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Shader is attached (but I adjusted it again :-).
I used it on both surfaces.
That's very kind of you. I look forward to checking it out. #AlwaysLearning
#AlwaysLearning - me to
I'm still not a fan of the PBR Skin shader...and still far prefer the Uber shader. This is one of the reasons. I'll likely be trying to convert V9's textures over to the Uber shader to see if I can make it look any better. I was able to do so with V8.1...just have to manually set the textures and tweak the values.
You convert textures over to Uber shader?
Maybe I missunderstand, but you can save your surface settings from your older scene, e.g. a G8.1 one, as a shader preset.
Then after loading G9 or V9 you can select one or multiple surfaces of those and then hit and hold CTRL key and double click the shader preset in your Library. DS opens a dialog where you can select to not change the textures but only the surface values. This way you can copy an uber shader to the G9 surfaces. It might be that you need to change the UV set after that in the surface settings. It should be Base Multi UDIM I think. But some features of the new PBR Skin won't be available then anymore. The tiled detail normals feature is not implemented in the old uber shader, so you loose that.
It's not so simple with some of the textures, as they don't work the same way between the two different shaders. One example is the specular/gloss map. There are some edits required in Photoshop or other such editing tool.
I still don't understand the purpose of the detail maps anyways, so I don't miss those. Tiling across entire surfaces is not how skin works...my hands don't have the same texture as my forearm and my forearm doesn't have the same texture as my elbow, etc etc. I'd rather rely on nicely detailed and high quality norrmal and bump maps.
Yes, I agree. I am also not using detail maps.
The detail maps on G9 are not tiled maps. They are a custom made set of 8k skin normal maps for the entire figure.
Just checked the Texture folder ...DAZ\Characters\Genesis9\Victoria9
Normals there are 4096. Maybe I should look in a different place ?
EDIT:
Found them: Textures\DAZ\Characters\Genesis9\Base\Skin_Details
So they went back to using full normal maps over the square tiled normals that were introduced with G8.1 and the PBR Skin shader?
It's an additional non-tiled normalmap used as an overlay over the regular normalmap for the same surface. In the same slot tiled G8.1 detail normalmaps were used.
The shader is still PBR, except set up with 1x1 tiling. In theory all what is needed to use tiled skin details is having detail weight mask made for G9.
@MallenLane Do you mean V9 rather than G9? That is, do the included retread G8 textures (Victoria 8.1, Kala 8, Jada 8.1, & Clara 8.1) have 8k detail maps as well?
You do great work BTW. Thank you.
The skin detail maps are universal, you can apply them to any of the textures.
Normal maps are still broken into two layers on G9, like G8.1. The quality and scope of the second layer changed however.
Layer 1 is the character sculpted normal maps, which go into the main normal map channel, and come with a character. These add things like character specific folds/moles/large wrinkles/etc; identifying surface attributes. These maps are 4k because they aren't intended to introduce the kind of tiny pore detail that Layer 2 is adding.
Layer 2 are the 8k skin details, which go into the old tile slot, but they are not tiled maps (notice the tiling is set to 1). These are 8k, fully custom created new skin normal, and they add all of the tiny micro details of skin, without adding features that are too specific.
These two normal maps layers combine to produce the final result of character specific with skin micro agnostic.
Why are all the textures not 8k? The answer to that is: the detail skin normal maps are the 8k element of the materials.
Those skin detail normal maps do the majority of the work in the final closeup rendered result by introducing the sharp micro shapes of the skin. There was no perceptual benefit to other map types also being 8k, because color isn't as defining as shape here, and having all maps be 8k would needlessly have introduced a massive memory usage penalty. We are talking (generally and vaguely) a 34% GPU memory increase, vs a 400+% memory increase for maps which would ultimately make little to no discernible difference.
So the focus was on the most 8k perceived detail return for the most efficient amount of computer resources used.
If you render the skin detail normals on a grey model, you can see that the majority of the 'crispness'" comes from the light and shadow of the 'shape' there. That makes a softer (or 4k) color albedo map appear mostly the same, because you are already gaining the visual crispness from the normal. And it's simply more hardware efficient.
