https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=1829&p=45962#p45962 ----------------------------------- Endosphere Sunday, 16 November 2025, 07:08 PM Re: Skin Texturing ----------------------------------- To summarize the points I've been making in all these examples: 1) Realism is an artistic style (as opposed to impressionism, abstraction, etc), and there are several different varieties of realism. To talk about cg or Poser 'realism' in general is difficult, without knowing precisely what type of realism any particular artist wants to accomplish. Is it photorealism, comic realism, cartoon realism, luminosity realism, or something else? 2) Despite point #1, there is a tripod of three visual elements which all work together in contribution to all realistic Poser and cg styles. These are good (realistic) models, using good (realistic appearing) textures, lit in good (realistic) ways. Lighting generally includes all factors such as external studio lighting, ambient object lighting, and specularity or reflection. After a good model, use of lighting is most critical in styles striving for realism. Unrealistic lighting (use of ambient object lighting, specularity, and general dullness) will detract from visual realism, despite countless Poser tutorials and gallery after gallery of images at big $$ websites claiming otherwise. As texture, I've briefly considered all techniques which determine the hue, saturation, and grain of 3d objects, such as direct object coloring, texture maps of various styles, and bump maps. Of the three elements of the realism tripod, texturing is actually the least important contributing factor. I've said that while a [i]bad[/i] texture can detract from realism, the positive contributions of texture are subtle, and a superfantabulous high resolution expert texture typically only offers marginal improvement to the final output image when compared to a lower resolution basic competence texture. This is particularly true in the case of our beloved Posette, who simply doesn't have the polygon count to benefit much from texture maps over 2000px. Also, a texture map itself only determines the hue (and a bit of saturation) patterns appearing on the model. We should not overlook the contribution of bump maps to realism, which in my opinion is equal in importance to texture mapping. I've also said that excessive cg resolution is unrealistic, and we can usually enhance the realism of Poser images by blurring the final output to better match what we see in real life with our eyes, or in a real photograph. **** I haven't visited Renderosity in many years, but I was over there recently in relation to these 'Lemurtek' figures we were examining in other discussions here, so I've been sniffing around there a bit. On the general topic of realistic styles and what people are currently doing with the latest and greatest softwares, a look through the image galleries of what people have been doing in the last week (as I write this now) reveals to my eyes that the Poser artists are getting thumped hard by the Daz Studio artists in relation to realism and realistic appearance in their imagery. Presumably both groups as a whole are after the same thing these days, which is the most realism and the least uncanniness, with most seeming to favor [i]attempts at[/i] photorealism, though large contingents also pursue comic realism. However, many of the Poser people exhibit the realism-sapping techniques I've been discussing, such as excessive use of ambient lighting and specularity, particulary (to make matters worse) in conjunction with extreme overlighting or alternately underlighting of the scene studio. That's nothing new, these same problems have seriously plagued Poser art since the beginning in P3 and P4 days. On the other hand, I see many of the Daz people have either abandoned those poor practices, or perhaps never used them in the first place. It was really very interesting to look through the two different galleries from a perspective of observing realism techniques. I don't want anyone to think I'm picking on them personally, so I'm going to flat out refuse to cite any examples. However, in general the Daz artists were making great progress from use of sound techniques and principles in their realistically-minded images, and I was impressed by many images I saw. Keeping in mind that I am strictly considering [i]techniques of realism[/i] (as opposed to general aesthetics or overall artistic merit), I unfortunately cannot say the same for most of the images I saw in the Poser gallery. I don't really know anything about the rendering engines used by the latest Poser and Daz. Would current Daz Studio inherently favor techniques and styles of realism in output imagery, or were my observations just a fluke due to small sample size since I only looked at images made in the last week? Another possibility is that the Poser people are stuck in the same old rut as since forever ago, while the Daz people are thinking with new ideas and fewer chronic bad habits. I'm speaking here only as a viewer or audience of final images. On any software itself I don't have a dog in that fight, since I'm sticking with my venerable Poser 4 and have no plans to ever change, so I'm not interested in any pointless internet arguments with anybody over what current $$ software is 'best' in this or that regard. Does anyone else have ideas on my conclusions, keeping in mind we only really want to discuss here [i]texture in relation to output realism[/i]?