A suggestion for comparing skin textures/shaders
fred9803
Posts: 1,564
On the product page I've found it extremely difficult to determin what a skin will look like in comparison to that of another product. The reason of course is that all skins will look entirely different under different lighting conditions.
How about we have PAs include one image rendered with a standardised environment and lighting scene file so we have a comparable unbiased image, similar to how GPU benchmarks are compared with a benchmark scene file.
It may not look anything like your render at home, but it would provide a base for an equitable comparson between different products. As it stands there's no way to make a fair comparson between skin hue, satuaration, displacement, SSS etc. in promo images.
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Comments
Why, when you can adjust any of those values yourself, either thru filters, lighting or in an image editing app. Also not all PAs have the same talent and as such, skins will vary based on the product and skill of the PA as well as the lighting used.
I have 100s of characters and have never felt the need to compare any of them skin wise.
While the idea is good in theory, in practice it's terrible. We'd end up with a whole bunch of characters optimized to look good in the standard scene that doesnt represent how we would actually light them. What could be helpful is if, as some vendors already provide, characters came with lighting sets optimized for the character's texture, that we could use as a guide for our set lighting.
In the end, though, there's no substitute for trying things and getting better at lighting. and, I guess, returning stuff you don't like.
Some products include an image of what the skin looks like in Daz's default lighting, and I appreciate that. I used to really struggle with skins that looked like they were pale in the store, but came out tan in default lighting. Now I know how to mod them, but I didn't always have that knowledge. Also, sometimes I plain don't feel like it. It's nice to know what you're really buying. Is this actually a pale skin or just one you put a blue light next to?
I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for standardized promos to happen though.
That's my point, or part of it. With a standardised render there wouldn't be any way to make your character's skin look good only under specific lighting. It's the same reason why we have a standard scene for GPU benchmarking.... a level playing field. This is not about how good or bad the renders would look, but I just want to be able to compare them to others without bias. Preferably between 5000K and 6500K. Does a skin look redish/brown/pale because of its set-up or because of the lighting in the promos? Currently we have no way of knowing which.
And this is why it's unrealistic. PAs want their people to look as best as possible, and you can't blame them for that.... it's advertising.
+1
It doesn't matter that much when you only have one character in the scene, but when you have more it doesn't help, no matter how much you tweak your lighting, the characters just don't look like they came from the same universe. One is pink, another is sickly gray and the third one has a deep tan which didn't show on the promo's...
Sounds right.
Yeh, that's when the discrepancy really stands out. If, and I know this will never happen, you had example renders of characters under the same conditions in the promos, you'd quickly see how they compare.
I don´t this would help us. No matter which standard lighting setup we´d agree on, some skins will look better under that specific light than others. That doesn´t mean that the other skins are of bad quality. It just means they´re made to be lit differently.
More useful would be if every character page included some information on how (some of) the promos are lit. So we would know how to recreate that look.
Agreed
I don't think it's a matter of "better" so much as pale, tan, red, yellow, or grey.
The problem with info on how it's lit in the proms is what if I want to light it differently? I won't know how it will look with my desired lights. But if I see it in default lighting, I can say: ok, skins that look like this in default lighting tend to look like that in warm lights, which I know from experience with other skins of the same cast.
The artist would be able to show the quality and versatility of the skin in all their other promos. But no, no artist is going to volunteer a default lighting promo if it doesn't make the skin look great. And Daz isn't going to force them to. So this is all moot.
If there was a system that allowed adjusting the skin shaders in real time, and didn't require a degree in art studies, we could fix the problem ourselves, especially when the textures themselves usually don't differ that much.
There is also the issue of contrast. Whatever tint you apply to a skin, if the contrast is much higher, or much lower, than the skin of a character standing nearby it will look wrong and is difficult to fix.
Seems to use the same color adjustment system than DS uses, in which it is not easy to, for example reduce the yellowness of the skin
That's not how skin works. In real life or in Daz. If you suggest optimizing skin to look good under a specific light set, then you're going to end up with a bunch of skins that all look the same. That's boring. My suggestion is to learn how to use the surfaces panel and make any skin work for you and your specific lighting.
Especially for those of us with defective colour vision (which is why I don't have any of the skin-tweaking products).
Fred is right, and at least he can compare a ton of textures under the same lighting thanks to some work Markus and I did a while back (Markus continued this for a long time, be sure to check the other links in that discussion)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/371716/genesis-8-female-example-and-improvement-discussion/p1
Almost all textures can look nice under carefully positioned lighting, but knowing what you're going to get when buying one is still a crap shoot. I probably have two dozen textures that I don't use because they don't look right under about half of the light sets I try and it's just easier to use a different texture than to mess with their settings. Darcy 8 may be the best example I have; she is a very good looking character but appears SO RED under most lighting than it's just easier for me to use Monique.
There's no reason why vendors can't provide a single render of their texture under several generic HDRIs and/or a 3-point scene light setup to give some idea of what you're getting out of the box - particularly to show how strong bumps, normals, and skin reflectivity are and what the texture looks like when the included character MOR is *not* used with them - and then go nuts with the colored lighting, gobos, and postworked promos.
The problem is, where does it end? The OP was talking about a single lighting set-up, and now we're talking about "several generic HDRIs" and then a "3-point light set-up".
The problem with a single lighting set-up, as already mentioned, is that the market will force PAs to optimize for that. That would be bad. Multiple set-ups would be better, but textures would probably look bad in at least one of them, and no PA will accept that. They'd just sell their stuff elsewhere.
I can't speak for all vendors, but a good number of us use neutral lighting for our "technical" promos. It might not be the *same* HDRI's, but they have uncolored lighting at least. I did lighting promos for a while, but got burned out. It was 16 renders for 2 promos. I suck with lighting so it's pretty much guaranteed that users will get a better look than I will :D
Fine, a single-light setup used by all vendors to show their textures is good too. White lights, 6500k; that kind of setup can be easily made and shared among PAs. There's no reason why customers should have to cross their fingers and hope that a texture won't require a ton of adjustments when all they want to do is drop it into a typical daytime scene. Markus made a hundred of these and isn't even a merchant, I think the merchants can manage to work in one additional generic render pass with the other promo images.
Yes that would be bad but it's not what I'm suggesting. PAs would still do all their optimised promo images, but just include one (1) that is rendered in a standard coltrolled environment.