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I have to stop twiddling with things over and over or I'll never get around to posting anything, haha. Anyways, I think these came out all right...
Those look really good, 8eos8. What method did you use?
Beautiful renders! Yes, what methods did you use and lighting?
How do yo do those eyes 8eos8? Looks very good.
I did this one last night. All textures are my own creation.
Very nice!
Back to iray. Below there's a little test showing scattering vs transmission. I did it to show why scattering can't be used instead of transmission or vice versa, since I see some "freedom" around on using and/or not using them. They are different physics effects and you need both of them to properly simulate volumetric skins. The shoulder seam is because I only changed the arm material for demonstration purpose. The subject is a Victoria 8 hand with a strong backlight. Scene included.
Scatter.
Transmit.
There's also my personal suggestion for a realistic skin. I agree for a high level translucency but I'd use the same color for scatter and transmit that's more pbr correct. This seems to work fine for the main skin features that are soft reaction to overexposure and soft shadows due to scattering, plus translucency due to transmission. Then again I'm more on the tech side so this is just a basic suggestion that I hope may be useful.
As for spectral rendering use faithful and avoid natural that doesn't work with photometric lights. I don't seem to be able to reproduce the spectral texture seams issue with these settings so may be this is fixed too. Personally I'd avoid spectral rendering though since it seems to strongly limit the translucency effect. Below you can see the standard rgb vs faithful spectral with the same skin settings.
edit. As for using the burn highlights or not in tone mapping, it depends if you want to simulate the human eyes perception or a real camera. For a real camera burn highlights and crash blacks are needed so it's up to you.
Standard RGB.
Faithful Spectral.
edit. Added picture labels. The included scene can be used to verify the results, it's Victoria 8 with the free basic wear.
@Padone, I can't see the differences in the settings for the two versions of the render. The results are certainly interesting.
It is RGB vs. Spectral Rendering. I'm just not sure which is which. The material settings are the same.
Ngl I have currently decamped to blender. Experimenting with the diffeomorphic plugin more and I realized my total time to setup and render had *already* hit pretty much equal. This is probably pretty specific to me, I *really* like strand based hairs, and anything other than short sbh in iray has a tendency to make my computer seize up. The extra setup time in cycles, gets balanced out by the much faster setup and render time for hair. If the memory efficiency of iray hair improves I will probably be back. (it is worth noting that the next version of iray that will be added to ds includes a proper strand primative so potentially this will actually happen pretty soon)
Even testing those vellus hairs I posted was somewhat painful
even more painful was testing this:
a much softer scalp transition yay! I've actually tweaked some things in the shader mixer adding some transparency to just the very roots (i also added some other things like adding a texture map to the bias and gain so you can make it a more jagged transition) the difficulty is actually previewing and testing these things. the load time to *start* rendering is 2+ minutes for aux viewport and 4+ for a render. having enough detail in the aux viewport to actually get useful visual feedback also not quick
also would this render look better with a more accurate numer of hair strands? a lower segment interpolation length? very much yes to both. are the odds of doing either, let alone both, falling to cpu or just straight up freezing my computer very very high? yes. very yes. (in testing this shader ive done 5+ manual restarts If i tried to continue id just end up pulling out my own hair)
I quite like it but my takeaway was "this is pretty good... NEVER AGAIN"
Looks great for someone with oil on their face.
Most of the time, we don't look like that.
Excellent render, j cade! You are quite a virtuoso when it comes to DAZ's SBH. But, yeah, I can only imagine how painful that must have been!!!
Are her eyebrows SBH, as well?
I like SBH but the thing i hate about it is that hair strands dont necessarily follow the style curve lines that you want them to. Hair inbetween style curves will interpolate their style between adjacent style curves and this basically gives them a mind of their own.
Her eyebrows are one of the daz character mesh eyebrows. I think theyre CJ8s.That is one thing I do love about genesis 8 Its esy to take one character add the brows of another and the makeup of a 3rd.
I have the definite advantage with SBH that I bought Garibaldi pretty much when it first came out back in 2013, so its less virtuosity in my mind and more a seven year head start on most of the people here. Add to that I also use Particle hair in blender and have watched just about every blender hair tutorial in existence- while enough of the information isnt applicable that I can't fuly recomend it as a method to learn hair in DS I have ended up adapting quite a few of the techniques.
If SBH gets more memory efficient I really want to buckle down and create a proper tutorial for it, but a tutorial that doesnt include any rendering doesn't really work.
Speaking of knowlege. A while back I acually figured out a workaround for this! paint a map with white dots at every vertex point (where the curve guides emit from) then plug this map into clump density. now the clump guides only spawn from right next to the curve guides so they don't get interpolated into areas you don't want them (sadly still doesnt fix long hair clumping through the head)
I love this thread! Great info!
