Blender-anyone imported a Daz character and used its textures to make a principled bdsf skin?
unused account - glossedsfm
Posts: 329
Hi,
I was wondering if anyone has taken a G8 or even a G3 character and a set of high quality Daz textures (diffuse, normal, bump and spec) into Blender and managed to make a good looking principled bdsf skin texture with it? I took the textures from the product below because its the best quality ones i have, plus i hear that Raiya makes good textures anyways and i used those on a G8F character I imported into Blender. However i'm having a hard time getting it to look good. Probably cause i dont know what settings to use for the bump and normals. I do also have the G8F skin builder so if needed i could use that to make the Leony textures a little more detailed by adding in pores or something. I also included a blender render of the character i've been working on. It was my first time making a principled shader so i was pretty much just adjusting stuff and eyeballing the appearance. But couldnt get it quite right cause wasnt sure what settings to tweak to get it to look right.
https://www.daz3d.com/leony-hd-for-victoria-8
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I am using Blender 2.80 and Cycles. The node setup attached uses a diffuse, specular, and bump maps only. There is a normal map as well, but using both bump and normal seems overkill to me in most situations. There are surely other ways to do this.
You tend to have to turn the bump height (distance) right down compared to Daz Studio. I do not to like shiny skin, unless the character is really meant to be wet or oily. Your lighting will be crucial as to how good or bad things look. You could make a really good material set up look horrible with bad lighting. The test render attached shows the output from the node setup with an HDRI only. Sorry about the spooky eyes and lack of hair, I might get round to doing them later in which case I will post another test. Only 128 samples used.
If the the skin textures where done well the bump and normal maps will be for different details. Normals usually for deeper creases and folds and bumps for finer details like pores and 'beauty marks'.
I think the character I am using doesn't have good normal maps, and it is not alone. You use bump and normal together, as shown in the attached. The render shows the effect, such as it is, with lighting improved a bit.
From what i've been told normal and bump serve different purposes. Normal is for angle and bump is for depth or maybe it was the other way around. Anyways i did find some principled bdsf examples that used both and thats the setup i went with. I just dont know what values to plug in for each one. I was just taking a closer look at the values just now and noticed that my textures reverted back to an old set that i used before and those were not as detailed as the RYLeony ones. I've changed them back to the Leony textures and it looks a little better but i might be able to get it better if i tweak the values. I redid the render and its in the pic below along with the pic of my principledbdsf setup. I also just now included the texture coordinates just like you have in yours, though i didnt notice any difference. I only changed the face and lips and nothing else so ignore the lighter color of the ears and neck area which is still the old maps. It's just a quick 5min render so number of samples i used is 256.
Looks like you have got something to work with there. The face now looks better than the ears and neck to my eyes. Now it's really only a matter of experimenting to get the result to look the way you want it.
For example, you may want to use a bit of subsurface scattering, especially if there is an SSS map for the model that you can plug in. Your values for strength and distance on the Bump Map node are fairly low - they will give you a smooth finish.
Using the texture coordinates node is just a (good?) habit for me. You're right that it may not matter here. It may only be specifying the default behavior. (Some people would routinely stick a vector mapping node in immediately to the right of it, but since I would not have changed the defaults it seems superfluous here too.)
The manual page for the Principled BSDF node is here if anyone is interested - https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/nodes/types/shaders/principled.html
I have tweaked my effort again. I think the result is better than before.
You may want to try the blender plugin. It does a good job converting materials. It also converts skins quite fine.
http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/
here some tests I did with the daz standard characters
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/123/material-tests
Do you have a pic of one the torso nodes that the plugin put into Blender? i tried that plugin a few months ago but i couldnt get it to work. But if i can see how it set up a node in Blender then i can just copy what is on your screenshot and just recreate the node setup on my model. It doesnt have to be the nodes for every single part of the model. Just one of the main ones like the torso or legs.
I'd strongly advice you to install the plugin. Since different skins get different conversions. This way you can see how the DAZ subsurface and translucency get converted into the Principled shader. Also below are some tests I did myself some time ago, just in case they may be useful. The plugin does it all anyway so it's easier to just use it. But I also understand who needs to get the whys and hows ..
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/111/better-translucency-also-helps-the-g8f
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/112/better-translucency-part-2-also-mixing
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/115/better-translucency-part-3-scatter-only
also here is some advice to match specularity
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/134/ultimate-specularity-matching-fresnel
Here's an example of the node setup that Thomas Larsson's Import Daz plugin generates automatically, and a Cycles render (128 samples) to show the results compared with the one I offered earlier. The nodes are for the face material but it's the same for all the skin areas, with different image maps of course.
