Using Gen4 Skins on Genesis
I recently bought the 3D Celebrity Starlette (http://www.daz3d.com/shop/3d-celebrity-starlette). It is a V4 character. I tried out the V4 character INJ morphs and I tried putting the Starkette skin on to a Genesis body. I was surprised to discover that the skin looked different on Genesis than on the V4 based character. The skin on Genesis looked more shiny or brassy. This is illustrated in the first pic below. In this image I have removed the Starlette face and body shape from the V4 based character on the left. The The Genesis character on the right is the V4 shape for Genesis with the Starlette skin.
I started to compare the settings under the surfaces tab for the skin of the two characters and discovered they were quite different. Things like the Glossiness, Specular Color, Specular Strength, Ambient Color and Ambient strength were all set quite differently. Where do these values come from? Are they Genesis skin defaults? I started to try to change them, but then I noticed a different icon labeled “Starlette MAT INJ” rather than the “Starlette Full MAT” icon I had used. I tried that Icon on Genesis, not really expecting it to work, but it did! It changed a lot of the surface tab settings so they were the same as the V4 version. The result is shown in the second image below.
This is much closer, but still not exactly the same. I started checking the surfaces settings very carefully. I noticed there still were some differences. The Genesis skin areas were using Lighting Model “Skin”, while the V4 based character was using “Plastic”. Also the Genesis character had maps for specular strength and displacement the V4 character did not. Not sure how or why the Genesis character picked up these maps when the V4 character did not.
I did a save as material preset on the V4 character and merged that preset file on to the Genesis character. This seemed to change all the properties I could see on the Genesis character to be the same as the V4 character. The 3rd image below is a render with these settings. To me the skins in this image are close enough it is hard to tell them apart.
Do you always need to save a material preset of from a Gen4 character to use the skin to work the same on Genesis? Or is it just the Celebrity Starlette package that is set up so the skin requires a lot of special settings to look the same?
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Comments
Are you using Daz Studio or Poser ?
I don't have this particular skin texture, but when i apply a skin texture to both v4 and genesis, they do look the same and have the same surface settings.
Maybe you applied a Poser texture to one and a DS texture to the other ? (just guessing here)...
I am using DAZ studio 4.5.1.6.
The "Starlette Full MAT" icon which produced the very shiny skin on Genesis is a .dsb file located in "My Library/People/Victoria 4/Materials/Starlette". This seems to me like it should be a DAZ studio specific materials.
The "Starlette MAT INJ" icon which did better is a .pz2 file in "My Library/runtime/libraries/Pose/Starlette/Starlette" which seems to me more like Poser material.
If the "Starlette MAT INJ" is using Poser material setting rather than DAZ Studio material settings, then the Poser material settings look better in DAZ studio.
Do the .dsb and .pz2 files include all the settings for the surface tab they are applying to? If not, where do the other settings come from?
Are the pics you posted rendered images?
If so, what is the lighting rig used?
What is the base shader? (in the Surfaces pane it will tell you what the shader is, up at the very top..) For the Genesis material, I'm going to guess that it's probably omHumanSurface or omUberSurface for the Genesis one and DSDefault for the V4 one.
The lighting rig is shown in the image below. This is two uberAreaLighPlanes. One above and one below the camera. This is something like what photographers call butterfly lighting, but the lights are too far away from the subjects for that. I did the lighting this way to try to get symmetrical lighting on the two figures.
The shaders all say they are the DAZ Default on both figures.
I think I figured out this is mostly a problem with the “Starlette Full MAT” icon which is a .dsb file located in “My Library/People/Victoria 4/Materials/Starlette”. I used just this icon on both V4 and Genesis and the first image below shows the same funny shinny skin on both.
When I used the “Starlette MAT INJ” icon on both the base V4 and Genesis characters, I got similar looking results that are much better as shown in the 2nd image. This icon is a .pz2 file in “My Library/runtime/libraries/Pose/Starlette/Starlette”.
Apparently if I apply “Starlette Full MAT” followed by “Starlette MAT INJ” things are slightly messed up.
I'm not sure why the product comes with these two different ways of loading only the skin. Perhaps one is intended for Poser and one for DAZ Studio, but it sure is not clear. I cannot find any documentation for this product, but the specs say it includes material presets for both Poser and DAZ Studio.
It is possible the DS mat is applying an Ubersurface material setting. I have noticed that trying to apply a texture set that uses the default material setting afterwards often creates problems.