Why PBR skins looks so ugly?
Imronin
Posts: 23
in The Commons
I don't know why people still use PBR skin since they look so flat. I like to use Uber skin but the choices are very limited. Is there a way to convert PBR skin to Uber? Or is there a way to make PBR skins less ugly? And I've noticed another thing: my renders are always a little bit darker than normal. Why is that?
hailee test 1.png
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Unnatural looking oil-free dry skin. LOL, my legs can look like that in winter. So, a lack of sheen/glossiness and needs more translucency on that particular example.
1. Are you using lighting techniques and render settings with PBR skin that you used with Iray Uber skin? I'd love to have one set of lights and just one render setting that was equally good for everything, but thinking you can use the same lights and same render settings with different shaders is naive. You need to be able to make adjustments to lights, render settings, and to be able to make adjustments in the "Surfaces" tab.
Unfortunately, given the state of Daz documentation (Stop laughing and/or crying!) and the company's attitude towards customer education and training, there really isn't anything to do but start the application, load various models, and start tinkering. I suppose you could try to glean some useful info by searching the forums and YouTube, but you'd be sorting through mostly outdated (shader types change and Iray versions change) stuff, stuff that was never correct in the first place, and stuff that has useful info. that is inefficiently or confusingly communicated to the reader or viewer. I'd save my time and go straight to the trial-and-error--the joy of incremental movement of sliders and 300-sample test renders.
2. "Flat" and "darker than normal". Looking at the test shot you've attached I'd say that (a) the lighting isn't intense enough and (b) the skin shader may have a "hidden" graying, bluing, or purpling quality. I find that the most frequent Surface tab adjustments I'm making to skin shaders is neutralizing or whitening values intended to produce illusions of depth or chiaroscuro-type effects (or sometimes just bad attempts at creating darker skin tones). Open the Surfaces tab and make sure. Adjust and test render.
What's the gray background in your included render? The Viewport Void? A gray HDRI background? A gray prop background? The same model rendered in different environments may be perceived very differently, even when lighting and render settings remain the same or very similar.
I have been griping about PBRSkin surfaces to a friend of mine since they first began appearing (and the poor man's probably sick to death of it by now). I will say that it seems like a lot of the Really Bad PBRSkin surfaces were some of the first ones to come out, and in the last few months I've seen several PBRSkin surfaces on characters that are actually quite nice. I think people needed a while to learn how to make those surfaces well.
But, yes. The Really Bad PBRSkin surfaces are incredibly uniform--no variations in skin tone, no blemishes, etc--and incredibly matte and flat, like the person has been dipped in a vat of powdered chalk. Sometimes I look at one of these surfaces and I need to go get a glass of water immediately because I can feel the moisture leaving my body.
If you have one of these on a character you want to use, I personally think you won't be able to light it so it looks good. I don't think it's possible. For the characters I own like that, I put a different skin on them when I use them. You can TRY what nonesuch suggests, but I haven't had much success upping the gloss and translucency with the Really Bad skins.
For what it's worth, regular Iray surfaces aren't immune to this; I bought a character just this morning which uses regular-Iray surfaces and yet manages to look exactly like a Really Bad PBRSkin character: absolutely matte, and an unnatural dusty pink, like she's covered every inch of her body in foundation that's the wrong shade for her skin.
Well, I'm creating scenes with multiple characters. This means there gonna be different shaders under the same lighting and render settings. I didn't have this problem with Genesis 8 Uber models (Mostly MSO). Then I switched to G9 PBR models. Look at this sample. This is a G8 Uber.
Is there anyone except Mousso who creates Uber shaders for G9?
The issue is with the SSS settings. You have to manually tweak them to get desirable results. It took me a long time to warm up to the PBR Skin shader, and I still have issues with it...but I've learned to work with it and get desirable results. It's all in the SSS. I don't have many Mousso characters for G9, but here is an example with Lorienne. I did not change any maps. It's all SSS settings that were changed. Took about 30sec to do. The issue is that most PA's (and even the core figures) are still using the same old SSS settings from years ago. They don't work anymore. They produce ORANGE PEOPLE. They need to be tweaked hardcore for the PBR Skin shader. They even need to be tweaked if you're still using Uber skins.
Same tweaks for Joan 9 (plus better brows because the ones that load out of the box are hooorible) -
Here is Angela 9 Space Infantry. Darker skin tones with PBR Skin tend to look much better out of the box than lighter skin tones. Still, here are some tweaks on Angela 9. The tweaks are a slight bit different, but still very easy to do.
FN Edith
I will note that there seems to be a bug where some shaders that are loaded after the initial scene load do not load properly, and this bug seems to worsen further down the timeline (quite a nuisance for someone who likes to build scenes on Frame 30 to give room to do dForce simulation if needed).
