I've had Poser 11 Pro for a while now, but it's only in the last month or so that I finally decided to update my shaders for SuperFly and acclimate myself to the new engine. Aside from the speed (a High Quality portrait took almost two days), I'm quite pleased with the results, and I'm starting to experiment with different render settings to see if I can find that balance between speed and quality.

I would like some advice on rendering eyes. Even at High Quality Sub Surface, my Genesis characters' eyes still look slightly grainy. The eyes have SSS via a Custom_Scatter node, Blinn specularity overall (at 0.5 reflectivity), and Fresnel reflection in the pupils. Sphere props are then fitted to them with a corneal bulge morph and a material consisting of just Fresnel reflection/refraction. I'm also using just three area lights.

I'm particularly curious about these light specks I keep getting in the irises and why, when caustics are enabled, each entire eye becomes much darker than it should be. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

You've got a great render there. IMHO, caustics are unnecessary in the eyes. That would take away the details of the iris which you want to emphasize (At least I would). Jeremy Birns has written several books on rendering and here is his page on caustics: Caustics: 3dRender.com As great as Caustics are in a render, I feel it isn't needed in renders of the human eye. Other opinions and thoughts welcome.

something I just saw on blenders cycles tute about a clamp function that gets rid of that. They called the white dots "fireflies." (ironic) I'm not at my Poser machine right now I'll take a look in a bit.

There are two settings in the render window called clamp direct samples and clamp indirect samples. I would assume these are the controls for this but they don't look like they behave the same way. The Blender setting looked like it goes to 1 and the guy set his to .98 in the tute. Posers settings seem to be defaulted to 10 each so I don't know if these are the same parameters.

Hi I render my still images of Genesis 2 figures in blender cycles via FREE export/convert plugin for Daz studio The genesis figures have three layers of gloss in the eye material there is a transparent layer on top of the iris and scelara or white eyeball layer. I have found that Cycles has a hard time clearing up three glossy materials stacked on top of each other. what has worked ,for me at least, is to remove all glossiness nodes from the Iris/pupil/eyeball and apply a nice glossy glass shader to the outer transparent layer to create the "wet "look of the entire eye. YMMV

wolf359 posted at 12:28PM Sun, 10 July 2016 - #4275277

Hi I render my still images of Genesis 2 figures in blender cycles via FREE export/convert plugin for Daz studio The genesis figures have three layers of gloss in the eye material there is a transparent layer on top of the iris and scelara or white eyeball layer. I have found that Cycles has a hard time clearing up three glossy materials stacked on top of each other. what has worked ,for me at least, is to remove all glossiness nodes from the Iris/pupil/eyeball and apply a nice glossy glass shader to the outer transparent layer to create the "wet "look of the entire eye. YMMV

Hey Wolf, any way you could share that cycles shader with us? I have issues getting the eyes to reflect enough and when they do they reflect too much. On V4 the only place I use reflect is on the eye surface.

Hi there

I would try to use on Eye reflection simple shader something like this,this is working for me

If you are using EZSkin on eye,then I would suggest delete all nodes and try again with simple setup of eyes,this has been rendered in Poser Pro 11 with SuperFly too

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

"Hey Wolf, any way you could share that cycles shader with us? I have issues getting the eyes to reflect enough and when they do they reflect too much. On V4 the only place I use reflect is on the eye surface."

Hi I am using blender 2.7x The free teleblend script for DS & Poser converts your material to blender shader nodes so my eye shaders from a genesis figure would be based on the original Daz image maps referenced in an image node and only useful on the figure I exported to blender from DS

My point was that the graininess the OP is getting would likely clear up give enough time but its taking so much longer than the skin because of Cycles having to clear up two gloss materials layered under a third transparent gloss material that the genesis figure all have in the eyes.

Also having SSS on the scalera( eyeball whites) is probably overkill except in the most extreme closeups and again is making the eyeballs slow to resolve in the render.

attached is a quick render only 29 minutes to 100 samples (non squared)

Still grainy ??..yes but the eyes are already starting the clear up as there is only one gloss node being calculated for the outermost surface.

@Jura11: Roughness of any amount only blurs the reflections for me and makes it worse. My problem is that I'd like the very bright reflections to reflect and the darker stuff to not reflect as much. It would be like a high contrast reflection.

@Wolf359: That looks good! I think I'll try adding some contrast to the iris texture maps, that may help a bit with getting them darker. The reflections still a prob for me.

