Problems have been manyfold with texturing. Creating an organic model is a lot harder than slapping paint on a car or spacecraft. Things like specular reflection, which can look like tinny colored white spots you see on glass, crystal, ice or water, or glossy like the light reflecting off a magazine, are constant over most inorganic shapes, and are easy to detail. A person, however, is a different story. Skin can reflect light differently in one area of the body than another, because of skin oils, age, wrinkles, and what have you. Examine the difference bweteen the front and back of your hands, and try to bounce the light off to get the highlights. You can get them on your palm, but it's almost impossible to do so on the backs of your hands. Its normal, the constant variation of an organic surface. Hair is even worse.
Which is why I find it to be so challenging. And that's also why I prefer to render women...they tend to remove most of their body hair, so it is not inconsistent to have me render a woman who appears to have a very expensive Brazilian wax. Its fair and believable.
I had hoped to make progress on a particular idea, that of a beer ad, because it is in my head and I must get it out, but it involves a rendered female and that takes time to get right, and I want to get it right. The beer is rather easy, having alreayd made th ebottle and will make a logo for it as soon as I make a woman. (Which sounds odd.)
So. the first problem I've bene having is one of texture. Texturing a body outside of Poser has to be done by hand, but I couldn't tell if I was having texture problems or was my lighting bad? Eventually I found that I was having texture problems. Here's what I came up with:
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07.php','popup','width=1000,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-07-thumb.jpg" width="300" height="144" border="0" /»«/a»
From left to right, we have 1) Untextured model with default lighting. 2) Textured model with default lighting. 3) Textured with spotlight 4) Textured with all aspect radiosity 5) Textured with advanced light tracing with diffuse light and one directional light.
Oh yeah, that last one works out GREAT. Okayh, so I'm not having lighting problems. I've having texture problems, mostly around the head, hair, and neck. But I can make pictures anyway without showing that!
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-06-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-07-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/fri0813-08-thumb.jpg" width="150" height="112" border="0" /»«/a»
Oh yeah. Still, there are model errors and texture problems, mostly because of how Poser exports Wavefront OBJ files and how 3DS will import them. This means I have to do a lot of fine tuning to get some of the textures to look right. In the following test renders, where I fixed some of the problems, you can see where some still remain...but they sure do look good.
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-03-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»
Detail of neck and upper torso. If you look very closely, you can see that the texture is sort of stretched and doesn't mesh quite well with the torso. That's one of the errors I'm ironing out. From a distance, you can't tell, but for closeups it's right there laughing at me, so I gotta fix it.
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-04-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»
Closeup of face. See the black shadow at the top? That's the eyelashes, a solid annoying block with no transparency. Since it's a pain in the posterior to make individual eyelashes all the time, the trick is to make a solick block, but put in a transparency texture to fake the eyelashes. The bitmap looks just like regular lashes, and where there is no color, the block is transparent and cannot be seen. A lot of things are rendered like that, and hair is the most notable among them. Who wants to model and render several thousand strands of hair?
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-05-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»
Closeup of face. While this looks okay, the specular, the area where the light reflecting off the skin washes out everything else, looks wrong, as if her skin is too oily or something. Also the skin texture looks pretty good, but it's smooth, not irregular and somewhat bumpy like real skin would be. At this range you could make out individual facial pores, and while many women probably aspire to this level of skin, it's not realistic. I'll have to use a displacement map here, but one thing at a time....
«a href="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06.php" onclick="window.open('http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06.php','popup','width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"»«img src="http://deskmerc.com/pixors/sun0815-06-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="187" border="0" /»«/a»
Another torso and neck shot. Here you can see polygon flaws along the shoulders...real people aren't so angular. You can also see the neck texture problems as well. The shirt is colored the way it is because I didn't bother assigning it a color or texture from the imported OBJ file, and those were the default colors. Still looks kinda cool, huh? It's two colors because those are actually two sub-objects making up the entire shirt. The rest of the body model is the same way, small sub objects like fingers, toes, arms and legs welded together to make a whole, and I gotta texture them all. Most of the time I can just group them all together and apply only one texture for the whole thing, but even then I have to iron out the details, as I've just shown.
Anyway, that's what I've been doing. Mote political and army stuff this week, I promise...I was busy last week with personal odds and ends that left little room for more structured thought.