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Of course, as CGI artists try to make their images more realistic, magazines and such like are photoshopping images to remove blemishes and generally end up making their models look more CG!
P.S. Is there a reason no-one has commented on my render earlier?
I had intended to stay out of this discussion, as I don't feel it's important to me, nevertheless I've been checking out all the nice renders in here, trying to learn something from them;)
So you wanted a comment PhilW, no problem. I really like the face, nice details wrinkles and stuff, very authentic, but the hair is the giveaway as often is the case. Anyway, she looks like a nice person
ETA: I've come to that stage that I'm really really tired of all the young flawless barbie dolls, so appreciate looking at more "ordinary" and mature people... uhumm... figures
I like the discussion so far...
When I show people a couple of samples of my work they assume they are photos. I realized I stared with 3 females with glasses on and it helped obscure some of the eye issues. Of course CG with glasses is easy to spot as there is NO Photographer being reflected back.
Cropping close to the face and NOT showing the ENDS of the hair does wonders too.
I just did a render with a photographer and studio reflected in the sunglasses, and it worked wonderfully!
The lay of thin straps from breast to shoulder is often the giveaway for me. At least as far as a semi-pro shoot or above. Eitehr the weight of the breast will pull the strap away frpm the body or the clothing assistant will be removing the slack by pinning it in the back.
Yes, I like Alexandra a lot as a move away from the stereotypical Daz character. How would you inprove the hair? I was thinking it looked pretty good (but then I am biassed!).
Hah, that was kinda funny to see the reactions. Not at all what I expected. It's just a random portrait and definitely a photo. My guess is that the discussion about CG vs render preconditioned your brains to look at this differently, noticing long necks or things that you thought looked artificial.
Here's what I thought would happen: everyone would instantly see it's a photo. Or if not that it must be insanely well done CG and is indistinguishable from a photo. So, I guess I was partially wrong about subjectivity being removed if only the render actually looked completely photorealistic. This was a photo and still there were doubts. Sure it's an artistic portrait, with artifical studio lighting and who knows how much photoshopping, but that was kinda the point. I was under the impression that even the most heavily processed photos still always looked like a real person. Ok well, not always, obviously there are extreme examples where the photographer really does everything possible to make something look artificial for artistic reasons. Showing super futuristic fashion for example. But usually, photographed and heavily photoshopped people still look real.
This begs the question, is it a non starter to expect people to see photorealism when the image was posted in a render-related forum? Is the part of the brain responsible for judging such things overruled or confused by the logical part that is too aware that we're in a rendering forum?
My opinion as an average joe comparing your render to what I'd see a way off from a photo of the same subject:
I would reduce the depth of field effect in her hair although I realize you have a balancing act going on there. I worked better in the last render you did in this thread but is less effective here.
The skin blur is good but I'd introduce a bit of porousness in the skin, albiet still slightly blurred.
The eyewhites less white. I used an DAZ Store supplied eye texture set for a render I did a few weeks ago. That texture set was the FioreEyes03 set of eye textures from the Fiore G8M product.
Why for this render & not the other? Because this render looks like a much tighter head shot as opposed to a less detailed bust shot of your prior render.
Again, this is true from a strictly binary perspective. It could either pass as a photo of a living person or it couldn't, and there's very little if any gray area there. But in the context of this thread, being "impressed" presumably means thinking that the image in question comes very close, or at least significantly closer than most, and that's where I think there's less agreement than you'd expect. While the placement of an image on the "unreal" side may be objective or at least subject to an overwhelming consensus, estimates of the margin by which it falls short of becoming "real" can sometimes be subject to surprising variation (i.e. subjectivity). Two people may agree that an image is definitely CGI, but one may regard it as very lifelike, even if slightly off, while the other might honestly say that they weren't even close to being tricked.
Oh I think you did a great job with the hair, I guess since I know for sure it's a render I look at it differently. If I had seen that picture in let's say a magazine it would have tricked me. I really can't put my finger on what I feel is slightly off, maybe it is too perfect, maybe it lacks some kind of subtle randomness. The eybrows look very good.
