G8 Dao & Cristina Seem to Have Issues. Suggestions?
magog_a4eb71ab
Posts: 769
I recently got three new characters from the marketplace here, two of which seem to have a problem. The Genesis 8 Female Dao ends up with a mismatched facial texture that produces seams around the top of the head, in front of the ears, behind the rear jaw, and the front upper part of the neck if any of the included eye shadows(non-layered/LIE) are applied. Its partly comparable in looks to how makeup is applied to individuals imitating Donald Trump in a parody. Its still workable for me as I have another product with which to apply make-up, but still, we're generally paying the same price for other characters with similar features.
The Genesis 8 Female Cristina is just straight up broke for Iray. Apparently the Iray skin option included with the character isn't Iray because it doesn't render. I suspect that the Iray texture is 3Dlight because it renders the same way. I've included screenshots. I also noticed some of the lip colors on the thumbnails don't even come close to resembling the rendered colors. When it comes to the eye textures... WHY on earth would you burn like half a dozen reflected lights into the eye textures? It looks as if they lifted the texture from one of their other character renders that contained a bunch of spotlights/primitives and used that for this character's eye textures. 
If you're rendering a portrait or anything from a similar proximity & angle, it looks kind of silly.
I understand little mistakes are made every now and then, but this is starting to get VERY irritating; especially if I have to load, test, and spot render every individual component of a product. If Daz doesn't test these vendor products via download and installation through the marketplace shop, may I make the suggestion of making some kind of a product review available so we all don't have to suffer through so many of these "mistakes" for ourselves, lol. 
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Comments
Are you loading the character preset, or loadign a base figure and applying the materials preset? Whichever it is, try doing the other - sometimes there will be mismatched settings if there was an update late in development.
The invisible skin issue is because you are in DS 4.10.0.123 and Draw Dome dome is off - the skin uses Chromatic SSS and in that version of DS Iray is bugged. The fixes are to turn Draw Dome on in Render Settings or to set the SSS Type to mono in the Surfaces pane for the skin or to use the 4.11 Public Beta.
The eyes reflections are annoyng, but some people seem to like them - fortunately eyes are completely separate from skin so it's simple to swap in eyes from another character.
For Dao:
I can go into Smart Content or Content Library, load Dao "Actor". From there, it doesn't matter what I do. The face and torso textures do not match if I try to use any of the eye shadows that came with it. I did go into the Surface Editor to compare the settings between the two and there are differences, but I'm not sure if I should even mess with them. These are the differences I noted:
HEAD(after applying Eye Shadow)
Specular Lobe 2 Roughness 0.30, Glossy Roughness 0.50,
TORSO
Specular Lobe 2 Roughness 0.62, Glossy Roughness 0.71,
Another thing I noted in the Surface Editor is a pronounced difference between the head's Base Color thumbnail and the Translucency Color thumbnail. I'm assuming that those are shrunk versions of the actual skin textures used for the base on those surfaces, so this must mean that when the eye shadow is applied, a different base texture is being used that doesn't match the torso's base texture. Columns 1-2 are for the head(see cropped screenshot at the bottom). Column 1 is the Head texture that is loaded by default when you double-click on the Actor Dao. All of the settings in the Surface Editor for the textures match up when compared between the head and the torso(Column 1 & 3). However, when any of the eye shadows are applied, the aforementioned 2 settings are changed for the head texture and the Base Color texture is different. I generally have a good eye when it comes to color and can see a major color difference between the thumbnails for the head's Base Color in Column 2 vs Columns 1 & 3.
Now for Cristina:
Turning the Draw Dome "ON"(yes, it actually renders now) practically quadruples the render time for me, which is a problem since small spot renders can take 5-7 minutes to complete, nevermind trying to do a full scene with that thing on. However, simply changing the SSS Mode from CHROMATIC to MONO for the texture does not work. I tried this with the head texture and did a spot render, which resulted in the same issue as before.
I'm a bit concerned with installing two different versions of Daz, especially with the latter being a beta. What kind of potential havoc/headaches can this create with the libraries, DIM(particularly the installation & use of content), saving scenes, poses, textures, etc.? The one thing I don't need at this point in time is doubling the amount of HD space Daz uses due to using 2 different versions.
DS 4.10 and DS 4.11 Beta can use the same content libraries. There is no disk storage duplication of content. There is no change needed to DIM. You will need to go to Content Directory Manager in DS 4.11 to tell it where those content libraries are on your hard disk, though. You can access Content Directory Manager from the Edit/Preferences menu. Or, you can run a script to copy your DS 4.10 settings to DS 4.11. That is the easier way. The script is
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/file_io/save_mapped_paths/start
How about if you just load Genesis 8 female Base, apply the skin preset from the character's Materials folder, and then apply the makeups?
I did that and got the same thing. Like I said before, the eyeshadow is not layered or masked over the existing base texture. The author appears to have made a separate non-matching face texture with the eyeshadow applied for each eyeshadow color option, so that when you apply any of the eyeshadow options, the entire skin texture for the head is replaced with it. NORMALLY this is not a problem and can be faster than adding layers. HOWEVER, the point I'm trying to make is that the edges do not match where the Head and Torso textures meet.
Its possible that the author intended the character to have a slightly different tone for the face(like as if having applied foundation, etc.), but unless you're making some kind of a character where seams like this might be more acceptable(clowns, facepaint, etc.), there has to be a uniformity between the textures; especially where the seams meet.
barbult, that's good to know. My next system is probably going to have a 2080 Ti so I'll most definitely have to install 4.11 on it. Hopefully at some point we'll be able to pool VRAM for Iray renders with the 2000-series cards if we have two of them.
No translucency options.
If that does work you have a workaround, but I would certainly advise opening a ticket to report this as a possible bug.
When it comes to the Cristina character, I was able to get the general look I was after by using the G8 base actor and using a certain % of the Cristina head and body morphs. I just had to test a bunch of skins from different characters and found one that was close enough. I used 5500K at 45,000 lumens with a single spotlight(Disc) height 25.00, width 25.00, spread angle 60.0, oriented in the front and above the character. It took 17 min 26 sec to spot render the area shown in the screenshot to 100%, which is probably a lot quicker than trying to use the original character/skin with draw dome on.