https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=1829&p=45954#p45954 ----------------------------------- Endosphere Sunday, 09 November 2025, 03:00 AM Re: Skin Texturing ----------------------------------- Interesting. Tastes as well as intended styles and usage vary of course, but I'd say the best of the three is actually the standard/default Posette. Yet that might change if she were depicted in some larger scene. I think the most important composition point is usually that everything present in any particular image/scene matches in overall style and technique, with no one detail sharply contrasting the rest in overall aesthetic. Texture selection/construction is just as much a part of Poser art as choosing and mixing paints for a traditional painter. Between the other two, I think the one on the far right is better, worth the effort of applying an extra prop; the one in the middle looks strange, as you said because the irises are too large. In Poser 4, one would just turn off the texture to the eyeball and pupil as a partial countermeasure to that issue (thereby falling back onto direct object coloring), but I don't know how that P7 material room works. On the larger point of Posette's (or Dork's) eyes, I have a few points that anyone working with the P4 models may find helpful: 1) Assuming for the sake of argument we take some or another notion of 'realism' as our goal in a particular image, there are different ways in which an image might make use of realism, or playfully contrast cg realism with cg uncanniness. In my own characters, for example, I haven't much interest in photorealism, but I do have some interest in the sort of alternate realism style probably most well known from the canvas airbrush paintings of Hajime Sorayama (not the content, but the overall appearance and style of presentation). Therefore a good goal for me is to make the level of realism on the eyes of my Posettes match the overall 'realism' of their face and body (which is a sort of 'comic realism'). This principle holds true regardless of your style-- what's important is internal consistency in the image, so nothing stands out as 'which one of these things is not like the others.' 2) Another useful tool for P4NW's eyes is an old freebie prop called 'Moist Eyes' by Momodot, though I don't know where it might be found (if anywhere) these days. The small and simple prop adds a thin transparency layer to the iris and pupil (but not the eyeball). It's not a major effect, instantly turning Posette's eyes into V3's eyes, but the effect is readily noticeable at render time. 3) A smidge of simple postwork can also help Posette compete with V3 (or later high poly models). In the Image below is a side by side comparison using a render of my Iris character. On the left was the standard result. On the right, in two minutes I selected the eyes only, and made them into two additional layers. One was blended by a Dodge effect, the other by a Multiply effect (that's what they're called in Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop is probably something similar). In any case, we can see that this minor and easy change really makes the eyes pop out in clarity, and adds a bit of glisten as well. [img]https://www.posetteforever.com/files/posted_images/5475/misc_lexamples.jpg[/img] 4) We haven't considered here using reflection maps on Posette's eyes. I don't do it, but it's a common and accepted technique many others used back in Poser 4 days, and reflection maps are part of the larger texturing puzzle as well. Just be careful and use a light touch, as reflection maps have dramatic effects upon output in Poser 4. The proper way to use them in P4 (which is unfortunately obscure) is make sure the 'multiply through lights' and 'multiply through texture' options are selected after choosing a reflection map; otherwise, you'll be like 'that's dumb, it didn't do anything!' After discussing Staale's textures above, there's another P4-era caucasian texture that I think is quite good both for distance shots and close-ups. It was called 'Etosha' by Gonmag. I'm not sure where you'd get it these days (it was a freebie once upon a time), but it's good quality (painted) and high-resolution (3000px). In the sample image here, I made use of the same model/lighting/set as my previous considerations of Staale's Vickybuster. Etosha also avoids a major problem that plagued almost all of Staale's hi-res textures, namely the appearance of stark tan lines on the texture (resulting from his use of photographic references in texture construction), which make those textures unsuitable for many artistic purposes in my opinion. On another general point, I'd say that any good texture for Posette will readily demonstrate the differing effects of different external lighting interactions in a given scene. In other words, if we change the lighting in a Poser scene, what we should see as a result is how the texture maps we're using react to this change in lighting. If we have to adjust the texture or material settings after changing our external lighting, then we're not using a texture well-suited to cg work in general or to the particular image we're making at the moment. For example, this was a major problem with almost all of the old Happyworldland textures from the P4 era, and also with many (though to a much lesser degree) of the Anton Kisiel textures from that same time period. Happyworldland typically used photo references (leading to wild disparities in hue and saturation), while Anton used painting, but both had the same underlying problems with lighting highlights often painted directly onto the texture maps. That was fine if Posette was placed in a scene whose lighting corresponded to whatever lighting had an imaginary effect upon the texture map, but otherwise you tended to get something that just didn't look very good. Rather than getting or making better textures, many Poser users incorrectly concluded that Posette herself had incorrigible problems, and they migrated to V3 (etc) instead, as a drastic overreaction. :shocked!: