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Just found this thread :) On the topic of realism ,here's a quick 5 minute ditry setup I did with mikey 8 with all his default textures using my updated shader I usually use in my own renders in Blender. I still believe you can still get believable renders with 4k textures anyways. 8k is over kill imho. Head shapes does help out though, but want to see if I can get a default daz character to look real. I have a raw and post of the two.
Edit: All textures are still the same. I did another render with tweaked shader again, less shallow scattering. Mikey became slighty tan now. Less shiney. Added hair particle stubble / eyelashes / eyebrows / a lot of peach fuzz.
double post
@mal3Imagery that looks great :)
I made gif comparisons between 4k/8k based on j cade's suggestion (using original unedited textures). sorry about the huge filesizes, but attachments dont work for gif for some reason.
Close:
medium:
far:
It seems like the normal map is the most affected when downscaling. If you look at the nose in the close up, there's a definite loss of detail when downscaling to 4k. If you think about it, it's basically the same as taking a geometry and making it half resolution. The specularity is also different because of the normal map.
Downscaling the albedo map only seems to make a difference when close up.
On far distances, the differences are overall less noticable.
Here's the blender file, here's the textures. and here's the hdri
some weird things:
1. some pixellation coming from the normal map . I am using 1 px gaussian blur.
2. maybe its just me, but the normal map seems to be "detatched" from the rest of the face. I don't know if this can be fixed by displacing instead of normal mapping. (I don't know how to use the normal map to displace. plugging into displacement node's normal input makes it look very different)
Hot damn! I don't supposed you'd care to sell your shader.....
Sure although it will come with some (a mountain) notes
1) 100% sss works better with spectral, theres less red glow and you can use slightly higher values for things like scattering distance which is good since values below .01 tend to make things go wierd (you can get by pretty well with the SSS in the 90% range not using spectral, I should probably take some time to investigate how much of a difference it really makes in the end)
2) miniscule values mean tiny changes can make things look completely different. For instance I never set scattering distance outside a range of .01 to .025. Tiny tweaks to Transmitted and SSS color can also vastly change the look of the skin (this is actually pretty useful if the texture you're using is a bit to red or what have you you can tweak it away from that, but you can also easily turn skin green if you're not careful)
3) this preset is designed primarily to work with your diffuse texture set in translucency color. since you're at 100% sss the diffuse channel is completely ignored and how translucency textures get set up has a way to much variance to try to make a shader that works consistently (does anyone know of a script that copies diffuse textures over to translucency? doing it manually is getting tedious)
4) The preset should work on darker skin too. Although its less fiddly if you turn the translucency all the way down to 98% (this isnt a caveat, I'm just pretty proud of this and bragging slightly)
I definitely have some settings that go against some of the suggestions you'll see in the forums (probably in this thread). Transmitted color is nigh white, and scattering direction is forwards but I will defend these
Transmitted color is one of the reasons skin goes orange. It basically (not really but sort of) gets multiplied with the translucency color, so things can go dark very easily, It doesn't have to be off white, but, in my expiriments, when strongly lit from behind transmitted measurement distance (henceforth TMD) values of greater than .5 lead to light shining all the way through the figure (bad and unrealistic) and given how TMD and Transmitted Color (TC) relate (TMD tells Iray at what depth things are the TC), to compensate for this you need to set TC twice as close to white. And if, like me, you set TMD in the .25-.3 range all of a sudden TC needs to be pretty close to white indeed
for reference, on the relation of TMD and TC one of these spheres has a TMD of 6 the other .25 with the only other adjustment being lightening the TC. Can you tell which is which?
forwards vs back scattering: I find that in strong lighting front scattering looks infinitely better. Front scattering softens up the shadows in a relatively natural way whereas back scattering looks super cg and crunchy. Irays shadow terminator problems are bad enough without help
compare SSS direction .30 :)
SSS direction -.30 :(
Its not just me, right?
