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I had one employer who would invariably ask me if I was feeling well if I didn't wear makeup - although she also didn't like the makeup I did wear either so...
I had a whole period in highschool where my most common makeup was red or purple eyeshadow on both upper and lower lid, minimal foundation and grey lipstick, but bad grey lipstick that was pretty low coverage (alternatively some foundation to make them less red because It took me a very long time to find a nude lipstick that wasnt darker than my lips)
These days I'm more uneven eyeliner and and a rainbow of lipstick (well pre covid anyway) I think I have at least 4 different green lipsticks. still pretty light on the foundation.
I have philosophical differences with the concept of wearing makeup to hide "flaws" but which is otherwise unnoticable. There is a certain level of societal pressure for women to be naturally poreless which I find very not fun and as such I get some of my kicks in dong the opposite.
for the images themselves, its definitely the most agressive in the green turtleneck with the longer hair. In the initial one I made the textures for, I was using different material settings, when I switched over to my newer settings it got a bit stronger.- I think I've actually tweaked the settings a bit since, but it is a bit strong still I just liked it enogh stylistically not to bother retweaking the textures. As a self portrait, even the darkest purple still feels emotionally true. I don't get enough sleep
Technical issues aside, (the base texture I edited is V8, rather than a resource) I'd feel a little weird selling myself on the internet.
At some point I might make something actually saleable, but I have a bunch of stuff I'm already procrastinating on
Indeed your work is excellent. It would be nice to find a more efficent solution for the vellus effect.
I've seen FaceGen generated diffuse textures totally exagerate how much purple and pink bruising was on the lower eyelids even when virtually absent from the source photographic materials. Of course the diffuse texture generated by FaceGen wind up much redder overall than the source photos too so I guess that's the cause of the problem.
I was told that you can also get the purple / red under the eyes via allergies which I guess can interfere with good sleep too so they sort of go hand in hand. As delicate as the eyelids rubbing them frequently will bruise them too.
Doing some testing using a point light (set to point or rectangle) with spectral rendering enabled enclosed in a room with no other lighting I get a totally black image when set to natural/ cie1964. If I switch to faithful/ cie 1931 I get the light to show up. Did I miss something or discover a bug?
I reported the same thing Sep 2019 to DAZ Customer Support but they never answered if that was a feature or a bug. Example, in iRay if you have Sun-Sky chosen but have photometric lights in your scene then ther photometric lights will seem to be greatly reduced in strength (because the light from the Sun-Sky overwhelms it I guess) or not show up a all. Which I'm not sure.
In my tests natural doesn't work fine with photometric lights. Faithful works fine. But spectral rendering tends to reduce sss a lot so I don't like it and I prefer the standard tristimulus pbr.
Wow! If it weren't some weird flaws in the chair (the rivets hanging in space), I wouldn't have believed this was CGI. The hair is utterly convincing as well.
Good info, I upped my light from 5100 to 510000 and still nothing. I guess I can throw in a ticket of my own. Maybe with enought tickets it will get resolved.
Ciao Padone, for me I find that the standard is much easier to get the SSS effect with ears etc. I started using j cade's setting as well as isidorekeeghan's from the PDF. While the SSS is dampened in spectural it seems as though I can get the figure to look like a solid soft mass. Depending on the lighting in standard the figure looks hollow almost like a beach toy. If you are not careful you can get that stone solid flat look. I still get good SSS in the ears, webbing between fingers and toes with Spectral and that solid soft look. Not sure I can properly explain how important that solid but soft look of skin should look. If I render behind my figure with the light source in front the figure can glow a bit. If I dial the SSS then you run the risk of getting a more flat look to the skin. Please understand that a realistic look involves more than just the material settings which is what I am specifically talking about here.
Here is a quick shot of Aurore using the principles of isidorekeeghan's PDF. Just using the materials as reference with work to do on maps etc.
Looking great, Siciliano1969.
I, too, have found isidorekeeghan's method to be the best.
Thanks leonides02! I was just on CGSociety.org and Artstation...... check this out:
https://cgsociety.org/c/featured/6dih/erica
Makes me want to just give up!
Where do these people get the money for Maya, Arnold, and Vray??? LOL
wow
Ian Spriggs is a genius when it comes to realism in CG renders.
Latest render... done in Blender, Cycles, Substance Painter, and of course Genesis 8 imported w/custom textures/shaders and some morphs done in Sculpt mode. Also used Multires via (at Subd level 2) using Diffeo...
i offer you my soul in exchange for a how-to, any .blend to reproduce the settings would be great too
when i played with diffeo it didn't look nearly as good as your result - again, i still offer my soul, maybe we can talk about it :)
Faustian bargains apart, @jeff_someone - you seem to have made the transition to Blender very effectively and those of us who are intimidated by Blender might have cause to try again. I do wonder, apart from the learning exercise, is it worth the effort to achieve similar results to those you can achieve in IRay? I must admit that my efforts in Cycles have never matched up to those I have produced in IRay. So yes, a quick how-to would be much apprecited.
psss ... you'll scare him off
it doesn't have to be a course how to do something in blender >.< screenshots of his material nodes would be enough for my soul :3
If you set the strands to only have 2 sides rather than three and set segment interpolation to 1 the vram hit is actually a relatively friendly 45mb and since all the strands ar so small the lower settings don't effect image quality (I swear the amount of memory needed has also improved in recent versions too although I could just be getting better at optimizing)
The skin looks great here. very soft
couple critiques: The lip transition is pretty harsh. even fully opaque lipstick has a little bit of a soft/uneven transition. as soon as you're a bit further away its wont be as noticable but for portraits this close it is (and as a general rule straight crisp lines on anything organic telegraph cg)
the teeth are generally off. TBH teeth are an absolute pain to get right, but one simple step would be to add more bump. teeth are actually pretty bumpy - much like fingernails they have vertical striations if you add some bump but keep the specular it might go a long way to making the teeth look more real
and one reaaaaaaaly minor nitpick generally if someone has eyeliner on they have mascara, so the lashes should be a nice matte black, they do look great otherwise
Obviously I cannot speak for Jeff_someone, but given that they were already doing things like making their own morphs Its very highly possible that some of that "efficient transition" is that they were already using it (theoretically they could have been using another modelling program but even then they'd have more experience with a more complex 3d software to aid transition)
So there might not be as much as a quick how-to as much as have already been using the program for years and be comfortable with it - I certainly think my Blender and Iray are of similar quality and look to each other with perhaps a slight edge to blender buuuuuuuut I think a large part of my Blender render's being as good as my Iray ones is I've been using Cycles as long as I have Iray (longer actually as Cycles predates Iray )
I will also add that the things that make Jeff's stuff stand out are pretty software agnostic things like the very naturalistic posing and shot framing (I really appreciate the posing as that is definitely not my forte) and of course their signature lofi postwork is independent of the renderer
Thanks j cade I totally agree. I must say I find the teeth even more difficult than skin. I added some refraction weight to them. They are tough to get right!
Yes, agree - if you have been using Cycles for a long time then it stands to reason that the quality will be comparable. I am still trying to overcome my dislike of the node system.
As for posing and scene composition, I'd say that they are my strengths too, having been posing for over 15 years in DAZ Studio. I'm not great at lighting (tend to follow a KISS approach which suits my style). I'm poor on the technical aspects such as materials and shaders. That's where most of my time is wasted because I don't know what those millions of combinations will likely produce so it is all trial and error. What I appreciate most about the images of @Jeff_someone is the fact that they look like old polaroids but they have great, realistic detail. That's some feat.
