Which DAZ Genesis 8 M/F characters are the most realistic/beautiful?
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Hey.. thanks for that... I actually forget that I already owned that hair and its exactly or very close to what I was looking for although I was hoping to see balding hair that like most men forms a crown. Anyways... a good reminder to me.. you reminded me I'd like to see a "Bernie Sanders" style hair and a Trump hair too.. Hmmm Anybody have suggestions?
It seems like this subject is done to death, and the thing that always winds up being missed in the discussion is **Lighting** and render setup... minor details when possible should be modeled (which can be added via a normal map), NOT built into the texture as in real life you see things such as moles or bumps on the skin as a result of light hitting it, especially in renders like IRAY. Light creates the shadows from these features; if you don't see them, fix your lighting. Built in details usually have a lot of specular in them that needs to be cleaned out, not leaving much left to put in a texture.. and when it's left in you have the result of dark, dirty faces.. which is why they need to be taken out as much as possible, because that simply won't pass QA in programs that use the newer render engines. So the bottom line is lighting, just like in real life photography. You can have a subject with very detailed faces, but bad lighting will wash it out. Again, you need to fix your lighting, using things like 3 point lighting with rim to create depth between the subject and background (and DOF helps as well)... because if you want to work towards realism, you have to look into how the professional photographers do it and they simply don't plop a subject in front of camera and just expect the light to magically do its own thing. That's all I'm going to say because it is what it is if you're serious about realistic renders... the skin is only part of render and less important than the rest of the setup.
I will have to agree with this. I will take it one step further. For example, take a photograph - you don't have to be a photographer - of a human subject. Even a bad photograph that isn't well focused, and you can tell a real person from a mannequin. Even without the details in the skin, you can easily differentiate the real from the fake. Its not only the light, it's the expressions or posture. It's the subtle things that only a live subject will exhibit, much of which we only detect unconciously. Sure, a bad skin texture is a sure giveaway but so is one that has too much detail. Not to mention a moving subject. I doubt it's possible to make an animation that will pass off as real in Daz Studio. But for still pics, besides the hair, you have the tools you need to create photos approaching real life in Daz. You have a sufficient mesh, realistic lighting system and a renderer that can display them in a physically plausible way. The rest is left in the hands of the artist. There isn't a tool in the world that can replace the artist.
Seldom is this fine hair visible in photos, but it does do one thing: it reflects light differenty and that is indeed what we're used to seeing. Marmoset Toolbag has an interesting approch to this with a fuzz setting that tries to mimic exactly that.
https://www.marmoset.co/posts/character-setup-quick-reference/
There have been a couple threads on how to make Donald Trump.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/159111/making-d-trump/p1
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2040601/#Comment_2040601
It seems the closest hair is probably https://www.daz3d.com/jimmy-flip-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s, but you would need to do work on the textures.
For another balding hair option, you might consider this free hair from AprilYSH http://shop.aprilsvanity.com/free-items/mitch-hair.html
Moles have color, they do actually need to be built into the color textures.
Snow if you want vellus hairs and body hairs you are better off adding them with geometry. It's much more realistic than painting them on skin, as far as I'm concerned skin should be as hairless as possible. There are peach fuzz and a lot of body hair products available.
Thank you but I've already have all of those resource sucking products... I'm looking to find more 'out of the box' characters that I don't need to add micro-details to.. I have some that I've bought from other sites as already discussed but I would like to see a LOT MORE of them and I think eventually.. I will over time. As people see the need, somebody that wants to make money will provide exactly what I want.. it's always been the case.. a little discussion is a good thing... we don't have to agree with everybody.
I can see a day where all the characters don't have to have anything added to them because they look real from the start... it should be point and shoot.. bam~
Not all moles have color compared to the surrounding skin to need to be in the diffuse map. And not all moles have texture different enough from the surrounding skin to need to be present on a normal map. And some moles have color and texture different from the surrounding skin.
So personally I think all moles and such in normal maps and LIE layers is better than to expect that selling a texture that includes some indiviual's skin properties so exactingly included that when one see that skin rendered the 1st person the think of was the person that texture set was based on isn't that good a marketing strategy for people wanting to write unique graphic novels.
Putting that same 5 o'clock shadow on everybody has already been complained about as not helpful to creators of unique renders. Better to buy some morphable hair sets and such.
That's so 1990's...
Good.. if you make products.. I know not to buy them.
It would be great if your renders are good enough to confuse with a real person. You can always change the morph and then they don't look like said person.. but you can only do so much with fake skin that has no details.. that requires you labor finding the things that should already be a part of a UNIQUE CHARACTER.
What you are arguing for is a GENERIC CHARACTER.. Why bother naming them if all you want is 'Generic character X' and when will you 'no detail' people use that talent to produce those realistic pictures you keep claiming you can make with your fake characters?? Show me how you do it ... If all your going to do is slap generic skins on different morphs.. as some people already do... I have no need to buy any further products.. I have a dozen of those character already.