Great one, Siciliano!!!! Would love to see a full render.
Thanks Leonides02! Here is a bit more of her...fixed her hair a bit. Iray with my skin shader...I'm done messing with them. LOL
And her is the other half of her.
Gonna go ahead and just rename this to the "Make me feel insecure about my renders thread". Really, so many super impressive images.
Thats amazing! Would you mind sharing some pointers?
I'd love to take a look at your shader. Are you using Chromatic? Quite impressive!
oh iray... I wish I knew how to quit you.
a test render thus why its tiny and the bg is still a bit noisy... thankfully blenders compositor make it rreally easy to just denoise parts of an image, so if I brave rendering it full size i don't have to worry about trying to wait until that clears up
seriously even with the tribulations I'm still firmly in camp "the best way to improve yr realism is strand based hair" this isnt even the best angle to show it off. Its styled so that both hands are interacting with it
though of course the hair geometry takes up more gpu memory than all the textures combined (I am of course being very efficient with textures, that entire background uses a grand total of 1 texture and for the legs I removed all but the diffuse/sss texture since theyre not visible anyway)
I suppose my other tip would be "semi abstracted backgrounds are your friend" the more that's out of focus the more you don't have to get perfect and you can focus on the bits... in focus and work on getting them the best you can. Rather than trying to get everything looking perfect and running out of energy halfway through. It looks like she's in some sort of loungy room non? It's actually a cylinder some instanced spheres (those are the lights) and a really hastily made prop in blender (the headed curtain I made it in less than 10 minutes)
Thank you,
I use references of real people and I try to find one with similar skin tone. I then try to replicate the lighting environment to test my skin shadows and how it looks in similar lighting. Here is what I am trying to accomplish:
Replicate the softness of skin. The human body is soft but a dense mass. Shadows are a tell-tale sign as to whether something is soft or a cement statue. Shadows on skin tend to be lighter with softer edges even in harsh lighting with a strong contrast between light and shadows.
Don't overdue the SSS. Avoid too much of the glowing ears, noses, fingers and toes. SSS is more subtle except in very strong lighting conditions.
Always try to use real photo references and not renders. The best way to determine if something looks right is to put it up against the real thing.
Everything is important! Eyes are important, skin material is important, good bump/normal/displacement/HD morphs are important. Skin textures, hair....posing etc.
I do my own foot morphs whenever you have to show feet in an image. Hands are even more important the feet. Facial gestures are important.
Try to find the best character and texture artists and also experiment on your own. Today, we have much better textures sets and lots of talent here at DAZ.
I hope this helps.
Thanks Leonides02,
Here is what I finally landed on for skin shaders after trying a whole bunch of different variations:
I use these settings for all figures. The only thing I really have to tweak is the transmission color. Depending on how light a figures diffuse map is will determine if I use a lighter or darker transmission color. I use RGB not Spectral Rendering. I find I have to really crank up the settings with Spectral Rendering and I still don't get that nice soft skin look in some cases with it. I stick to RGB...works best for me.
Thanks Leonides02,
Here is what I finally landed on for skin shaders after trying a whole bunch of different variations:
I use these settings for all figures. The only thing I really have to tweak is the transmission color. Depending on how light a figures diffuse map is will determine if I use a lighter or darker transmission color. I use RGB not Spectral Rendering. I find I have to really crank up the settings with Spectral Rendering and I still don't get that nice soft skin look in some cases with it. I stick to RGB...works best for me.
Using the above settings here is my 60's stewardess (flight attendant). What stands out is the too thin paper mache scarf. She is not perfect and still CG but it works for me.
I do like your renderings very much and 100% agree with your advices. I'd stress though that testing your sss settings with strong light conditions is the way to make them pbr compliant, that is, make them work in any light setup.
As for your settings here's a couple of notes, just from the tech side that may help.
1) Scatter and transmit intensity doesn't make sense with chromatic sss. It's intended for mono sss where the reflectance tint is multiplied with the diffuse color to modulate the sss tint, tipically to subtract some reddish. In your case you also use a white reflectance tint so using scatter only is the way to go with chromatic sss and there shouldn't be any difference.
2) Using a 0.6 dual lobe weight doesn't make much sense either. Dual lobe is intended to replace the standard specularity to better simulate skins. Mixing it with the standard specularity adds a unneccesary and probably "unrealistic" third layer. You may try with 100% weight and 0.6 reflectivity instead that may produce the same effect.
3) Your scattering distance is somewhat low that's why you need to pump it up with a 0.3 direction. This makes the scattering stronger but less soft. I'd advice to use a zero direction and a higher distance that's more "realistic" in terms of simulation.
can you just release your own perfect iray skin shader.
Good info Padone, I will give the advice a try and see I come up with.