I'm finding it harder to push the limits of realness.. and wonder if I now just don't see things how I saw them before...
Thanks - the eyebrows are from my Ultimate Eyebrows product.
Certainly your sensory processing changes as you study stuff more. I can tell different kinds of fiber by touch, but I couldn't when I started knitting. I also couldn't tell any of the Daz 7 women apart when I first started w/ DS and boggled that people could identify any given model at a glance. And yet I can do that now.
I've been eyeing various renders more closely after this discussion. I'm just too spoiled by Hollywood. There's a render over in the Ollie thread that I stared at for a while and then shrugged, saying, "It doesn't look real but it does look Hollywood." So many renders seem like they could be stills of characters in a live action special effects extravaganza. Not real -- made up, Photoshopped, outfitted with prosthetics -- but played by real people, interacting with real people.
This thread is a fun and interesting read. Made me think of something that happens all to often to me (maybe I shouldn't admit it). I see someone in a store, restaurant, etc. and think "wow, great skin, but the SSS is just a touch too "strong". Then I come back to reality and realize the it's real skin, and real SSS, and, well, come to the realization (again) that reality has a wider range of "real" than I often think. I also realize that some people just have amazing SSS shaders ..... I mean skin.
That's a genesis 3 female.
Maya or any app with desent pysics or even zBrush & can render hair like that .
but to get any 3D character render to look realistic your half to tweek in a 2D app.
I agree with this - while as people we are extremely sensitive to faces and what is real and what is not, the exact nature of "real" is not a fixed set of parameters. Hair color can obviously change widely, and you see wide variation in skin tone, shininess, etc. even in the same individual at different times (sweating, flushed, etc - different states will require different settings, but they will still be seen as real).
As a carrara/bryce-ian as well, I often note that the gods often get clouds and haze wrong in the real world. They simply aren't right sometimes. Not sure whom to send the memo to.
Loving this thread.
I thought the 'test' portrait was a well-done render, but really doubted my certainty because of the realistic hair. The neck threw me too.
@philw, your recent head-shot looks like a real person, certainly in the render, but you totally nailed the 'personality' factor in that one. Someone inside! The hair looks like great/real hair, but the precise sense of the random combing is where I would detect 'render'. Hard to explain, but the texture/sheen/SSS/etc. look quite correct to me.
RE: conditioning, here's a recent 'test' that still has me guessing:
The other night I was browsing the DAZ gallery new images and paused (...) at a pair of female renders that were in the normal new image series at the time I was browsing (kinda racey pair and the second isn't in the main-stream now, so I'll post both links).The first that came up seemed like a well-done render to me. Just a touch of the uncanny-valley - headlighting look. Then I saw the second and said... "wait a minute. That's real". Is the first one real? I went back and forth, and still don't know if the pair is real or rendered. The posture (...), skin, and 'weight' of the muscles/skin in the second are absolutely masterfully convincing if they're both renders. Once convinced of the second, I'm wondering about the first... Go look, and don't cheat the order! :
would you peg the first as real?
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/553046
Now, is the second real?
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/552686
Maybe it's a brilliant sell for the various HD morphs sets out there (and masterful pose/light/angles/etc.), but the second one has still thrown my so-called 'discerning' eye...
FWIW, I still find the girl on the fountain shot 'real' even with the various and correctly mentioned flaws. The fountain looks fake-ish (time-exposed water can look like that), but doesn't 'blow the shot' for me like some mis-matched elements sometimes do. She simply looks right/real/convincing.
Maybe if enough of the key elements are 'right' enough, we happily 'ignore' the wrong-isms, when judging the 'valley'. I would guess the emotional strength of a scene can distract us from the detail scrutiny as well. e.g. a Story scene, or a render of someone that looks very familiar may tweak our 'render' sensing logic.
