Black Is Beautiful II

Hylas

During the recent sales I purchased three black female characters. Hope to get some renders out soon, will post them here!

Rather disappointed in Shangrila by Mousso. Her morph is lovely but her skin lacks depth and is waaaay to yellow and orange. Even worse is that her face has a different tone than the rest of her body, so when I tried to balance out her complexion by adding blue to her skin, either her body or her face were always not quite right. I just requested a refund.

This is only my 2nd Mousso character. The first one (an Asian character) has great skin, so I'm not sure what happened here. Or perhaps it's just me... the promos look alright. But then again, I never had problems like this with previous black characters.

I'm much happier with Darcy 8 and Aniyah for Darcy 8. Face morph and skin are great for both characters, especially Aniyah. I don't particularly love their body morphs - both characters are very skinny - but it's not hard to dial in some curves.

Gordig

Hylas said:

Rather disappointed in Shangrila by Mousso. Her morph is lovely but her skin lacks depth and is waaaay to yellow and orange. Even worse is that her face has a different tone than the rest of her body, so when I tried to balance out her complexion by adding blue to her skin, either her body or her face were always not quite right. I just requested a refund.

Not mentioning any names, but there are some PAs here who probably shouldn't be creating black characters.

ZamuelNow

Slightly adding onto this, I highly respect the vendors who tell you what light set they use or render multiple examples. In an interesting reverse from Hylas, I remember when I bought a character due to one of the vendor's forum renders after ignoring the store renders (which were heavily washed out).

vwrangler

Hylas said:

 

Rather disappointed in Shangrila by Mousso. Her morph is lovely but her skin lacks depth and is waaaay to yellow and orange. Even worse is that her face has a different tone than the rest of her body, so when I tried to balance out her complexion by adding blue to her skin, either her body or her face were always not quite right. I just requested a refund.

Shangrila's main thing is that she's an overpaint of an FWSA Skinvent texture, and once you do that, it's hard to get detail back into the diffuse. She's also got a truly odd SSS layer; it's much darker than her diffuse, and I'm pretty sure that skin doesn't quite work that way.

Her face is different, yes. It's set in from a different source than the rest of Skinvent, and then color matched, and it's hard to do that well. I do think her default shader made that much stronger than it is; A8L8 seems to mute it somewhat. Somewhat.

I did wind up editing her hands and feet, because they were just weird. The lines on her palm had been drawn back in to be darker than the surrounding skin, which is good ... but they were perpendicular to where they should have been, which was truly weird.

The yellowness that you saw was primarily due to her shader, rather than her texture. I shifted her to a different shader model with Altern8 for Lee 8 (A8L8), which both brought out what little detail she had, and undid the yellowness. I also tweaked that shader setting pretty hard to reduce her translucency weight, because A8L8 is meant for a lighter-skinned character; a translucency weight of .65 for a darker skinned character is kind of ridiculous. And then I gave her different translucency maps. I probably wouldn't have done any of that if I'd looked at her in the first 30 days I had her, but, well ... such is life. Anyway, she's workable now, I think.

 

Hylas

So Shangrila's skin really has issues, good to know that I wasn't seeing things. I feel vindicated. Pity, her morph is really nice!

Hylas

Here's a really quick one...

Face: 66% Darcy 8, 33% Mei Lin 7, plus a few tweaks
Skin: Darcy 8 with lowered translucency

 

Hey, if somebody could do me a favour and do a quick render of Laverne, but with Darcy 8 as a base instead of Monique 8, I'd sure appreciate it!

sunnyjei

vwrangler said:

One Iray HDR light set that I use frequently for test renders is a freebie set by AgentUnawares: https://www.deviantart.com/agentunawares/art/Portrait-Light-Set-01-716649600

The light set has a specific render setting for dark skin. He states that the set is for use in portraits, but it works pretty well for full-length as well.

And as a side note, Daz seems to have changed something about how the forums work, with the recent unpleasantness and other issues, I guess. What I used to do -- copy the URL of the file attachment's thumbnail and delete the "thumbnail" text to get the full URL to the main image -- doesn't work any more. I had to put the example into the Daz gallery.

Anyway, an example of how the AgentUnawares set can look. Note that there is a wall, painted a scratchy semi-gloss black, behind the character, which acts partly as a reflector. If there were no wall, the background would be either nonexistent, if the HDR dome were turned off, or black if it's on. In this case, it's on but you can't see it anyway thanks to the wall.

EDIT: The texture is Tyrone for Darius 8. I think the settings are from Altern8 for Lee 8 -- it's been a while -- but they're definitely not his default setting.

