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Ah, oh well, be an excuse to get them. It's time more PA's like your good self got on the Iray bandwagon. There are far too little realistic characters/textures around now. I think we may also need a complete new shader for skin as Iray Uber is a bit generalised.
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I can only agree - the Uber Shader is limited and skin outcome is not yet where it could be. My intention for the Iray Materials was to get the best out of what is already there, to get the optimum from the source material using all the various channels of the shader. But the 'kick' is still missing and we only can hope that NVidia or DAZ can implement a few really needed features into the shader soon or at least sometime in the future.
Here's the promo for Rodan 2.0 :) All promo images were rendered with the default DAZ HDR and dome rotation of 35.
There has to be an Iray guru out there that can develop something. We need an Iray equivalent of the old HSS for 3DL. After that, shaders became generalised again with US, US2 and to an extent AoA. Daz's bread and butter is the human characters and they need to be the best they can be.
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Yeah he looks pretty good, were you basing him on George Clooney!?
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Here's the promo for Rodan 2.0 :)
lol Almost all of my male characters are based on real persons, just to make it a bit more interesting, but I never was after a look alike, I only wanted to have some real facial features. :)
I think one of them was Matthew Fox as far as I can remember.
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Nope, not this one. Never watched Lost.
Hi Jepe! I feel compelled to pop in - (I read this thread but am afraid I'm lost when it comes to doing the Iray skin settings myself) I just wanted to say THANK YOU so much for doing this! Will you be making a thread to announce what you've done, and list who you've updated? I think I have most of your characters... but don't want to miss any that you are updating. (I really wish you could redo Marius for Genesis 2 (or 3) male, I have always wanted that character but don't use David)... Thanks again for putting so much effort into these :) -Cathy
Oh, must have been a character somewhere else that looked like him.
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Thank you for your nice words, Cathy. Should I make an extra thread about the updates? - Well, I'm not sure if it is really necessary or wished. Marius, well, that is a fine character, but past is past. I used the skin resource of him only one time again for Enzo. Maybe you can kind of recreate him when transfering the morphs over to G2M with GenX2 and use Enzo's skin, don't know, havn't tried that yet.
For G3M - well who knows. I don't want to start making characters again.
Yea, sorry about that. The link for what ever reason will not work. I thought I had copy and pasted it wrong but after 3 more tries it's very strange that I can't get it to post a workable link. If you just do a search for "free online normal map generator" in Google it will be the top most search called NormalMap-Online
well that's weird. Copy and pasting this text directly from Google gives me a working link to the site page. OK, what ever works! lol
What do you think is missing? The uberiray shader is an MDL shader but it is a bit "all things to all people". As I understand it, any MDL aspect you need to add is there in shader mixer somewhere. The tricky bit is knowing what needs to be hooked in.
From my experiences I can only say that the components subsurface scattering, translucency and specularity aren't as they could or should be. The skin has not enough depth and doesn't look enough like skin. No matter what combinations I tried or if other maps are involved, even the DAZ solution with the newest textures for V7, not convincing enough.
You might get some insight in a different threads.
This gets very deep but it does have some good information about skin settings and what should be going on as far as real physics. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/62232/iray-uber-shader-documentation-questions/p1
Some of this is helpful conceptually as well. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/905844#Comment_905844
I'm not sure if the issues are not more "us" than the shader set up itself. That said if there are things that should be added/changed I am pretty sure that with the help of someone who has a better grasp of mixer it would be a reasonably easy fix.
That is too technical for me, sorry, with too much guessing and not one single rendered sample, not helpful for me, in the contrary, it only makes me insecure.
Yeah, that's the thing. When you try to find info, you find that the experts all talk like we know as much as they do. If you google for answers, you get taken to one page on a forum that only has a third of the info you need and you then have to trawl for the other bits. Sometimes, they use a function on software that you don't have and the software they have costs a fortune. You then try to find a free alternative that isn't a 'trial' that has that same function and it can take ages.
This is why we need PA's that know Iray and can do that work for us
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You shouldn't be. You're just supposed to make art, leave science to others.
Did you try Mec4d's skin settings? http://snowsultan.deviantart.com/journal/MEC4D-Iray-skin-settings-537152092
And here's a link to Mec4D's (Catherine) Iray work here: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#galleries/123613/
IMHO, she has figured it out.
More
http://madamgoth.deviantart.com/art/iRay-Skin-Settings-536588913
http://madamgoth.deviantart.com/art/iRay-Skin-Settings-Version-2-562593528
http://second-circle.deviantart.com/art/Daz3d-Iray-Skin-Shader-Settings-533277195
Mec4D does have it figured out, but there are addidtions you have to make in order to really reap the benefits. For example, you should plug an albedo map into the Translucency Color and an SSS map (Take the diffuse map into Photoshop, desaturate it, then do Levels and change the value from 1.00 to 2.20.) into Transmitted Color. There is a lot of conflicting info around on albedo maps, but, if you'll bear with me, I am in the process of putting together a tutorial on how to do them in Photoshop. I'll post a link to it in this thread when I'm done. Hopefully this will be in the next few days...