The result is pretty good, though the eyes look a bit flat and dead. There are some curiosities in the node setup. The plugin makes no use of the spec map that is used in the Daz Studio scene, which is a minus point I think. The Multiply node between the diffuse map and the Principled BSDF looks to be having no effect, as the factor is 1 meaning the white color has no input, so why bother with it. I suspect that with a Clearcoat value of 0.01 and Clearcoat Roughness of 0.778 that the effect of having a clearcoat is barely detectable at all. The IOR value seems pretty high for a coating on skin; that is probably down to attempting a generic solution to cover many materials.
Anyway, it's a decent starting point. One thing to note is that if you are using this plugin with Blender 2.80 Beta you will need to use the development version, as the 1.3.1 stable version throws an ugly error when you try to enable it in Blender, which has been fixed in the development version but you are on the 'bleeding edge'.
Thank you,
I think i'll alter it a bit to add some translucency and subsurface. With the Daz eyes i do notice that they look different when compared to the rest of the body. Because of how its mesh is structured i had a hard time setting up a principled shader for the eyes that looked good. The eyes you see in my pics are actually non-daz eyes with its own textures that i just put in place of the daz eyes and then weight painted to the Daz eye armature...then i just deleted the old daz eyes.
Hi there. Not sure how much experience you have with Blender, but I wouldnt use the princpal shader for a skin shader at all as there is to little to control over. I personally would build off from the subsurface shader and combine it with the gloss shader and using a color ramp or fresnel node to control the back lit if you are familiar in combining different nodes together. If you are new to Blender then the principal shader is probably the best way to go then if you want fast results. Here some examples of my own shader on my OCs.
mal3Imagery, funny thing is i tried making a skin shader which i think was kinda like that and i showed it to some Blender users and they were all "but everyone is using principled shaders now".
Please be sure to convert everything to iray uber shader before exporting. Since the plugin doesn't handle the whole set of the iray shaders with the same quality. It is much better specialized converting the iray uber shader.
Also, in the import options, select "BSDF" for opaque materials and "Guess" for refractive materials. BSDF will give you a better conversion of iray materials. This is because iray can generate both pbr and non-pbr (aka specular) materials, while the principled shader can only generate pbr materials. Standard BSDF nodes can also generate both pbr and specular materials so they match better with iray.
The "Guess" option for refractive materials is your best option to match eyes and thin glass in general.
That said, if you find any odd behaviour please let me know it and I'll see what I can do to help.
@Padone i just wanted to bring this topic back up for a quick question. I'm doing a different character but this one has a tanline. Does that plugin automatically convert tanlines over too? or will i have to manually set them up in Blender using the tanline masks from the runtime/textures folders?
The plugin has basic support for LIE if this is what you're asking. I guess you just have to try it and see what happens .. Please let me know if there's any problem so we can report it to Thomas.
Yes the tanlines did mention something about LIE presets and i believe i used them to get my tanlines. I'm going to give the addon one last try because i just converted another Daz characters textures in Blender and with a lot of mix-matched pieces it was a bit tedious and a pita.
A couple of last questions though. Does it convert eyeballs and eyelashes fine? it does clothes too right? i guess a better question would be is there anything that the addon cant do?
This past month i've been messing around with the Diffeomorphic and this is the way the model looks.
First one is with the Blender import options set to principled, second one is with them set to bdsf. I'm guessing that i would need to tweak the SSS settings? The textures i used are from BlueJaunte's Sahel model with a tanning effect added using Skin Builder 8. But i think when i did some tests using unaltered Sahel textures it looked pretty similar to the pics with the coloring above the lips but just a little lighter/untanned of course. I've also done some tests using G8 and V8 textures and those came out looking OK.
Any thoughts or tips? I'm not very good with setting Blender SSS values so in the meantime i'm going to look up some tutorials on how to do that. I'm also going to try looking up different node setups similar to the ones @mal3Imagery was talking about. I messed with one of those before before switching to the principled but I would like to use the Daz textures that i have instead of coming up with a generic looking skin. So i guess i need a node setup that uses the Sahel Diffuse/Bump/Normal/SSS/Roughness maps which is for the head and also one for just Diff/Bump/Normal/Roughness for the rest of the body.
https://i.imgur.com/fCJSTRP.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/jzy4ujC.jpg
There are some materials that the plugin can't do fine and you have to tweak them yourself. All the common materials in the G1-G8 basic characters and outfits packages seem to match fine. While some characters using advanced materials may not be fine. This happens for Victoria 8 for example, using diffuse overlay, dual lobe specualr and choromatic sss that are all not documented features in the daz uber shader documentation.
In the latest updates of the development version plugin Thomas was able to add support for diffuse overlay and dual lobe specular but the chromatic sss stills not supported.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import-daz/issues/316/no-eyebrows-on-victoria-8
I see, i might just do the character skins manually but use the plugin to convert clothing which has been a HUGE time saver for me. Also i still like the utility that diffeomorphic has with sorting rigs and stuff. So next up is for me to figure out how to get Daz morphs into Blender 2.79 using the diffeo plugin.
Please share the node :D