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Yes of course I agree on this. I do not agree going outside pbr specifications in the uber shader trying to reach for more realism. Because this makes the whole pbr technology in iray pointless. And makes your assets only good within dedicated lights.
Then of course you're free to make your own assets as tricky as you wish. But this is not good for general distribution because daz customers fairly expect iray assets to work fine within the iray pbr technology. The pbr technology is there to help for more realism, not to limit it. My advice is to try to use it right before working around with tricks.
The fact that the uber shader allows to go outside pbr boundaries for 3delight conversion is not to be considered as a justification to always insert non-pbr materials inside iray.
thx for this thread, very useful points of view:)
this is my contribution to the subject, with a focus on trying to get rid of the "silicone effect" in typical iray default skins
Looks much improved, although I'd say her skin was still a bit too shiny.
Well done! What is the technique here? A roughness map?
thx, Leonides, should I tweak glossiness, reflectivity or dual lobe?
@ SadRobot, thx :), well, I'm not yet satisfied with the result but the philosophy behind it consists of decreasing translucency drastically (in this case max 0.25) and enhancing skin tone and unevenness which provided maps can allow, by using diffuse overlay, dual lobe, emission and displacement channels
Now which hair is this, it looks really great, but for right above the sideburns (looks like the author skimped a little). I don't know if you could fade the cap a little to soften it?
https://www.daz3d.com/matilda-hair-for-genesis-8-females
very realistic indeed and on sales too
as for the cap, my fault, I've been using the colerain hair cap
Hi LBSTHL - You may want to check your render settings. Specifically, the Filtering --> Pixel Filtering. The default 1.5 is too high. I usually go for 0.8.
This is a huge leap over your previous renders. I think if this got slotted in to some images where I wasn't looking for CGI, it would pass until I gave it some attention, which is a high mark. When I study it, I notice the lack of wrickles/creases around the eye, but this post woldn't reveal them in the neck area. The eyes are a bit bright, but, again, this is very good.
I've been following this thread for a while trying to absorb the massive amount of information here. Thanks to everyone for their contributions!
Can I get some constructive critism on my attempt at photorealism in Daz? I haven't done anything in post here except to clean up the weird black lines that show around the hair sometimes.
There isnt a great way (certainly not one I can probably quickly and clearly explain in a forum post) because in the gen 8 standard setup there's a seam right there argh! makes painting it on anything other than a 3d painting app an absolute pita. if you are limited to a 2d app you're best bet is probably a strong limbal ring: basically the ring of flat darker color many irises have this way the seam is all one color. and then you can blur out that.
option 2 is to force gen 8 to use what is basically the gen 3 setup hide the sclera and copy its settings to eye moisture which is much easier to blend with the cornea as their uvs dont have a seam (you can steal a refraction map from any of the main gen 3 characters)
option 3 postwork. its not that hard to blur the line in post. Ive definitely done this
I highly recommend not using depth of field / F-stop blur. Or if you do, recommend you make it very subtle. Also pay close attention to the placement of your character... notice how her leg floats above the mattress... that can be a quick giveaway. Some weird things going on texture-wise on her knees... recommend you start with a Bluejaunte or ISourceTextures texture set to start out as they're both exellent quality.
Aaaaaaaand another attempt at photorealism from me, sort of attempting to to emulate those red carpet pics against backgronds with event logos.
