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That's awesome! If this was in the store I'd snatch it up in a heart-beat!
Quite an interesting topic, highly discussed all over the CG circles everywhere.
If I may give my 2 cents, I would say the most important element into tricking our brain to think something is real is complexity. Complexity of shapes in all organic things, not necessarily human characters. And in that I do include asymmetry, unevenness and good proportion, things our eyes are very well used to recognize and detect. And I think the term complexity is a bit different than microscopic detail. One would definitely argue that complexity usually comes from detail, which is true in most cases, but is not that kind of complexity I am talking about.
I quite liked the comparison with the bad photo of real things, where the lack of detail as we understand it in CG world does not make the subjects depicted less real. Even a bad looking wig cannot cancel out the “reality” of a person wearing it. I totally agree with this point of view. I can even say, sometimes too much detail like pores, skin detail, wrinkles and such is also a giveaway that something is fake. Because it’s too much of it. In my opinion, it only needs to be included where it needs to be, in essential areas, then the brain does the rest. Definitely, where it comes to human figures, there is a lot more to consider in terms of the intricacies of gesture and posture. Lighting, due to its complexity plays a huge role as was said earlier, but again, no amount of perfect light will help a badly built mesh look realistic. But, depending of the distance to your subject, of course, I think you can get away with less complex shaders and textures than with less complex shapes and variations and good proportions. And that is a thing that’s quite a rarity, even in the high-end Hollywood productions. Maybe this is because it is so time consuming and costly to do that there is always a balance as to where the realism is being pushed.
I personally do think that, given the latest improvements in technology and based on what I’ve seen demoed on the net, that goal of indistinguishable realism in CG is not that far away and is perfectly achievable.
As far as our Daz /Poser models, well, that is a totally different story. Even the latest Genesis 8 has still a lot to be desired in terms of complexity, asymmetry and shape proportion, especially in the eyes, ears and mouth department. Subtleties make a lot of difference IMHO. But nothing is stopping us to keep trying, is it?
A little bit of fan art that I did last year that I thought I would share on here - it was put together in Carrara and rendered in Octane, but most of it could equally have been done in DS and rendered with iRay. I made the colthing and it was draped using VWD - these days in DS I would use dForce. I am working to achieve the look of strand based hair in a managable form for DS.
I keep trying for 'realism' in DAZ Studio and I feel this image is probably the closest I've come so far, though it's still a long way off real and wouldn't fool anyone.
I just wish there was a decent strand based hair option though as most of the transmapped styles look terrible the better the rest of the image gets.
Definately messed up the eyes and need to fix them but I think I mostly understand how the IRay shaders mix together for the SSS and translucency effects.
Love the level of detail on Alexandra 8HD that can be brought out though, much more detail than most characters.
Very nice character indeed! I think the giveaway for me is the dress, when looking at the full size pic the fabric kinda says bumpmap;) Nice looking hair!
Nice looking character! Ya the eyes are a bit odd, and she's not looking at the camera, which is a bit disturbing;)
Yes I really like Alexandra too. Great image - it is almost getting towards what I would call a hyper-real image, kind of like a photo which has been sharpened to bring out every little detail. And I like that sort of look, but perhaps you need to almost degrade it, add some depth of field, etc, to achieve a photoreal look.
Here's another recent attempt of mine, with a new and improved hair shader. Constructive critique is welcome as always!
Another hint is how she is standing on the ground. It looks like a sandy surface, but her feet aren't sinking in, which they would, if it was real sand and a real person.
Thanks for the kind comments, I have done a re-render of the image with a slightly better eye set up (still not happy with it though) and a bit of depth of field but I'm not fully happy with the coloured version so I've done the usual cheat and changed it to black and white.
Still not sure if it would fool anyone though.
That's really good and you could redo it with a black background or outdoors at midnight with no light except portraiture style light and that will increase the 'realism'.
Also the hair while nice isn't doing any favors on the realism front. See if you can find a male or female fibremesh style to your liking as a replacement. Good thing is though if you change the original hairstyle color to black & render as I suggest above that will go a long way to hide the problem areas with regards to realism for the hair too.
Another Daz Studio example with the new hair that I am working on. This also includes items from my Ultimate Eyebrows and Ultimate Make-Up sets, but otherwise the figure is pretty standard.
Here's Anastasia, throwing herself into the fray. I know she doesn't look like a photo and so does she, but we're quite happy for her to be picked apart to see why not if it brings the day closer when she might do :) I think that apart from the usual (hair, eyes etc), one of the things that says 'rendered' rather than 'real' are how few - or even none at all - creases there are in the skin. Even young people's skin creases when it moves, the creases just don't stay put when the skin relaxes or moves in another direction. Years and years of repeatedly making those creases in the same places will sooner or later cause them to become permanent wrinkles - over-exposure to sun and loss of elasticity due to age will see them set in sooner, but none of this stuff can make much of a wrinkle on a face that's never moved. People are forming wrinkles all their lives and on an expressive face there are usually at least a couple visible, even if it will take old age (or Zev0!) to keep them there.
