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Hmm...It's what I originally stated. The texture looks faded somehow. I believe at some point you stated you created it yourself. Perhaps start with a PA texture that you think looks good. I like the model head more now than with the squar jaw, and the proportions seem correct to me. The eyebrows are too uniform and appear unnatural to me. The eye reflections seem off from the way the scene is lit, perhaps this is just a problem with the eye geometry. Are you using the "cornea bulge" morph? Try the "lacrimal young" morph as well. Eye lashes are excellent. The bump/displacement is AMAZING! So my question is , why aren't you using the texture that came with that bump/displacment map? I would also say the glossyness/roughness of the skin is somehow off, and the reflection from light should be more crisph "crisp", but I do like the oily skin look, so that may be a personal preference. What index of refraction are you using? And with the eyes, you may have the same problem I do, where the yes look a little dark (dull) in comparison to the skin, and dont have a bright eye'd bushy tailed, "mushy look".
EDIT: OK...I need to clarify. To me, the bump/displacment for the skin around the eye looks really good. Ridges and creases in all different directions. But once you get outside the eyebrow, there seems to be uniform verticle lines that make up creases in the skin. No. You've been working on this project too long to have those verticle strip lines in your bump map.
Welp..I took my own advise with the eye morphs, and I'll be darn if the model doesn't look a little bit better. Sigh..LOL, I need to take a break for a while.
Thanks for the clarification. My texture maps are based on this merchant resource. It didn't come with bump maps, and I knew just grayscaling the diffuse maps wouldn't cut it for realism, so I experimented with Photoshop manipulation until I came up with something (i.e. a ten-step layered process) that seemed to work at least reasonably well. Part of that involves overlaying a pattern fill of skin pores at 31% opacity, which is where those "vertical strip lines" are coming from. They're actually all over the skin, but I think the forehead is where they're least overshadowed by the non-patterned details.
Are the eyebrows too uniform in color, shape, direction, or what?
Cornea bulge is dialed up all the way to 1. I'll try the Lacrimal Young morph. Index of refraction varies, as I took a rather anatomical approach to the eyes. The eye surface generally is at 1.38, but on the cornea, this is multiplied by 1.34, which is the aqueous humor's refraction index. The pupil also has Fresnel reflection with an IOR of 1.4 to approximate the actual lens that sits in the pupil.
My eyes actually started out significantly brighter, but more than one person commented that they looked too bright. You're the first person in a while to critique the current brightness of the eyes, and you seem to be advising a move back in the other direction.
I think I've figured out what was making the random spots look faded (though I'm not sure if they were ever meant to be that sharp in the first place). Let me experiment a bit.
If you like fair skin and some freckles, you should check out this:
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/the-metropolitan-collection---dublin-v4-2/90599
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/the-metropolitan-collection---lyon-and-paris-v4-2/93874
Honestly, Hyteckit, I have no particular preference for freckles. My characters have them simply because the merchant resource had them, and they were light and sparse enough that they wouldn't look too odd on characters who aren't really supposed to have any noticeable freckling at all (like Elvis Presley or Christopher Reeve). I'm also afraid that, if I remove them, I'm going to once again hear from all directions, "The skin's too smooth and perfect!" Aside from density, it can be hard to know where to draw the line between true freckles, which only some people have, and the kind of random blemishes that everyone has and are therefore crucial to avoiding that dreaded porcelain doll or cartoon look.
Well this thread has definitely inspired me: a texture I worked on more than a year ago, but could never get fully correct in DS, Blender on the other hand... super easy. only 3 textures per uv area, and 4 other nodes. Setting up skin is approaching faster in blender at this point for me.
Other fun stuff: I didn't have to style the hair at all, its an aprilysh hair converted to blenders hair particles, because you can do that and its fun. (I still need to work on the methodology, but man it is getting easier and easier to bring stuff into blender and get everything up and running)
It definitely has things I would do differently (also I think I made the vellus hair a bit strong), but I think it has a good demonstration of what I've been talking about with making sure the details you remove from the diffuse get put somewhere else, those creases around the eye are all mesh and normal map
edit: render time was just over an hour... have I mentioned that I love blender?
