a little tribute to War Witch...
By
Archimedes,
Posted on: 2005-05-24 01:57 in Multi-Media Fan Creations
Oh yeah, I forgot about Oblivion. ::drools:: Morrowind was one of my favorite games. I hope Oblivion lives up to it (think it probably will).
To Kboc: It might not be that most poser models look the same as much as most Poser renders (since, as you say, Poser isn't used for modeling). Subsurface Scattering is a nice addition to Poser 6. To use SSS in Lightwave you need a plugin (the ice cave render on my photobucket page uses it).
"Resorted" to procedurals?! IMO, procedurals are rediculously powerful, and are often overlooked by people who think you need image maps to do any texturing. The 17 renders I have up on photobucket use all of 6 images between them (the wallpaper, which is a photo, the starfield, which is an amalgamation of about a dozen satellite photos, the text on the golden apple, the iris pattern on all the eyes, the chessboard surface, since I wanted to accurately reproduce my specific chessboard, and the keyboard keys for the steam computer). The great benefit to procedurals is that they can scale up or down without pixelating if you put enough layers on them. They also don't tile. For the project with the guy in the armor on the mountaintop (my senior project at college), I needed the rock that he's standing on to be viewed both from far away and from extremely close up (there's a shot where you see his feet walking), so the bump map alone has 33 stacked procedural textures, all with different types of detail at different scales, so that as you zoom in close to it, rather than blur into formlessness, new details, like little bumps and scratches, emerge that were invisible from further away.
I also didn't like texturing until I learned how powerful procedurals are for achieving photo-realistic results (I'm still not crazy about doing UV image mapping). After learning more about them, texturing became pretty much my favorite aspect of 3D.
Augur - lvl 50 Illusion/storm controller
Arctalus - lvl 50 Ice/Energy blaster
Crey Avenger - lvl 48 Fire/Rad controller
Augur Prime - lvl 41 Peacebringer
Spiky Whatsit - lvl 39 claws/regen scrapper
I agree with Augur; most Poser pieces are recognizable as Poser because they're rendered directly in the Poser render engine (which is total crapola). Poser's render engine is recognizable in an instant and doesn't have ray tracing, procedurals, or anything more advanced than shadow-mapping. It's for that exact reason that I take my scenes into other programs for rendering.
Additionally, most artists seem to skip what I consider the final and manditory step to completing a piece; postwork! Every 3D program has it's quirks, and the artist MUST correct those quirks before a piece can be considered complete, or they'll be haunted with the tiny little errors that keep a piece from being incredible. By quirks, I mean such nuisances as figures clipping through clothing, joints that don't bend correctly, shadows that are too dark, or too light, and hair/clothing that falls flat when it should be lively. Any Poser artist that doesn't correct these issues isn't done with their piece... and it shows.
As far as my preference, I'm a Vertex-pusher at heart. I love making 3D items and prefer Maya. I don't mind texturing and have created some pretty cool ones, but making the UVs line up is such a pain on a new model that I try to resort to either procedurals, or start with a pre-made object that's already UVed. I actively avoid that stage.
Ultimately, my goal is a finished piece of art. I use models from here and there, textures from the internet and friends, some items imported and some modelled native... whatever it takes to get to a rough render. Then I polish and tweak that render until it's a presentable piece. Whatever it took to get to that final piece should be unrecognizable - that's when the image becomes magic. 
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I agree with Augur; most Poser pieces are recognizable as Poser because they're rendered directly in the Poser render engine (which is total crapola).
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FIREFLY, the new render engine, is derrived from PRenderman. You're still using P4 then 
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y14...sylla-test.jpg
I did this render last night as part of a test. IMHO, that's as good a quality render as anything coming out of any other raytrace engine.
You might do this: continue setting up your scenes in P4, then send them to Daz/studio to use it's raytrace engine.
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I also didn't like texturing until I learned how powerful procedurals are for achieving photo-realistic results (I'm still not crazy about doing UV image mapping). After learning more about them, texturing became pretty much my favorite aspect of 3D.
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The most realistic renders of human skin are all UV. The most realistic renders of human clothing are all UV.
Procedurals + Image is very powerful, yes. But procedurals aren't powerful enougn not to end up with a recongnizably repetetive pattern.
I admit, I got very lazy doing the Black Rhino renders. I could have done some more blotchy stuff and come up with a halfway decent cammo pattern...
On human skin: I've never seen them look good.
It depends what you're texturing. Image maps are obviously necessary for a lot of things (anything that needs specific and controlled details), but I think many people tend to write off procedurals the first time they try to slap a default procedural texture on an object and it doesn't look photorealistic.