I've attached examples with Jada 8.1's PBRskin and the standard Ultrascenery shader, respectively at frames 0, 15 and 30 of the timeline (if you're using the Iray preview, you need to reinitialise for this to show). I don't immediately have an example, but I've come to conclude that even Frame 0 is not quite correct.
Saving and reloading the scene resolves it, but it's a complete pain to have to keep doing that. This definitely affects at least these two shaders, but I believe it might also impact other shaders too (as the parameters affected here seem to be different for each shader - for PBRSkin, glossiness and possibly something to do with translucency/volume are affected, but for Ultrascenery, tiling is wrong, so I'm wondering if there's some parameter in shaders like Uber that is affected, but is less often used or more minor).
I did report this to Daz a year ago (and I noticed it some time before that, but took some time to convince myself it wasn't my fault), but unfortunately the ticket has languished entirely unresponded to, despite me trying to follow it up more than once. (If anyone else can replicate this issue and send it in, please do so, because it may convince Daz to look at it).
TL;DR: PBRSkin does not load correctly if it's applied after the initial scene load, so that might be part of the problem people are experiencing.
I think generally speaking, IRAY Uber skins tend to look more idealised and glamorous, like a fashion editorial or a movie poster. PBR Skin is trying to be more realistic than that, in an everyday, person-on-the-street way. But as far as the Genesis figures have come over the years, they still mostly aren't photorealistic enough to be mistaken for an actual photo, they mostly tend to look a little (or a lot) artificial. And the more idealised IRAY Uber skin shader tends to pair better with the slightly artificial look of the Genesis figures than the more realistic PBR Skin shader.
That's my interpretation, anyway. I do use PBR Skin sometimes, but I prefere IRAY Uber.
... and every skin tone, but PBR in particular are way to dark compared to the environment. Turning down the translucency weight doesn't help, because that makes the skin look flat.
Thanks for the comments guys. So this time I tried differently. Used HDRI lighting and a few changes in Tonemapping settings. Then I got this. At least now I know I can do something with PBR skins LOL
It looks much better now. PBRSkin Shader is great with no doubt though there's some limitation in it. (There's also a PBRSkin Plus shader...) Anyway, in most of the cases, it's always 80% lighting patterns + 20% shader settings. Poor lighting patterns ruins your skin shader settings as well as texutre maps...
MelissaGT, I would love to hear more about what you tweaked on Angela 9 and Joan 9 to get those results. They look great.
As someone with content going far back into the catalog, I know it's difficult to get different generations of content to work together. I could, for example, stick a PBR character into an older MSO/IrayUber environment, throw in another character with an AoA Subsurface shader (intended for 3Delight use), and then add some really old props that were for older versions of Poser and never intended for Daz Studio. You can't expect to get this stuff to work together seamlessly, even stuff that is Iray native--Iray native covers different shader types.
As can be seen from this thread (and other threads), people have widely varying opinions about what skin should look like in Daz Studio renders, and that puts Daz and the PAs in a rather difficult position. They can't be certain what lighting and render settings will be used, and users have different preferences. Some like to depict Caucasian characters with corpselike whiteness, while I prefer some degree of tan or pinkishness (still well shy of sunburn pink or fake orange tan). Some people tend toward skin without any reflectivity, and others go to the extreme of making everyone look like they're freshly dipped in peanut oil. And don't get me started on those primarily interested in skin microdetail.
While a ticket should have been passed on it may be worth posting this to the beta thread, assuming it is still an issue, with the steps to reproduce.
100% agree with that. For me, nothing can beat the combination of an MSO model and Paper Tiger's HDRI lighting. I'm open to suggestions if you know G9 models with similar quality but different facial structures. Especially male ones.
Hey MelissaGT, your renders in DevientArt are amazing. Can you make a tutorial for indoor lighting? Or suggest any HDRI lightings to buy.
A very easy/fast way to reduce orange in a skin is to drop the brightness of Transmitted color a small amount (like 5-10).
If skin looks too dry, some easy things to do: Increase Dual Lobe Specular Reflectivity (I like ~.5, maybe a touch higher). Also, decrease Specular Lobe 2 Roughness Mult to, oh, .2.
You can also experiment with some top coat, but I don't think it's necessary.
Ooh, thank you! That is very useful information. Unfortunately, SSS is one of the things in skin surface settings I understand the least, so I'll have to just fart around by trial and error. But this could potentially rescue a few PBRSkin surfaces I gave up on as unusable ...
I've found one issue with native PBRSkin's is the introduction of the detail weight - this combined with the specular weight can create a very matte, almost grey-toned effect on some skins.
