https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=1829&p=45955#p45955 ----------------------------------- Endosphere Monday, 10 November 2025, 02:55 AM Re: Skin Texturing ----------------------------------- Twenty years ago friend pangor :friends: started this discussion, which was meant to be about the relation of realism and textures in Poser work. I hope I haven't unfairly put words into his mouth, all these years later, by supposing that by 'realism' he meant 'photographic realism,' because after all, there are also other kinds of realism in visual art. Maybe he was talking about something else entirely. But the odd thing about photographs is that if we set aside special purpose photos taken by scientists or advertising agencies to specially study some subject, the truth is that most photographs are quite bad at depicting physical texture. Even totally average photographs typically capture brightness and contrast well, and can be quite vivid in depicting color saturation (though less so in regard to hue). But even a well composed photo is usually quite poor in capturing texture, because of course the average photo cannot take advantage of the carefully arranged studio or professional lighting needed to capture such details on film. The average photograph is really quite blurry, compared to the crispness and minute detail which we regularly output in our Poser images. When speaking of Poser models, our definition of the word 'texture' rolls physical grain and color hue together in the form of a texture map, so that's always going to be a little confusing when we compare Poser images to the appearance of photographs. Thus I think we might be better off subverting the original thesis of this thread, and say that at the end of the day, texture maps have rather little to contribute to photorealism in Poser art. We'd have to keep in mind that a [i]bad[/i] texture can definitely detract from or ruin efforts at depicting realism in Poser images, but if the texture is even just average and decent (as opposed to spectacular), then it makes its humble contribution to the image and needn't be further considered. The main compositional techniques or factors which will contribute most to realism in our Poser images are good models and good lighting, rather than excellent textures. What do we mean by realism, anyway? Here's a portrait of my Iris character, a nearly antique P4NW with a relatively low resolution texture and bump map (each only 1200px). Those textures were both painted, rather than made from photographic references. She's also been rendered in ancient Poser 4 (since that's all I ever use). Furthermore, Iris was specifically developed to be a comic-book style character in most visual aesthetics. As a result of these challenges, I did a little postwork here on the render to counteract all that, but we should note that the object of most of that postwork was to make the original render [i]less[/i] rather than [i]more[/i] realistic (such as making the image much more blurry and less color-saturated, which is another way to say, obscuring the texture and bump maps used by the model). [img]https://www.posetteforever.com/files/posted_images/5475/iris.jpg[/img] Do we think this image is realistic? If so, which features are realistic and why? Surely it can't be confused for a photograph of a real person, however. Maybe if it was an oil painting on canvas, we'd say the painter had good technical skills and brushwork. What particular details, then, are lacking realism or contrary to photorealism in the image? If we carefully consider these topics from this alternate angle, I think we'll see that very little of what we have to say concerns the use of texture maps in the image. And since I think if we could still ask pangor, we'd find he was probably more interested in 'realism' (of whatever variety) than in textures, we're at last, all these years later, getting into territory more helpful in identifying and addressing the underlying issues that really interest people asking these kinds of questions. [b]*** Edited/Added later the same evening:[/b] From curiosity, I went over to deviantart and did a basic search for the term 'poser' to see what the big $$ spenders are getting up to these days. Certainly, I saw many lovely images with various forms of artistic merit and appeal. But from another perspective what I mostly saw was that in addition to making the same old mistakes people were making at the turn of the century in Poser 4 days, we've also come up with all kinds of new ways to make jarring visual uncanniness that reminds us we're not looking at an authentic image of anything that actually exists in the real world. I had to go many pages deep into the search before I came across an image that struck me as actually (almost) indistinguishable from a genuine photograph of a real person, and therefore something relevant to our discussion here. [url=https://www.deviantart.com/3drenders/art/Emilia-12291904-825061238]Emilia 12291904 So great job on that one, 3drenders. :notworthy: In relation to what we've discussed here, does consideration of that image change our ideas any further on the relevance of texturing (compared to other facets of composition such as model used and lighting) to realism in Poser art?