase from Daz.

And here is "Bobby Sue". NOTE: This is the only one I have posted so far that is not V2 aware, I had to "browsgone" the head.

this is marjorie by the3dwizard. he was kind enough to send me the texture to see how it would fare in comparison to the others, lucie in particular. i have to admit, im impressed - it looks a lot more realistic than lucie, who just looks like a standard texture thats been darkened. several people mentioned that they were looking for a good afro-american texture, well heres the best ive seen. same image conditions as the others - however i did use the 'vicky brow+lash trans' from renderosity freestuff for the eyebrows because i think they suit her better.

fauve - I do the same thing, in fact that was my biggest reason for joining Catharina's membership for copywrite free, and for learning to do the textures myself, I just knew I was going to change a texture so much that I wouldn't realize it wasn't mine and give it away.. so to be on the safe side.. I only edit Catharina's or create my own.. so many textures floating around on my hard drive I didn't want to forget about something like that.

This is shaping up well to help me make future purchase decisions :) Any chance you could post the pose, camera and light you are using so I can post my images under the same circumstances? It would be VERY nice to be able to compare them that way. When I get home I will see if I can come up with a more closely matched pose/camera set up though I will keep using Anton's lights for now. Thanks for starting this it is REALLY helpful :)

Attached Link: http://www.hickorytech.net/~dlwilder/

I finished with a rough webpage of both Vicky and Mike textures that I have. Note that there is nudity from just above the waist up. I'm pretty sure I got the credits right but if anyone sees any errors please let me know. :o)

I like marjorie by the3dwizard very much. Also this texture is on sale till end of october. hint But often I use photorealistic textures. Not because of the photorealism but because many painted textures are to 'clean' for my taste. Thank god, different people like different textures. Imagine there where a texture which everybody likes and uses, what a nightmare. ;)

The Shelby texture looks a lot like it was made using my makeup kit, which is free here at Renderosity. Okay, not to make another big stink about copyright issues and what not, but whoever bought the Shelby texture probably got ripped off. You could have easily made one yourself using the kit... compare the eyeshadows. It's even the same shade just on a different base texture. Enough said.

Chailynne, very interesting comparisons!!! thanks :)

Well, when you factor in the lights, the poses, the work I saved by not having to generate all the shades and building the MAT files I came out WAY ahead even if the author used a kit to build her. I'm not convinced they did by the way - jsut that I was far from "ripped off" in either case :)

This is one of the many hand painted textures included with the "Sakari" character package.

I really like cake1's textures, she did the Lucie one above, and this is from one of my DAZ sale pages, it is the Jane II texture sold here, I think I modified it a little (mostly in hue). A lot of the "photo realistic" textures are actually too photorealistic for me, I never do extream close ups anyway, and I like to think of the girls as being "perfect", unlike me, with the look you get in Playboy after they airbrush all the blemishes out. I also bought Catherine's texture licence, and I've used some of her textures in a couple of my items, but I actually toned down the pore level detail somewhat, and played around with the hues a bit, and backed off some of the other stuff they have, but they were a good starting point, though. I'll have to do some befores and afters for this thread.

This is Catharina's Victoria rexture, as it comes out of the box (I think!) on SMV.

Here it is as modified, as I said I toned it down and smoothed it out a bit. This one comes with SMV's Bustier, BTW.

Blackhearted, this is a VERY interesting comparison...would it be too much trouble for me to ask you to package up the camera, light, and pose so I can test some other textures under the exact same testing conditions? I think If I stored each face shot in one directory, it'd give me a helluva leg up in choosing the right textures for my future shots! I think my favorites so far are Shelby and the Vic2 Light Hi textures. True, the V2LH are pretty generic, but that just allows me to play with them more to get them to my liking. And I made my own 'Standard' and 'Lite' versions by scaling the sizes down in Photoshop...for those high overhead renders... :)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/freestuff.ez?Form.Contrib=soulhuntre&Topsectionid=0

I actually have a comparison set-up in freesutff. There were a few threads of texture comparisons using this kit. Hope it helps.