I added a noise node via gradient bump and set to 0.35.  Thought it might add some extra life to the nylon...not sure it made much difference.  

Anyway, thanks again bagginsbill - it appears my quest for the ideal stocking texture may at last be at an end!

Paul

Hope this helps...

Paul

 Hmmm...wonder if something like this could be used to make a condom for male characters...

That's great, Paul!
To what did you attach the gradient bump?

xan

Quote - OK so load my shader. Again, there are a lot of nodes here - don't worry about them. Just pay attention to the ones I've left open.

This is an awesome tutorial, and I'm anxious to put it to work - however...

I'm a relative beginner with Poser, so this is probably going to be a rather basic (i.e. dumb) question, but so far, I've not found, stumbled onto, or otherwise encountered the answer - so here goes...

How does one 'load' this shader? :-P Just point me in the right direction, and I will  be forever grateful!

Please don't beat me up too badly LOL!

I've figured out a lot of stuff simply by reverse-engineering things, but this one has eluded me thus far. I probably can't see the forest for the trees...

Thanks,
Rod

Well, I think I may have found the answer while perusing this thread - that and enough additional information to keep me busy for the next three weeks. It boggles the mind.....

I just printed out this entire thread, so I've got lots of studying to do. I'm amazed at the amount of knowledge available here. Thanks BB for the outstanding info and tutorials, and everyone else for the additional info!

I know where to go if I have more questions - and I'm sure I will :-P

Rod

However, I've come up with a result that has me a bit puzzled. First let me say that I'm a rank beginner with Poser - just bought P8 a few months ago. I've figured out how to do some cool stuff in the Material room, but my uderstanding of how all this works compared to, say, a pro like Bagginsbill, is roughly equivelant to a grasshopper's understanding of string theory. In other words the likelihood that I've done something stupid is pretty much 100%. I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Anyhoo.... I loaded my DeeAnne character (she's a mish-mash of V4,A4, and I also used a skin mat from Shauna from the G4 Pro Pack). I used the grouping tool to make two separate stocking areas, one for the legs and one for the hip area as I intended to create the effect of pantyhose. I assigned the legs and feet to 'stockings' and the hips/torso to 'stockings-up.' I used BB's shader to assign the skin colors as directed for both areas, and selected red for the hose. Here is the first result:

Not too shabby, but wait - what's that little area on her right leg, just under the dress (circled in red)?

..Continued below....

WTF??

As I said earlier, I've probably screwed something up, I just don't know what at the moment. If one of you experts could point me in the right direction, or slap me up the side of my head with a wet fish and tell me 'Read such-and-such again' I would be forever in your debt.

Bagginsbill, do you drink coffee? If so, how many pots a day do you go through figuring all this stuff out??

Thanks,
Rod

You will need to create a material zone for this shader pretty much the way BB spelled it out on the first page of this thread. Which means: using the grouping tool. Once you've created this mod, save out to Cr2...

I got the impression from reading it that the hip - torso zone and the leg-feet zone were two separate areas, and couldn't be grouped as one. Maybe I misunderstood what BB was trying to explain..

I'll give it a shot tomorrow, and see what happens :-P

Thanks :-D
Rod

If you are a Mac, change the preview to Sreed. The grouping tool has problems in OpenGL in selecting polys even if you rotate the character to get the back of the legs.

Edited to add in P8 only. Prior versions it worked as expected.

Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm running Win XP on a PC, but I'll give that a try!

Thanks!
Rod

I used the grouping tool to assign two separate zones; stockings_L for legs and feet, and stockings_U for hips and torso. I am assuming here (and yes, I know what happens when you assume..) that since the hips-torso zone and the legs-feet-toes zone use two different skin maps, you have to make two stocking shader zones as well. Am I on the right track here? I used Sreed as suggested by grichter, but it made no difference. I'm attaching screen shots to clarify..

this image shows what the figure looks like after loading the skin textures into BB's shader.

Continued....

If I just work with the lower leg-feet-toes, it works great! It's just when I try to set up the hips-torso that this issue appears.

Any ideas out there? I'd sure like to get the results some of the other folks here are getting.

Thanks in advance for looking, and any help any of you can provide!

In case I didn't mention it before, I'm using Poser 8 on a PC running Vista Home Premium. I think I mistakenly said XP in an earlier post....

I'm going to wait until Bill replies: it's his thread. I had a solution which involved modifying a texture file which I'm happy to share with you, but Bill usually has a cleaner, more logical (less kludgy/hammers is what got Germany built!) solution.
Barring a solution forthcoming from him, you may sitemail me, if you want. But I guarantee you, Bill's going to have the better answer to your problem.

OK - that's cool :-) Thanks for your reply!!

You know, I'm either blind or just trying to figure all this out waaayyy too late at night.... I thought I'd read this entire thread, but I must have missed a couple pages. I see where Acadia was having the exact same problem. I've printed ALL the pages in this thread, so maybe - if I put on my dang glasses - I can get this figured out.....

I'll still take any ideas that you or Bill may want to offer. I haven't been on Rendo all that long, but I've already figured out that Bill's probably forgotten more than I'll ever learn about this stuff...

Rod

The attached picture is BB's stockings shader applied to:
2_SkinHip
3_SkinFoot
3_SkinLeg
3_Toenail
Without creating any new material groups. The groups with 3 prefix take the limbs texture; the one with 2 takes the torso texture.

If you're using a figure that has fewer convenient zones already set up, then creating new ones for the pantyhose or stockings is necessary, but with default V4 zones pantyhose is just about done for you already. Or perhaps I've missed what you were trying to do?

john is correct - if all you want is phose aligned with the existing groups, you don't need to make new groups. However, making new groups can reduce the number of zones you need to edit to 2 instead of 4. This can be a help if you're playing with the shader a lot.

