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fix Poser dynamic hair in Vue

When imported texture problems happen

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Commercial figure models - Imported texture problems

Credits:

The following people contributed directly to this Vue tutorial:
   Paula Sanders - Tutorial
   Walther Beck - Forum postings
   Roderick Davies - Suggestion

Thanks folks!

Support for Poser is built into Vue Infinite, right?

So where's the problem?
You'll find that certain ways of doing things in Poser or DAZ|Studio can lead to problems when you export figures into other programs - such as Vue.

Mostly this has to do with their materials. For example, you'll discover that Poser material highlights may be pure black or white and set to the highest possible lighting value. Or reflectivity may be set to 100% for a material which should be transparent.

The good news is that importing figures into Vue Infinite does work well for the vast majority of figure meshes (polygon objects) and textures. You need only identify a few problem textures and adjust those through the Material Editor in Vue, then apply the right render settings, to get good results.

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Here is the Poser 6 "Jessie High Resolution" figure, which I decorated with the default blonde dynamic hair, sunglasses and necklace. She is seen here directly after importing her into Vue 5 Infinite.

The model is illuminated by a default sun, from the upper right, and there’s a point source fill light from the left at ear height. The light rendering type is Global Illumination (GI). The environment is the default for a new Vue scene. As you can perhaps see, I boosted the light level somewhat (+0.25). Sunlight Vs ambient is set to 75% sunlight and shadows are somewhat illuminated, at 75% shadow intensity.

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First, let's review the import process

Because Vue Infinite is specifically designed to support Poser imports, you need to invoke the correct import for Poser files. There's more than one way to do this, but all should lead to the dialog shown below.

In Windows, I use 'File > Import objects... > Files of type: Poser object (*.pz3, *.pzz)'. The file type .PZ3 is a normal Poser object file and .PZZ is a compressed version. "Quaternion interpolation" is only needed for animation. For a single still image, use the indicated single frame option.

Fixing the sunglasses

Obviously the sunglasses and hair need work. Let's start with the lenses of the sunglasses.

To select all instances of a material in our scene, no matter how many times, or on which object or object group they’re used, we click on that center tab above the object list. The sunglasses lenses are labeled "shades" and that's what we double-click on to open that material in the Material Editor for our corrections.

You can see that these lenses are set to be 100% reflective. I reduced that to zero. Now Jessie's eyes will be visible through the lenses, but I wanted to also make the lenses more transparent than they were.

It turns out that a fancy function is used, to set different transparencies for different parts of each lens. But rather than editing the 'Transparency production' function (by right-clicking on it) we can just change that 'Transparency' filter shown to the right.

Of course the 'Global transparency' slider is available (upper left), but I found that even at 100%, the lenses were still too dark - so the filter is a better tool.

A little experimentation showed me that increasing the minimum transparency to 75% and leaving the maximum at 100% looked good. So, we "OK" that dialog, or save it first for future use. Of course for safety, we save our scene often, checking the checkbox to include the textures in the scene file.

Fix the dynamic hair

Moving right along, we select the dynamic hair material in the same way, by double-clicking on it to load it into the Vue Material Editor.

Looking at the color tab, we discover that a function is being used. I found that this function has no effect on the image. It seems to be a translation of the function (shader) in the Poser 'Materials Room' and it does no harm to delete it.

Another useful change may be to switch the look of the hair highlights from "anisotropic" to "isotropic".

Anisotropic means that the hair highlights look different from different angles, in the same way that rotating a piece of velvet shows highlights appearing at some angles and disappearing at others. There seems little use for anisotropy in a still image, so i changed to full isotropy. Isotropy is, naturally, where the highlights look the same from any angle.

Now for the major highlight settings. Here's a handy tip: Like some other graphics programs, many of Vue's controls will accept typed in numbers which are higher than their sliders will produce. That 130% 'Highlight global intensity' is an example. The slider can't produce anything bigger than 100%.

Such a hot white highlight explains why the hair looks so washed out. How bright you want it is a personal decision. I went for 50% of the 130%, at 65%. You might want to change the size of the highlights as well. I didn't do that.

That's about it for the Material Editor.

Render Problems

Notice the grainy, spotty look of the hair in the top image. This effect, which most users call "grain", is actually a lower than optimal number of scene samples during rendering. In landscapes, it can be made worse by lots of ambient light in your scene. That doesn't seem to be the case here though - as I'll discuss later.

The fix here is just to use a lot of Object Anti-aliasing (OAA) in your render. And the best way to do that is with the 'User' type render, where you have complete control of the render settings.

When I say "a lot of Object Anti-aliasing", I'm not kidding. I used minimum 75 and maximum 256, and would have liked a bit more, were it not for the long render time. Here are my render settings.

1. User settings allow you complete control, for the best trade-off between quality and render time.
2. There is the Object Anti-aliasing control we need. You probably don't need 'Texture Anti-aliasing' (TAA) in this scene, but you might in your own still scenes with figures having clothing and with other scene objects.
3. I usually like to optimize the last render pass, but #4 won't work if you do that.
4. If you want to do postwork on the hair in Photoshop, you might want to try the great 'Multi-pass' option - which lets you save a complete set of layers in .PSD format. For example, you will get a layer with only the hair, so you don't have to cut it out yourself.
5. Note that my test render is not set for very high quality. I'd use 50% to 75% for a final high quality render - or even go into the 'Edit' feature and customize things.

Below are my actual OAA settings.

Next, I have an image showing how the hair looked at each stage of my testing process.

The above includes some tests without ambient lighting, to see if that made any difference. It didn't. "High OAA" was 25 to 150 at 75% quality - not nearly as high as the final "extreme OAA" of 75 to 256 at 100% quality recommended above. "Mat only" means changes made only in the Material Editor, not in the render.

Before & After and Some Postwork

This last image shows before and after the process above. The right-hand image is after some postwork I did in Photoshop.

Don't Forget the Obvious

Rod Davies pointed out to me that one can always improve the visual quality of stranded hair by just scaling up the whole model (or sometimes the whole scene) to make it larger. This can help the render engine to do a better job and can have other benefits.

Walther Beck commented that he scales up all scenes and their imported objects by about 2X to 3X.

I myself remember having problems with a grayscale 2D image map controlling an Ecosystem, because my scene scale was too small.

Sometimes we forget the obvious!

~ End ~

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Wishing you a creative future!
   _jim coe