Question... what am I doing wrong? (Genesis 8 male Quinton character)
Malandar
Posts: 776
Ok, so I am making characters for a story I am doing, and I needed a male character, so I chose the Quinton texture for the character, so I add the texture and put the sss at 50% and then I did a test render, instead of the really pale guy that Quinton is, the texture turned out very, VERY dark, like nearly African American dark, which is not the look I am after for this particular character. But this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened where I load up a pale character texture on a character I have made and then render and the character is WAY darker than the texture used should make. I have had this happen with G8 female as well though I don't remember which character it was offhand. This was a 3Delight material set rendered in a 3Delight render. The first render bit is the G8 male with the Quinton texture the other is a G8 female with pale skin in the same render that is normal. Oh, and the lights used are just two linear point lights. Oh and they are pretty close together so it is not just him being in shadow, that wouldn't do this.
Does anyone have any idea what is causing this? I mean I can probably move on to a different texture for him, but I would like to know what is causing this.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Okay, it still seems a bit dark, but the render is bigger and people can see more what I mean by it because they can see the light on his skin in this one,
What are your tone mapping settings?
Not sure that's a thing in 3Delight... I looked in the 3Delight settings and didn't find tone mapping.
Ohhhh. Sorry. I misunderstood!
No problem at all I do that all the time... I had to go back to 3Delight because my video card only has 3 gigs of ram and it takes a stupidly long time to complete an IRAY render. I need a computer upgrade badly lol.
Oh if I don't comment for several hours It is not me flaking out and not answering, I have something I need to get done today before it gets too late so I'll be away for a while, but I'll check back tonight when I get home.
Okay, I am back, Anyone have any ideas?
What exactly is your lighting setup? How many, what intensity?
Are you using the default 3Delight settings that come with Quinton?
The above was 2 linear point lights the front one being at 98.9% and the left one at 79.4% they are fairly close, the front one if you used real type measurements about 5 feet away, the left one is beside and slightly to the rear. but the female character is pale like she is supposed to be and she is right to his left side.
Is there a way to see a screenshot with both of them in the screen? It's hard to really guage with those tiny thumbails showing part of the characters.
Off the top, try moving quinton over to where the lady is and see if that helps. It could be lighting setups like Vwrangler said. Also check to make sure that the female's skin do not have some somrt of luminancy set to them. I forget what the term was in 3DL days, but I remember sometimes vendor would put a like glow setting to the skins so they would appear "brighter" in dark scenes.
Quinton is set to 3DL right surface settings right?
Yeah both of em are 3Delight materials, give me a few I'll get a screenshot, but they were basically the same lights I used on another render of the female and she came out great in the render. Oh and as far as I know there is no light coming from her, I think it is emission and that is 0,0,0 black.
This is the setup on the lights and also how far away she was in the original render.
did a quick render of them in the position above and with the same lights and this is the result.
O.o it acts like Ambient might be set too dark on the guy. Might compair the girls skin vs the guy and see what settings she has.
Well, one issue I have found, is that the skin on the female is This one, https://www.daz3d.com/ry-alison-for-victoria-8 which is Iray only, so that may have a bit to do with it, but still as pale as Quinton looks in his promos, he should NOT be that dark. I'll find another skin for her and see if she is still as pale or if she suddenly goes as dark as the guy.
Could you upload the scene file as an attachment in the forum? I don't have Alison, but I do have Quinton, so I might be able to test it.
I tried to estimate where things were, based on what you said, but based on where I tried to position things, unless you made some changes, Quinton is well outside the falloff zone for a default linear point light where he is. (For that matter, so is Allison, so I kind of suspect that she's got Iray textures is why she looks like she does.)
I really do think the issue is that you simply don't have enough light in your scene.
I also tried rendering him in my default 3Delight setup, which has a lot more light (3 Advanced lights, 4 spotlights including one specular-only), and something is not quite right with his 3DL setup. I think it may be the maps themselves. They all look like they're in the right places and I looked at the settings and the torso and arms all have the same numbers, but there's a clear line between his torso and arms. There's no line between his torso and legs, and his torso and head, so it looks like the arms texture is off somehow. (NOTE: Sometimes this is individual Studio installation weirdness. His arms may be fine when you render.)
