iray skin needs its own base mixing.
Angel
Posts: 1,204
Ok so here is the one thing that I cannt stand about Daz3D iRay. Every skin is SO unique that pairing two people into a scene and they both look like they both belong to that scene is a daunting task and its en exersize that no matter how often you repreat this and learn... Every skin you buy is SO vastly different from one another there is no such thing as "knowing exactly what to do" because every skin has its own learning curve. Your basicly forced to re-learn how to do skin, every single skin you buy.
And the make matters worse... Say you DO get the skin to look good after 4 hours of messing with it... You change the lighting, or move them into another scene or load a different HDRI and the skin reacts to light SO vastly different that you again, are forced to reconstruct every surfaces for another 4 hours... This is a totally absolutely mind blowingly MASSIVE time hog... What needs to happen is DAZ needs to make a scpecial lighting room for vendors to do their skins in. So that Vendors are not all using wildy different lighting to surface their skins. And THEN Skin needs to have its very own base mixing called Skin so that we can put a stop to this generic Translucecy and Generic, make shift SSS and plasticy gloss and all these generic sliders that are ment for tables, cups, clothing, and swords to fake what should be a real setting... Like skin oil level slider bars and skin roughness, and skin velvet and skin translucency ect...
Let me just put it this way... I've never been able to see my own refection in someone els's skin because they were "wet" or oily... I understand there is roughness too, but its NOT fragmented When you apply gloss to these figures. No matter how good your spec map is. the fact of the matter is, you're polishing your character with an absolute surface, not a fragmented one. The glossy roughness is a way to FAKE fragmentation... Which works fine on floors, tables, cups, and household items. but on skin, it makes them look like plastic. Because you're applying the same stratigy and concept and rendering rules as plastic, to skin. When you do this. What ends up happening is where the gloss is on your character, the bump map is canceled out. Unless you APM up the bump maps, which in that case makes the non-shiny parts look dry and rough and jagged. Because your trying to fake fragmentation with bump maps. Until Skin has its own special sliders... There is no way to win.
If there is one thing we ALL know. It is that SKIN behaves in a very unique way, and PEOPLE is of the utmost importance in 3D, and therefore skin deserves own specialized sliders... Because as of right now. iRay skin either looks like a plastic doll, or the other extreame of a ceramic figurine. This is the best I've ever gotten skin to look and that's largly do to postwork http://www.daz3d.com/galleryimage/image/182786/iranian-beauty_full.png
So the issue is,iray skin has no volume... Its super super flat. Top that gloss fakery, and generic SSS and there is only two possible outcomes. Flat and shiny, or volumetic, but looking like stone.
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Comments
I agree. Real skin has backscatter and dispersion and it's hard to use the tools on the uber shader to do it, tho I guess one COULD. I haven't tried it, but I've been meaning to. Just too much other stuff to do atm ;). But I will agree that skin doesn't look at good as it possibly could for the type of render engine it is.
Laurie
my leo7 renders ruddy red.
been reading iray tutts all day. desparate enuff watching 3dsmax tutts on iray.
I'm working with Ivan right now, but I discovered turning down the Translucency on his skin toned down the red. I'm going for older, and turned it down from .65 to .25... Not sure about Leo, but if there is a red color there, try dialing it down...
Watching with interest.
One of my issues with all this stuff is I don't use the default DAZ figures that much. I develop content for Hivewire so just understanding basics took me a while and still leaves me questioning "can this look better?" well of course it can if you have a PHD in phyisics and lighting and ......... I was happy to find in my collection of shaders one set that doens't seem hooked absolutely into the Genesis figures and low and behold my skin tones do look better but still needed tweaking. I'd like to say I learned allot today but by tomorrow most of the info will be somewhere, floating around in my old brain and I'll have no way to access it! lmao
I want to read this but wall of text is hurting my brain. Please use paragraphs. I really want to read this (IRay and Skin Settings is something of great interest to me) but as someone with dyslexia, I have a lot of trouble reading walls of text without any break-up or proper paragraphs.
I "might" be on to something...more testing.
Here is Raiya's Kyle with most of him still with the default shader/textures. On his ear and face is my shader changed quite a bit - I added a little backscatter and changed the type from metalicity to weighted. As soon as I nail things down (I might have to ease off on the translucency color - it might be coming thru too strong, but at least makes the skin looks more "alive), I'll post better renders and settings. Ultimately though, I think the skin will only greatly improve with the addition to depth maps to the texture sets (for translucency and SSS).