It was actually learning how to write Renderman shaders that really opened my eyes to procedurals. We had an assignment in school where we had to create an animation of the moon orbiting around the earth (or, at least, planets that resembled both. Specific continents weren't important) using BMRT (a freeware Renderman renderer) and no commercial graphics software, which meant writing a C++ program from scratch that outputted the renderman animation files, and writing all our shaders from scratch. I ended up writing shaders that calculated elevation, which used that (along with lattitude) to calculate different biomes and cloud patterns and shaded them appropriately. Was probably the most important project I did in school.
But yeah, as powerful as writing shaders can be, no shader will ever actually replicate the actual shape of the continents of earth without images. Ideally, textures are made up of both mapped images combined with procedurals.
Augur - lvl 50 Illusion/storm controller
Arctalus - lvl 50 Ice/Energy blaster
Crey Avenger - lvl 48 Fire/Rad controller
Augur Prime - lvl 41 Peacebringer
Spiky Whatsit - lvl 39 claws/regen scrapper
The most powerful procedurals I've ever seen were in Bryce.
That said... BMRT is a very nice render engine... I think I still have it on this PC somewhere... Writing shaders though... oh the pain the pain the pain...
One thing, using blend modes with alpha channels on images, you're right...
Maybe I'll send you my mech and see what you can do with it... 
I've tried a few times to make the switch over to Maya, but I'm too entrenched in Lightwave. I also prefer Lightwave's native renderer to Maya's, and every time I try to learn Maya, whoever is trying to teach me doens't know how to do in Maya what I know how to do in Lightwave (same goes true for that class I took that used SoftImage), so I always end up getting frustrated, not only by my inability to do something that I had taken for granted, but that those teaching me can't tell me how to do it either, and I end up going back to Lightwave. Eventually, when I get the time, I'll probably put more of an effort into getting more comfortable with it, though.
Augur - lvl 50 Illusion/storm controller
Arctalus - lvl 50 Ice/Energy blaster
Crey Avenger - lvl 48 Fire/Rad controller
Augur Prime - lvl 41 Peacebringer
Spiky Whatsit - lvl 39 claws/regen scrapper
<----has seriously considered switching from C4D to lightwave simply because Messiah does Lightwave best
You've no idea how much I want Messiah
The first year or two of college (as well as a couple years of HS) were devoted as much to programming as they were to computer graphics, so I sort've enjoy writing shaders. I hope to learn how to write lightwave shaders some time soon, because the level of control you have with them is unparalleled.
I probably also have a copy of BMRT stored away somewhere on a hard drive. I don't think it's even available anymore, since Exluna got sued out of existence by Pixar a couple years back (on the day that they filed for bankruptcy, they were bought by NVidia, which, a few months later, unvieled "their" new real time shading technology. NVidia, IMO, is very good at knowing who to buy).
If you want to send me the mech object (is it a .obj file?) I can try my hand at texturing/rendering it.
Send it to AugurCoH@gmail.com
Augur - lvl 50 Illusion/storm controller
Arctalus - lvl 50 Ice/Energy blaster
Crey Avenger - lvl 48 Fire/Rad controller
Augur Prime - lvl 41 Peacebringer
Spiky Whatsit - lvl 39 claws/regen scrapper
OBJ, yes... I didn't know NVidia got Exluna... people had high hopes for Exluna 
I'll zip it up and fire it off... expect it within the hour.
sent
*glazes over at all the tech talk* Er... how about them normals.
Anyway, between the bunch of you all, I smell... group project! 
Wow, all those programs are a big help. I wanted to do a digital render of my character, but had no idea where to get that kind of software. I will have to get some of those programs. Are they downloadable or do they send you the box if you buy them?
DAZ/Studiom Wings3D, Anim8or are all free downloads.
http://www.daz3d.com
http://www.anim8or.com
http://www.wings3d.com
Kboc2... It may not be directly your fault, but I hate you. I just put over $300 dollars into software....
Oh well, I wanted the stuff anyways. Plus I have come into a surplus of money lately. Thanks for the links! I will have something in a few weeks posted I guess.
What did you buy? It's probably money well spent.
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The most realistic renders of human skin are all UV. The most realistic renders of human clothing are all UV.
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Actually, no. The most realistic renders of human skin are achieved with procedurals. Specifically, a sub-surface scattering algorithm combined with several others (including pores (a repetitive pattern), creasing (a semi-repeating pattern based on chaos mathematics, primarily only on stress-zones (elbows, hands, etc.), a hair shader for realism, and then ONE image map texture for vein details (optional)).
