Someone asked in the chatroom recently how to do realistic latex in Poser. Maybe everyone else has already figured this out, but after screwing around with it for a good hour I came up with a recipe that I think produces decent results.

Instead of making the bodysuit black, I made it very dark grey. This added more variations of grey/black to the bodysuit, which I think looks a bit better. The highlight is set to white, and is low, about 20%. I added a reflection map (just a black and white photograph wrapped around a sphere) set to 100 strength. The problem with using reflection maps on a transmapped figure (bodysuit trans from Creed3D) is that the reflections translate to the skin no matter what I did, so I had to do postwork to remove the wet look from the skin.

Anyway, just a silly little tip, in case anyone is interested.

Looks great. Thanks.

wow, looks wonderfully real. Sharen

"The problem with using reflection maps on a transmapped figure (bodysuit trans from Creed3D) is that the reflections translate to the skin no matter what I did, so I had to do postwork to remove the wet look from the skin." ----- I think you can avoid this by making an all black texture map for the body parts which are transmapped, the rest is white. You can also load the transmap as a texture map . Poser does not render reflections on black textures. Tell me if it worked. Karl

Oh wow, that looks really good. I may have to give that a whirl.

What i would like to know is what you did to create the reflection map; that is, how did you wrap the black and white photograph around the sphere, and in what program. Many thanks in advance-- Nan

Yes, on the reflection map, does it matter if you don't distort parts of the photo first (to account for the spherical mapping)?

I used a random interior photograph of a room, blurred it, made it black and white, and wrapped it around a sphere in Bryce, then dropped the sphereized version on top of the original background photo and used that as a reflection map. You could also make a sky in bryce (or vue) and make a nice sky, and make a mirror surface sphere to create the reflection map. I got the idea from Kai's Power Tools, which uses sphereized environment maps for the shapeshifter filter, but because most of them are dropped on a black background it created too many variations in the image, so I just made my own. But there are a ton of ways you could do this in photoshop, too, using the sphereize filter, for example. Just experiment. I discovered you can use almost any picture as a reflection map, given proper amounts of blurring. =)

I'm probably being a bit slow here, but I don't understand the reflection map creation. Any chance of a tutorial or maybe upload a copy here so we can see what we're aiming for? Seeing the seperate layers would be really helpful too, especially the spherized layer. Baz

This is an example. I made it in 2 minutes.

1. Find black and white image with good contrast. (google is good for this.)

2. Open in Photoshop

3. Run gaussian blur (1-2 pixels)

4. Make a circular selection

5. Run Spherize a couple of times

6. Gaussian blur again, 1 pixel or so

That's it. In Bryce or Vue you can reflect the image against a sphere to wrap it around the sphere, as it were. That's what I did as an experiment. But the Photoshop method works just as well.

And then you make a rectangular selection and layer it over the original?

No.. if you look closely, you see the circle is over the original image. You want the circular (spherized) part to be on top of the original image. I usually do this in several layers and check the map in Poser at the same time to see that it is working.

Right, now I understand, I'll give it a try. Thanks a lot kieraw. Atrice

No problem. It takes some practice to figure out which types of images are good for this, but keep in mind that you can use colored images as well for interesting effects. ;)

why did you need to spherise it in the first place? how did it look if you just applied it as it was? thanks for sharing btw :) always nice if someone does the research for you ;)

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a sweet disorder in the dress kindles in clothes a wantoness,
do more bewitch me than when art is too precise in every part

I found that by spherizing it makes the reflections curvier. This of course is not always required - or even wanted. But it looks neat on plastics and metallics.