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ROFL ...You're too funny. The hair is Linda Ponytail Hair by OOT and is one of the most realistic looking hair products released by Daz, imo. V4 indeed. lol I think that would upset OOT a bit to hear. :P
The environment is a real place, an HDRI of a real environment so the "not helping her realism" doesn't make any sense to me.
But thanks anyway for the feedback. These things are often quite subjective. I appreciate your opininion and appreciate you taking the time to give some feedback. :)
Thanks everyone for the feedback! While I don't agree with everything that's said, and there are differing opinions (that's just part of being human), I'll take what I read to heart and see what "sticks" in my brain as sounding like good advice to me and make changes to reflect that feedback. Thank you guys for taking the time to give advice and feedback, it's much appreciated!
I just did a render in DS that I think is my most realistic to date - I don't want to share it just yet as it is a promo for my new product so everyone can see it then, it is just that everything seemed to gel together to make a realistic image (IMHO of course). You'll be sure that I am analysing it to see if there is a "special sauce" that made it so, but I haven't identified a specific factor yet. But it has proved to me that we have the tools and we are pretty close!
Double post for some reason!
You tease!
Looking forward to seeing your work, Phil.
- Greg
Dito! I can't wait to see it! :)
Well I state what me eyes see I'm not trying to be hurtful but there you have it. I wasn't doing a comparison to other DAZ renders but strictly what wasn't fooling my eyes in the least
OOT does a tremendous job with hair, but it can't change the fact that it's still plain old poly strips and not a real strands-based solution. Hair is just a horribly complex subject with (apparently) around 100,000 hairs all interacting with each other and gravity, wind, motion etc. So indeed even if we had flawless characters, if the hair isn't doing all that then it'll give away that it's a render all too quickly. Not much we can do about it. Render more bald perhaps
Disney is highly stylised, not sure what that has to do with photorealism. Also such a hair blunder would presumably happen during some movement? If you had a braid going through an arm in a still render, I'm pretty sure you'd notice.
The environment is actually what killed it for me too, because it's obviously a photo, but it's blurry due to low res and because that blurriness is due to low res, it's the same blurriness all over regardless of distance, and because that blurriness doesn't carry in any way to the main figure who is completely sharp.
It was during movement, and they 100% did it on purpose because not only did they deliberately position her so that you couldn't actually see the braid clip through her shoulder, seconds earlier, when she was positioned so you could see it, they did the same sort of braid flip without it passing through her shoulder.
Yeah, as long as it's believable, you can get away with anything. I mean using ghost lights to fake bounce light isn't exactly realistic at all, but when it works, it works.
Here are a couple more attempts from me. I've been experimenting a bit with caustics and increased corneal bulge to see if they help with the eyes, but I welcome constructive critique on any aspect or on the overall impression, as always!
Her sclera and teeth seem a little too bright to me. His hair has some obvious problems. The soft focus of the eyes is nice, but the rest of the image should follow suit. For example the bumpiness of the skin on her shoulder seem too sharp next to the softer look of the eyes and hair.
Thanks for the detaled and to-the-point critiques, Illucid. To test a hunch of mine, might I ask what you think of his eyes and teeth?
They're the same texture so you may feel safe taking criticisms on one as applying to the other even when you didn't render the examples the same to "compare" properly.
His eyes seem more natural. Though his teeth look too bright to me.
That's what I was getting at. I found it odd that he/she specified that the female character's eyes and teeth looked too bright rather than making a more general statement (e.g. "the eyes and teeth" instead of "her eyes and teeth), especially since he/she went on to make a different critique specifically regarding the male character. I wondered if the lighting made any difference. The arrangement of lights is the same, but the characters are posed differently, so the illumination wouldn't hit them in quite the same way. If Illucid thought the male's eyes looked fine or at least better, that would've been informative.
While I actually agree about the male character's hair, I'm back and forth on the eyes and, to a lesser extent, the teeth. On the one hand, they do jump out even at me in certain renders, but on the other hand, I've seen actual photos with comparable lighting (i.e. a 3-point studio setup) where the scleras are actually brighter (example below). I know this because I sampled a well-lit spot on the eyes in the photo and an analogous spot in the female character render in Photoshop and looked at the HSB values, and the B value from the photo was actually a little higher. I did the same experiment with the teeth and got similar results. Of course, a 100% rigorous test would require a precise replication of the lighting rather than just an approximation, but still, I'm not entirely sure if the margin of error is wide enough for that to matter.
This tells nothing. You can't compare sclera brightness from two different pictures, you have to compare relative brightnesses somehow...
To me your teeth aren't necessarily too white so much as as lacking translucency and color variation. I can't pinpoint what exactly feels off about the sclera, but I suspect that that may also not be so much inherent brightness as lack of realistic reaction to light.
I think the difference is in lighting on the iris. His iris seems very well illuminated and hers seem much less so. That plays into weather the brightness of the sclera matches. The photo you attached is interesting for the teeth. In the real photo, there are darker shadows between the front teeth, and the bottom edge of the front teeth has a highlight that adds a sense of glossiness to the tooth texture.
TBF If I'm brutally honest I thing the relative brightness of the eyes and sclera is a small detail when compared to the fact that the skin texture just looks straight up blurry.
Yes, the teeth are a bit tricky. My problem is that, in my experience at least, as they get more translucent, those shadows between the teeth get weaker, so I had to strike a balance. I think they're already about as translucent as they can get while still looking like individual teeth instead of seeming to merge into one weird mouth-wide tooth.
J Cade, does the skin look too smooth (i.e. bumpless), homogenous in color, or both?
FWIW, let me do a quick experiment with a close-up of another character with the same textures/shaders. Which one (if either) looks better?
Both too smooth and, I wouldnt say homogenous (it has more color variation than you find in plenty of textures) but literally blurry Its especially noticable in the eyebrows where individual strands are thick and all sort of blend into one stripe. Between the two images I would say the second looks a hair better
also for teeth (and everything sss-y whil we're at) the trick is high SSS low scattering distance/subsurface scale). Although tbf teeth (like ears) can have the confounding factor of tending to be modeled a bit thicker than they are in the real world
Okay so I fiddled more with the hair styling... absolutely obsessive hair styling, so much moving around tiny clumps of strands. Then I figured I might as well stick it on an actual character. Technically this is still a test render. Mind you it did take test render level speed. Nine and a half minutes to render, and there's even a bit of DOF too, Cycles is officially kicking Iray's kiester on the speed front. Everytime I finish a render in Cycles I wonder why I ever use anything else, And then I remember thebunches of renders in cycles I never finished because the setup time can suck.
Anyone notice anything super off before I render full sized?
That is fantastic, I love the super fine baby hairs on the face.
That's really nice, j cade, and some of the best CG hair I've seen! How much trouble getting the character into Blender?
I use the teleblender script from here in the freebie forum the meshes are simple but I usually have issues getting the textures and have to manually load them all in, but given that I'd manually fiddle with all the shaders anyhow its not that much more time in the grand scheme of things, and once you have a good setup (like for the eyes) in the next thing you work on you can append those material settings from your previous file and just swap in new textures (its definitely not DS level preset clicking though, obviously)
(also good skin setup in blender is way easier shaderwise imo, the sss is way less fiddly to setup properly)