Getting Perfectly Smooth and Soft Skin in Daz (no freckles, pimples, etc.)

Greiya.Archives

I'm fairly new to Daz Studio, been using it for a few months now, and one thing I really hate about genesis 8/8.1 characters is that every gen 8/8.1 character I've tried so far (and that includes ones that are supposed to be anime-esque) has skin that tries to be realistic by having a bunch of freckles, beauty marks, pimples, rash, moles, etc. I even dislike sweat and hair pores, as well as the fine details on the skin

So far, I've removed these things manually from the skin textures in photoshop. I also remove/disable bump maps and normal maps too. While this works (it's inconvenient and not perfect, but it works), I've seen other 3D artists that have managed to get perfectly smooth skin on their characters. I'm wondering if there are any daz studio assets like a set of skin textures or such that is perfectly soft and smooth skin? Or are these artists all making their own skin textures/shaders from scratch?

 

I'll post examples of renders by the artists I mentioned below in a separate comment (in case anything needs to be removed, it shouldn't - they don't contain nudity, but I'm just being cautious cause I'm new on the forum and haven't found the full list of rules yet). I'll also include my own results using the method I described above.

 

PS: Another method I found works for getting smooth skin is using gen 3 skin textures on gen 8 characters. Aiko 7 and Aiko 7 characters have very smooth skin. But either way, the smooth skin in the renders the other artists produce looks much better than either of my methods, I'd love to know how they do it

Richard Haseltine

One way to reduce elements of relief is to use a very soft light (and HDR, or lights with their geometry set to be non-pointlike so that they emit light from an area).

Greiya.Archives

err, I'm not sure if attaching the images suffices to include them. if there are no images showing, gimme a second I'm figuring it out!

 

if images are showing, the artists of the three images that aren't mine are 1) Necdaz (blonde, it's watermarked), 2) マゾ豚 / mazobuta / mfighter (brunette in latex), 3) 小天 / footfetish911 (image with speech bubbles)

 

the 4 images containing the same 2 characters (brunette in maid uniform, and pink haired woman) are mine, smoothed their skins with the first method described in the original post

 

sazzyazzca

Perhaps this will give you the look you're after:

https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-2-for-iray

Greiya.Archives

Richard Haseltine said:

One way to reduce elements of relief is to use a very soft light (and HDR, or lights with their geometry set to be non-pointlike so that they emit light from an area).

While lighting is very relevant to how skin looks in a render, I'm specifically looking for solutions using surfaces (of the characters), I want character to have absolutely no freckles, pimples, etc.

thanks though! I just hadn't yet posted the comment showing examples of what I meant / was referring to so the question probably wasn't very clear on its own, mb!

 

sazzyazzca said:

Perhaps this will give you the look you're after:

https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-2-for-iray

interesting, I'll try it out tomorrow and share results here, thanks!

crosswind

I myselft don't like what you mentioned either. If I really need 'human real' or 'photoreal', I go for photography... but people always have diff. preferences.

With DS, I usually have 3 weapons:
- 1st: retouch texture maps ( there're quite a few chacracters have 'beautified' texture maps but not enough ). Better know well at least one image editing software (Ps, Gimp, etc.) and beautify everthing you can. Yes, light is important and I always use combo of ambient light and mesh light, but good lighting patterns or sth. won't give you good skin textures on the chars... dirty textures are still dirty, rough still rough...
- 2nd: shader tweaking on surfaces.
- 3rd: post work.

Roman_K2

OTTOMH, has anyone thought of massive, “pre-” post work at the outset, like running the base texture(s) through various content aware, A.I.-type modules to smooth things out.

There are also "clay" and "porcelain" shaders... adjust the overall color/hue/saturation in these and away you go?

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/9b/ff1aa7506449dbcadb35ae560edab5.jpg ... heh, it's not exactly my cup of tea but that's an interesting, very smooth Disney-esque look.

Seven193

A.I. will transform any image you send it, and yes, even Daz texture maps.

I just did a simple test with a texture map of a head, and it removed all moles. In fact, it worked better than expected. It removed all blemishes.  The only issue I see is a potential problem with seams. But, I haven't transformed an entire body set yet to see if that's a real problem.

Workflow:

- Use Automatic1111 stable diffusion.
- Download a checkpoint file called "RCNZ Cartoon 3d" from civitai.com (assuming you want toon skin).
- Use img2img, and load your Daz texture map.
- To preserve the shape and details of the map, first pre-process it through ControlNet (an extension that needs to be installed separately).
  The most useful preprocessors are probably hed boundary or depth.  I haven't tried them all, just soft hed boundary.
- Then run it again using the preprocessed control image loaded in ControlNet.
- For the prompt, type in something like "smooth skin".  And like magic, it removes all blemishes, while keeping the details of the nose, eyes, ears, and mouth intact.
- For the denoising strength, keep it low, like 0.25 or less.

And if you get out-of-memory errors, you may have to scale down your map to 1024x1024, if you're trying to reskin a 4k image or something like that.  I think your graphics card needs at least 8GB. 12GB is better, and so on.

 

Sven Dullah

Thought I'd just mention simply removing the diffuse/base color textures and replacing them with a generic color from the color picker...