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The reality is that even the studios have specialists and many of the game companies have gone the same way. I was watching a tutorial where a guy was making a texture with substance designer. He said it can take him up to two weeks full time to develop a really good one. As things get more complex they get more time consuming and the better off everyone is if they are not shifting the full load themselves. If people have limited time, which is most of us, focusing on composition or even just having fun is just as important as
I sure hope so. Actually I hope NVIDIA comes out with a good skin shader and DAZ copies it accurately. The ubershader has so much bizarre behavior.
@Khory
that's absolutly right - one of the reasons why i think that a really good character model for Iray is not possible to make for the current price range... i hope somebody does it ... but the workload will be way higher then before.
+10
At work so I can't really do anything until I get home but Hanabi sort of hit the nail on the head with her words. I'm a good artist using natural media but digital 3D is allot more time consuming to learn because at every turn there's allot more than just brush to canvas. So I start to understand a little about iRay in the Surfaces tab and then I turn around and need to learn about lighting to really bring it all home! YIKES!! It's a bit daunting to say the least.
To some, esp professional photographers (I think there are a few here) that understand the ins and outs of lighting and photography, are familiar with the terminolgy and how to choose the right strengths for this setting and that setting, it's easier! BUT not but for those of us that are not into photography it's like speaking another language. iRay is brilliant but going from one rendering engine to another (3Delight to iRay) with limited time (job, health issues, life in general) to learn it all, tutorials are like gold, esp really good ones!
I have bought many of the lighting sets but decided from here on out to avoid those as I'm not really learning to set up my own and clicking this one and that one is just not giving me what I'm looking for 9 X's out of 10! I like a couple of them (Like the Painters lights) but most are, again, confusing when you don't like a setting or a light value and have NO CLUE as to how to improve that setup without having to load another set and pray it's more to your liking.....
So it would be nice to have a concise, easy to follow and understandable tutorial explaining the best sort of set up using the the best sort of basic setup to give us that needed knowledge to create our own.
edited....
Just to be clear. The ubershader is a very complex MDL shader that was created to fill a very general need. We also have quite a few examples of simpler MDL shaders from Nvidia. I am not going to hold my breath expecting nvidia to do an MDL shader just for skin nor do I expect Daz to kick in any more example shaders. Frankly I was stunned that they did as many as they did to begin with. I actually know a couple of PA's who are qualified (I think they understand general shader language and the shader mixer reasonably well at least) and would be happy to ask around about getting one done. But no one has been absolutly clear about what they need in the shader. Without a solid list of what is needed and expected no one is going to make what your looking for.
@timmins.william
i confess that some things which i would say more sensible in my native language come over a little bit to harsh here...
the point was - that in the beginning there was really a lot of advice how to make renders with 100 mio lumens ... and a handfull of posters which said otherwise just disapeared in the thread jungle here ...
and this made people Not use it ... as ZarconDeeGrissom just told above.
Nothing personal or so
i am afraid that Khory is right here.... before there is not a standard how models and skins should be created... and what is really missed.. it is not reasonable to develop a special skinshader...
So we use what we have.. and continue to find the best possible compromises - that's why this thread is still alive and also fun
my words - or what i tried to say above
Your needs as a texture artist who works on characters is going to be different than most peoples Ramwolf. At least initaly you need a fairly bright uncolored light set up that will give you a super even light without casting much shadow. That set is used to look for seams and other errors. You wouldn't want to use an HDRI that has much going on because of how HDRI lights work and it could lead you to look for false flaws. Nor do you want color initially because your adjustments would be dependent on the color temperature of the image. In other words if you use lights that are warm you may go with a skin tone that is too cool. The same is true of lights that are very cool. You need to avoid to much color shifting from the lights in the beginning.
If anyone is wondering what I mean about how HDRI lights work the best way to understand is to load a sphere in the center of an empty scene that will be lit only by the HDRI light. Do a render and look at the colors and how they play out on the surface of the sphere. If the sphere is predominanty blue/green then it would be considered cool. If by some qwirk of fate it is more red/yellow then it would be warm. Most HDRI will be very blury on the sphere but occasionally your going to find one that has clear areas where there is dark and light even on the sphere. How the colors and light/dark play on that sphere is how they will act on every figure in the scene.
Oooooooooooooooooooooooh you can open MDL files in DS! This is unexpected.
No worries on NVIDIA necessarily needing to create a skin shader themselves (though I'll be somewhat surprised if they don't), someone else will eventually in Max.
All the included MDL shaders can be opened in shader mixer and others can be brought into shader mixer similarly.
I'm sure someone mentioned it already, but it hit me (given my toying with refraction and skin) that ... well, translucency is a simplified version of refraction and SSS, right? So...
I turned Translucency off completely and used a translucency map in Refraction weight, set Refraction weight to about .6. Shut off 'share glossy inputs' and set refraction color to light pink, transmitted color to ... brighter red, .5 SSS, .5 SSS direction.
