Hi there, I've recently (1 month) started to play with Carrara Studio 3. I've been importing my Poser figures and rendering them with pretty good results. I'm on the quest for photo realistic renders, and the capabilities of CS3 are inmense. Still I'm having trouble finding the best settings for the skin on my figure. I use hi-res texture and bumps, and it's ok, but my biggest concerns are the shininess and highlight settings... can't get the best out of them. I'm posting a fast render of my latest work. Despite all the work, shines are far from perfect, and the bumps seem to have faded away in certain areas. Any help? Oh and any tips regarding the eyes would be welcome too. Thanks! Ike.

Hello Ike,

For good, high resolution textures, the fastest help/shortcut I've found is to duplicate the bump map into the Shininess channel in the shader tree and then play with the texture map's opacity a little (Reducing it to 85% sometimes). When I do this I can also reduce the amount of bump strength too since bump doesn't always have consistent effects from one body part to another because of the UV space.Playing with the bump and shininess channels together using the same texture map will get you to good results pretty fast. An additional trick is to use the Gaussian option for the bump texture map while it's in the shininess channel too.

Once you have a good shader, remember to save it into your "My Shaders" section of the Browser tray so you can easily reuse it later.

Also, even after you've created good photorealistic settings in the shader tree, because of different ways you may light a scene, what you do in one scene may still need a little tweaking in another.

Hope this helps!

Mark

Message edited on: 11/04/2004 06:55

Mmmm... sounds very interesting Mark, I'm gonna try that. BTW is there any option to lock the texture preview window? By default it shows the whole object, and I have to move the camera around to have a clear preview of just the face. Then i render and when I come back, the view has changed back to the default... it's quite annoying to be reseting the camera once and again... grrr! Thanks, Ike.

Add that "grrrr" to my list too.