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Did the test again with a Genesis 3 character..(LY Katarina) Same light set up...same render settings. 01 is 3DL mats....02 with Iray mats that the character comes with.
Daniel
Again 1st one very much pale and stuff second much darker. Interestingly enough the 3DL mats lose their details..mostly her freckles in the face...while the Iray although darker has much more skin details
It's easy to see that the iRay settings have been applied in number two even to me with very little experience in iRay and 3DL. I find the iRay renders much prettier and more natural but of course look at the subject matter being rendered.
There are situations you want a more comic book or painterly style done and it seems 3DL is the way to go in the case barring other changes to the source material.
My thing is not really with 3DL vs Iray its more of the nuts and bolts of it. For instance why does Danika for example get a sunburn where as Katerina for example gets a tan. If you look at the promos for Katerina for example she is quite a pale model but in my example she looks almost as dark as most of the Vicky 7 renders (who for myself is too dark for my taste). I can see the benefit of both as render tools for certain situations but i would like to know how to correct things i dont like to things i do like. If that makes sense.
Daniel
I know it's not a one versus the other but I stated the fact that iRay is easier to create realistic lighting bedcause it utilizes the HRDI Environmental Lighting Domes.
The reason one character looks sunburned vs the other looking tan would I suppose be due to the base color of their skin. Fewer brown pigments means paler skin that more easily reflects the color of the light which is reflected off of it.
The temperature of that outdoor enviromental light will vary according to time of day between 2700K (yellowish like incandescent lights at dusk & dawn) to 6000K (washed out white-blueish of high noon) and then again that is affected by dust in the air, fog, cloud cover, mountains, buildings and latitude from the equator. So with each HDRI lighting reference you use it will be unique from all others - as there is not way to replicate the point in time again.
Well for photographs and artists trying to create the same style look as they do again and again that is not so nice - so DAZ added the Autohead lamp to can be using to create portrait style lighting hightlighting which is on by default and it looks like you left on.
3DL in contrast as it was created as a lighting solution for entertainment media is biased towards rendering the same style of look in the models used and that's the difference you are noting.
Note I'm telling you these things as a hobbyist, not a professional and I learned most about environmental lighting when I decided to replace my lightbulbs at home with 5500K LED lightbulbs.
I guess i have to be more involved in the light temps i am using based on the model skin i am using and the environment they are in if there are other things reflecting off the skin. On a side note i dont use the headlamp its off for me by default i have created a spot light rig with various lights for different situations butterfly, side lights ..rim lights etc all saved as a group that can turn on and off. The tests i did just use the Butterfly light which is just above the model facing down. Lumen lvl 100,000 and temp of 6500
Daniel
Hi Daniel.
Applying the Iray Uber Base! converts the 3Delight material settings to Iray use. The procedure is suboptimal, because the 3Delight settings are just simply transfered without any adjustments to PBR shading needs. For example, the "Specular Color" and "Specular2 Color" from the 3Delight material will become "Glossy Color" and "Top Coat Color" on the Iray material. In case of the Genesis 2 Base Figures that will be a light orange for "Glossy Color" and a light blue for "Top Coat Color". Which is just plain wrong. Can't say it often enough, the "Glossy Color" and "Top Coat Color" of a dielectric (non-metal) material needs to be white, only metals are able to change the color of the specular reflection. If one creates a dielectric material for Iray, greys, blues, oranges, or any other color has nothing to do there in "Glossy Color" and "Top Coat Color".
The "Subsurface Color" of the 3Delight material will become "Translucency Color". Specular maps will be put into the "Glossy Color" and "Top Coat Color" texture slots, although DAZ's Iray Uber documentation states that those rather need to be put into the "Glossy Layered Weight"/"Top Coat Weight" ones. That's not the converters fault but the result of the year long bad habit of 3Delight material creators to put those into the "Specular Color" rather than into the "Specular Strength" texure slots where they actually belong. But even then the weights needs to be raised (3.00 and more) since the standard specular maps for the 3Delight renderer aren't really Iray compatible. Too much black in them, and in the PBR shading realm Black (0.00) means "No". No glossiness, no roughness, no reflectivity, etcpp.
Values are transfered 1:1, for example a "Bump Strength" of 25% in 3Delight will be a 0.25 in Iray. Since Iray handles bump a bit differently, the value needs to be much higher, depending on the bump map around five to ten times the 3Delight material value.