I then made a copy with -.1 push modifier (so I could use Ears Gone morph to get those problems out of the way), made it uniform light pink. Basically, a light blocker. If I felt like getting fancy, I could do something like shrink the front of the nose or whatnot.
First result (rendering another with different light angle)
That was almost exactly the kind of thing I wanted, and tried to make. Tho I was working with shapes, so I wanted something less then a pure white no-map light sphere. All the 'Daylight' HDRI's also have coloring in them as well (Sky vs sun), so there a no-go for a "Photo neutral" test chamber.
The way Iray renders, you don't get gloss (or whatever) and shading before an hour of 'Iterations', unlike the Progressive Render mode of 3DL (that gives you something almost instantly with ever increasing detail with more time). So in an 8-hour day, I could make at most 8 adjustments to something, and not use my computer for anything else during that 8 hours. As Khory said about time, I wasted an incredible amount of my time waiting for test-renders when Studio 4.8 was in Beta with Iray.
I also discovered that the ISO and shutter settings (tone mapping, or whatever it's called) appeared to be drastically darker for similar setups then my cameras go for on Auto and the flash off. I never did an actual ping-pong ball test with a 40 watt incandescent, vs Iray. I didn't need to, I was using a WW2 search light (800 million lumens) to get the results of a single 40 watt light bulb at the same distance with the same Render settings as a Camera on ISO400 and Quarter-second (1/4 S) shutter speed (Exposure Value of 10). It just didn't add up, not by a long shot.
So yea, I stepped out to let things settle down, and ketch up on all the stuff I couldn't doo when running Iray test renders. I honestly don't know how PA's can make anything without a VCA farm to give them reasonably timed test results when making stuff. I gave up on the Iray Test Chamber to be honest.
I'll give it another go. I have the Test chamber set up with a 500watt Halogen (10,000 lumen) for each spot light, 40 foot Soft Boxes Removed. In 4.8 Beta, it was more like a distant oil lantern at a mile or more away, on a starless star night, lol.
I'm impressed. I expected to go to bed, and get up tomorrow to a Black spot on the screen. I know FW Yasmin dose not Have Iray skin settings, She was one of the first test subjects (looks at the date of the scene) back in March of 2015. Compare that to the original render, same exact settings...
Drastic improvement I'll say.
ZarconDeeGrissom
this above is a simple 100watt bulb in a 10x10m cube.... 4.8
i posted a lot about such tests as you doing right now ...here in this thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59100/using-other-light-sources-in-iray/p1
the result are very close( acutally the same) to camera values in reality
rendertime: i am on one of the weekest possible cards for my tests... on a labtop.. entry 710 nvida.... after 5 -10 minutes i see usally all what is needed (including reflection and sss) to change settings.. but yeah it slows me extrem down... but the labtop is not one year old and not a cheap one - just bought it before i knewn about Iray and the need for a better card
Same figure, different angle.
The eyes look a little weird, and the bump/normals and gloss should probably be tweaked, but I like the light effects through the skin.
I'm not convinced the work put in really makes much difference compared to Translucency, but it's probably a LITTLE better.
My first two iray products were done on a 7 year old computer with no cuda cores. I did hundreds and hundreds of tests. Yes, the product did take longer than a comprable 3dl product would have but not that much longer. Promos too less time than they would have to get similar results because I would have had to use uberenviroment lights. I had plenty of promo images run 12 or 14 hours so for me Iray was notably faster even on the old computer. I think if you stuck to the simplest light set ups then 3dl was much faster, if you branched out though it started to slow dramaticaly.
I know that movies use excessively bright lighting but I think that us using lights like that has pitfalls. For one thing they use makeup that has a dramatic orange cast to it to keep the faces from going white. I don't think we want to have to do that.
ahh Beta 4.8 with reddish heads and 1 mio lumen was maybe tought for movies! lol.. kidding...
i can just imagine what a 7 year old pc means..
.. i tried luxrender on my labtop...right before iray came... after 15 hours the results looked about the same as now a similar scene in 1 hour in iray on my poor card.... i am sure with the right setups luxrender would be faster, maybe 10 hours..
I think Iray is a great thing - Ubershader is a little bit too complex... and a manual with some hint how parameters and maps actually work.. would have saved me from rendering 400 of my 500 test marbles - but still ... i like daz iray
+1
The ubershader has great versatility for many kinds of materials, and seems especially suited to gorgeous automobile paint (it's got a whole channel dedicated to metal flakes!). When rendering human skin though, it still leaves something to be desired. Since DAZ's main specialty and area of focus is rendering the human figure, it seems a natural to release a shader made just for skin and other organic surfaces, and a lot of Daz users would pay money for it. When Daz released the sample MDL shaders, I assumed that was just to illustrate Iray's future possibilities and that some really impressive new shaders would eventually be hitting the stores.