(obviously this is an unrealistic test example to demonstrate exactly what i'm talking about, but it is absolutely noticable in examples with strong lighting or HDRI with direct sunlight. Its also something I've definitely observed in my tests shining a flashlight at my face)
And because its way easier to share a preset than settings, heres the shader preset, just select the surfaces you want and click apply it will only effect translucency and volume and leave your textures alone (theres even a thumbnail because every now and then I go through and render thumbnails of my presets. Thumbnails for my 10 or so skin presets is nothing on rendering thumbnails for all the HDRI from HDRI Haven or my presets for the daz characters to click their makeup onto any other character... why put them on the diffuse overlay but create a preset that also reaplies the base texture too...why daz)
Thank you! that is illuminating. the biggest difference definitely looks like how the normal effects the specularity
I just cheat and add some tiling bump (or in Iray metalic flakes)
of couse higher resolution maps vs adding in some tiling overlays has the distinct advantage of not being nearly as uniform, which definitely matters as you get closer
But yeah this definitely makes a good case that higher resolution normals might be worth it
My best guess would be to use vector displacement?
I won't pretend to understand any of the discussion, but I will happily swoop in and gobble up one of my favorite artist's settings. Heck yeah!
(Thank you bunches, j cade! <3 )
I'm hard pressed to say which is better. They are all good but really I can't say which is best since Mikey is not real. If he's based on John Travolta v.1 is the way I'm most used to seeing him. I second Leonides02 about the shader.
Awesome thanks. I can see if my computer & MSI Radeon RTX 570 8GB can handle your blend file.
I tried your preset & it turned skin the prettiest light blue (like Hindu Goddess Kali) but I think it was because I was using Sun & Sky.
Thank you for sharing, @j_cade!
Is this only for characters without a true SSS map for translucency?
It turned my gal very, very pale and you could see her veins very clearly, LOL.
What texture were you using and was it from gen3? as mentioned the shader works best if you plop the diffuse textures into translucency as there's a lot of variation in how translucency textures are set up (and since it is 100%sss the diffuse slot is completely igored). Most gen 3 textures will turn blue because they have light, desaturated translucency textures, which honestly wont work with any shader settings with sufficiently high translucency
I probably should have bolded note 3
Basically provided you have a good shader setup you shouldn't need seperate diffuse and translucency maps: see those high res head scans for instance. Seperate translucency maps (especially the gen 3 style) are a bit of a hold over from pre chromatic SSS days when we were trying to approximate a 3-layer skin shader
Some gen 8 translucency maps will work, if they're sufficiently similar to the diffuse.
Also think about those desaturated translucency maps logically. they're desaturated, but then you slap on a wash of color by setting the translucency color red. all you're doing is losing color variation.
This is interesting, j cade.
Yes, I am using the Victoria 7 translucency map. Do you mean we should have the veins, discoloration, and everything else 'under' the skin right on the diffuse map?
OK, I checked & I'm using the Dain 8 surface settings with include a baby blue on both the glossy color & top coat color. So I manually changed the SSS direction to Forward 0.3 like you did instead and it's fine.
I have a similar problem, in my case I used the iole HD for kala for G8 maps and the results are far from satisfactory to me, I've read the whole conversations and I'm still confused because I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
I only plopped the diffuse textures into translucency color as you said to the face, lips and ears to get a comparison (the rest of the body uses their translucency maps) and I can only get a darker and more orange skin, maybe the original diffuse maps are dark and very orange and the TC multiplied that? :/
(spectral rendering set to faithful cie1964 / burn highlights 0 / crush blacks 0.1 and gamma 3.00, saturation into a default value, also I used a single spotlight with a very high lumen value like 200000.0)
Also, here is the custom shader I was using, with your preset and without maps
Sergoyeles...
Also that damned, and apparently irresolvable seam with Spectral rendering. On your render it can be seen at the arms.
