[Resolved] Skin Merchant Resources - what are these used for?
Skin Merchant Resources - what are these used for?
Newbie here and I have been seeing skin merchant resources being sold around here... cannot quite figure out what these are for since the characters already come with skins. If they are meant for customization (eg. shades of skins, tattoos, personalised scars etc), can't the skins that already come with our characters be customised too? Unless these merchant resources are far higher in resolution?
Speaking of skins... some characters have skins that look so fake almost like rubber dolls... but I have seen renders where the skins look perfectly human. Is this just a matter of putting on the right lighting (intensity and color shade)? Why can't the PA's simply make the skins look human from the get go?
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Yes, for your own use you could start from an existing character, but if you're making characters for sale or as a freebie you can't do that, it's not allowed to use someone else's work as part of yours, unless it's specifically made for that use. That's what a merchant resource is for. Merchant resources are tools for content creators, they can use them as a base to create skins for characters they intend to distribute. Depending on the resource it will be allowed for commercial items or for freebies.
Not all characters are intended to look realistic.
And yes, lighting and material settings can make the difference.
Merchant Resources can be used to create your own characters for sale or you can use them for personal use also. Usually it is the base texture source and you modify it and make it your own by adding whatever skin details you want to it created your custom characters.
The skins that come with bought characters, you can modify them for your own use but you can not share/sale the files from the original character that you used.
Unfortunately there is no perfect solution for real human looking solution. There are many variables that go into that including the textures, lighting, and various shader settings for the textures. Theres no one size fix all for skin textures, some PA's get really close but its hard to make one character look great under every light and enviroment available.
As the name Merchant Resource (or MR) implies, they are basically meant for other PA's to build their own characters for sale using these textures as a base, modifying them to make them individual and (they hope) unique enough for others to buy (the terms and conditions on MR textures usually prohibit creating freebies from them). You are not allowed to modify non-MR textures for resale, hence there is a market for MR's.
As a non-commerical individual, you can use these MR textures in the same way to build your own character textures, or just use them as they are if you like them, but this is more work than using ordinary skin textures where loading presets, bump and normal maps, etc, have been created for you. As an individual and purely for your own use you can similarly modify any texture set you have already bought, but must not pass them on to anyone else.
I realised I didn't address your second point: skins do look very different depending on the lighting used. Because the creator didn't know what lights you might use, they can't make them look perfect under every condition. There are whole (lengthy) threads in the forum about making realistic-looking renders - it can be quite a complex process of trial and error.
Some skins are meant to look non-realstic (anime, toon, etc) and older skins don't always look good by today's standards, although there are various products in the store that attempt to improve the settings.
Oh dear, looks like my slow typing (and the way the forum doesn't refresh the page when you post an reply) got me again
At least we all seem to agree on our replies!
Thank you @Leana @Daventaki and @MelanieL those were all very helpful insights!... now I know that it isn't as I had hoped, which was for those merchant resources to be somewhat super HD quality (above the HD textures that DAZ sells) to improve the human look of skin, but alas it ain't so! Personally, I dislike seeing any skin that looks rubbery unless it's the artist's intention and I personally consider my renders a failure unless my characters' skins look convincingly human. I toy around with translucency, reflectivity etc and have been watching some youtube guides but it's a lot of trial and erorr involved especially since I am still learning about lighting. I once followed a youtube video where a guy added a blue key light and a brown fill light and wow the skin just became totally human-looking, I was speechless. I tried it on one of my G8M characters and it worked but didn't work for the others I guess each skin requires its own tweaking under, as you said, different lighting conditions.
For another example, I'm working on a character that is mostly furry, but I need them to have skin on their palms, soles, personal bits, nose, lips, and inside of ears. Rather than cobble together those bits from my photo sources, which takes more time, I'll use a Merchant Resource. It's going to be unrecognizable by the time I get done with it, so I'm not worried about a lack of originality when it comes to that.
Thanks for that @SickleYield ! I can't believe the concidence, just 20 seconds ago I finished watching one of your YouTube videos on scene lighting that I had chanced upon and subscribed to your channel. Noticed that you have some recent videos on Marvelous Designer as well as the RSSY Clothing Fitter... both are subjects that I have been searching for in the past week! Thank you so much for your contribution to the art!
And thank you for the kind words. :)