SkinVue6 Workflow Tutorial:
Basic Poser Character Rendering

This tutorial explains how to use Vue 6 and SkinVue6 to add realism and clarity to your imported Poser characters.  It  demonstrates a typical workflow and reveals a number of tips for producing higher quality renderings using Vue 6 and SkinVue6.
Poser V3 Character Render
Poser Preferences Setup
 
Poser Setup:  The first step in the process is to create a character inside of Poser.  For this example, a V3 character with clothes and hair is used.  The most critical areas to focus on when creating characters inside Poser is the look and appearance of the Body pose and the eyes.  Try to eliminate as much as possible any kinked-looking body joints (e.g. elbows, shoulders, knees).  Also, make sure the eyes are pointed in the right direction.  Normally, I also apply a small amount of eye blink to both eyes in order to eliminate the "deer in the headlights" look.  When saving your Poser scene file, make sure you uncheck file compression, and external morphs in your Poser preferences screen.  Otherwise, the figure will not import into Vue correctly.

 

 
Vue Scene Setup:  Before importing your Poser character into Vue, it is normally a good idea to set up your Vue scene.  In SkinVue6, there are a number of empty scene files available which have been optimized for character rendering.  They all employ "High Ambience" atmospheric and light settings which help to produce softer, less saturated shadows - ideal for character rendering.  The scene files can be loaded from Vue's interface or the SkinVue interface.  In this case, the "Indoor" lighting scene will be used. 

  • Do not select "Collapse Identical Materials" on import- SkinVue6 will do the collapse for you following Material Swapping

  • Always turn "Group figures as single meshes" on.  This does two things.  First, it makes the operation of Vue6 and SkinVue6 faster.  Secondly, it gives you the option of swapping materials for a whole group or just a figure within the group.

  • Each imported character must have a unique name and that name must not use underscore characters "_".  SkinVue needs to reserve the underscore character in order to correctly parse and create material names.

  • Do not change the names of the imported Poser materials - SkinVue6 needs these names in order to swap the materials correctly

 

 Poser Import:  When importing your Poser characters into Vue, listed to the left are several guidelines to follow.  Also, if you find that after importing Vue's display performance slows down, turn off Open GL in the display viewports by switching the display viewports to "Filled Box".

 

 
Hide Hair Objects from Rendering
Turn Down Indirect Lighting Quality Boost
Pre-SkinVue Setup:  In order to optimize the speed of SkinVue adjustments, it's a good idea to turn off objects in the scene which will slow down preview rendering.  Listed below are three checklist items you should perform before applying SkinVue to the character:

1. Set rendering quality to "Preview"

2. Turn off (hide) any non-essential objects - particularly Hair objects which slow down rendering considerably

3. When using AO, GI, or Radiosity, temporarily turn down the quality slider to - 2.  This will speed up preview test rendering.

You may also notice that the color of the character's bikini is gray instead of red.  This is due to a problem that Vue has when importing procedural materials from Poser.  Don't worry - we will fix this later.

 
SkinVue Material Swapper
SkinVue Material Swapper:  Now it's time to fire up the SkinVue Material Swapper and swap the Poser materials with the SkinVue shader materials.  Open up SkinVue (from the Python menu), select your character, select the "Enhanced" skin type and click the swap button.  SkinVue will then exchange the Poser materials with SkinVue materials.

 
SkinVue Skin and Eye Modifier
SkinVue Skin and Eye Modifiers:  The next step is to fine tune the SkinVue Skin and Eye parameter settings.  On the Skin Modifier tab, I have adjusted the settings for less Specular Intensity, more Specular Eccentricity, less warmth and a bit more SSS.  On the Eye Modifier tab, I added a bit more luminance to the Iris and EyeWhites and turned down the Reflection Strength just a bit.  After changing the parameters and doing few test renders, we now have something that looks more human instead of a mannequin.  Do one more test render using "Final" quality mode with the Indirect Lighting quality slider set back to zero to make sure that the skin and eyes settings are correct.

 
Adjusting the Cloth Materials
Fixing the Clothes Mats:  Now it's time to fix the bikini materials.  We could simply go into to the materials and set a color correction to Red to make the clothes match what we had in Poser.  However, in this case, I'm going to apply a seamless texture to the cloth materials to add a bit more life.  Having a good library of seamless textures is a good way to change the look of clothes quickly and easily without having to use detailed UV texture maps.  In this case, I just applied a simple fabric pattern to the bra and bikini materials.

I also adjusted the scene lighting exposure a bit in the "Post-Processing" options and added a bit of "Lens Glare".  You can find these post render processing options on by clicking the little half moon button on top of the viewport window.
Transmapped Rendered Hair
Painted Hair
That Darned Hair:  Now that we have a decent looking character, what do we do about the hair?  Generally, I never use 3D hair objects.  Instead, I normally paint the hair in Paint Shop Pro.  It takes a bit of practice in order to do this correctly.  There are a number of good hair painting tutorials on the web that describe how to do this correctly.

If you insist on using 3D hair objects for your renders, here are a couple of guide lines:

1. Unless you are doing animation, never use Poser strand-based hair.  It takes forever to render and it looks awful.  Use transmapped hair instead.  Kozaburo makes some pretty decent looking hair objects for Poser characters - and they are free.

2. Turn off indirect lighting for the hair and apply specific lights that only affect the hair.  Indirect lighting will kill render times for transmapped hair objects.

3. Use a paint program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to touch up the hair.  Softening filters, painting in additional stray hair strands, and using the smudge tool are effective tools to help make the hair look as good as your character.