Can you change a flat skin tone to render with a bit of shine?

tryst46

OK, I got something close to what I wanted.. The problem is that many of the mats don't apply to other models. The model has a dead skin look, no shine to it at all but no matter how I try, the only skin mats I can get to apply to it are equally as dead. Is there some way to increase the shine on the skin in the rendering stage to make the skin look more alive? The annoying part is, the skin looks fine in the view window but when it comes to rendering, it renders flat. I know that early version models might have this problem but surely there is some setting in the renderer that can overcome this.

Some other models render with a proper skin tone but some simply refuse to. Typical that the one I chose doesn't want to render to look more realistic.

Richard Haseltine

How are you lighting the scene? How are you rendering, Iray or 3Delight? Which figure are you using?

tryst46

Using Iray with basic ambient light, no spots. The character is one from the Kids4, several of them in the scene, both boys and girls.

I managed to find a skin that doesn't look like they've taken a bath in bleach that the Kids4 standard mat does but it still appears that the skin for this particular model is a matt paint effect. The problem is that I have several kids in a scene playing together in a garden but not really enough variance in skin tones so they all have the same skin. I got a skin to overlay from another old model from a freeware download but unfortunately, it has the same base matt effect. I guess once I find out how to make the materials vary in hue/contrast, I might be able to vary the skin tone a bit between the models. That's not the problem though, it's the matt effect that's really annoying me, even worse that the garden has a paddling pool and I can't create a shiny, wet skin look as if one or two have been playing in it.

 

Richard Haseltine

Part of the problem is that those are older figures, so they don't have Iray (or possibly even 3Delight) materials. Applying a 3Delight material (for Genesis or Victoria 4 say) with the ctrl(Win)/cmd(Mac) key held down and selecting Ignore for Maps will give you a DS shader without disturbing the textures, but the lack of control maps (things like SSS) may give undesirable results.

tryst46

Is there a way to create new Iray skins or is it entirely a limitation of the model itself?

Alternatively, is there an updated kids addon that can be used now? While it did take a lot of time to change the builds and heights of each child to my, rather OCD satisfaction, considering the disproportionate scaling methods DAZ uses, I would probably do it over with some newer models with a more realistic skin look if I had to.

murgatroyd314

Select the skin surfaces, apply the "!Iray Uber Base" shader (which should do a basic conversion to Iray without changing any maps), and play around with the "Dual Lobe Specular" settings. I think you can get the sort of effect you want with this.