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In case of his DeviantArt Gallery, he undoubtly is. In case for his vendor at the DAZ Shop, there he is more mercantilist than artist, acting more like selling prefabricated products to other people for them to make art out of.
And on this subject, regarding physically based shading, it's necessary to understand A) the raw basics how things work in the physical world and B) what a renderer does, trying to simulate this physical world. Iray allows one, although it is layed out for everyday rendering purposes, and so some methods are simplified to turn out to be hardware-friendly, to put in real-world measured data and get a close to real-world result out of. From a customer perspective I expect a Published Artist to have knowledge about A) and B) when creating products for the Iray renderer. No more, no less.
The substantial information has been updated on on September 29 11:19:51 AM UTC. That one is final now, no guessing left. That's the way absorption and scattering work in Iray, and the informations included come straight from people at NVIDIA. The latest posting of this thread includes an example and data in a valid range for a caucasian skin type. Regarding your too technical comment see my answer to jag11 posting.
Only those aren't MEC4D's own skin settings, theese are hints given by her for ACross's shader setup in the "Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part II" thread. Her skin shader setup is a bit more complex, including desaturating the diffuse texture map and creating her own normal and displacement maps AFAIK. Going her recommended way by picking the skin color for Transmitted Color, I'd recommend to set your Transmitted Measurement Distance at around 0.85, a value of 1.00 or even 2.00 will result in a too low absorption property, as well as using a lower value will result in too much. If you use a Top Coat Thin Film for simulating the thin oily film (sebum), the default value of 1.50 for the IOR there would be appropriate. A value of 20000 (nanometers) thickness for the face, and 1/2 or 3/4 for the rest of the body is somewhat close to real-world measurements.
Those include more or less some (from a physical based point of view) errors:
1) Glossy Specular doesn't match the Refraction Index used, the value there must be lower, that's just still plain plastic specular reflection. If one deosn't know how to calculate that, go with the PBR Metallicity/Roughness Mixing Mode. There it's calculated automatically. Transmitted Color has similar values for red and blue RGB color channels. The value for the blue one should be the lowest, since there is a stronger absorption occuring in the blue wavelength range than in the green and red ones (red the least). Transmitted Measurement Distance is set too high, resulting in roughly 1/10 absorption. Scattering settings result in about 1/4 of even the lowest scattering occuring over the red wavelength range measured.
2) Can't make out the RGB color values exactly, but from the Distance of 2.20 used I can already tell it's too low without looking into detail. Scattering is even lower, just around 1/10. If you don't own Specular Maps following PBR requirements, don't put them there. Those build for 3Delight don't even work not so good, they work nothing at all. Top Coat Color is a bit strange. If you don't put something in Top Coat Thin Film there's absolutely no sense in setting the IOR to anything else than the default, for no thickness: no film at all. Could be a remainder of a former attempt though.
3) Strange Translucency Color, Glossy Specular doesn't match the Refraction Index used, Glossiness too high, should be around 0.30 max, and setting it like that you wouldn't have to set your Top Coat to blow it, Transmitted Color for red is in range, green is a bit and blue is way too low. Scattering is at 1/27.
Well, you can always state that you give a ... about physical correctness, but in that case I'd reply that I see your artistical freedom as a lame excuse for being too lazy to do your homework. Insignificant for a fellow DAZ Studio user, but essential for any PA around creating products for Iray use.
Interesting stuff. Cath is working on a shader of her own, and it will be interesting to see what this brings...
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Where id you get that from? Do you still use different colors for each RGB channel then, or do you set it to 255 white? Since, the good thing of the color channels is that you can produce different absorption coefficents that way, by a simplified method though, but still somewhat around and so simulate the behavior of light through different wavelength ranges.
Putting a desatureated map into that (depending on if it is even possible to use one there), would turn your Transmitted Color to greyscale, like the scattering is restricted at by now, and would counteract the benefits of being able to use it's full color abilities.
Thanks. Me, too. I'd argue that it wouln't be just a shader and will include appropriate texture maps, too. Things created by her will be definately one of the things I'd buy blind.
I picked it up in one of the Iray threads, I forget which. From what I could gather t was what Cath described as a shadow catcher map and it's what the SSS map is like in her old character packs. Do you just not put any map in there!?
I believe Cath is working on a character which will feature her new shader.
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I've made some adjustments to Darius based on some of what you talked about and will render him now.
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He looks goodish, but, I'm sure there's more I could be doing somehow. What are good settings for Glossy Reflectivity and Glossy Layered Weight, that might be where I'm getting stuck.
I'm hoping Cath releases a caucasian, asian and african character with appropriate shaders for each, then we'll have something to work with. We need stuff from PA's that will give us stuff for Iray alone without any influence from 3Delight.
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what is missed yet in ths thread is the use of a thickness map for translucency and sss transmission....
about the color - blood is always red ! i dont see a need for a color map. i also think that @Rogerbee's black skin example comes close, but using more red instead (guessing) picking a color from the skin will improve this result! if the face goes to red - well that's because of the missing thickness map!
I was just thinking about that map, where do you plug it in, is it into Translucency Weight!?
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