And for fun a render of the just the diffuse texture, a render substituting a plain color for the diffuse texture. and a render removing all sss and just using a plain grey diffuse
There is, I think you'll agree a lot more detail in the normal map than the diffuse
Ah, those are very informative.
I think smoothness refers to being too flat which makes the skin look plastic, lacking pores, wrinkles, folds, ridges, bumps, indentations, random patterns, imperfections, and so forth. Adding freckles or spots alone doesn't change the flat look much. Look at the picture below that I find photorealistic. There are wrinkles on the forehead and under the eyes.
How does the above compare to yours below? I notice the the guy is missing eyelashes or just not noticeable.
I bought this skin merchant resource. Haven't used it, but it reminds me of Taylor Swift instead of Victoria 7. Haha...
Her eyebrow is raised in the expression, but your right it does look weird lol. Maybe the expression is effecting the hair? I'll have to go back and look when I get home. I remember thinking her hair looked messed up, but I was thinking that JBF . . . err . . . just took off your helmet hair seemed appropriate. I assumed it was because of the lazy way I pulled her into this scene from an existing scene where she and her hair were already posed and there were dFormers involved (and some zeroing may not have occurred properly).
To be honest, I was more concerned about the armor and didn't really pay much attention to her. Now that I am, there are all sorts of things that look off! I never finished the sculpting on her - maybe it's time to do so. I think her nose needs more definition, and her mouth (especially the corners) does, too.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing your girl in a full, natural environment. And I thought discussion about DOF was appropriate for a thread about photo-realism since last time I checked, most cameras had lenses ;)
- Greg
This looks really good to my eye, @hyteckit - with the possible exception of the shadow on the outer edge of the sclera and some blurriness of the iris. I tend to agree with your thoughts on "smoothness".
- Greg
FWIW, here's another fairly close-up test render.
And here's an attempt to improve the realism of my characters' eyebrows. Did I succeed?
That close, there's no way you can tell. In order to see whether that looks good or bad, you need to see it from both close and from far away. But if I were doing this, I would change the eyebrows completely.
Also, the sclera looks dry. Keep trying, Gregorius! You can do it!
Gregorius,
For some reason, I believe it is with the height mapping there are these vertical lines on the forehead above the eyebrow that I dont see anyplace else on the skin.
Well, here's a more zoomed-out test of the same eyebrow technique.
No. Much farther away. Show me at least his chest.
Eyebrows are far to groomed but as a famous star maybe had these stylists to the stars at his beck & call? Did they have those sorts of things then?
Turn limits off for the cornea bulge parameter and set its value to 1.60 (or 160% I forget the unit of measurement for that one) or so - whatever value is necessary to get a more realistic hemisphere type shape for the cornea to produce better refelections.
Okay, here's an updated eye/eyebrow close-up with the vertical striations on the forehead hopefully gone followed by a mid-range shot as per ArielRGH's request.
They are still too thin. Do an image search for Elvis eyebrows & filter for large images - you will see that yes Elvis dyed his eye brows and they were always cuts & groomed, sometimes excessively in his photos but not to the degree you have here. The shape is a bit different too.
Thanks for the detailed critique, but the priority right now is looking like real eyebrows on a real person, not necessarily being 100% accurate to any specific person. When I asked for feedback, that's what I was asking about. How real do they look?
They look pretty real to me but like a woman that's plucked, trimmed, and colored her eyebrows.
Eyebrows are not multi colored unless your an older person. What you see with eyebrows that LOOK like they have various colors is how the light is hitting them so you will see light glints and shodows of the hairs against the skin. You may want to look at some close up hi rez photos of folks to get what I'm talking about. I've been doing hair for over 35 years and I'm always in folks faces looking at them close up and as I said if they are older they will have a mix of their eyebrows with white hairs, that's about it...