Rendering times for such layered procedural textures are horrific. I've had LW scenes with layering like that crash because of too much diffuse interreflection. Those that didn't still took outrageous amounts of time compared to a simple well laid-out image map. But, for true realism, procedurals ARE better and more realistic (including no artifacting at increased magnification).
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Procedurals + Image is very powerful, yes. But procedurals aren't powerful enougn not to end up with a recongnizably repetetive pattern.
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Not true. Even simple procedurals can incorporate multiple noise & pertubation functions that make the 'pattern' almost undetectible except at miniscule scaling of the texture on a normal object (which makes little sense.) Just look at some of the output available in POV-Ray procedurals for a good example. Or any of several Renderman Shader definitions.
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Now for the whole Poser-is-or-isn't-art thing....
Poser is a tool for LAYOUT. Not modelling. Although it does provide rudimentary tools, almost ALL models in Poser are created in full modelling packages, exported to .OBJ format, imported into Poser, and then the animations/rigging/morphs/etc. are done. Layout is still an art-form. Does anyone claim a photographer isn't an artist because he didnt' create his models? Nope. He poses them, lights them, arranges them, and then takes the photo. It is STILL art.
Would a painter using a photograph from a book as a reference for his background be making 'canned' art? No. The artist still applies his own interpretations, arrangement, lighting, shading, and many other creative elements to the composition. Poser imagery (and most of what has been seen/available is from Poser4&5) is very distinctive. Poser 5 introduced the Firefly rendering engine to the Poser community, and they are still adapting to it. Poser 6 was just recently released.
Older poser images are VERY recognizable, as are certain 'tell-tale' abberations in the morph targets of the standard models (and those models derived from them).
Most Poser users use poser for EVERYTHING in production of the final image. This is WHY it looks 'poser-ish'. If, they created their scene in poser, using props modelled in Luxo, with a character modelled in Maya, and then exported the final scene and converted it to Lightwave, then applied textures and procedurals as needed, adjusted for proper lighting, and rendered a full system with particle effects, voxels, and everything else.........you wouldn't even notice it was a poser-posed composition (unless it was one of the early and very distinctive models from poser, like the p3 or p4 woman/man models.)
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On human skin: I've never seen them look good.
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Take a look at A Practical Model for Subsurface Lighting and you'll see a new approach using BSSRDF from the SIGGRAPH 2001 Proceedings. It is possible, just time-consuming.
And, IMHO, Poser is a great tool for doing poses/animation tests.....it is quick, and can provide great feedback during the roughs stage. I prefer LightWave for doing my final renders and my initial modelling though. But the animation preview work always seems easier in Poser. I love using it to tweak a BVH file or figure out exactly how I want an animation or scene to flow. Then I'll transfer that to LW.
CuppaJo: **waves wand - you are mesmerized by the shiney bouncing Positron**
HypnotizerZero, Psyche-Delia, Twilight Samurai, Burning Rubber, Ignitrode & more...on Virtue.
AMD x2 4600+/7950GTKO/2Gb PC6400/Win2kPro
Oh, and also check out the latest offerings from E-Frontier (what Curious Labs has become) with the International offering of Shade which is a VERY popular modelling/rendering package in Japan....now available here! And there is a free trial version available too.
I'm still stuck on LW though.....just too intuitive for me compared to all the other packages......
CuppaJo: **waves wand - you are mesmerized by the shiney bouncing Positron**
HypnotizerZero, Psyche-Delia, Twilight Samurai, Burning Rubber, Ignitrode & more...on Virtue.
AMD x2 4600+/7950GTKO/2Gb PC6400/Win2kPro
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And, IMHO, Poser is a great tool for doing poses/animation tests.....it is quick, and can provide great feedback during the roughs stage. I prefer LightWave for doing my final renders and my initial modelling though. But the animation preview work always seems easier in Poser. I love using it to tweak a BVH file or figure out exactly how I want an animation or scene to flow. Then I'll transfer that to LW.
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YAH! One of the things I know can be done quite well is taking BVH animation and moving it around package to package...
I couldn't dissagree with you more on the idea that Proceedurals produce more realistic skin texturing without bitmapped textures.
This is only one example of a render that tends to blow tha theory out of the water...
While high-res texture maps for skin are good for general purpose, they fall apart in two common areas....
First, they are fixed resolution. If you get close enough to the surface, they will pixelate.
Second, they do NOT allow for the translucency of skin or its special properties (such as fresnel effects at the edges).
In order to overcome even the first problem (and then only to a degree) the image maps have to be enormous. Which can quickly cause memory issues. Try having 200 different high-resolution characters in your scene. With BSSRDF and a few simple procedurals your memory footprint for the characters is very close to just the geometry. And all the shaders can be shared between the 200 characters, with only the paramaters (a few bytes total) being stored with each.....much more efficient, much more realistic, but much slower.
