What are the best skin shaders for Genesis 8 female?
Flortale
Posts: 611
I need to crash course skin shaders. I'm sure one of you guys have narrowed down the best Genesis 8 shaders. Please share your wisdom!
Post edited by Flortale on
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Well the DAZ Originals characters, any of them, or the G8F/G8M base characters (the base characters are missing the shader material settings presets for the genitalia though) are good and I prefer the newer ones that have presets for Low, Medium, and High Translucency such as Ollie 8, Edie 8, Girl 8. In addition the Hazel for The Girl 8 character comes with both the Translucency Low, Medium, and High presets as the other DAZ Originals Genesis 8 Pro Bundle characters but also presets for Specular Low, Medium, & High.
Generally speaking, low transluncency makes a pale character look paler and a dark character darker which means that the presets need to be individualized by DAZ to be actually appropiate for a very pale character, a very dark character, and inbetween by not relying on the translucency strength crutch so much because low transluncency also makes the skin look more solid and plastic too.
The specular presets that come with Hazel make a character look more oily/sweaty, which is natural, but if a character is very pale that extra oily/sweaty is mostly lost because the contrast is too low between the specular reflection and the pale skin just like in real life.
Of the skin settings from PA characters for Genesis 8 I like Darwin's Mishap's the best. He obviously busted his butt to research and trial & error settings to come up with those for his products but the only caviat is his way of doing skin presets is so different than the DAZ Originals pro bundles characters way of doing it. He's still doing PBR when you look at them but he's using shader settings that are more descriptively like the old 3DL method of doing skin material settings (in my opinion).
I'm talking only about the human body shader materials settings here, not the actually skin textures, normal, bump, displacement, cutout maps & such. To apply just the settings & not the textures & maps to a character you just select the desired Surfaces & control-LMB on the material preset that you want only the settings applied from & use the popup dialogue that show up to select from the dropdown menu - settings only, no images. You'll see it when you look.
Those are decent, but I need better.
Come on everyone, please start listing the best skin shaders for Genesis 8.
I'm a former Poser user. On the Poser forum we have something called EZSkin which produces the best results for skin. What is the DAZ equivelanet of EZSkin? What is the best skin shader solution for Genesis 8? So far the default Genesis 8 skin material is pretty good, but I want to know if there's better.
I like Beautiful Skin Iray by Fuseling and SickleYield. https://www.daz3d.com/sf-beautiful-skin-iray-genesis-8-female
Are you trolling or being serious? lol .. Those are the worst skin shaders I've ever seen.
Well the new CC Foster has excellent skin shaders that look good in all lighting as demo-ed by the ad copy.
But seeing as it seems you want a product sold as a product that is nothing but skin shaders and not the image materials I recommend you look at SickleYield's Beautiful Skin for G8F & G8M.
And to supplement that I recommend Altern8, although Altern 8 does more than change a few skin shader settings, it also has presets to modify tone mappings which is immensensely useful for giving skin that 'morning light', 'dusk light', 'night light', 'day light', 'indoor light', 'cloudy day light', and so on that is very hard to replicate in DAZ Studio using just the generic Sun-Sky settings. You can, however get those effects using HDRIs taken at the correct time, date, and weather condiditions (you can use the light from HRDIs but not the image in case you didn't know that).
You may need to explain what you mean by "best" - people will make use of them in different ways, and have differing priorities when assessing the merits of a shader set.
I usually start with one of the presets available in Altern8 - Skin Shader System for Genesis 8 and then do some of my own tweaking using the Ultimate Iray Skin Manager to make my own manual adjustments based on the character's skin and the lighting of my scene
You do good research. I also narrowed it down to these two products, lol.
Heya, what is the advantage of Ultima Iray Skin Manager? Adjusting gamma seems like an unnessary pain in the butt. Adjusting gloss is easy. What advantage does it provide exactly?
I like the Skin Manager because it lets me adjust the settings for all skin surfaces at once rather than one body part at a time. I know I could select multiple surfaces myself, but Skin Manager already knows how to do that for me. It's mostly a time saver more than a product that adds something new. You could make all of the modifications yourself through the Surfaces settings. I just like the way it's presented and consolidated in Skin Manager better.
Holy moly. That's quiet an amazingly good reason to use that then ! Thanks for the tip. It's really gonna save a lot of time.