 

 

@vwrangler

what a great looking character :) What hair is that? I never get the hair to look that good.

barbult

Hylas said:

Hey, if somebody could do me a favour and do a quick render of Laverne, but with Darcy 8 as a base instead of Monique 8, I'd sure appreciate it!

Here (front and profile) is Laverne 100% with Darcy instead of Monique. I dialed Darcy at the same percentages that Monique was in Laverne (body 70% head 75%). Her ear looks a little misshapen, but otherwise, she looks nice. I didn't fix poke through on the clothing.I wanted to let if fit as closely to her shape as possible.

Hylas

barbult said:

Hylas said:

Hey, if somebody could do me a favour and do a quick render of Laverne, but with Darcy 8 as a base instead of Monique 8, I'd sure appreciate it!

Here (front and profile) is Laverne 100% with Darcy instead of Monique. I dialed Darcy at the same percentages that Monique was in Laverne (body 70% head 75%). Her ear looks a little misshapen, but otherwise, she looks nice. I didn't fix poke through on the clothing.I wanted to let if fit as closely to her shape as possible.

That was quick, thank you!

vwrangler

sunnyjei said:

@vwrangler

what a great looking character :) What hair is that? I never get the hair to look that good.

Thanks!

It's Terran Hair. Included in the Darius 8 pro bundle.

sunnyjei

vwrangler said:

sunnyjei said:

@vwrangler

what a great looking character :) What hair is that? I never get the hair to look that good.

Thanks!

It's Terran Hair. Included in the Darius 8 pro bundle.

I knew it! What secret magic are you doing over there to get the curls looking so nice? I have that hair and it has never come out looking so nice in renders

emotionaldreams2

sunnyjei said:

vwrangler said:

One Iray HDR light set that I use frequently for test renders is a freebie set by AgentUnawares: https://www.deviantart.com/agentunawares/art/Portrait-Light-Set-01-716649600

The light set has a specific render setting for dark skin. He states that the set is for use in portraits, but it works pretty well for full-length as well.

And as a side note, Daz seems to have changed something about how the forums work, with the recent unpleasantness and other issues, I guess. What I used to do -- copy the URL of the file attachment's thumbnail and delete the "thumbnail" text to get the full URL to the main image -- doesn't work any more. I had to put the example into the Daz gallery.

Anyway, an example of how the AgentUnawares set can look. Note that there is a wall, painted a scratchy semi-gloss black, behind the character, which acts partly as a reflector. If there were no wall, the background would be either nonexistent, if the HDR dome were turned off, or black if it's on. In this case, it's on but you can't see it anyway thanks to the wall.

EDIT: The texture is Tyrone for Darius 8. I think the settings are from Altern8 for Lee 8 -- it's been a while -- but they're definitely not his default setting.

 

 

@vwrangler

what a great looking character :) What hair is that? I never get the hair to look that good.

this is wonderful work. as a creator of ethnic characters im always watching others work for tips

vwrangler said:

One Iray HDR light set that I use frequently for test renders is a freebie set by AgentUnawares: https://www.deviantart.com/agentunawares/art/Portrait-Light-Set-01-716649600

The light set has a specific render setting for dark skin. He states that the set is for use in portraits, but it works pretty well for full-length as well.

And as a side note, Daz seems to have changed something about how the forums work, with the recent unpleasantness and other issues, I guess. What I used to do -- copy the URL of the file attachment's thumbnail and delete the "thumbnail" text to get the full URL to the main image -- doesn't work any more. I had to put the example into the Daz gallery.

Anyway, an example of how the AgentUnawares set can look. Note that there is a wall, painted a scratchy semi-gloss black, behind the character, which acts partly as a reflector. If there were no wall, the background would be either nonexistent, if the HDR dome were turned off, or black if it's on. In this case, it's on but you can't see it anyway thanks to the wall.

EDIT: The texture is Tyrone for Darius 8. I think the settings are from Altern8 for Lee 8 -- it's been a while -- but they're definitely not his default setting.

 

 

this is wonderful work. as a creator of ethnic characters im always watching others work for tips. to improve

emotionaldreams2

environment used here was Quick Lights Vol4 by PaperTiger

skin is my character Lucious Maiya on rendo

 

 

 

 

 

sueya

I have noticed some people saying that Shangrila's texture needs some attention in order to make her look good. I have therefore tried using Kande's texture on Shangrila ( girl on left) The girl on the right is CC Joliette 

Kelly2k7

deleted

Hylas

Kelly2k7 said:

I have been playing around in the surface settings lately, trying out new settings and got this as a result from a practice test.

Very nice!

@sueya: yeah, Shangrila's morph is really nice. She looked great with the skin of Eden and Twylite.

Kelly2k7

I haven playing around in the surface settings lately, trying out new settings and got this as a result from a practice test.