The "Iray Optimized Genesis 2" MATs are a bit better than just converting the 3Delight material to Iray by the Uber Base (or the auto-conversion), but still contain a glitch there and then. The "TL" designated translucency texure maps in the "Translucency Weight" texture slots f.e. supress any translucency effect and so any color you put into "Translucency Color" won't affect your skin in the final render. They're either not Iray compatible or the renderer expects a simple float value in this place rather than a texture map. Similar to the "Transmitted Color" texture slot where a map plugged into simply doesn't work and make that parameter ineffective. "Floats only" in this place.
Too red (and also dark) skins are mostly a result of enough red already contained in the diffuse texture and adding even more red (darken) through a not so optimal "Translucency Color" and/or "Transmitted Color". The Victoria 6 diffuse textures are a good (or bad
) example.
For setting up a skin shader I'd recommend a neutral light which AndyGrimm suggests: a spot with 15000 Lumen and a temperature of 5000 (K). If your skin setup looks realistic in that lighting, it will most likely look realistic in any lighting.
Thanks Arnold that clears alot up i will play with what you mentioned now that i know where and what to correct.
Daniel
I think they work if you choose Scatter&Transmit under Translucency, having an effect on the figure with the texture visible "inside" to whatever degree you ramp up the translucency slider. I'm using them a lot these days, along with an internal geoshell using the M4/V4 muscle maps for internal colour and displacement, a deep "light blocker" geoshell coloured red, and sometimes even autofit the V4/M4 skeleton inside (the principle being different skin and internal layers going down to the bone, and you can actually just see the bones under the skin of the top of the hand, for example). If maps are too dark and I don't want to regrade them (lazy, I know, but life's sometimes way too short), I switch off limits for the colour values and use values of more than 1,1,1, which works well for very pale skin and the like (not for the skin diffuse colour but for the translucency colour texture map, which seems to transmit more light at +1 values).
I have an Intel HD 3000 GPU and 8GB RAM and am doing CPU iRay renders using the standard exposure settings. The lighting and the Dome background is an HRDI freebie with a mostly bright sunny day and it appears to be about noone from the shadows generated under the Girl 7's feet. One of the renders uses no Auto Headlamp and one does. I've replaced the Girl 7 default texture set with Victoria 7's iRay optimized texture set.
So why is the Girl 7 looking like the light from the HRDI is in heavy shade or at dusk? Is this because the iRay shader is not bouncing light off the ground to create more diffuse light?
The same thing happens with the Guy 7.
If the characters (Girl 7, Victoria 7, and Guy 7) were portrayed on the DAZ Store as having darker skin than that would be fine but since they aren't that leads me to believe I am doing something fundamentally wrong in the iRay settings of the Render even though I'm really leaving it mostly alone and not changing any exposure settings. Why they must be using flood lights to get the skin tones they are getting in the
If I have to adjust any of the exposure settings then I am concerned because I know that typical consumer grade photography is based off of ISO 100 which is already the default they've set.
In reading the forums I've seen most people compensate by adding extra lights to the scene but that is defeating the purpose of HRDI lighting.
@D.Robinson
You're welcome.
For the standard diffuse maps used on the variuos older (and also newer) figures you can take into account that they already contain the final amount of tranyslucency, subsurface and ambient occlusion effects. We need to set Translucency and Volume parameters to have light shine though the "thinner parts", like ears, to make it "look right". An optimal solution would be to have greyish, dead-looking base skin textures, and then breathing live into them through realistic Translucency and Volume effects. But that would need the several skin texture creators to change their workflows and adapt them to physically based shading needs. Due to the fact that they did put their specular textures into the wrong texture slots for years, I wouldn't expect they adapt that soon... if ever.
So if your skin turns out to be too dark/tanned, you can simply use the default diffuse texture maps on the "Translucency Color" texture slots and set "Translucency Color" to plain white (255-255-255). That way only a small amount of already built-in translucence is added to the base diffuse texture maps.
@Jimbow
Just to avoid misunderstandings: I was talking about the "TL" designated texture maps of the Genesis 2 Female Base figure plugged into the "Translucency Weight" texture slots. Like the "V5BreeTorsoTL" texture etc. Not about diffuse or greyscale textures plugged into the "Translucency Color" texture slots. There textures work just fine.