This: [image]http://poserpros.daz3d.com/forums/files/20668_1117468798.jpg[/image]
versus
[image]http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/bssrdf/face_bssrdf.jpg[/image]
is a question of aesthetics. Which is more realistic? I'd say the latter, though it is obviously a more idealized figure, rather than an aged one.
Don't get me wrong. Image Map techniques are still needed. Doing a full figure with nothing but procedurals would be excrutiatingly slow, and would require obscene amounts of geometric detail (a very high polycount). But it WOULD be extremely realistic. You would still probably require at least one or two image maps just for things that do not lend themselves to mathematical modelling (like vein structure.)
There are trade-offs to both methods. The best ground is usually found somewhere in the middle. A good image-map for coloration, combined with a perlin-noise bump function, all modulated through a BSSRDF procedural. Boom. Very realistic, without excessive memory or CPU consumption.
CuppaJo: **waves wand - you are mesmerized by the shiney bouncing Positron**
HypnotizerZero, Psyche-Delia, Twilight Samurai, Burning Rubber, Ignitrode & more...on Virtue.
AMD x2 4600+/7950GTKO/2Gb PC6400/Win2kPro
Okay 200 characters in a scene I grant you. But those aren't close ups. For that proceedurals are just fine.
Fresnel... drool... wish Poser had it
I haven't yet played with BSSRDF, but you're saying it can't be mixed with textures???? I'd heard otherwise...
I never said it couldn't be mixed with textures.....
In fact, almost all BSSRDF shaders depend on image maps for light mapping, bump mapping (if you don't use a procedural bump function), and color mapping.
You, however, did earlier say:
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The most realistic renders of human skin are all UV. The most realistic renders of human clothing are all UV.
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(emphasis added)
Which is simply not true. The most realistic renders of both involve sub-surface scattering shaders, anisotropic shaders, layered UV image-maps, lightmaps, shadow maps, and more. They also use hybrid recursive raytracing with diffuse radiosity algorithms. They also often take several days to trace a SINGLE image.
Check out just how realistic skin can get with proper shaders (including sub-surface scattering) without using much more textures that a light-map. SubSurfaceScattering Tutorial PDF
CuppaJo: **waves wand - you are mesmerized by the shiney bouncing Positron**
HypnotizerZero, Psyche-Delia, Twilight Samurai, Burning Rubber, Ignitrode & more...on Virtue.
AMD x2 4600+/7950GTKO/2Gb PC6400/Win2kPro
But it's true they are all UV. If you're mixing up shader nodes with textures for skin or cloths (and I assume that would include BSSRDF) with textures, it's still all applied to UV.
For instance, when you're doing a specular map it's applied to the surface filtered through UV. (Poser people are just now beginning to get how important this is).
If say, I wanted a ruddy complexion to the guy in that tutorial, I'd have to have alternating red and yellow blotches applied to it, but if it's not done via UV it would apply uniform over the head and look completely unrealistic.
I do like how light comes through the ears, BTW... one of the cool things about it
P6 supposedly has this, we'll see... I'm still using P5.
Maybe I'll beat EFrontiers up for not giving us a fresnel node
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You could be seeing the most brillant texture work in the world and not know it. But yeah, on an overall level, Source is a 'better' engine in terms of graphical might. The Unreal 3 engine (which incidently, NCSoft recently licensed) is a year or so ahead of Doom 3 and Source. Either way, many pretty and photorealistic games are a coming. ot to discount non-headliner engines. Remedy's engine they build for Alan Wake is absolutely incredible as is the engine for Elder Scrolls Oblivion.
Id is, indeed, a very good example. IMO, Id makes crappy games (I'll admit, though, that I never even tried Doom3 after my utter disappointment with Quake 2 and 3, as well as Return to Castle Wolfenstein), but really top notch game engines. As much as I preferred both the look and the game-play of Unreal Tournament to Quake 3, the Quake 3 engine was much more streamlined, and was capable of some really amazing stuff. That said, though, I think they might be losing their lead in game engines as well. I don't know much about the Doom3 engine, but I thought Half Life 2's Source Engine looked better (though, once again, that might just be Valve making much better use of their engine than Id of theirs), and the demo videos I've seen of the new Unreal Engine blow both Id and Valve away (of course, the new unreal engine isn't released yet, and Valve's Source engine is being updated to use HDRI, which will be stunning, so who can really tell who's ahead).
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Well Doom 3's problem was that you were in the dark most of the time.
Umm.... to relate to the topic, er... DOOOOOOOOOM!!!