Meanwhile, Rod, go back to page 5. I could not possibly explain the mistake you made any better than I already did. You combined two regions into one that actually must use different maps. Look over my explanation to Acadia on the previous page.

Quote - Next image - I used the grouping tool, selcted the hips and torso, and assigned this group to the stockings_U material zone.

Right here you went wrong. This area needs to be two different materials.

Thanks, BB! Yeah, I thought I'd read everything at least three times, then discovered I'd missed that part where you explained it to Acadia. That's what I get for trying to figure all this out at 2 AM... LOL

What John did in the above image (beautifully, I might add..) is exactly what I'm attempting to accomplish. I'll get it through my thick head eventually!

Man, you must breathe, eat, sleep, dream this stuff 24/7! Amazing!! Thanks so much for sharing your time and expertise!

Rod

Quote - Man, you must breathe, eat, sleep, dream this stuff 24/7!

Not quite that much, but a lot more than most people.  As I've said before, expertise, in any field, comes with 10,000 hours of study and practice, regardless of your natural talent or intelligence. I have about 6,000 hours in with Poser so I'm getting close.

Sheesh, I have a lot of hours too, but I really think you might be leveraging a bit of your physics and maths skills, here, Bill. Seriously, I never considered materials might have a mathematical basis until I happened to read your thoughts on the matter. Or your knowledge on light and its behaviour: nahhh, could have gone 12000 hours in Poser without arriving at the discovery that perhaps there might be a basis in physics for the way light behaves.
You know, the whole: "none are so blind as those who refuse to see" thing...
I was doing like most: stringing nodes together willy-nilly to see what effect I could generate. Fun, but bogus.

Yeah, well, I saw Avatar this weekend and ... I'm a total newb.

Quote - Yeah, well, I saw Avatar this weekend and ... I'm a total newb.

:-O

I have GOT to go see that....

I feel that way everytime I see Pixar doing movies like Ratatouille and Wall-E.....

Loved 'em both, got 'em both! Glad to see I'm not the only grown-up little kid out there ;-}

Maybe we could get BB to do a shader tut for rat fur?? :-D

Note - this isn't a rat. It's just a ball, stretched a bit.

When trying to design a shader, don't waste time rendering a figure. Use a low-poly stand-in like this. It saves a lot of time.

Rendered in P8 with one infinite light + IDL, ball, ground, and backdrop. About 5 minutes. Raytraced shadows were used on the inifnite.

Note: This is not a shader on the ball - it is on the hair on the ball. I used the hair room.

OMG! :-D

I was kidding, of course, but that's awesome, BB!!

Of course, now I'm going to have to try it.... Maybe I'll make a Tribble pet for one of my girls LOL!

This is cool stuff! Thanks, Bagginsbill!

Attached Link: Geena's Loft

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2002332

Thanks BB for a sterling tut and for taking the time to share your knowledge with us 'greenhorns!'

Hmmmm - maybe I could use the rat fur on a primative and make her some furry stocking tops.... LOL!

That is a very cool render, Rod... I reckon she looks great. Well done... another shader convert!

Okay, so I just re- discovered this thread. I am a total dweeb when it comes to some things and this is one of them. I spent an hour figuring out how to "load the material onto the zones" but am good with it. I noticed it doesn't work with VSS. If I render without syncronizing, I get what I'm looking for but VSS "fixes" it. Is there a 'simple' way to use this with VSS? And I mean totally step-by-steps?

Thanks everyone for the help...

nekkidchikken,

Sorry - I was in Mexico last week. I'm still trying to get caught up on this forum, as well as being pounded at work, and I have my daughter home from college for just this week, so a lot going on at home, too.

I'll be back.

No prob...

I was joking and trying to move it to the top of the list in case it got missed. I was away as well. Hope you enjoyed Mexico and having your daughter home.

If there's a thread, feel free to aim me there. I will happily read it and go from there.

Basically, under VSS you will need to create a new material zone to house your new set of shader nodes for stockings.  Assuming that you created new MAT zones for your model, this should be simple.  Once you have the VSS script running, navigate to Designer on the palette, and click on Add Material Zone.  See image.

This will create a new material zone for VSS.  Name it Template Stockings or somthing recognizable.  The new zone will only contain your Root Node; populate the zone with all the shaders necessary and illustrated in prior posts. 

Note:  If you are using PoserPro or PoserPro 2010, you will not need to insert a Gc node.  However, if you are using the regular Poser versions, you may seriously need to consider including Gc into the workflow. 

Select other - type it in to create the Rule Nodes for the new MAT zones on the model.  Make certain to also create the Rule Node for the template.  At this point, connect the new nodes to each other and disconnect and delete any nodes which reference the old leg zones.

Thank you, sir. I will give this a try.

Ok one no two quick questions.
I have searched your link but can not find the shaders; can you provide me with direct link to the shaders please. 
sendond question;  What bout the top part of the stocking where it gets darker

The shader is in the original first post of this thread - an attachment. Sorry don't have time for long explanations at the moment. Perhaps someone else is around who can help.

Please clarify for us - do you not understand:

1) Attachments
2) Renaming files
3) Poser material files - what they're called, where they shoudl be kept, how to load

Not trying to be an ass - please take no offense. It's just that I don't want to bother explaining stuff if you know it already.

foud it thanks

OK I must be doing something wrong, I can not save your stocking file any othwre way than a .txt file. Even saving it in P8's material room does me no good. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong?