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@wowie you've done some great work there. Cheers.
Hi Wowie,
Yes certainly, I'm going from the manual... I don't like purposefully fighting with what the devs intended =D There's enough to fight already!
You see, I guess that you and Takeo are getting awesome results with (ultra-capricious) ultra-translucent scales because you're both using only the most recent generation of figures, starting with V4, right? Then it may be possible to find some reliable "sweet spot" at the higher scale spectrum because DAZ figures have been modeled in a more or less consistent manner V4 onwards.
But - if you, like me, were fond of older generations or of non-DAZ figures (think The Dude, Antonia etc), you would notice that ultra-translucent scales are seriously dependent on the model geometry. You can feed the exact same settings at higher scales to The Girl3 and The Dude and have them look different in the same scene. You can Sub-D Antonia without changing anything else and get a completely different SSS effect.
This is SO annoying, I gotta tell you...
This is why I am going with the physically correct scale because it offers much, much more consistency between all the differently quirky models out there (not tiny figurines that the render engine sees but full-scale "people" - imagine if you were making a real-world tabletop figurine vs a lifesize statue, which one would need more polishing due to how small surface imperfections are perceived at its scale? A similar effect in play here)
And I'm not sure what you mean about "things with volume" - the way I understand scientific images like the one here, the bulk of the scatter happens within a 3 mm depth in skin, am I not right?
http://orion.bme.columbia.edu/~hillman/Skin_Imaging.html
If you look at the renders attached, even the original UberSurface that has no backscatter boost is still capable of more or less convincing translucent ears at the 0.1 scale. UberSurface2 definitely fares better - since a ) it has backscatter boost; b ) it has better controls (those "strengths" of scatter and absorption should be in theory be actual depths).
The specular effects in these renders of mine are definitely "meh" because these are literally quick tests - I'm at work right now... and good specular is at least as important as good SSS, IMO.
BUT I literally didn't finetune the settings for the figure or texture - I just followed my own written guidelines established in experiments with older generation figures in DS3! So, I find I have a good basis for further enhancement.
Just goes to show how many ways there are to arrive at a destination LOL
Here's a sphere with two different maps, plugged everywhere (only diffuse and SSS active), multiplying 0 by 0 several times =) You can see that yeah, it's dark, but nothing really negates the scatter.
So, I will be sticking with layered shaders for makeup - and geometry shells seem to be indeed the way to add more layers with the least hassle, but I need more tests.
That would work too. You can enable the second diffuse channel with US2. Just split the strength percentage between the two (if you use the additive blend mode). I've found that you can enable very strong translucence values and still maintain most of the diffuse texture details this way. Plus, you can have different diffuse roughness for each layer.
Oh yeah about geometry shells. Does it always be on the outside of the mesh (envelopes it) or can it be made inside the model/figure? If it can be done, I wonder if it all possible to use it to block scatter just like in real life. That would be cool.
Have you taken the curvature of the shapes into account? A good place to see this effect is the nose, viewed from the side.
I've attached renders with SSS scale set to 1, 2, 4 and 8 with the default backscatter value (2) so it will more pronounced.
As you can see, you'll notice translucence at about 4. 8 which is what I used before overdoes it.
Right now I'm on my mother's computer that has no DS, so I can't test, but I'd say it might well be possible to set the shell to be inside, just from the look of its controls (making the offset negative).
The thing is, I can't personally see much use for that apart from maybe a hands-over-light-source type of situation - when the backlight is sufficiently strong for bones to actually matter.
Again, may I humbly refer you to the link found in one of my previous posts? http://orion.bme.columbia.edu/~hillman/Skin_Imaging.html
The way I understand this, scatter is generally not too much influenced by structures underlying the skin because they're too deep for that.
If there are any doctors or any other similar professionals lurking here, would they be so kind as to please speak up and confirm or correct this?
On the other hand... given that the higher-scale renders you posted seem to look kinda a bit too translucent in the nose region, maybe you do need some artificial "scatter block" at those scales. Hard to say; as I wrote, I gave up on trying to get anything useful out of them long ago.
I'm looking at my mother's profile right now who is sitting across the table from me, against a pretty bright lamp in a darkish room here (it's night here in Moscow, Russia), and any backlight-generated scatter is confined to the first few millimeters of the outline of her profile; it doesn't really seem to spread that much into the nose wings as in the renders you posted... Same with my hands when I put them against this lamp. My phone can't capture good photos in dim light, so you'll have to take my word for that that it all looks quite similar to that backlit render I posted here a few months ago... here it is: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21611/P30/#318738 - it's the 0.1 scale. If you look at the hands and nose in that render, this is basically what I'm seeing right now IRL.
So I think, for "my" scale, there isn't really a reason to try and insert a "skeleton" inside the figure, but unfortunately I can't say if it might work for you. You should probably just give it a try =)
And here's what I forgot to reply to from one of your previous posts...
Unfortunately max raytrace depth won't help you with controlling what surfaces get reflected, it's just to control the number of bounces (reflections of reflections, when you put two mirrors against each other). What you would need is raytrace distance, but I don't think Omnifreaker's shaders have it (can't recall if AoA's shaders have it either). If you look at ShaderMixer, there is a "Trace" brick which provides raytraced reflections, and it does have the distance parameter. It can't be attached to omnifreaker's shaders, though.
Always great stuff going on in here. Thanks to Mustakettu85, your SSS method was a lot of fun to try out. I'd seen work done with desaturated diffuse textures before but having your shader configuration there made it too good to pass up. I had to tweak the diffuse and specular a little but it was a great starting point. Full size image is here http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/14948/
Thank Jim! I'm glad you found the technique useful, that's an awesome render! And yeah, diffuse and specular are that devil that is in the details, these are what needs the most tweaking from texture to texture, in my experience.
Speaking of diffuse and specular, I found these little bits of goodies.
http://filmicgames.com/archives/233 - How To Split Specular And Diffuse In Real Images
http://filmicgames.com/archives/547 - Everything is Shiny
http://filmicgames.com/archives/557 - Everything has Fresnel
Should help all of us understand physical materials better.
Thanks a lot for bringing these up! These articles are brilliant. Especially the Fresnel one. Revolutionarised my understanding of things when I first came across it.
There's a quote I keep seeing around which goes, "The brain of the shader is fresnel , but the heart is the artist himself" by Goran Vinterhalter.
PS And then there's this which is also fairly valuable, concept-wise: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmily/
You're welcome.
Been experimenting a bit with a very soft lighting setup. Tweaked the skin setup a lot these past few days, primarily trying to get somewhere close to what a typical photo session would look like.
I once thought getting skin right or believable is tough. Hair is definitely tougher.
Yeah, transmapped hair is tricky.
Are you using anisotropic specular? I found it helps a lot with transmapped hair.
Then, take a look at the omnifreaker's wiki page for UberSurface - http://omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberSurface - scroll down for "Tips and tricks".
Here's a render with this hair - http://www.daz3d.com/leah-hair - the texture is mine and needs more work, though. Unfortunately I don't have the scene handy, but the parameters should be somewhere in the region of glossiness 70% for the first specular (I make it the coloured one) and roughness 90% for the second one (the white one).
Btw, here's something I've discovered recently - http://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_slides_v2.pdf
Interesting read - shows just how each model we generally know don't even come close to true measurements.
Well, it's not the specular I'm most concerned about. Most of the available hair models generally comes with baked in specular :(
It's getting translucence and volume so it doesn't look (too) fake. What I've done so far is fiddle with opacity color, transluency and velvet. I did try using the diffuse on the second layer of US2, but it doesn't seem to honor opacity maps so no go there. Haven't tried SSS yet, but I want to avoid using that if possible.
I did scale back on the opacity color levels. Going below 160 makes the hair too transparent and you can see all the way through. I left occlusion enabled, since it gives a darker shade near the skull/head.
Below is my current hair setup. Second render is with both specular enabled with anisotropy.
Oh yeah. Do anyone notice that when using lower SSS scale you need to bump up SSS shading rate when the object is further? For instance, I got some noise when rendering G2M/G2F head to toe with SSS scale 0.5 and SSS shading rate of 4. I need to bump it up to 2 or 1 at that distance.
Yeah, that would probably be too time-consuming during rendering. But maybe, just maybe, at some super-translucent scale and super high shading rate... I'm just not sure it would work well on a non-closed geometry? After all, hair models are made out of planes...
Have you seen these threads about "phantom shielding" hair? Gotta be faster than just leaving AO on:
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=179165&highlight;=
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/4949/
Well, given enough time and effort, you will find a setting that works well with 3delight. But you'd probably can get it done much faster with other render engines.
Ah yes, the geometry shell thing. But the thing is, I actually want to use AO on the hair, since there is no other way to have the skull cap or part of the strands near the skull cap darker than the outer 'edges' of the hair mass. If you turn off AO, then you'll lose that and the hair looks uniformly bright.
I'm not sure it's a render-engine dependent problem. I'd say the root of the issue is that transmapped hair models are, by definition, a very rough approximation of real hair. The limits are set by actual model geometry and the texture maps applied; both are equally important IMO.
Well, you should probably read the topics I linked to more carefully - this is exactly the effect the author of the technique is after, but the innovative side to the technique is that it allows for significant speed gain. Why? Because you are only occluding the clone of your hairstyle, and the clone does not have opacity maps applied (= faster AO calculations). The clone is set to "phantom" mode - so that it is invisible in render, but the shadows and AO it receives are visible. Give it a try, I'm sure you are going to appreciate it =)
...and a happy upcoming New Year everyone! =)
I understand the technique, but the resulting look is not what I wanted. As I said before, it produces uniform brightness and I want darker areas between the strands/clumps of hair from AO. Just look at wiseavatar's first image at the topic you linked.
I have tried doing a mix blend with opacity maps as a blend mask. It does produce the look I want - translucence on the rim areas of the hair mass and a better blend the hair mass and the translucent strands. The blend strength needs to be something like 50 % and I can go as low as 1/4 of the opacity color so translucence appears stronger. The downside is render times goes way up.
Here's a comparison render between using AO but shading rate to 128 (second image) and another with the geometry shell trick (first image). Render times with a Core i7 4770 for the geometry shell trick is about 1 minutes and for the shading rate override is about 4 minutes. There are some differences like color, opacity problems.
And basically, the hit on render times is why trans mapped hair is not the best way of approaching things. You can get AO on transmapped hair without using the 'fantom' setting of UE2, but you are then off into the land of incredibly long render times (even longer than Luxrender times...), and that is even with the various speed increases in the last several versions of 3Delight.
A couple of the other problems with transmapped hair are what you really are dealing with are a bunch of flat planes, bent, twisted and otherwise arrayed on a basically spherical item. This makes it difficult to actually shade them, because there UV maps may indicate one direction, the geometry another and what it looks like a third, with transparency map cutting it all into little pieces, so that even a custom shader that will do AO, have the diffuse, transparency and translucency is nearly impossible to achieve.
And that's why curve based hair (LAMH/Garibaldi for D/S) and other 'hair systems' for other apps are the current 'state of the art' . They have none of the drawbacks of transmapping hair and don't have the 'weight' of geometry based strand hair. They are incredibly fast to render and rather easy to shade...realistically, too.
This is an example of the look I'm trying to get. I did this with US2 blend mask and the second layer diffuse. The effect is exaggerated and isn't quite right. I probably need to balance the blend mask strength and opacity color so it's darker where the light is blocked. Render time with this setting is 10 minutes 25 seconds (about 2.5 times the shading override render).
I've played around a bit with the mask settings. Multiply with an adjusted opacity color seems to work best. Renders faster too (about 8 minutes) compared to blend mask mode. So, I'll think I'll stick with this one. Adding a geometry shell generally throws off translucence and opacity settings, though it is faster.
Alright, I'm sorry, I see now. So you want that sort of definition...
I'm thinking now about whether it would be possible to bake an AO map in something like xNormal... an AO map you could bake once and then just multiply within the shader. Probably not, if the hair model is mapped like they are usually mapped.
Have you ever given the plugins mjc1016 mentions a chance? I know neither LAMH or Garibaldi work in DS3, but they can export .OBJ files. Those .OBJ files are generally quite large, but they next to always render faster than transmapped stuff. The trick is, though, to first actually make the hairstyle and then find the best options for exporting the .OBJ...
Maybe that's just me, but I find that for shorter styles, even the most "crude" geometry-based strand models look more "natural" (and are infinitely easier to shade). When it's not a closeup, they look even better than transmapped ones, IMO.
Here's one of my favourite models on the market - http://www.most-digital-creations.com/short_hair_v4_poser_daz_studio.htm
And a render of mine: http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Turning-tables-318537126
However, I won't know if this model is going to look good blonde because I don't really do blonde =D
I've seen LAMH and Garibaldi. They can look good but unfortunately the hair is still static. It will work with short hair, but I don't think it will be as good as strand based, dynamic hair. That's one of the reason I got Carrara a while back. I still haven't wrapped my head around the way Carrara handles material though.
When DS gets a physics engine, Garibaldi and LAMH should be dynamic...the functionality is built into the curve system used, it's just that there is no way of actually using it. There should be ways of 'faking' it with deformers, but I haven't tried it....
Before DAZ introduce physics to DS, I'd like them to fix issues with IK and the timeline editor first. And make them work with each other. For example, where IK is honored when editing a key in Graphmate or timeline graph editor.
I think deformers or morphs are not the right way to control hair. Deformers and morphs will, well, deform the geometry rather than control it. I did try rigging a hair model with bones once. Did it with a transmapped plane but the geometry can be replaced with strands from OBJ import. But it's nowhere near as flexible as full dynamic hair. I do love how I can tightly control the way the hair moves and flows though.
Some more test with another hair model - the End of Summer Hair.
The render with shading rate override took about 3 minutes (third pic). If I use a geometry shell for the hair and turn off occlusion, cast shadows and accept shadows for the hair, render time is 2 minutes but the hair is uniformly lit (second pic - no shadows). Turning on accept shadows on the hair and cast shadows on the shell brought the render time back to something like 2 minutes 40 seconds (first pic).
Did some more experiments. I tried using geometry shell to block SSS but that didn't work. The SSS precomputation isn't aware of the geometry shell.
Then I started playing with gamma correction. I think this is a big part of the puzzle. With gamma correction enabled in the render option, the best combination seems to be 0.8/2.0 (gain/gamma). Below are renders without SSS with three settings - 1/1.8, 0.8/2.0 and 0.6/2.2.
@Wowie : I did some experiments with hair some time ago but wasn't satisfied
getting transmapped hairs to be translucent is quite tricky as the calculations are on a surface instead of some small little tubes like with Garibaldi's or Lahm's plugin
I remember I played with opacity and SSS but that is not quite convincing.
I didn't play with the anisotropy parameter but that should be the way to go. However even with that you have to rely on very good maps especially having good baked in specular effect.
As I rather play with Blender theses days I can tell you it is easier to get something good with curve/ribbon hairs
In blender you have a lot of options to shape your hairs. I don't think the Garibaldi and Lahm are as much advanced but you should have some control over the shape as you can comb them. So you can simulate some dynamic effect by shaping the hairs in the position you would like them to be. No need for dynamics for that
If you want to give it a try, you can get Lahm player which is free and get some static hair presets. you can't do a lot with them except render and a bit of shader tweaking. But it can give you an idea of what you can get
For stills maybe. I'm generally interested in a solution that works on both stills and animation. It's not possible with DS (yet) but it's something that can be achieved with Carrara.
Something like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLn1DQmsR6U&html5=1
Interesting! Did you rig it the old way or through weightmapping?
Looks good! But would the gamma change affect all the other materials?
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And I did some SBuilder wrestling during the winter holidays, so here's how I put the shadows into dzAreaLights using transmission from the surface back to the light. Basically I did not find the way to refer to the point on the light-casting surface, so it's calculated here from the L light vector and the surface position, according to linear algebra. It seems to be faster than just putting a shadow construct there set to raytracing. I haven´t yet properly tested this against UberArea lights either, but it is definitely faster than SMixer area lights with shadows, and as the dzArea lights do have spec/diffuse only modifiers (that UberArea ones don't have), I will be using them.
I wonder if they would be legally redistributable in actual compiled form, though... Does anyone know?
It was a legacy rig since I did that in DS3 with the Figure Setup Tool. Unfortunately the .CR2 Exporter in DS4 isn't able to export some of the ERC code I use to control the hair length (toggling a node's visibility rather than adjusting scale). I might just revisit that again after I'm done with something I'm cooking for G2M.
Yup, but probably not that much. I started with my old preset and most of it transferred fine. Then I boosted the value for the lights since the results were very dark. I was using values of around 100 to 200 percent, but with the gamma change I have to go all the way to 800 to 1300 percent. So in effect, enabling gamma correction allows you to have much more range and precision in lighting. From the results, I'd say enabling gamma correction for the textures also allows you to better maintain texture saturation compared to just using gain/gamma alone.
Edit: A full torso shot of M6 with Bjorn texture. No SSS yet. I removed some of the redness from earlier on and want to have it enabled with SSS (rather than tweaking the diffuse colors).
I have them both now, and they are flexible enough for creating most styles apart from complex braids IMO. But then, it helps to have working knowledge of how to cut and style actual hair, so I can't really speak for everyone...
I watched a video of Lahm long time ago (last year or more) and the system is taken from Maya Shave and Haircuts if I'm not mistaken. Blender has the same. What you can do in Blender (and in Maya too I guess) and that is missing is everything related to physics. I also think the shaders are somewhat limited compared to what you can design in the two others but that already give great possibility to model whatever hair you could have in mind. I have fun making some hair but I often think it's like playing Barbie when I comb
I didn't play a lot with DS lately but I'll give a try to your Arealight network. I find it strange just looking at it, but I think it is better to test it to know