I ran a couple of tests about a month ago. Removed the diffuse maps from "Base Color" and set "Thin Walled" to "On" to just observe the influence of the translucency parameters. Even with a "Translucency Weight" at 0.9 and "Base Color Effect" set to "Scatter & Transmit" the figure only shows the Base Color (in this case white, see pic. 001). Only with the TL texture maps removed translucency parameters are taken into effect (see pic. 002).
It's actually a (common) laymens misunderstanding that light is able to reach down to a bone, light reaches down to the subcutis layer at maximum (whichs main purpose, among others, is protection of lower tissues against UV rays and padding nerve ends) and there gets reflected back to the skin surface: The Appearance of Human Skin Takanori Igarashi, Ko Nishino, and Shree K. Nayar. Technical Report: CUCS-024-05. Department of Computer Science. Columbia University. New York, NY 10027, USA. June 2005. (Figure 19 on Page 31 [34 of that file] shows a schematic of the optical pathways in skin). What you most likely see is the subcutis-covered bone, not the bare bone itself (skin's thin there).
Thanks. I will adjust the Surfaces settings how you say and re-render the scene I have.
I've experimented with muscle map geoshells and bones autofitted. I think in the vast majority of cases it's unnecessary, but I think the bones might be handy for backlit noses and candled hands (high translucency and nose can make the character begin to resemble a ballistic gel mannequin)
I had to goggle what a ballistic gel mannequin is...I thought it might be the Circus Act shooting someone out of a cannon...
Depends on if the HDRi used is actually one. Many freebies out there really aren't, but just some highres medium or low dynamic range jpegs with different exposure values slapped together and then exported in hdr format. Didn't count all the fake HDRi's I trashed already. You can try and rotate the dome to see if the lighting changes significantly. Could be that the sunlight's origin is from behind your figure's back.
When it comes to Iray HDR lighting, I'd recommend "certified" distributors like DimensionTheory, Dumor3D, OutOfTouch... that way you can be sure you get something from someone who exactly knows what he/she is doing... including the knowledge that one simply can't built an appropriate HDRi by just slapping a bunch of jpegs together.
They are, especially for the hands. The displaced geoshell using the muscle maps displacement has a really nice effect on the tip of the nose. The effect is subtle, but the internal organs and bones improve the internal light scattering to my eye. I don't see how they couldn't, to be honest. Renders also seem to go a bit faster.
With that setup you're comparing apples to oranges ;)
Will, I'll look them up (I can't load a scene right now, but I also use mapped refraction to make areas gelatin-like, including the ears). Meanwhile, here are a few tests I've done over the last couple of months, including an early test of my latest gallery image.
Don't know how you come to that conclusion. That render experiment shows that a texture map plugged into the "Translucency Weight" will effectively disable Translucency Color and texture map coming into effect, regardless if "Base Color Effect" is set to "Scatter Only" or "Scatter & Transmit". If a texture would work in this place you should get something added to the white base color at that weight of 0.9, especially at the nose and ears, for that are the brightest areas of the G2F Base TL texture maps. Iray material parameters, although on DAZ's surface material tab for the Iray Uber equipped with a texture slot, might doesn't support texture maps. "Transmited Color" is one of them. At least that's what the folks at NVIDIA say.
Apologies. Busy day, and I should know better than to reply to anyone until I don't have to multitask :/
I took you to mean textures in the colour slot, not the translucency weight. In fact, it's probably one of the reasons I find displaced meat geoshells, blocker geoshell and a skeleton seem to work so well, rather than using translucency [weight] maps which I gave up on a while ago.
Thanks. It is 8K big my current HRDi from one of those freebie sites from that HRDI thread elsewhere in these forums, but I will go back to using the well known Freebie of the Pixar Campus or that Golf Course near the French Alps as they are known to be good.
As suggested I dropped the translucency color to 1.0 1.0 1.0 but Girl 7 was still much too dark. So then I drop the translucency weight from 0.65 to 0.33 and the Girl 7 begins to look about the tone of the Victoria 7 promo ads in the DAZ Store since I'm using that material set. Finally I try dropping translucency weight to 0.10 and set the translucency color to 1.0 0.31 0.23 and it appears more or less similar to the 2nd render where I dropped translucency weight to 0.33 but left translucency color as 1.0 1.0 1.0.