Edit: the lips are still at the default so that you could better see them next to the shader I've been playing with.
Laurie
The skin does look more natural and alive. Cool. Looking forward to reviewing your settings if you do share them Laurie! :-)
I "might" be on to something...more testing.
Here is Raiya's Kyle with most of him still with the default shader/textures. On his ear and face is my shader changed quite a bit - I added a little backscatter and changed the type from metalicity to weighted. As soon as I nail things down (I might have to ease off on the translucency color - it might be coming thru too strong, but at least makes the skin looks more "alive), I'll post better renders and settings. Ultimately though, I think the skin will only greatly improve with the addition to depth maps to the texture sets (for translucency and SSS).
Laurie
Sure I'll share em....lol. I got no problem with sharing ;). I need to do a lot more tests tho. First off, I'm going to let it do a full render with just the face and ear so that I can compare the two. But already it looks promising. I might just toss out what I already did and then let someone else more knowledgeable do more with it. Heh.
I forgot to mention that the lights was the default HDRI. No other lights.
Laurie
If anyone is curious about my settings, you can look at the procedural skins in my free pack (in sig)
In particular, I find that tweaking transmitted color range can have dramatic effects. I'm also finding that in most cases, it's just easier doing without top coat and tweaking glossy reflectivity and roughness.
I think the problem you'd run into is that even controlling for lighting, different vendors simply have different styles and different ideas of what looks best Even then, If you give, lets say, FW and Gypseyangel character the same material settings they still may not match because the textures themselves are very different styles.
I am in sympathy, but I dont think asking a bunch of different vendors to conform to one standard is likely, your best option is probably to pick a skin you really like the settings for and use it as a material preset for all your skins by first applying the skin with the textures you want and cntrl-clicking your donor character material to apply its materials whithout overwriting the textures uou want to use.
If you want to be a little more elegant about it, you could pick a character who's settings you like and use it to make a material preset. Its super easy, actually: just apply the character materials you want to borrow from go file>save as>material preset. Name and put it where you'd like. A save options window will come up, in the top right theres a thing for more options select "uncheck all images" and save. you've now made a material preset of your favorite settings that won't overwrite textures.
If you're extra fancy like me you can make your own fully custom material setup with settings that get things exactly how you want them, I can get any character looking exactly fitting in with my style in just a few clicks.
And yes Iray is capable of very nice SSS. here's my proof of concept only image maps are bumps and normals the rest is just flat color and material settings
Thanks so much Will!
Good point about personal tastes. I tend to like skin on the 'dry' side because emulating real world is generally my goal. Other people are interested in glamour style stuff, so glossy wet skin is 'best'.
I would consider top coat essential for skin...the very top layer has that little bit of oilyness with a fresnel shine to it that the main gloss can't do on its own. Not to say that one HAS to use it, but I'm kinda of a nerd and like to see how close I can get to as real as possible :P.
Laurie
I've not had good results from the top coat. Tends to look overly shiny or something with my attempts. I'm sure there are base settings to try to give the shin a nice dewy sheen but I've not found them yet.
Most texture sets I've seen have the top coat set to Reflective, which is going to look really glossy. Fresnel is less glossy and looks more...I'm not sure I know how to describe it...scattered around gloss? LOL. I'm of the opinion that fresnel should always be used as the top coat for skin. Of course, ymmv ;). Nothing I did made as much of a difference as adding backscatter, fresnel to the top coat and changing it from metalicity to weighted. All other changes didn't really do much and if they did, it looked worse ;).
Laurie
I went with top coat for a long, long time... I just don't think the effect is noticeable under the vast majority of cases or worth the time spent to fiddle with it and avoid it washing out the skin.
But, as you said, ymmv!
That's my thoughts on that as well. Reflective would be used in like car paint and the like...
I apologize...what I said before was misleading. I was not in fact using the HDRI, it was just straight sun. Will be trying it under different kinds of light of course, but it looks even better with the HDRI :).