The word of the day is definitely straaaaaaaaands. The hair is made of 2 sets of strands, strand vellus hair, strand eyebrows, strand eyelashes (well strands imported from blender where theres a bit more precision)
I think this is a good jumping off point to discuss morphs mainly because I'm quite proud of this lady, who was primarily sculped in blender. I think she looks pretty, right? But remeber that old thread about how V8 looked too manly? If anyone from there saw this character in the viewport I think they'd have a heart attack. And its made me think that there's probably economic pressure to make characters less photorealistic, and I don't mean photorealism is ugly people, because like I said I find this character very pretty indeed. But in particularly in combination with SSS whch soften features that means morphs should have features that look stronger in the viewport which doesn't have SSS, (I constantly see eyelid folds look completely nonexistent/buttery for instance and my guess is look perfectly fine in the viewport without sss) But if you create a character with all this strong detail, how much of a wory is there that the theoretical customer is going to be looking at it in the viewport and judge it based on what it looks like there. While we're at it, when sculpting/morphing characters we're looking in a viewport without SSS how do we judge what the features will actually look like when rendered?
For reference here she is in the viewport, DAZ is definitely never going to release a main figure with a nose like that I think, and not because they don't hire better sculptors than me, they definitely do. But because they already get enough whining about characters not being "pretty" enough
The promo image for the sale does not do that hair justice. Now that I've seen it in your render, I bought it immediately.
amazing j cade
Some recent work....quite a few issues, especially with teeth materials. Will make a second attempt at this image.
DAZ (Iray) / Photoshop & NIK Tools
This looks very very photo-real. On the other hand like the guy on the left looks unnatural, inconsistent... My brain says, "real photo" and then looks at the guy and says "incorrect, investigate further". The girl got a pass, but not him. His body has hair and masculaine attributes; but then his face looks like something quite feminine, "disconnected", if you will, from the rest of the body, almost as if it was a kid's set of features. But now any level of detail I saw with this specifically is not about the photo-realism, it is the asset-realism, I guess. Because it looks like a photo. But he looks like a 'something', not quite sure. If the idea is to create a puffy angelic head on a man's body, it looks "photo-real". Which is an awesome feat, this is very powerful that you can do that. It means you can warp objects but still maintain a photoreal presentation.
Now the hair on their heads....that looks flat, yet I instictively know it is a good mesh because I gave it a pass initially being more distracted by his face. So with the hair on their heads it is the presentation that looks "asset-real", but not as strong "photo-real". When I first saw this thread I would have been more forgiving, but now I am seeing the patterns. The typical non-3D artist person will see it as real. Curious if your mind sees what my mind sees there, but anyway really awesome as always. Inspirational.
So because he looks more like a bowling pin shaped soyboy than a daz chad he's unrealistic lmao - you been on daz too long my guy.
@ marble: worth the price indeed.
response of skin reflections to soft lighting
"So because he looks more like a bowling pin shaped soyboy than a daz chad he's unrealistic lmao - you been on daz too long my guy."
@lilweep - You are half-correct. It is the inconsistency between head & body that does not look asset-real. Yet, it does look photo-real. And that is what makes, as you described, the "bowling pin shaped soyboy" head, so very fascinating.
Fair comments... I readily admit my male character isn't at the level of realism as my female character. I've struggled with this for some time. No matter what morphing I do it always seems to have a weird look to it. I think part of it is in the eyes... not sure. I did reduce the fatness of his head a bit. See below. I think it's a little better, but still has that 'odd' feel to it... I think I need to add some additional variation to his face colors/marks/etc...
Oh wow, thank you SO much for pointing that out to me! I had no idea about that value and it turned out to be a total game changer. I guess my skin never looked better. Still unhappy about the hair though. Is there anything one can do about unrealistic hair other than getting a different asset? :/
Oh, and I also fooled around with the style introduced by @jeff_someone to that thread. Your art is so inspirational! :O
Added it to the attachments as both, RAW file and reworked file. I'm fooling around with filters a lot and think some of them get quite close at concealing the plastic visuals of DAZ. Long live instagram reality! :D
Would love and appreciate some feedback :)
Actually I think you've done a really great job with this. As far as the look of the various surfaces including skin, hair, fabric etc...all look amazing. However the character herself has cartoonish facial proportions...no adult human has eyes that big with a chin that small. But mostly its just the far too large eyes that alert me that the image is stylized. However I personally very much like the feeling I get in my tummy looking at an image that looks real...except that it can't be.. unless I'm going crazy kind of feeling! Anyhow, great work!