So instead of ubershader's channels like Metal Flakes and Emission which are useful in a variety of materials but serve no purpose for a skin shader, I'd love a dedicated skin shader for Iray like the "Skin Material" I see people using in Modo, with channels for Oil Layer, Epidermis, Upper Dermal Scattering, Lower Dermal Scattering. A google image search for "modo skin material" shows people getting fantastic results with that shader. Attached is a screengrab of the Skin Material settings panel in Modo that I'd be thrilled to use in Daz.
I don't think Daz needs to be told how to make a better skin shader by their customers though - selling a superior skin shader should be their bread and butter. It's something I assume that they have in the pipeline. I sincerely hope some new shaders come out when 4.9 is out of beta, that seems like it would be a logical time for an advancement in that area.
Speaking of that, what's a good replacement/translation of Velvet setting in OmniShader?
Based on what I have read here what your asking for is mostly cosmetic. Would you really pay money for me to go into the shader mixer and change the names of a few things? People might but I would feel like a real jerk for doing it. I'd think anyone else who did was kind of a jerk too.
In my opinion nothing. Backscatter should do it but I think due to how back scatter is set up in the ubershader (it links into spec or gloss I think) it is very inflexable and I don't think that the results are very good. Oddly enough it does work if the headlight is on but then of course the scene is blown out..
the problem is that Iray just has one subsurfacescatter..starting from the surface to a x thickness...
a layerd skin shader needs a seperatly scattercolor for every skinlayer (as we can see in the modo screenshoot... and that is currently not possible native in Iray.
I'm not asking for just the names to be changed, but a new shader with new parameters designed specifically for rendering skin that performs as well as the Skin Material does in Modo. Anyone who makes a Daz Iray shader to fit that bill certainly isn't a jerk.
That Modo shader has three different layers of SSS going on (not achievable in ubershader by simply changing the names of existing parameters) and the layout is beautifully concise and simple, with no scrolling through irrelevant items to get to what you need. Also, when comparing Iray renders to real world photographs and renders from other software, I'm starting to suspect that something about the way specularity works in ubershader is standing in the way of realism in skin. Here are a few Modo renders I found online to show what people are doing with it. I have some of those same 3D models seen in the Modo renders attached, but I currently can't get that quality of skin when rendering them in Iray. I can maybe get kinda close, but not quite. If we could get results with the ubershader like these renders, we probably wouldn't have a 57 page deep thread of users struggling to get good skin settings.
Is there a freebie light set I can use to study that will give me a setup like that? I'd be most interested. Hell, I'd pay for a light set like that. I'd use it to study how it's set up but would love a tutorial on HOW to set one up more than anything else.
After getting home from work I did edit my original post as there were parts that were rushed in writing them out as I had a clien that just walked in the door.. sorry for any confusing bits! lol
..yes.
..and Khory is correct.
...+1
...+1 as well.
pearbear, those are incredible renders. The kind I would expect from a supercomputer, or a film Production computer cluster. Unfortunately, most of us do not have such luxuries. And as such, we have to make do with what looks best with minimal compute resources.
I'll say it again. I would love to have the hair on the girl in kyoto kid's sig, even tho I would never be able to render it. There is one of me on a single computer, not an entire division of Pixar, lol. Now looking back, I've seen some incredible results using the incredibly limited Daz Default shader, and it dose not even have Sub-dermis whatever. That was baked into the Diffuse and Specular maps. Velvet, what is that, not in the Daz Default shader, lol.
While I admit the drive for scientific molecularly accurate models of the human body is admirable, it is going to have major limits without simulating the bones and organs and muscle densities (with varying flex). Not to say the computer needed to simulate all of that.
I'm happy to have the basics, that don't take hours to calculate. The real basics. Diffuse, Specular, bump, and velvet. While SSS is nice, IF your doing welding scenes or x-ray inspired stuff, it is not blatantly there in normal scenes. Besides, to get proper SSS, you need to at least do up the skeletal structure and take that into account, I don't have the mainframe to render that.
Bump, yea, Iray is seriously lacking there. You can not do a bump density lower then the polygon density of the model in Iray, and that is a scary thought. How many hair follicles and sweat pores are on the human body, I don't think there is a graphics card in the Milky way with that much ram, lol.
There has got to be a way to drop the Diffuse Specular and Velvet maps from 3DL into Iray, and not have it look like a porcelain doll.
Also, I've seen different settings listed for different skin-tones, as if the skin is completely different in molecular content (Like glass vs metal), lol. I honestly don't think the Melatonin tinting would require that much polar opposite variation in surface settings. To the best of my knolage, the color of the hair of blood dose not make someone black or white, it's the diffuse pigment in the surface of the skin.
P.S. I really like this one by the way. It looks like a real normal every day photograph.
I see areas of Velvet, and Specular, and I would be happy with that.
Same with this as well. My complements to the Artists that did these renders, there incredible.