Daz Skin in Blender
Hello all! This is my first posting here, so please be gentle. I hope I don't mess up or say something that I'm not supposed to.
So I've been learning Blender since March 2022. Within the last few weeks, I've taken up Daz for character creation (the other add-ons just don't seem to compare). My question is about skin shading and node setup. I use Diffeomorphic to import my models from one to the other. In Daz, they look phenomenal in the viewport. When I export them to Blender, however, they look ATROCIOUS! I'm sure this is because of the rendering engine, but I digress. I have developed my own node setup that gives me control over skin tone and shininess. While they certainly look good, I am aiming for more realism. I recently watched a YouTube tutorial that includes using maps that (I don't think) come with models called Cavity and Translucency. I wound up substituting in the Bump and Subsurface Scattering, but I'm still not pleased, since I no longer know how to control the skin tone or shininess like I had with my previous setup. Any advice?
Edit - I tried to attach screenshots, but it keeps saying "Failed to write file to disk"
. . . because of course it did . . .
Comments
Hey - I'd jump over to the Blender-Daz subform https://www.daz3d.com/forums/categories/blender-discussion and have a big long read through the threads there.
Huge amount of variables, but you're never going to get something to look the same in Cycles as it does in Iray (presuming that's what you are comparing). You can come close with a good plugin like Diffeo and lots of tweaks
(The daz forum image attachment is always broken, and possibly has a delay for new users.)
Are you using Eevee or Cycles? If Eevee, yeah, it looks awful, but with Diffeo, Cycles looks pretty close. It's not exact, but close enough that I mix shots from Daz and Blender in my animated films and no one knows the difference.
jwcjaygaines,
Like sid mentioned above, you'd get better milleage posting to the Blender-Daz subforum. A number of people there have been tackling the skin realism challenge.
Apart from Cycles, have you considered Octane? I've only seen people showcase their work with it, but OctaneRender Prime is reportedly free to use, perhaps limited to a single computer. A search online for "blender octane skin realism" yields examples, shader resources and links to other discussion groups. I myself have only a passing acquaintance with Octane-Blender because of its awesome non-photorealistic rendering (NPR).
Hope that helps.
Cheers!
Thanks for the kind replies! I will indeed go check out the other forum. Yes, I use Eevee, mainly because I'm on a laptop and Cycles likes to set my computer on fire. The amount of heat coming off this thing is scary. I'm surprised I haven't burnt my apartment to the ground yet!
Note to self: check your renter's insurance policy and make sure it's updated, just in case . . .
But I will also look into Octane. I should probably be spending all this Daz money on getting a desktop setup. Safety first! LOL!
For screenshots, uploading to another service like imgur and embedding them works better than the inline attachements most of the time
Eevee can't do iray skins, what you get in diffeomorphic is an approximation that you will have to tweak by hand. Most of the times it is enough to adjust the sss intensity to get something good. Otherwise use cycles.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Material Methods
Thanks for posting this page, @Padone! I read through it and saw the thing about the square approximation thing in Eevee, which is something that has been driving me nuts to figure out what I was doing wrong. I don't render like to render with Eevee, but I like to animate the face with the Eevee preview mode on so I can see where the eyes really are looking and such, but that little cloud has always made it annoyingly difficult. Now I know what I was doing wrong!