Not happy with G 8.1 Skin - Issue in 4.15 ?
Anim
Posts: 241
I bit the bullet and bought Vic 8.1 but don't like the results so far.
Took a room and put mesh lights in it.
Took sphere primitives and attached leather and rubber iray shaders.
Observation:
The light in the room is already to high.
I would consider the dark leather being overexposed (according to my photography experience).
Same for the mid dark rubber.
But:
The skin shader is to dark according to my feeling. I would expect human skin to be lighter than the dark leather.
Overall the skin looks way to translucent to me. E.g. check the upper nose area. It looks like it is made of candle wax. In my opinion the whole face suffers from this.
The border between iris and sclera looks unaturally blurred to me.
Spectral Rendering makes the face lighter but that seems to be a bug because it looks like it disables the translucency completely.
Question:
Qould it be that 4.15 beta with its current iray is buggy and therefore the whole skin shader is borked?
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
I'm with you at the moment - not with Vicky, as I don't have, but I can't manage to get any "life" into the G8.1 skin at all .. other than when I have a really obtuse angle between light / surface / camera .. I get zero spec highlights in the skin .. put a G8 model in the same scene and the skin captures all the light in the scene .. the G8.1 shader just looks flat and dead.
Thanks for showing me one of my problems: Spectral Rendering. Another issue I had was having to turn down the Dual Lobe to .1 from .6 to get rid of unnatural white highlights. But then the skin was dull. I've also had issues with Genesis 8 skin (Babina 8) having artifacts when applied to G8.1 (but still using the G8F UV).
So, it is not only me not being that happy with the new skin shader.
What I also don't understand is why Specular Occlusion is enabled by default. Normally it is used to simulate global illumination in renders that don't calculate GI (common in game engines). But in iray which does global illumination anyway I would expect it to be off. Some users wrote they use it to reduce spec highlights, but I don't think that's its purpose. Maybe DAZ included it to be more compatible with real time rendering.
Daz seems to have had an obsession with super high translucency for a long time. People are not jello! If you place a bright light behind some Daz characters they will glow, LOL.
V8.1 is a step in the right direction for Daz overall, but they are still guilty of some old tricks.
In my opinion the new shader seems to be a step back instead of forward, but maybe after some more trial and error I'll get better result.
Anyway here is Vic 8.1 with 8.0 ubershader and the usual tweaks (same scene with reduced light intensity).
To me it looks more like a human than the new default skin shader.
8.0 ubershader? How do I get that? Do I just copy the shader settings from G8F?
the infamous "Daz PBR Skin shader" is only is a wide and broad expansion of parameters for the usual iRayUber shader, with AO and Detail channels.
is something when I did my own filament shaders and named like "Zilvergrafix Ultimate Champion Edition Magnificent FIlament Shaders"...and really nope.
It is a separate shader, not the Iray Uber Base.
Sorry, missleading wording from my side. It is not a specific 8.0 shader but the standard iray ubershader which I adjusted for skin. I assume you know how to assing it (just select the surfaces of Vic 8.1 or any other figure in the surface tab and double click the shader in the library).
But the example I made is not "ready" so to say - e.g. I think the light scattering through the ears is to weak.
It's not a bug it's the default, as it's meant for auto-art, if you want more realistic results you'll have to tinker; the spectral lighting is based on an accurate real-world lighting model, what you need to do is bump up the translucency channel to 100%, and input the color for the transmission to 99-99-99 or 254-254-254... And you can either switch the previous transmission color to the SSS or leave it pink depending on the texture's tone... you can also go to the tone mapping render setting and turn the F/Stop to 24 which will give you more control over the overblown lighting!
BTW, I thought it would be fun to show my custom shader with SRM off!
Oh yeah, I'd like to point out that my custom lighting is based on this, which I'm eternally thankful for!
Thanks for chiming in.
I appreciate your input and be sure your settings work for you. Unfortunately they do not for me. I knew about the document you linked but had and have my reservations regarding the correctness of some of the included information. But that's only my opinion which could be wrong.
But again thanks for your help.
Sure, no problem anytime!