I often wonder if some of the magazine shots I see these days are rendered. As PhilW mentioned, the corrective retouching brings them nearer the uncanny-valley than I sometimes like.
cheers,
--ms
Stunning work! :D Looks great. The only thing that is a "give away", imo, is the hair and eyelids. Lovely image! :)
It looks real, as in I'm convinced of it being real, but suspect it is a render. The neck is unusual to some, but not so far outside the 'norm', whatever that is.
@Mindsong - those two images that you referenced still look rendered to me - good realistic renders without a doubt, but still rendered. It is hard to pin down - the lack of background doesn't help the realism, the "body art" is the kind of thing that you would see in a 3D character rather than a real person, but it is pretty close.
I definite have seen hair that real, though not out of DS. Hell even I can get pretty darn close in blender with only... moderate effort. and there are definitely people out there more skilled than I.
Behold.
It was a good excuse for me to practice my hair styling in blender, I could fiddle even more and get it better, but figured this was good enough for, you can definitely get little frizzy sections
Wow. Very nice.
What's limiting this hair realism in DS? Is it Iray or the mesh itself?
Not to mention behaving physically plausible with gravity, wind etc. (if that's the case in Blender). The VFX industry uses all sorts highend hair solutions like these:
http://www.joealter.com/
http://peregrinelabs.com/yeti/
Follow up on the memory comparison: that hair used roughly the same amount of memory as an *untextured* Genesis 8 at subdivision level 3
It also rendered in 15 minutes pretty much completely noise free. (The grain was added in post to match the reference better)
So you're implying other DS options such as LAMH and fiber hair are intrinsically different than a 'strand', and strands consume far less memory.
I'm guessing it wouldn't help to learn to use Blender for hair similar to LAMH (as an external addon) simply because the process to transfer the hair from Blender to DS would require converting to obj with polygons, thus eliminating the benefits.
I just found this sort of funny, as a former professional portrait photographer I would be mortified if I had myself reflected in a clients glasses and not able to see their eye. This is why it's standard practice to ask the clients to remove their lenses if they want to wear their glasses during a shoot. Another trick is to take two photos, one with glasses and one without then photoshop over the glare. :) For sunglasses where you want glare and reflection but you can adjust the angle so that you get the background and not yourself in the photo. :)
I think 90% of people with no practical experience in CGI would accept this picture as a photograph.
@bluejaunte
Just got back to this thread today, but I though your image was a photo for the simple reason that I couldn't immediately identify it as a render. I'm a photographer and familiar w/ current post processing trends so that didn't throw me off.
I was a very popular portrait photographer in my area before I got too sick to work in the field anymore. Coming from someone who actually took photos of real people - can't get more photo real then that :) - here is what I find interesting.
The things CG artists try and do, we photographers get paid a great deal of money to NOT do. :) When I 1st started out 90% of my business was high school seniors doing senior photos. I was one of the 1st people shooting digital and I was the only one with a photoshop and CG background. People came to me to hide the pores. I made 6 figures because I could give porous teens baby smooth skin. :) CG people try hard to show the pores in order to show realism.
Now days there is a lot of photoshop on the photos of people, but the people still look more like people then the CG version although i think the CG version is getting very, very close & a few of my CG people have fooled even a few old photographer buddies. The most convincing are usually dramatically lit, have strong depth of field and are not facing the camera head on.
That's pretty close. IMO still doesn't have the same realism though. Look at the top of the photographed hair, how there are so many small distinct clumped sections of hair that are still a part of the smooth main mass all moving together. Look at the soft fluffed halo of hair behind her head where the outer strands of hair kind of float away from everything. Look at how there are thin free sections of hair that stay completely together until close to the end where they break apart. I still haven't seen this stuff even in Blender (and blender does have very very good hair). It's just really hard to get that sort of naturalness.
EDIT: Especially, look by her ear, where she has short sideburns right by her long hair, and the long hair tucked behind the ear pulled the sideburns along with it so the closer they get to the ear the closer they get pulled up towards it, and one long free strand didn't quite make it and just kind of curls around the front of her ear before meeting back up with the rest. That kind of thing is ridiculous to try to get.