Digital Art Zone

I joined this conversation to learn, both from others and by experimentation. I am currently learning some lights can cause rather long render times, LOL

It’s true… there’s a certain setting on UE2 I have found, right now I forget which, that when adjusted gives faster render times… it was a big part of why I posted my light sets on sharecg

I was utterly drained yesterday so I didn’t get to do much.  I do bring an interesting answer of sorts.

So…one of the skins I like is PD Naomi.  It is a two skin set that winds up being the one that renders quite well with both skins in the same scene with no fiddlying with settings.  In asking P3Design about it, the “answer” is essentially that there isn’t an easy answer and it takes experimentation.  However, in addition to that she also noted that good bump and specularity settings go a long way towards helping as well.  That seems to lead back to what I tend to do with some Poser skin textures where I use RecieCup’s settings to get them to look right in DS.  Furthermore, the light and dark skin for Naomi seem to use the exact same settings so there is a factor of figuring out the right base starting point and adjusting from there.

Image uses the Naomi shape on V4 with a personal light set that uses UE2.

“RecieCup’s settings”

Where does one find those?

That’s a bit of a personal shorthand.  You know how with your materials you have to load them and then reload all of the textures?  It’s actually something I’ve done for a while using one of RecieCup’s characters.  I’ll load the desired character textures, load the skin from one of her characters, then manually re-add the textures.  It’s actually what I do with all of my freebie character promos, barring the ones that are her characters’ skins.  She has freebies on ShareCG, Renderosity, and on her personal site RenderCandy with her site probably being the fastest way to get them all.

Okay, so I grabbed Rehana… NICE Texture!!! wow

Anyway, top is my Materials under my raytrace lightset
bottom is Rehana Default, same lights…

Now you’ve got me really intrigued.  I’d always known but it never fully sank in until now that RecieCup’s character’s had a certain sheen around the edge but it’s a lot more noticeable when put in contrast with your materials.  Interesting.

Remember that with this current set of materials, all I use are the bump and diffuse maps… the rest are all colour and the Lana spec maps for strength.  I’m still debating where to go with this, but at the moment, I’m not unpleased with the results I’m getting from this current set.  The only difference with the caucasian set is that I use the diffuse map for colour in the SSS channel.  That’s what I used for Sam in this image:  http://wancow.deviantart.com/#/d5nwypf but in that image Michael has his own defualts.  I was really interested in seeing the comparrison between the two…