Digital Art Zone

I haven’t tried that with the soft lights so I have never come across this before. I know the softlight kit is purely a Ray Traced light kit so it may be down to Max Ray Trace Depth setting needed to be increased. If I get some time over the weekend I will have a play and see what i come up with.

Yeah, I’m meaning to setup a simple test scene to play with it but haven’t yet.

What with my CV work here, home life and the project I am working on for myself I don’t have much time on my hands.

Szark - 14 December 2012 11:36 AM

What with my CV work here, home life and the project I am working on for myself I don’t have much time on my hands.

I hear ya, the day job’s had things pretty crazy for me lately and some other personal commitments have eaten up a lot of my time. I was off yesterday though and got to put a decent chunk of time in on tweaking skin settings and learning more about SSS, learned a few new things from that whole process and I’m pretty happy with that. Next up is to work on the eye surfaces a bit and add in some hair for a final render.

adacey - 13 December 2012 07:02 PM

Szark - 13 December 2012 06:04 PM

Quiclky before I go to bed point light never have worked with Deep Shadow Mapping and far as I am aware it has always been like that and will continue to.

Yeah, that’s what I found out. That really put me off deep shadow maps at the time and I haven’t gone back to them since.

The other really odd issue I came across was the lights in the Uber kit don’t seem to work with transparency. I tried putting an ubersoft distant light to shine through a window and it didn’t work, which drove me nuts for awhile until I figured that out. Then later, I tried an ubersoft point light in a lantern (seems to be a recurring theme for me) and the inside of the lantern lit up but nothing outside of the lamp was lit. By that time, I’d already determined the transparency issue so I just switched it for an Uber Point light instead, which worked fine.

adacey while doing another tutorial on Area Lights I had a thought that it could be that Refraction and Max Ray Trace Depth (render settings) were not set properly. I haven’t tested it though.

Well sorry folks I won’t be able to do anything now for a while now due to my computer saying NO…..read this post for more info.

Rest assured once I get back up and running my first job is to get what I have promised done, if no one gets there before me.

Wow, that sucks. Good luck with the saving up, hope it doesn’t take you too long to get back into commission.

Yeah it does suck but that is life and I will have to deal with it. By my calculations and if nothing major pops up 3 to 4 months before I can get a new computer,

Uber Area Lighting: The Basics http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/14536/

Awesome tutorial. I’ve been wanting to play with the area lights but haven’t had the chance to yet but I have used mesh lights in Reality so I was thinking it’d be nice to play with the area lights to get some similar lighting when working with 3Delight instead of Reality.

Thx adacey. I can’t wait until I get a new workstation so I can get some info done of skin shaders too. I am going to make a new realistic portrait when I do get a new computer and do the tutorail at the same time. I have been collecting products all year for this intended project, just a few more to get like one of the hair plug-ins and I will be set.

But getting a new computer might take up to 4 months unless something else comes up first.

Yeah, I went a little way down the skin rabbit hole recently. Started out with a poser material so while the skin textures were really good they didn’t look great in DAZ. Did a ton of playing with working my way through moving to US2 (I like that it has the upgrade script so I don’t have to start from scratch, plus it has a few skin SSS presets that proved to be a great starting point) and working on each channel bit by bit to try to get a sense of how it impacted the overall look of the image. Took a long time but by the end I had what I thought was way better looking skin.

I do remember a lot about most channels so fire away if you need help.

Szark - 05 January 2013 09:13 PM

I do remember a lot about most channels so fire away if you need help.

My experiments had gotten me this far, pretty happy with the results but if you have any suggestions I’m open to hear them. The hair could use some work but I think it’s more an issue with the geometry of the prop, not the materials. And I really should fix that bra strap if I were doing this as a final render.

Looks like your http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/13688/#199062 seam is back.

As for the settings I was mainly refering to if you don’t understand what a channel does. So without seeing your settings I can only say that the spec looks too tight and to shiny more spec is needed in the top edge of the nose. Are you using a good qaultiy Spec map? I have said in the past I usually throw out the spec maps but not all the time but I do seach my texture folders well and compare spec maps and choose the best. You can always take a spec map in GIMP and use the Dodge toool to brighten areas up more like the nose.

But knowing what a good spec map is steams from expereince and hours of studing the human skin under different lighting conditions, looking at real poeple on the street, in shops, on tele and in photos and I still have to mess with every single skin set out there. Anyways yes if you want to post your settings for the face should do as the body and linbs looks ok and see what we can do.

I would be increasing the bump to on the face a little too even though she is young.

Oh and contray to what others say never use Ambience if you are wanting realistic results, ambience should come via the lighting IMHO..I never use Ambeint on human skin..ever.

I don’t and haven’t had much luck in using SSS and Transluency together as SSS is the result of translucent skin so I don’t see the point in using Transluceny even Omnifreaker said as such when talking about Uber Surfaces 2, SSS and Transluceny.

Imho the red in a skin texture for Uber Surface/2 and HSS should be coming for the SSS channel and not burnt in to the texture itself. But the vendors do have to cater for the whole so I won’t complain…honest.