I've read a lot about this problem in the past and after trying a lot of things, all I've got is a headache
Have you noticed if you have spectral off and then set SSS color value to max it messes it up,
but if you dial it down just a bit it works fine?
sometimes i settle with this instead of turning on spectral. spectral seems to cause issues with seams sometimes.
your preset is awesome, thanks a lot, but applying your preset still doesnt make emily lighter, this is what i got (diffuse and transluency are set to diffuse map)
did you have some kind of super bright lights shining on her?
I never really understood SSS anisotropy. To me it just looks like - makes it more diffuse and + makes it more translucent, lol. But I agree i prefer +
all in all I prefer exporting models to blender lol. It just eliminates so much guesswork.
sigh
davidtriune, do you have an EXR of that render you can post? I wonder if you're encountering a color space issue.
thats a great idea
Here is another render with ACES tonemapping, which brightens everything up
It looks a lot better. but i feel like we can dial down the saturation somehow .
Here is my old method by comparison
That looks good! Are you able to apply OpenColorIO in Photoshop?
When I combine the Blender filmic space and OCIO in Photoshop I notice my renders aren't orange anymore.
i dont have photoshop :(
I just tonemap with either ACES in Nuke or Filmic in Blender.
Yep! Well theoretically with a dedicated skin shader you could possibly do something fancier, where the veins specifically scatter a different ammount or hey, you could have them modeled so when you bend the hand back the're more pronounced, but in Iray you can't mix volumes the way you can mix sss shaders in engines like cycles so all you're doing is blending the 2 textures on the surface anyway + introducing a bunch of diffuse which is far more inaccurate than any theoretical drawback of veins on the surface (and to reiterate they were always on the surface anyway)
I dont have Iole, so I can't look specifically, but I will say when running the shader preset through the characters I did have while making it the 2 characters I had by far the most issues with were Stephanie and Olympia, both of whom share a similar complection to what it looks like Iole has, my guess is they're a bit more saturated, and something about that is tweaking with my shader setup. certainly in general for gen 8 the diffuse texture is a bit darker than the translucency so swaping them in is going to darken things a bit
My lighting setup for setting up skin is as neutral as I can get it. Generally when I'm tweaking for a skin I'll set it up like this and then try and tweak things so the character rendered matches the color of the texture as closely as possible
The wierd glow is my favorite bug! Thats why I like spectral you can push the settings without things going completely skrewy... on the other hand that seam bug is not my favorite bug.
No arguments there, Skin is so much easier, hair takes way less memory the bumpmapping is so inexplicably better Im actually confused, unfortuunately I havent found a good way around manually loading scads of textures and have yet to find a good way to incorporate it into my workflow of "set up all the lights hair material and then decide I want to just tweak the pose a tad oop now I'm changing the pose entirely and using different clothes"
oh and the ability to make glass still actually refract but not cast shadows I really miss that one, It makes eyes sooo much easier
Oh are you talking about the second image? Sorry I should be more clear. I am comparing j cade's shader vs my old shader with brightened diffuse map as the translucency map.
Try Affinity Photo , it has 90 day free trial and its $30 now... It's a great photoshop alternative.
Posted on wrong page - oops
I've got some hair for critique (also clothes). Same hair with different lighting. Could definitely use some critique as there's still something bothering me but I can't pinpoint precisely what it is.
Also fun fact between the hair and displacement on the shirt I am using more memory on geometry than textures
I dont think we spend enough time talking about clothes in this thread, I think generally my skin looks consistently more photoreal than my clothes (and I don't really mean that as a complement to my skin)
She looks good, j cade, and he hair is excellent. My first impression is that her lips are too glossy...?
Well they both look good but the hair I don't like the drape although I know some people actually don't need hair spray to make their hair do that. The top looks like she's opened the fridge. Nothing wrong with that. I think the shirt looks good and realistic in both but like the bottom one better. The hair is the weak point but better than typical.