Getting Realistic Skin for Genesis 3
mwokee
Posts: 1,275
I'm using Daz Studio and am trying to learn how to get realistic skin. I am playing with skin mats which are an improvement over the defaults but they are still far from the good stuff you see in the gallery.
Is it a matter of adjusting the settings or is there a product-for-purchase for professional grade results? I search in the shop and find a number of products but I don't know which one to buy. I'm willing to invest in a good does-it-all product but where do I start? I've already made a number of purchases that turned out not to be what I thought.
Thanks
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What you are looking for is the holy grail. :)
There is a thread with some very knowledgeable people working on exactly this.You might have a look over there to see if you can find what you are looking for.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54239/fiddling-with-iray-skin-settings
I don't know if they ever came up with a "one-shader-does-it-all" yet.Some of the "Realistic" part maybe open to interpertation.As the old saying goes "Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder" .
I actually think the default 'Iray skin optimizer' isn't bad. The IG essentials that are coming out as freebies are pretty good, too.
That's, like, 90% of the work and you don't really have to do much more with the skin (IMO) -- a lot of the rest of it is working on good lighting.
Yeah... a holy grail... part of my problem is I need to generate images in quantity so I usually render in 3Delight. Iray takes so long and I have to render in large pixel sizes.
If only Iray rendered as fast as 3Delight...................
I thought we were looking for "one shader to rule them all"..
If you want Iray to render as fast as 3Delight you can always use uberenviroment with loads of glass or transparency and so on. The Iray is actually faster.. (ducks and sneakes away).
I'm going to need some help with this. I looked everywhere for translucency and thin walled.
I found translucency in the Reality Editor but that propoerty only shows up for objects designated as GLOSSY. I can't find thin walled at all which included looking in the user guides.
More details on how to change these settings would be appreciated.
Thanks
Reality editor? I have no idea, if you are using Reality, my bad.
If you are using Iray, Translucency Weight is about the 6th entry, set it to 0. Thin Walled basically means 'treat this like a shell rather than a volume.' If it's on, it only looks at surface stuff. If it's off, it does deeper stuff (Subsurface Scattering). It's a bit after the Top Coat options and before the Emission options.
Can you provide the steps to take to reach these settings?
This is what I'm doing:
1. Select Gen 3 Female
2. Surface --> Presets --> Skin --> Jeane All MAT
3. Lights --> Presets --> Iray --> iRay Lights Soft
After that I go to the Surface tab. I assume that's the right place because I can find Translucency options but there is no Translucency Weight. The steps I take above may not have these options available or I am not drilling down into the software correctly. When you say "it's the 6th one down," you're assuming I already know which set of options to go into. I click on Surface and try all possible options after that and am not finding the trail of bread crumbs.
UPDATE: I was using the default character for Gen 3. I added the product "Leyton Hair" after which Transluceny Weight and Thin Walled appeared in the list of properties.
After setting as suggested above, I ran a test, it took 19 minutes to render to 99% after which I stopped the rendering. This was for an image size of 800 x 640. Is that considered fast? In the world I live in, size matters, it's preferable to render at 8000 x 6400 for image size. It can be painful to render 8000 x 6400, even with 3Delight.
LOL, love that reference to beer goggles... not thought of that for years.
Welcome to the world of rendering; there is no such thing as too much procesing power for renders. Hence the availability of render farms.
You need to make sure that IRAY is showing as the shader in the surfaces panel when you select the surfaces specific to the character - something like skin, or skin-lips-nails; Translucency Weight is in the image below, with the other (Thin Walled) being much lower down.
For those following along at home... the Shader option in the above post, it was not there. It took me a while, but I found how to set it by searching the product library with keyword IRAY. Look for an item called "!Iray Uber Base."
My test scene was as described before, basic Gen 3 female with Leyton hair. It appears each object in the scene will need to have the Translucency Weight and Thin Walled settings changed.
When I did the render, it took 19 minutes to get to 84% for the 800 x640 thumbnail, so it was actually taking longer. It might be perhaps I had a different light setup, I'm not sure which light preset I used last night versus today.
I am liking the more realistic look of the renders but I am not seeing any shortcuts here to make the render go faster. I did render without the hair and that took 2 minutes so objects in the scene matter when it comes to rendering.
So... it appears one size does not fit all, I have noticed with 3Delight different light presets can greatly affect the render time even tho0ugh nothing in the scene has changed. Specific objects can also greatly affect the render time.
Anything else you all can tell me that I might be missing?
Thanks
My two cents worth is that most people who think they have issues with skin, are in fact having an issue with lighting. The Iray shin shaders seem very temperamental about the lighting environment and can look vastly different with even minor differences in scene lighting, far more so than when rendering with 3DL. This is why so many people complain about how they can't get their new character to look like the promo renders.
The positive side to this is that when you nail the elements (character + shader + lighting), you can achieve spectacularly beautiful renders. Not that I can even come close to that yet. The process is far from easy and I'm kinda glad it isn't. 99% of my renders end up in the recycle bin. Art wasn't meant to be easy they say.
Well, the real world, and the light, just take a look at your own skin as you walk about the house, if looks different as you move.
The attached image took 7 minutes 37 seconds to 99%. Default settings for everything, 2 Photometric spots. 640x960 resolution. A 4000x6000 render of the face from chin to mid-forehead took 1 hour 20 minutes. Graphics card is GTX780.