Getting older content to look good
lindans
Posts: 99
in The Commons
Is there a way to get older content, specifically V4 stuff to look good in Iray renders? Daz Studio 4.20 I have tried using the Iray Uber base but not sure if I'm using it correctly everything looks plasticy LOL! I have so much older content and it seems to be going to waste.
Any hints appreciated
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Comments
Simply applying the default iray shader probably won't look good on every surface.
Not every surface is an oak tree , or a patch of broken concrete, or a long thick mane of luxurious soft hair.
You're are most likely going to need to set up the shader for each surface once you have the default iray shader applied. :)
For the V4 items I use, I've replaced all of the shaders with Iray shaders since just applying the Uber Base rarely works well. For example, recently I used a lot of JGreenless's shaders (like https://www.daz3d.com/simple-fabric-iray-shaders and https://www.daz3d.com/basic-fabric-iray-shaders), but there are a ton of great PAs who make shaders too.
There are 3Delight to Iray converters, some of them for sale in the store, that should help get you to a good starting point. That said, they have obvious limitations and you'll need to be comfortable retouching things on your own, so maybe it would be better for you to invest in learning about the surfaces tab.
You can also just use Iray shaders to convert the items, Which means you won't be using the original textures, but older models usually have lower resolution maps, so that may be a good thing rather than a disadvantage.
It's also worth considering that older models are also lower poly. They will usually work well for background elements, but bringing them to the forefront and next to modern items will usually make the image jarring. Moreover, 3Delight had per pixel displacement, which means quite a lot of things got details added with displacement maps that will just create blocky artifacts in Iray unless you crank up the subdivision, as Iray only displaces the actual geometry of the mesh.
Regarding the specific question about things looking like plastic, increasing the surface roughness should help a lot with that, as well as decreasing the glossiness.
Well, I have tried with V3 here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5611236/#Comment_5611236, with V3 being the left character. Came out moderately well with the G8F iray characters.
Took a bit of time tweaking the DAZ uber settings after applying the uber settings to the character, but it worked in the end.
Regards,
Richard
There are a number of skin convertors, but https://www.daz3d.com/n-g-s-anagenessis-2-revolution is by far the best thing I've found for pre-genesis era figures as it creates the maps missing in the earlier versions. Way back in the day I did some pretty amazing conversions of some Stephanie 3 characters, and keep in mind that the default skin maps for Genesis were V4 and M4, so anything that's set up to convert Genesis can convert those skins if you put them on a genesis base first. All that said, you still have to deal with the lower resolution of many of the surface textures and the bending issues of the older figures since DAZ never produced weight-mapped versions and the one that are out there are designed for Poser.
This is why i stopped using older, pre Iray characters, they just never look as good as ones made for iray IMO. I tried for several months converting and tweaking and adjusting, finally just moved on.
I find that a lot of older clothing looks far too shiny after applying the Iray Uber Base. However it is an easy fix, just increase the glossy roughness and it will look a lot better. Then alter things like glass and metal to use proper Iray shaders for those types and then things are looking much better. I agree that newer clothing generally (although not always) looks better, but a lot of items were never remade for newer figures, so I do use them for this reason.
Wow, thanks for that important information @Cybersox!
Concerning 3DL to Iray shader conversion, this tutorial of esha has helped me a lot:
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-training-intermediate-01--tweaking-the-surfaces
Ha ha.... Oh the English! I really miss them (Lived in East Anglia from 97-2002.
If I could get my stuff to turn out "moderately well", by your standards, I'd consider myself a serious artist!
To be honest, I thought your V3 was the best of the lot!
"moderately wel"... ha ha ha...
;)
That is called the Art of the Understatement.
I have used V4 and M4 skin textures on Genesis as a starting point, then used one of the Iray skin converters like this. https://www.daz3d.com/iray-converter-for-genesis
If you add a bit of glossy roughness to your clothing and reduce the glossy reflectivity dial and adjust the glossy color node from white to something off white and 25% darker then alot of the plasticky glossiness disappears. I would certainly recommend buying some fabric and leather Iray shaders to re texture some probelmatic surfaces.