She is facing the North Sea in these renders so the sun is to her southwest between 14:00 and 16:00 I'd guess but I'm not a sundial reader. I will see if she is too washed out when facing south.
How do I make her appear sweaty without spending cash? That's what the spectral or glossiness maps are for no?
Might be worth checking out Zniman's skin settings over at DeviantArt (I'd link to it, but the settings are embedded into a pic that's probably not safe for work).
Thanks, I'll do that one too. I've yet to be satisfied really with any of the settings I've tried although I've made the Girl 7 to look more the skin tone she's Ad Copied with in the DAZ Store she's still a bit flat looking.
I just watched a tutorial by SickleYield and by PearMan (or PearBear I think) and the methods they used work but I want to try to stick to HRDI lighting and PBR more than they do.
So what I'm going to try is dial down the albedos to something really small like 5% - 10% and dial up the Top Coat, Glossiness, and Bump to 100% and see where that gets me. Today, so far, I cut the albedo/diffuse down to 10% and the Top Coat Weight up to 100% and it's been rendering for 6 hours now but there is a bit of a oily skin sheen for the 1st time and the skin has more varied depth to it than before. :-)
If that don't make a big improvement then Zniman's, SickleYield's or PearBear's method's all visibly work and I'll try them all.
Wow! That ChiYoHD is the type of sweaty look I was trying for.
These are my favorite HDRI's Best part is, if you're just using them for lighting, and not as a background, then you can just use the small versions which are free. And they are some of the best HDRIs out there
@nonesuch I still think topcoat with tiling bump is the best way to do sweaty biggest advantage going for it is that you then don't need to use a spec map in the top coat > strong highlights, but the highlights still get suitibly broken up. but one thing o keep in mind if things arent showing up as shiny, lighting plays a big role, if there's nothing bright to reflect there won't be much in the way of highlights > if you're using a very diffuse HDRI and no extra lights it doesn't matter what your skin settings are they will still look diffuse.
for reference here's some relatively shiny skin. Basecoat glossy is default topcoat is my settings (tweaked for less subtle shine than I usually do)
topcoat weight .35
topcoat color blank with no maps,
topcoat roughness .22
topcoat bump 1.38 and a black and white tiling map of my own creation 9 (though a simple noise map would honestly do) and tiled to various amounts (more tiled on the torso and arms)
I agree...Greg's are great.
Thanks so much. I tried the Zniman's but mine came out very red, more than sunburn red, a true red, so theirs much be applicable for the custome textures maps they made...
So I'm trying PearBear's method and it's working! I just deleted the spectral maps, dialed up the Top Coat to 1.0, the Bump to 2.0 (which now with the Top Coat at 1.0 seems a bit strong), and some other adjustments, mainly at getting the eyes also not to look so flat, and over 10 hours later the flatness is gone!
I watched HGTV yesterday on a 50' TV from about 10' away and the image is much more like the way those people are lit on TV. I think now my highlights are too white, as if actually heavily sweating or wet so I will take your advise and change the Top Coat colot to be a light grey, probably 0.7, 0.7, 0.7 and I'll make the other adjustments just suggest too as Lee is excellent and the lighting look I'm trying to get on people.
:-) I'm so glad to finally be getting something that doesn't look flat.
I do like Greg Zaal's work and have his freebie bundle. I intend to buy some of his other HRDis after I get a bigger SSD and check the lighting generated of the scenes I like. I like that he includes the date and time but it would be nicer if he included the approximate lattitude, longitude, temperature, humidity, and maybe something like cloudy (overcast), raining, partly sunny although that I can tell mostly from the pictures.
When you say b & w tiling map do you mean a 2 pixel map, one white & one black and you just let DAZ Studio tile it?
OK, I can do that easy enough. Thanks.
I've noticed in reference photos skin is mottled in variences of the person's main skin color. I'm not talking freckles, moles, hair follicles and such though but I think it's related to distribution of fat and blood vessels under the skin. A map similar to what you're talking about for Top Coat and a noise function seems like it would simulate that effect well but in which layer to put such a map? Ideally I'd make the Albedo very translucent and have a texture map the opposite of a Top Coat, instead like an Under Coat. I guess that's done with Translucency Weight and Translucency Color?