Hylas said:

Kelly2k7 said:

I have been playing around in the surface settings lately, trying out new settings and got this as a result from a practice test.

Very nice!

@sueya: yeah, Shangrila's morph is really nice. She looked great with the skin of Eden and Twylite.

Thanks 

Gordig

A few characters I designed for a fantasy project.

Yamowe

Mawasi

Giral

ALLIEKATBLUE

Hylas said:

During the recent sales I purchased three black female characters. Hope to get some renders out soon, will post them here!

Rather disappointed in Shangrila by Mousso. Her morph is lovely but her skin lacks depth and is waaaay to yellow and orange. Even worse is that her face has a different tone than the rest of her body, so when I tried to balance out her complexion by adding blue to her skin, either her body or her face were always not quite right. I just requested a refund.

This is only my 2nd Mousso character. The first one (an Asian character) has great skin, so I'm not sure what happened here. Or perhaps it's just me... the promos look alright. But then again, I never had problems like this with previous black characters.

I'm much happier with Darcy 8 and Aniyah for Darcy 8. Face morph and skin are great for both characters, especially Aniyah. I don't particularly love their body morphs - both characters are very skinny - but it's not hard to dial in some curves.

I don't know she looks fine to me.  I got her when she was sold at Rendo.

magog_a4eb71ab

Gordig said:

Hylas said:

Rather disappointed in Shangrila by Mousso. Her morph is lovely but her skin lacks depth and is waaaay to yellow and orange. Even worse is that her face has a different tone than the rest of her body, so when I tried to balance out her complexion by adding blue to her skin, either her body or her face were always not quite right. I just requested a refund.

Not mentioning any names, but there are some PAs here who probably shouldn't be creating black characters.

Completely agree, and the issue isn't just limited to dark-skinned characters either. Perhaps I'm more picky than others, but it just seems that there's very very few that can make skin reasonably CONSISTENT. I've been told things ranging from "Just use different skin" to "Its your lighting". Well, when I see two different skin colors and/or major light/dark discrepancies between limbs/torso/etc., that are generally an equal distance from the same light source and are being illuminated from the same angle at the same brightness, its NOT the lighting. Its even more obvious when you open the textures in an image editor and see the dramatically different RGB values. It almost looks like they used two completely different skins and blended them together just enough so that there aren't any seams.

vwrangler

magog_a4eb71ab said:

It almost looks like they used two completely different skins and blended them together just enough so that there aren't any seams.

Well ... that's almost certainly what they did do.

When you use merchant resources, you have to work to make them look different from every other character using the same resource. The first thing they'll do is swap out the face and blend the edges, and -- ideally -- tinker with the skin tones to make them match without washing out the detail in the face. That's all fairly difficult.

Working from photographic resources that haven't been mapped to the UV of whatever character you're trying to make is apparently immensely more difficult -- time and cost prohibitive, for most -- which is why merchant resources get used. (And in the case of male resources in particular, overused.)

Hylas

Gallery link

Grace for V4, materials and face morph transferred to G8.

Freebie credits:
Gown by Adam Thwaites: https://www.most-digital-creations.com/g8f_gown.php
Body Morph by bu_es: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/aminata-for-g8f-monique-8/79842
Pose Converter by MCphylyss: https://www.sharecg.com/v/89846/browse/8/Script/Daz3d-Pose-Converter-Standalone

emotionaldreams2

Hylas said:

Gallery link

Grace for V4, materials and face morph transferred to G8.

Freebie credits:
Gown by Adam Thwaites: https://www.most-digital-creations.com/g8f_gown.php
Body Morph by bu_es: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/aminata-for-g8f-monique-8/79842
Pose Converter by MCphylyss: https://www.sharecg.com/v/89846/browse/8/Script/Daz3d-Pose-Converter-Standalone

lovely.. what hair is that?

emotionaldreams2

Kenyatti pauses in the middle of creek bridge to contemplates just how safe that shortcut through foreboding forest is.

 

Hylas

emotionaldreams2 said:

lovely.. what hair is that?

It's Redz Real Curly by RedzStudio, over at Renderosity.

The same vendor is selling a very similar product here as well: https://www.daz3d.com/short-afro-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8

NylonGirl

Glasses really make a wardrobe complete.

Hylas

Gallery link

Freebie credits:
Zebra Texture by WendyLuvsCats: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4244721/#Comment_4244721

3Diva

The character Laverne is still one of my favorites. Here she is with some Altern8 Lee 8 Adjustments and light post-work (color and contrast adjustment).

Sevrin

Here is a render I did of Oshun.  This is a beautiful HD model and she renders pretty nicely without too much trouble.

NylonGirl