The hair looks painted-on. In the eye closeup, seems like a sheen of reflection across the eyebrow middle, as if a plastic figure. Assuming it's a male closeup, the eyebrow should be more disorganized, like attached.
The best part of the close-up is the caruncle, it glistens with realism, but the rest seems too perfect.
Also, I agree with the comments about giving your pictures expressions. It's hard to comment on just 'texture realism' when the render itself strikes as shrek-ish. I'd recommend making sure all the pics have hair, uneven lighting, assymetry, not directly facing camera, and something other thank poker-face. Then, with the 'bigger picture' fitting more into the realm of realism at first glance, it's easier to pick out the things that still remain unrealistic with more accuracy.
EDIT: Ok, I was a page behind. Looking at your latest posts, you've gotten rid of the weird eyebrow reflection, which is good. However, they're still too perfect for a male and the latest version shows orange-ish highlights on each hair.
Now I will say this - the full male picture I see on this page looks better (more realistic) from the neck down than any other pic I've seen from you so far. There's a problem with the unnatural line at the armpit area on each side, but that's probably an easy fix. The color variation where neck meets chest is excellently realistic. Give that guy some pose or expression other than zombie-destroy-the-world-ai, and I might be able to get my brain to evaluate the face. :)
Yes, I think we are all seeing the same thing. To be honest, I don't think you can get to realism from here with "tweaks". You really need to take a step away from this model and texture and look at something else for awhile. Like take 3 or 4 weeks away. Right now, you are trying to tweak individual aspects based on individual comments and you end up with the same problem, where you cant see the forrest for the trees. And with every response you give, you answer your own questions why it doens't look real. A recent comment of yours is you are using a female source texture (which looks really nice, and has sufficient detail based on advertisement) for a very masculine face model. Yes sure, you will be able to tweak some stubble, wrinkles, and facial hair, but all this tweaking of an existing texture will add additional problems. And what's worse, you wont see the problems because you've been looking at this texture for so long.
Sometimes, it's important to get back to basics. Which is start with a diffuse texture, and create your bump/normal/spec maps from the diffuse and see what you have. All that said, you've have a really neat technique for bumps maps around the eyes. Build on that technique. But right now you are posting WIPs in a thread about techniques and theory, and IMHO it's derailing the thread.
So, I wanted to try to render types of skin others are using in this thread. I found it to be extremely difficult to render very pale skin. The skin is so easy to "over light" and over expose, that I really had to reduce the amount of light I use by HALF! And as a result, the freckles, wrinkles and other details didnt really show up as I'd like. The render looks more like an illustration than I'm used do. (Although, I did use a V7 based model with gigantic eyes that added to the problem. I found it much, much easier to work with darker skin textures because they were more forgiving.)
Ideas? Comments?
EDIT: You see light blue artifacts in the eye lashes becuase I attempted to sharpen the image to get the freckles and details to show better...without success.
Looks very nice. The nose and skin look very fleshy to me, nice oil sheen, the lips appear very wet, and your hair (as always) looks great. There is lots of detail. If the eyes were closed I'm certain I would do a double take, but right now,the eyes kinda give it away. Very nice and expressive model!
Wow, London's skin looks super real on V7. But you're right about the eyes. Even without the artifacts, the eyes themselves look painted instead of real.
As for 'freckles, wrinkles, etc', those showed up just fine and look good so I don't think that needs work. Perhaps try an eye package like macro eyes. Those are awesome. Also maybe put her hair down so it's not so perfect and shiny and I'd think she was real!
That's quite nice. The pupils in such light would no be nearly so big but other wise the eyes look OK. And it's a fact that pale skin details get blown out in bright lights. That is why pale bodybuilders stain their skin with fake tanning dyes. I would expect her body skin to tend paler than her face but not by a big amount.
The render doesn't look any more like an illustration than the darker toners renders I've seen. Neither are convincingly realistic but maybe because I am expecting a 3D render.