Laurie
Surface settings and lights are so integrated that you can not consider one without the other. IG Iray Essentials skin sets were specifically created to go with all of IG lights, including tweaking the translucency maps in particular. If you have any InaneGlory lights and any IG Iray Essentials, you can get the look of any of his product promos. As far as faking it with "tricks," some of that comes down to the fact that we are NOT in fact dealing with real life, but working within the limitations of our given tools. It is 100% agreed that some sort of consistency, without resorting to blowing out the lights so that the rest of the scene is washed out, is sorely needed.
Oh and I think I've posted them somewher before, but my sss settings are roughly (I change them based on the feel I'm going for)
Translucency weight: .5
trans mode: scatter + transmit
trans color (edit: Reflectance tint): very light (sometimes orangy) yellow
transmitted color: very very light blue basically white (blue ranges from blue to greenish, skin looks a bit to pink? make this greener to neutralize it a bit, think complementary colors)
Thin walled: off (duh)
Transmitted Color: Slightly dark red set this one before transmitted distance
transmitted distance: 1.5-2.5. This roughly controls how see through the figure is. easy way to figure this one out is remove all lights but a bright spot light behind the figure and see how much of it glows red does the neck? chest cavity? You don't glow all bright red when lit from behind, lower the value till just things like the ear and hands are glowing but the arms and neck aren't
Scattering Distance: less than 1? I switch this one around a lot depending on mood. higher values are softer but more likely to wash out bump, normal, and hd details. Higher values can also make the nose a little red the above image was .75 which is way higher than I normally go for non-toons generally I set ths around .15
SSS amount: .8 to 2 ehhh... I'm a lot more guessy with this one, if you set it higher you can set the scattering distance higher without getting rudolph nose
SSS direction .5 eh? There was a whole debate on positive or negative valeues for this in the forum a while ago, I think positive won? IDK I find positice gets glowier ears and scatterier looking skin
I use top coat but with a tiling bump map basically just black and white noise tiled really small to break up the spec and try to get rid of the smooth plastic look.
A note on Translucency color Transmitted color and my little soapbox. In the most basic terms Translucency color is the color of the SSS at the surface Transmitted color is the color of the SSS and we go deeper into the mesh (transmitted distance is how far it takes to go from the former to the latter) So if your transmitted color is lighter than your translucency color that would be like saying in the realworld that the further into your body you got the lighter it was and the less dense things like bones there were.
It seems to me that Translucency color is multiplied by transmitted color, so I tend to arrange the colors so that makes 'sense' -- like lighter, less saturated translucency color and then richer red/brown deeper in. Or something.
Some of the older formulas I was turned on to always made my skin settings render very very red. Like a sunburn you wouldn't survive in this world or an aliens so I always mess with those tones to find ones that may not be true to nature but look better when rendered out. Here is Dawn with my Bruna skin.
Added, my settings. I'm off to watch a movie... The Conjuring 2 ...
Here's the results of my efforts. Now tho, I need to get to bed ;).
I need to play with my skin settings and see if they apply to regular textured skin.
Some fun experiments!
My settings applied to a cube lit with a single light coming from the side. left is the surface of the skin right is what happens as you get "further in"
Now the same settings but with a red in the translucency color slot the transmitted color is actually bright green, but as long as the color was lighter than the translucency color the effect was absolutely microscopic. I did some experimenting on G3 and as far as I can tell if translucency color is darker and more saturated than transmitted color, it completely overpowers it, so once again onto my soapbox.
and for fun the sss settings of victoria 7 (no maps obviously) Why is it green? there's nothing green anywhere?
Agreed. My general thought is less saturated/lightish orange for translucency, brownish-red for transmitted. The brightness of transmitted has a REALLY dramatic effect -- a little lightening can turn skin into gelatin.
I really had fun playing with it. My favorite is Genesis with glowing blue torso and bright orange glowing ears. You can do all sorts of fun color combinations, Maybe I need to do more renders of aliens and people who've had comic bood nuclear accidents
Sorry about that.
It also bothers me that if I try to soften the skin, with translucency it becomes darker. Translucency seems to be the only way to give the skin volume but at a high setting they turn into a dull dark brown color. It's sure this is a missunderstanding on my part but it sucks because all I'm trying to do is get light to pass though the object without turning them into a ghost or a slug. I like this skin because it has volume, but the only way to get the skin to have any sort of realistic volume is to make it SO translucent that light literally passes though the nose and emmits on the other side. http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/images/209466/
Thank you so much for adding paragraphs! :D Now I can read it and join in on the discussion.
:) Thanks, Angel!