@MallenLane Thank you so much for that detailed and comprehensive response! Thanks for also teaching me a new meaning for "agnostic." I wish Daz would just package you up for a G9 intro page and quash all the misunderstandings and mystery, but that's not their style.
I vote for that lol
Sure you can, save the ones in temp
This was one of my first major annoyances when I started playing around with Genesis 9/Victoria 9. I never use the L.I.E editor and if I do have to tweak something that way, I usually just pull the image into photoshop so I can do it faster and save the file somewhere rather then it being "temporarily" stored.
I had my own thread on this, but the question of how to do something simple like make the lips glossy was never answered. (though it was moved to a weird place in the forums)
Anyone have a tutorial on the workflow for Gen 9 and customizing individual parts of the surfaces now that they consolidated surfaces?
Btw: Under General>Misc you can find some interesting things.
FACS Detail Strength: controls the detail components (wrinkles) for the FACS targets. This is a strength slider, so you can have as much of the effect as you want.
Eye Resting Focal Point: modeling on forward facing eyes is easier, but real humans have eyes that are pointed slightly outward. This slider rotates the eyes about 3 degrees outward at it's maximum and will stop the cross-eyed illusion.
Eye Look Automatic: also on Genesis 8.1 and controls whether the eyes automatically move the eyelids with eyeball rotation or not. Now a strength slider for more control.
Body Pose Detail Strength: controls a few properties related to wrinkles and compression in the feet and wrist.
Flexion Automatic Strength: controls the intensity of the basic flexion movements on the figure. Now a strength slider for more control.
Base Joint Correctives: is now a strength slider so you can adjust the intensity of the correctives. This can be helpful for shapes that are smaller than the base.
Thanks for the info Mallen Lane...
My understanding limited though it is, eyelashes, tear, eyes and mouth are no separate objects
Looking at the surfaces listed for them
Mouth has mouth and teeth mouth seems to be the inner mouth and gums
heres what it looks like in zbrush
Eyes seem to be very different and the surfaces are
Eye left
Eye right
Eye moisture left
Eye moisture right
I've attached an image for Genesis surface but it does appear that lips do not have a separate surface but I may have missed something I'm still exploring what is what.
@Seeker Stock Art
I tweaked further. In case you are interested, the altered brow shader is attached.
If the lips are part of the head surface now, how do I make them glossy by themselves? Bit confused here.
You need to paint the roughness texture map of the face. Or go into geometry editor and make a new surface for just the lips yourself.
For a few years now DAZ have been pushing us into using layered textures, if you don't believe me then go check Victoria 8's textures (if you have her), the makeup and eyebrows are RGBA PNG, they get slotted into the Diffuse Overlay section of the Iray Uber shader.
The problem we have with G9 is that the PBRSkin shader doesn't have options for layering textures, DS4.21 got a "big" update to the Layered Image Editor to remedy that, so from now on it's time to learn how to use LIE.
I still feel that geoshell makeup is the best option.
I do hope someone comes out with a detailed tutorial on how to use L.I.E. just looking at it, it doesn't seem capable of doing much of anything. I always use Photoshop when I have to edit a texture. But if for some reason L.I.E. is better I'd use it, so long as it's explained why and how.
But in the end, LIE is just an image layering tool. It is also required to learn a real image editor to edit / create the textures. Gone are the times of simply dragging a slider to add a bit red to the lips. What used to take a few seconds, is now a real workload. And while one need to learn an image editor anyway, one can use it's advanced layering and skip LIE altogether?
It is more work, but I think diving into texture editing instead of just slider dragging gives way more freedom to create the render one had in mind.
So, like always in life, everything has pros and cons
So all it does it just let you load textures and layer them on top of eachother with blending modes? Well that is rather useless then (for me at least). It is unfortunate that working on G9 will take much longer than G8, whether or not the final results are better.
There's a couple of issues, Cutout Opacity tends to mess Translucency and SSS settings (which is why PBRSkin doesn't have it), and there is no direct way to get Iray to use an alpha channel, so the blending of the layers has to be done before it's sent to Iray.
Can't even use the ShaderMixer for it as none of the MDL image bricks give access to Alpha channels, so just like Iray Uber you need to use the Image Editor tool or LIE to force it.