some fun I had instead of going to sleep at a reasonable hour
Even if you have used cycles for a long time this is not certain - creating & rendering photorealistic characters outside of software like daz3d is still mostly a privilege of professionals and the information about it is quite rare - only few share their experiences in Blender like here https://blenderartists.org/t/human-progress/1143224. In maya there is much more information about it, but who likes maya. *laughs
Diffeomorphic is a great addon, but it is far from being a plug-in-play solution. I would even be willing to buy the .blend to extract the information by myself and to spare me many hours of suffering. Actually screenshots of the material nodes should be sufficient to reproduce the results. I would be grateful in any case. My soul still stands to the offer. : )
For what its worth, a few things I've learned in my 'Daz to Blender Journey':
- For my style, Blender doesn't really offer anything that Daz Studio can't already do. Iray and Cycles are both PBR renderers and have essentially the same basic capability. The 'realism' in my renders is purely due to the scene composition, posing, lighting, and materials/shaders - not the renderer itself. I do prefer working with UDIMs, so I use Diffeo's Make UDIM materials at the outset when creating a new character. Then I've been using Substance Painter to paint the various layers. I use just Diffuse, Normal, Height, Specular Level, and Roughness. The workflow between Substance and Cycles is 'ok' but not super elegant, as there is no true integration between the programs. I've done some trials of BPainter and some other Blender plug-ins... they're pretty good in general (and it's nice to have the full integration), however, the performance is not on par with Substance. Maybe someday...
- the node system is your friend (so Marble hopefully you overcome your dislike). It's a lot easier and more structured to add / tweak your shaders using the node editor than it is using Daz's pure parameter based approach. Want you lip color a little redder -- just connect a 'Hue-Saturation' color node to your Diffuse and play around...its great and no need to modify the base texture.
- My workflow is to create a baseline character in Blender (rigged, morphs imported) and then Append it into my scenes and then attach clothing, etc, at that point. Honestly, its kind of a pain in the a** to append and bind clothing to a character after the initial set up is done. Need to be really careful about scale of your character when doing so, and dont expect to clothes to bend as accurately as they do in Daz...it just doesnt. I usually end up just parenting the cloth mesh to the main armature and then use the 'Data Transfer' modifer to copy vertex weights, etc. I know you can 'merge rigs' in Diffeo, but that's been hit or miss (I think due to my character scaling, etc).
- Speaking of scale, there's a known bug in Blender in simulating things at small scale... as such, I always scale my charatcer up 10x and do likewise for all the clothing I attach. This way it simulates nicely.
- Also at first I tried importing a million morphs into Blender...as if I was trying to replicate Daz's library into Blender... but then I realize that's kind of dumb and often caused some problems with driven/driver parameters, so now I just do the minimum morph import... JCMs, and select custom morphs for facial expressions mainly.
- I'm probably the only person in the world who really likes Blender's particle hair system. I've used Ornatrix, XGen, etc on Maya and while they're far more 'robust', they just dont have the nice, easy feel of Blenders hair tools. That said, sucks big time having to recreate eyebrows and eyelashes and 'other hair' everytime I create a new character. I've tried to create separate meshes to parent those particle elements and then use Shrinkwrap so I can re-use them from character to charcter... it 'works', but it has funky results because the Shrinkwrap wraps is a little hard to predict and isnt always precise. So, in the end i just remake them every time. Major kudos and thanks to Cinus for his free hair converter -- its amazing, easy to use and the results are great. I mainly just tweak it from there...
Anyhow, would be happy to post my .blend file, but not sure it'd be informative as the textures are separate and the file itself is 700+MB.
Jeff
Thank you Jeff for taking the time to answer me detailed and sharing your experiences - it's very valuable! I have read everything carefully and find your tips helpful. Did I understand correctly that you don't use textures from Daz and create your own from scratch? That would be a real test of patience for me.
I would still be very pleased to take a look at your .blend, unpleasant to ask you for such an effort. Especially the materials/shaders for eyes/skin are interesting for me - if it's too impractical to post the .blend, it would be great to see screenshots of your nodes and maybe one of your diffuse maps to see the coloring. That should be enough to understand it. Thank you very much!
For skinning clothes, have a look at "voxel heat diffuse skinning" on Blendermarket - you might find it useful.
wow, this is amazing!