Lowering both of these can inject life back into the skin, but experimentation is needed as every skin will be different and lighting plays a huge part too.
Also shameless plug - my 1-Click PBRSkin product developed with Josh Darling makes it easy to adjust these settings: https://www.daz3d.com/1-click-pbrskin
Hi Melissa! Maybe you can help me. I applied a PBR Skin using an Annagenesis 2 shader/plugin to a Genesis model, but I found that the skin in some areas was too light. I've tried changing the Base Color to something darker, but everything gets darker, including the cheeks and lips. Is there an easy way to control the intensity of the PBR skin? Some kind of slider or plugin, or some trick. I'm trying through Ultimate Skin Manager, but there are too many variables. Is there no simple way to control its intensity in relation to the original model? OR some parameter that controls the contrast between the light and dark areas of the skin?
MelissaGT shared what she did with Olympia 9 HD here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8208241/#Comment_8208241
Maybe it'll help you with your problem.
Regarding Ultimate PBR Skin Manager, I don't have it but there is a manual in '/ReadMe's/Ultimate PBRSkin Manager Documentation.pdf'
V3Digitimes is usually very thorough in her manuals.
If you're still lost, time to light the 'V3Digitimes's distress beacon' and ask for help in the official discussion:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/481901/ultimate-pbrskin-manager-commercial-2-additional-utility-scripts-available-here
You should get an answer by V3Digitimes (how fast will likely depends on how busy her schedule is).
There is an issue with iray I think.
Skins in DS-Iray have to be quite dark in order to look realistic. almost every vendor's skin material is too dark compared to the default environment settings.
PBR skins make it even worse. If you try to make them brighterby lowering the translucenvy, you'll end up with a dull unatural skin tone.
I just keep ignoring PBR material skins, for the DAZ uber skins are easier to controll and more realistic a brighter skin tones.
My current recomandation on skin material would be "Isourcetextures" skin textures combined with "Altern8 Skin Shader System".
I also recomend testing skin materials with the "Venitian Sunrise" HDRI environment map from PolyHaven at default settings, for it has people's skins mapped into, that you can compare your characters' skins to.
EDIT:
Maybe PBR skins are actually best, when exporting to other apps.
@Masterstroke I haven't noticed IRAY skin to be especially dark. Quite the opposite - I find engaging IRAY usually makes everything look a bit brighter, crisper, more believable (or at least more appealing with almost no effort). It has the same sort of effect on a lot of 3DL materials. I haven't methodically examined it, though. Filament, of course, had a tendency to blow everything out. But that also seems better-behaved these days (4.22 build in use), and that makes it a go-to for setting up scenes, posing figures, and so forth. It could just be that DS scenes require more illumination than one might think - I've seen evidence of that! Admittedly, I haven't messed much with PBR shaders. You could be right that the PBR textures work better on export. Every renderer has its own lighting model and "look."
I've found some, particularly thorugh 3rd party vendors, that come out looking like the model was dipped in tomato soup. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if the vendor got a crappy merchant pack from somewhere. I don't notice this with all of them, though. Mousso's works are good, though sometimes like mentioned, I do prefer the uber mats instead. I love Mousso's works, but the models can be sometimes too supermodelly for what I'm after (not that that's a bad thing, just sometimes not the look I'm after). I haven't really dabbled into iSourceTexture's newer models lately. I know he does have some nice skins that are more imperfect.
Yes, translucency must be kept high. Changing the map is a better approach, either within Daz or within an editor.
That's a useful tip for look development and calibration. I will check that out in future.
What also plays a role is that the PBR Skin shader has a bug with the Specular settings where they will sometimes not work correctly, this is possibly related to the Timeline. Therefore if Specular is appearing too matte, it is often due to this bug and you should restart Daz.
Thanks for your time! I had a simple but good idea: I placed the two characters side by side and selected the areas using the surface selection tool and noticed which parameters had been changed. There are actually a lot, but just by increasing the Glossy Layered Weight I made the forehead areas and other parts lighter, which gave the character a more realistic look. I tried for hours to change the parameters using the figure that had received the shader preset for the skin, but there are so many and it's a lot of trial and error that I gave up. For now I'll stick with this simple solution that I found. Thanks! ( left has the shader, mid is the original, and right is the one with Glossy Layered Weight different)
When I was trying to change the parameters of the skin that I had applied the shader to using Ultimate Skin Manager and asking ChatGPT for help, the skin became reddish and saturated as if it had been in the sun all day. I don't know exactly which parameter I changed, but I'm sure you can adjust it, because after a few tries I fixed it. However, when I tried to use the same parameters on the character in another environment with different lighting, the result was terrible. Hahah waste of time!