My first thoughts are that he needs a bit of definition in his face. At the moment (and I understand the lighting is intentionally washing out the detail) his face looks doll-like. Maybe a jawline or cheekbones or those lines from nose-to-mouth. After all, he has a hairy chest but on my laptop his face looks very young.
Jeff,
For me the two of them look too much alike... the male and the female... could be sharing the exact same texture save from the position of a mole or two. I think this second version looks markedly better than the first for the make. However I think that in either of these images I would have found him more convincing on his own. I also think the hair colors are too similar. These two must be siblings.
Also, the two of them are overexposed, however it is certainly forgiveable, it is the main thing that still reads slightly idealized to me. Still as always Jeff, awesooem work!
Okay. This is the second submission from you recently. If you don;t mind I'd like to draw attention to an issue I observe here that i used to observe as well with Masterstroke. It has to do with preconceieved assumptions.
I think both images are fantastic, however in my view they both have highly overexposed skin. If you are going to overexpose a skin, all of the other surfaces need to be overexposed to match such as the hair. I know your intent was to make a very fair skinned character, but I think you've overestimated it slightly here.
Did you purposefully overexpose the skin? No. You may however have assumed you needed to push the envelope on the skin color to ensure that the character didnt render as too dark. I suggest letting the engine decide these things, rather than imposing our assumptions. Let the engine do the hard stuff!
Truth is, "pale" skins like this arent as light as we think, they tend to trend toward pink after a certain point, rather than continuing to get lighter toward whiteness. Human skin will never be as white a snow flake for instance, or as white as a brand new white t-shirt. "White" skin isnt really so white afterall...just as "black" skin isnt black at all. Even pale skin like this one must absorb some amount of light.
It can be really tough to know just how "light" a skin should appear in a render. In this case I am judging from the surrounding surfaces, such as the hair and the gray background, that the skin is overexposed while these other surfaces are not. For comparison, I am going to upload a couple images of the lovely red head Cynthia Nixon from Sex and the City, to demonstrate what I am observing in terms of overexposure of the skin compared to the other surfaces in the photo.
I can also read that the skin is overexposed in terms of contrast as in the darker reddish colored hues around the eys are very dark in comparison to the other parts of face. Nature wouldn't do this, however overly aggressuve contrqast enhancement either in postwork or on the texture itesle before rendering can cause this mismatch. Whenever I see these types of contrasts I know something is off and that the image is strongly processed.
Really getting there. Eye whites are too white so they look uniform and flat. Teeth are for my eye closer to the correct value than the whites of the eyes. In fact.....dare i say....for most humans with reasonably white teeth, the teeth should be "whiter" than the scleras of the eyes. You've got these in the opposite manner here. Leave the teeth where they are, but dim the scleras significantly, while not losing the blue of the irises. Great work as usual!
Interesting study. A few observations.
1. I can see areas where there appear to be seams...disagreements between the torso and limbs. I can even see a difference between the face and the torso.Materials dont truly match
2. Generally, this skin is far oversaturated. Human beings in real life are not nearly as colorful as our mind's eye likes to imagine them. Simply lower her saturation to about half the current value, it will help a great deal. Currently the face appears lower saturation than the other parts of the body. Try to ensure that they are matching.
Thank you for the feedback. I've fixed the issue with her knees and the pose. I did start with a Bluejaunte texture but I'm not sure my method for "improving" it is worth anything. What do you do to layer on realism? I used a 3DSK product which has tons of refrence photos to pull "snips" from. Then I layered those over the bluejaunte texture in Photoshop. Now that I see the refrences to blood maps on here it makes me realize that there is more to this process than I have seen in other places. But I'm not sure exactly what it is.
Here is an update. One with DOF and one without.
her pose and expression still looks weird. hope this helps?