EDIT: If his arms show that seam in your renders -- and although the lighting is dim, I can see that they do -- the issue with his arms is that the image gamma on all of his other maps is set to 1, but the image gamma on his arms bump and specular is set to 0. You can fix that by using the image editor in Studio's surfaces (click the down-pointing arrow next to the image in the Specular Color slot, selext Image Editor -- NOT Layered Image Editor --- and then on the resulting screen, either move the slider or click on the number to set it to 1)
I had used the settings supplied and it was the first texture I had used, changing it to base settings with no sss to see how that is. rendering now.
Okay, I set up a scene with G8 male and the lights and camera in the same spots, add Quinton and you can see what I am dealing with and probably tell what I am doing wrong. I almost just typed up the settings on my lights, but I figured I would just leave them in the scene. and as far as I know, nothing is in the scene that is not in the base DS. And yeah I wondered about what was going on with the line between arms and shoulders. And you very well could have it right that I don't have enough light. I was doing IRAY renders and then I went back to 3Delight renders when I decided I didn't want to wait a day for a render to complete. And yeah you are right Alison was an IRAY only texture.
Well, I've downloaded your scene and tried it, and the issue really and truly is just that you don't have enough light in the scene. The question is, how much light do you need for the effect you're going for. Do you want a dimly lit night time scene? Is it meant to be sunset/sunrise? Full daylight?
Below are three renders. The top render shows the results of the scene exactly as you posted it. The only change I made was to put Quentin's texture and morph on G8M.
Second image is your scene, but with the intensity of the lights at 200%, intensity scale at 1. It's still pretty dim, but you can actually see him much better.
Third image is with light intensity still at 200%, and intensity scale at 2.
I didn't do anything to your scene lights other than change the intensity and scale. They're still in the same locations.
Depending on what exactly it is you're trying to accomplish, I might recommend aiming a spotlight at him, and then using a linear point as fill on his face, if needed. Or using an Advanced Ambient light, if you have that, to provide some global lighting. You just need something more in the scene than you have.
Yeah probably is my lights, but the thing is I rendered out another with an ambient light and 4 point lights with long-range falloffs and they were both still... brown Which is not a bad thing at all, they both look good that way, but they are not supposed to look like that, and the amount of light I put in the scene washed out the color of the scene elements while the characters remained... brown.
Lighting in 3Delight is WAY more frustrating than I remember, and this will definitely influence me into upgrading my system sooner rather than later.
I am VERY frustrated right now, I can't render a thing because I am trying to do it in 3delight and all my characters are way darker than they are supposed to be and I don't think it is a matter of not enough light because every time I add more light they are STILL too dark and the background gets washed out. Vwrangler I appreciate the help, but I added another point light and set them all at 100% and set them so that they do not start to fall off and I get nothing but dark characters and washed out backgrounds and they were even worse when I upped the intensity to 2...
Unfortunately, I got nothin' more. Point lights are really not great for lighting bigger chunks of scenes -- that's not quite what they're designed for.
Have you not been using 3Delight before this? Or have you been just doing CPU Iray renders?
I did Poser for years, then started using Studio when Genesis 1 came out, I never had this sort of trouble with the lights/textures before now, and about a year ago I got a computer with a 1060 in it so I started using IRAY finally, but now I want to do bigger renders in IRAY but I need a better gpu for that. So now I am trying to use 3delight again.
The only thing I can suggest is using Advanced Ambient to provide a general global light for your scene -- altering the strength of that as needed -- and use linear point lights to provide highlights. You can also use UberEnvironment for your global lighting, but that will be slooooooow. With Advanced Ambient, you may need to set flags on the hair, because that can also slow things down, but it's still faster than rendering with UberEnvironment. (Although looking back on this thread, it looks like you tried that and it was still too dark, so ... I still got nothin'.)
Alternately, since this is 3Delight, you can use the ambient strength channel in the skin textures at a low value. The down side is that it literally makes them glow a bit, so in a low-light situation, they'll look very odd indeed.
I don't know what it did, but this https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/convert-it---iray-to-3dl-characters/124690/ works. I put the IRAY version of a couple of textures on them and they rendered just the way they were supposed to, they are not super dark or anything, they look like they are supposed to, cost me a little, but screw it, solved my problem and gave me more texture options.
I do appreciate the effort everyone went through to try to help me on this problem, Thank you.