It's basically what you said. You've made a great expression on her, one that is, had it all the wrinkles and contorted muscles correctly placed, would make the expression very cute, but as an technically very limited expression on a typical 3D model, it just makes her look like a 3D model (or one looking to avoid wrinkles late in life with botox or something where the skin tone and oiliness and such not so even).
You'd basically have to go into Mudbox, Zbrush, or Blender and sculpt the rest of her expression in there to get her like we can see you wanted. So of like that G8F model, forget her name, that was released last month with her own sculpted smile expression that was so convincing.
Thanks for the response. This is one I made with Facegen when the most recent version came out. Everything more or less ended up where I intended it to be, but I think she's positive proof that we need more wrinkles around here! Half the reason I got into 3D in the first place was that I'm no great shakes at drawing people, and realistic wrinkles are definitely beyond me. There must be plenty of talented PAs in these parts who could come up with wrinkle overlays for figures - from mild to extreme, I'd have thought they'd be at least as popular as make-up overlays are. If we're looking for realism, as long as the real world is spending a vast fortune in the fruitless pursuit of banishing wrinkles then we probably ought to be buying them :)
Reminds me of Jean Stapleton or vaguely of some 70s folk singer. I think the only way realistic wrinkles will come to the masses of people like us is if in addition to the 'bones of rigging', muscle and fat rigging and similar are added to 3D modeling SW. I think it'll happen but not until some university or big business gets the funds & open sources their IR&D. I think it already exists somewhat but when it comes to DAZ 3D no ideal.
Looks good ,but the eyes are just so perfect there all wrong.
Regarding the idea of a "wrinkles overlay", if you get a product like Alexandra HD, the HD details are on a separate dial and so can effectively be applied to any figure. I've not had a chance to try this yet but I can't see why it shouldn't work.
I find it doesn't work that well, unless one wants all the details; if they did separate morph dials: upper/lower arms and legs, stomach, abdomen, breast/chest area, neck, face, hands, feet; I'd buy em all.
But they are too restrictive for me as they are.
I think she's getting closer (maybe lol). I'm getting happier with her. I want to make a couple more adjustments, but here's the latest version of my girl. What do you guys think? Feedback welcome! :) She's a work in progress.
Her skin looks great, Diva! I'd be curious to see her lit by Sun/Sky and the default HDRI (for sake of comparison since everyone has those lighting setups).
- Greg
You have made a lot of progress. I will restrict my comments to the lighting - overall it looks good, but the main (key) light looks like it is either a point light or a distant light with no softness, so it is producing hard edged shadows which tend to be a giveaway of being a 3D render. You should look at softening the lights by making them larger / more diffuse, so that they give soft edged shadows which will look more natural.
Your point is well made!
Soft shadows is something you usually want in photography though, most portraits will have it so it makes sense to strive for it in such renders. As mentioned bounce light will also soften things up more in the real world so there's one more argument against harsh shadows.
1) The chin under the lip, that 'scoop' looks too deep and makes the chin look very odd in my eyes. Or there is something wrong with that lower lip pose maybe?
2) The depth of the creases for her expression on her face is missing the other secondary wrinkles to make the expression more believable (like that bespoke smile that was zbrushed on a G8F character a few months ago). I can't zbrush myself but you can I think I've seen in your other posts.
3) Hair looks V4-ish.
4) Arms, legs, neck look too muscular for such a thin torso
5) Backgroud/Enviroment is not helping her realism.
Otherwise very excellent.
There's soft shadows and then there's soft shadows. I (personally) find that daz renders tend to have much bigger issues with mushy lighting (that blurred hdr with low dynamic range look) than with shadows that might be a bit harsh.
And bounce lighting doesn't soften shadows per se (in that it doesn't make the line of the edge of the shadow softer, but, since there's more light coming from other directions, makes the shadow color comparatively lighter so the transition is less evident), multiple small lights act in the same way. In the real world we are much more often lit by, say 5 small lamps than 1 giant square metre light, while the 2 can look overall similar in terms of general form there are subtle differences that I think improve the feel of realism.
Compare
default hdr (nice eye reflections, mushy soft lighting that does nothing)
neutral environment and 1 big spotlight (Perfectly reasonable looking, good for studio style or painty looks, but not really how we see people in our day to day lives, and the eye reflection is a bit sad)
neutral environment and 3 small spotlight (still can work as studio lighting but also a bit closer to what you might see in your bathroom mirror... other than the figure obviously. Also definitely nicer eye reflections)
(the 3 small lights also tends to render faster than 1 big light)
I think part of the problem is that real photos aren't perfect while a render is. If you reduce the quality and throw in some random jpeg artifacts and noise, a render can start to look more photorealistic. I've played around with this stuff before and it's definitely a big factor.
Yeah it can definitely be too soft too, lots of HDR-only renders look like that to me.
Camera gear has been pretty highend for some time now. If that was the deciding factor then we would all find today's photographs lack in realism. I think this artifact and noise thing goes more into the realm of faking a lower quality to hide imperfections again rather than to truely increase photorealism.