Now hair is a whole other story.
It really depends on what sort of older items you're talking about and what maps they have available to use. I was just looking at some older clothing items the other day and trying to convert them to Iray and some convert nicely, while others don't. If the item in question only has a single color map, then you're pretty much s. o. l. and you will need to replace it with a tiled shader, or make your own bump/specular/etc maps from scratch. Most often a tiled shader won't work, because you'll be missing needed details such as stiching, etc. (it might only work from a distance where you won't miss tiny details like that). If the older item does come with things like specular/gloss maps, bump maps/height maps, and even normal and displacement maps, then you really have everything you need to convert to Iray well. You just need to play with the shader values.
There are also some really well-made older items that modeled everything out, rather than relying on adding details directly to a color map. For those, you can use tiled shaders and they'll still look good because you don't lose any detail by replacing the color map. In one of my pieces I found a veil for V4 that had so much modeled detail, it came out wonderful just replacing everything with new tiled shaders.
Thanks all, will try a few things mentioned.
Thanks, made my day.
Regards,
Richard
One of the big things is that the Bump setting for 3DL is much stronger than Iray. That's the reason Iray Bump goes up to 50.
Often, the older geometry holds up pretty well. I find some of the older models need texture tweaking. Some need new, larger diffuse textures and upgraded/additional textures for gloss, bump, specular, etc. Sometimes, a tiling texture shader may do the trick. THis is time-consuming, but newer models may need texture adjustments as well. 3D was never *that* easy.
Depends what you're trying to use.
Applying new shaders and materials to a house/shed/shelf-unit (etc - basically any prop), is a good way of using older models. I might use the existing textures, but often find they are too low res.
For characters, I convert their textures to G8 and plug them into a PBI shader.
There is no difference between old and new geometry. A quad is a quad, a tri a tri... Etc.
A good model doesn't age; put new shaders and/or textures on it, and it can look newly released.
By that logic, anything made out of steel is the same as anything else made of steel, so a knife sold at a dollar store and one made for master chefs should be the same. That said, in the context of this discussion, I believe most people are using "geometry" to refer to all aspects of the figures/props sans those defined by textures. And in that case, while the basic material structure is the same, the way that many older figures and props were created were generally not made up to quite the same spec that consumers now expect. That's not so true of V4 and M4 themselves, mind you, as they remain very impressive pieces of craftsmanship, and work quite well with the after-market weight-mapping... but the same is definitely not true of the hair, clothing and other props from the pre-genesis periods, which can often be pretty rough compared to more recent products, nor is it true of the V3 generation figures and earlier. The introduction of Z-brush kind of redefined everything that was possible.
...one thing I do for clothing is go into materials tab before converting and change the lighting type to "Matte" as it usually is set to "Plastic".
For anything metallic keep the lighting type as is and remove any reflection maps that may be present. Also turn off the ambient channel if it is active, Some older Poser content used this. If it is something that's supposed to glow like a flame or other light source, just use the Iray emissive channel instead.
@Cybersox has it right. Some of the older models are quite nice! I've looked at the mesh and been impressed with that. Others are too low-poly or poorly structured. Even now, some models have issues. But these days, textures are usually larger and more detailed. That often helps.
With respect to hair, it's fortunate that any hair can be used with any figure. Some of the clothing is still nice, but some of it is limited in how it can be used. I think a lot of the garments were designed to work around the limitations, providing wardrobes of clothing that real people would likely never choose to wear. Some of that still goes on today.
I've used both of these to get good "starter" results. You always have to fiddle. Another trick you can try on V4 is to get one character set for V4 that has decent Iray materials. Apply that to whichever character you are working on then swap out all the diffuse maps for the ones that do not have Iray mats. That gets you bump, normal, spec mats that look good in Iray, with the diffuse maps of the one you really want to use. There are a lot of V4 skins that are quite good.
https://www.daz3d.com/iray-converter-for-generation-4
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-3delight-to-iray-converter