@ ghostship2

Please have look on this eye surface setup

And test renders

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

With just the envirosphere all I get with that shader is the "Stepford Wives," glossy black look. If I add and area light as I'm assuming you have here in yours I can see through to the sclera/iris but still shrouded in darkness.

there was a blenders forum that I happend upon and this guy talked about the same thing:

"I have spent some time working on a cycles eye and recently put it on the side as I wasn't getting good results. The roadblock I keep running into is this: The reflections in a real eye seem to only reflect the strong white emmisive portions of the scene, and ignore (or drastically reduce) all other reflections. I tried various cornea glass setups, putting gloss on the iris, modeling the pupil separately but I never quite got it. I felt that the "isglossray" might hold promise, but I never quite figured it out. I've included 3 eyes that show how only the strong whites reflect."

ghostship2 posted at 2:01AM Mon, 11 July 2016 - #4275317

With just the envirosphere all I get with that shader is the "Stepford Wives," glossy black look. If I add and area light as I'm assuming you have here in yours I can see through to the sclera/iris but still shrouded in darkness.

Hi there

I'm using this shader only on eye surface and on tear I'm using above simple shader which works for that

Not sure why you are getting such strange effects,in my case I'm using two Area lights(2 point light setup) with one point light with low intensity ...

Not sure how you have setup eye(sclera,iris etc),but my is simple setup,without the SSS etc

I will post later my eye shader setup,but is very simple with image map plugged in diffuse plus bump map

Otherwise I'm using bright or brighter HDRi image on EnvSphere which can make maybe difference

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

tear and cornea are set up with physical surface : transparent, 1, roughness 1 so they are completely invisible. I am not using any SSS on the sclera or iris.

OP eyes look pretty good. Luvenis, care to share your clear eye shader?

this is what I got with mine and the strange problem I got with Jura11's shader.

OK. I have figured out what is the problem. You need to have caustics checked or glass mats will render dark/opaque.

If you're still interested, Ghostship2, here's the eye surface shader that I use on a simple primitive sphere prop with a custom morph to bulge out the cornea. The only reason I use the Alternate Diffuse and Specular channels is because my OpenGL preview goes totally blank if I use the Reflection and Refraction channels (even with the preview map plugged into the regular Diffuse channel). The masked multiplication of refraction indexes is intended to mimic the effect of light going through both the cornea (IOR = 1.38) and the aqueous humour (IOR = 1.34), a watery secretion that fills the space between the cornea and lens.

Interestingly enough, Jura111's Cycles shader gives me at least roughly the same result with caustics that the above shader gives me without caustics. If I ever need to render something involving both eyes and something for which caustics is more critical, Jura111's shader will probably be very helpful. Thanks, Jura111ǃ

Thank you! I'll check this out!

This is great information! Thank you all.

one thing that I have found is that the root nodes transparencies are not equal. The Poser Surface node has the most transparent transparency. If I use the physical node for transparency it leaves a shadow on underlying surfaces. So if you need to make part of a clothing item transparent, it's best to use the Poser Root node for that. This was part of my problem with the eyes in that the sclera and iris where being obscured slightly by the not-so-perfect transparency of the physical and cycles root nodes.

UPDATE: As I continue to tinker with render settings, I'm noticing that the bright speckles also show up on some non-glossy/non-SSS materials. It seems to have something to do with distance from the camera and perhaps the size of area and/or point lights. As far as I can tell, converting an area light to a point light creates more speckles, whereas shrinking an area light makes more speckles in the background and fewer in the foreground.

those are fireflies. same thing happens with digital cameras when there is not enough light. You need to bump up the samples or try lowering the clamp settings at the bottom of the render settings window.

Thanks, Ghostship2! Your tip actually helped me get rid of fireflies in the eyes too. Here's an example of what my latest settings can produce.

Hi there

Regarding the interior I would use Area lights,sometimes I use more than one,usually I end up with 2-3 and one Infinite light with enabled shadows,regarding the point lights,are you have enabled on them Inverse Linear or Lineal Square ?

Here are two quick renders

In this one I've used 2 area lights and one Infinite light with intensity 100% with enabled shadows plus BB EnvSphere,still is grainy(only 25 samples)

And this one,there I've used 3 area lights with one infinite light and BB EnvSphere

Regarding the lights again,you need to find yours way how to light the scene,usually for portrait renders I use 3 point which consist from Area light with spotlight and one infinite light

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura