iRay Skin Shader for Darius 6

acanthis

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vwrangler

It's probably not the Glossy Layered Weight you need to drop, it's the Translucency Weight. I'm nowhere near that computer so I can't see what settings I've used, but I think with Darius (and with a lot of characters), if the Translucency Weight is above .15, it's too high, if that waxy look isn't what you're aiming for.

According to Sickleyield's tutorials, what you need to do is max out Glossy Layered Weight -- depending on the conversion, the top value it will default to is either 1.0, 2.0 or unlimited (don't ask me why, I've no idea) -- then work with the Glossiness and Glossy Roughness.

Ah, OK, here's the relevant part of her comment on my Darius image:

Sickleyield, on "Darius and the rose"

... Short version, though, without custom maps:

Translucency should be very low if there are no maps. Not higher than 0.1. If there are maps in color but not weight still not higher than 0.2 for most renders. SSS can be higher because it only shows up with the right kind of lighting. Having translucency too high will bork your gloss. Make sure SSS direction is -0.5 because it tends not to convert automatically to that, and depth should be much lower than the 10 it tends to automatically convert to.

Turn the glossy layered weight all the way up. Use roughness to make it less shiny after that. How much roughness you need will depend on the textures and what their spec maps look like (if they came with any). This is the thing in Iray that is most different from 3Delight skin shaders.

Top coat can be useful at a low value (say 0.2 to 0.4), fresnel, and 1.44 on the IOR. Don't try to use it in reflectivity mode on skin, it's usually going to cause issues. You can put the bump map in top coat map and top coat bump map if you like but it actually doesn't do much visually. [...] (Higher top coat and higher translucency are useful on the teeth and mouth parts.)

Anything that's tinted blue or aqua, especially if it's the diffuse or glossy, should be tinted back to white or gray for most things. If things look too orange it's usually your SSS or translucency color or both that need to be desaturated from their present values.

Turn up the [base] bump to 2.0 or so. It's always too low when autoconverted.

Light skin with mesh lights. Photometrics suck at skin and HDRs are only okay on their own. The sun-sky lighting is so-so....

That said, in order to get him to work in Iray, I needed to make him custom bump and SSS maps from his old ones, which are just wrong for Iray. (I do not know how to make bump and SSS maps. It was an adventure. With extra cursing.)

Also, be very careful with the Top Coat layer. I try to take it as low as I can get away with to keep characters from going to glass or weirdly sparkly.

mjc1016

vwrangler said:

Also, be very careful with the Top Coat layer. I try to take it as low as I can get away with to keep characters from going to glass or weirdly sparkly.

Top coat shouldn't be needed unless you want an 'oiled' or 'wet' look, any way.

acanthis

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vwrangler

acanthis said:

Thanks, vwrangler and mjc1016. I am experimenting with the Translucency weight and can already see a marked improvement. This is going to take a few experiments but at last it's going in the right direction.

Hopefully, DAZ will be releasing "iRay Essentials" for ALL of the G2M/G2F characters over the coming months - and not just abandon them because we've now moved to Genesis 3!

iRay Essentials is a published artist product, not a DAZ-produced one.

Unfortunately, the shift to Genesis 3 isn't the only issue. I think for the last several figures, only the specifically named figures -- Darius, Monique, Callie, Cory, Ninive themselves -- have their own UV. Every other character in those lines uses the underlying named figure shapes, but the UV is usually either Base Male or Base Female. (Cayman is Base Male, Shaneka and Tamara are Base Female, and so forth.) Even Ysabeau doesn't have her own UV, surprisingly enough. It may or may not be worthwhile for a vendor to do something for Base Male or Base Female, depending on how well this particular product did, but Darius, Monique, Callie, Cory, and Ninive themselves are likely to be orphaned for this sort of thing.