Hi all

I've been trying to improve on the skin material of imported Poser models and thought I'd share the fruits of my labours.After much experimentation I've come up with the following tweaks to the highlight settings which I think result in a much more realistic render:

Open up the material browser, locate the various skin materials and make the following changes to the settings in the highlights tab:

• Set the Highlight Global Intensity to 40%
• Set the Highlight colour to a very light pink or yellow (you may want to play about with different colours depending on the lighting of your scene).
• Activate variable transparency and load in the 'Soft Spots' function (or 'Pitted surface' for a subtler effect.).

This seems to yield good results under most basic lighting/atmosphere set ups but I found that it wasn't that great with volumetric atmospheres - for these I suggest setting the Highlight Global Size down to 0% which seems to work much better.

I'd be interested to know what people think or, more importantly, if anyone can come up with a better formula!

Here's an example of these settings in action. The first pic is a straight Poser import, the second uses the formula above.

Cheers

K.

Should probably have mentioned I've only tried this with Daz's Vicky - but I imagine it will hold true with the standard Poser figures. K.

Looks pretty good, really. I've been doing that for a while too, but your highlights look better than mine have, so thanks for the tip! As for the bumps, it's really hard to get a realistic skin bump from Vue's procedurals alone on Poser characters. Again, yours looks good. I can't remmember what function I used, but I think it's Noise/Smooth set at extremely small scale and gain levels. Here's another thing you can do to have more control, which I just started messing with, but it's a Poser thing. Use the grouping tool in poser to map out additional polygon areas on the Poser figures, and give them descriptive names. In this way you could, for example, apply specific materials to only an arm or a leg, or a finger, including bumps, etc, in addition to the normal texture. And that will load into Vue and the newly mapped mat will be in the material browser. BUT, if you try it, save your Poser figure with a different name because for some reason sometimes Vue will leave out any newly mapped body parts on import, so you don't want to overwrite your original Poser figure in Poser. I found THAT out the hard way. But it doesn't always happen. shrug

A nice difference, Katt. Thanks for sharing the tips! :)