We can have BOTH. It's not a compitition.
These are sterling observations. I'll build on them even further. As your post stated, pretty much any photograph of a human looks like a real human, regardless of lighting and any other considerations. Why is this?
1. Problem: There is NOTHING at all smooth or flat about the geometry of a human figure. Humans are collections of living cells that follow instructions to build tissues one layer at a time built from the inside out. The resulting surface is ALWAYS going to be LUMPY. or Noisy to some degree. There is no master builder to ensure that faces and other tissues are perfectly smooth, perfectly symmetrical, or that eyes are the same size. So one of the first things we notice about real photos regardless of lighting is lack of perfection from the figure, in both surface smoothness and other details. We expect to see some degree of ugliness from a real photo.
Solution: We need ways to disrupt the surface of our human flesh renders with lumpiness at the geometric level. Like a turbulence map. Kind of like a cellulite feature. I want the ability to produce not just wrinkles, but also pits and scrapes and scars. Just think recent images of Mickey Rourke. Knowing what a hearthrob he was only a few years ago compared to now, should be a good lesson on what I am talking about in regards to the "lumpiness" of human flesh.
2. Problem: Xerox copies are always lower in quality than their originals. The exact same thing is true when it comes to human skin. 99% of the time I see renders featuring photo captured textures and I feel like I am looking at a lossy xerox copy of what human skin should look like. I almost never think I am looking at the actual skin. It's like double processing. For this reason I think that skins based on high res photo scans can often be problematic. Even some of the top vendors who makes tons of money here selling textures built up from high res photos, still often look like xerox copies of a human skin rather than like the actual skin itself.
Solution: Just like we do in Zbrush, we need to have skin built up from brushes: Pore brushes, wrinkle brushes, leather grain brushes... as these are your best bet for producing a skin texture that isnt a xerox copy of an oroginal, that doesnt have directional lighting cues built in as all photos will have. And while its no doubt the real photos would capture a million subtle details that hand painting will not, it will come at a cost of a complete loss of control. Image the same document scanned by 3 different xerox machines....all three results will look different. Whihc one of them is correct? Unless you have executive control over each step of the process including the photo capture session itself, you may not get a texture as awesome as the one you might have produced with different methods. This is not to say we cannot or should not use photo based skins, its just important to understand that there are ways to ge there that DONT require anyone to disrobe. A copy is still nothing more than a copy.
3. Wrinkles are the biggest giveaway. There's no single correct way to do them. Shading, or morphs, or both? Good example is forehead wrinkles. Sure, you can take a photograph of a human face and without a doubt the camera will perceive a series of lines along the forehead. In this "Xerox copy" approach, the camera will do its best to capture the "result" of said wrinkle, appearing as a line somewhat darker than the surrounding pixels. Great. but in reality this surface was not flat and the line you see is only the deepest part of the shading as it occurs along that 3d crevice. In reality there is no dark line at all, there's just folding of skin. So when I am considering this texture for my CG work, I have to ask myself if that line along the forehead is baked in deeper than it should be (as would be expected from a lossy Xerox copy)? If I am going to apply morphs or displacement or something similar to create the wrinkles, do I still need that dark line to be baked into the texture?
Sometimes, there really is a dark line that sits at the bottom of a wrinkle of the skin, usually because that wrinkles have been in place so long that the wrinkle has actually become somewhat of a scar. In such a case the question still remains, how much of the representation of these wrinkles do I want to be provided by lines baked (or captured) within the textures versus the percentage of the wrinkliness I want to allow the render engine to produce on its own from morphs and displacement during the rendering process?
4. Lighting is an issue. In real life all artificial lights are based on specs. If you want your render to look more like real life, try to use light only those few sources that are modeled as realistically as possible, as well as giving them strengths and other effect parameters that match the real world. Basically, know whether you're using a 60 watt soft white bulp or a 120 watt bulb with clear glass that you can see the element radiating..
5. Another thing that tells us that random image capture of a person is real is due to the randomness of the surroundings. Scratches and missing edges on tables..stains on curtains, stains on human teeth and spots in the whites of the eyes and missed stitching on the clothing. All these errors help establish that the second law (rising entropy aka disorder or lack of a perfect order) is being respected. Absolute perfection will look false every single time. Even photos of real automobiles look pretty fake because its quite easy to fake the hard solid metalic surface of a car. But how about the lumpy softness of a human face? Much more difficult to pull off.
I love this..! I love you! YES.. Reality is in the imperfections that make us perfect! Beautiful..
To my mind anyone focused on actual characters is missing the boat. Generic skins are fine, so long as they have the details needed to look like real skin while not going overboard to the point of upstaging the morphs themselves by lookin too muhc like a single specific person. Again, if I can tell which skin was used under a morph then the skin is too detailed, simple as that. textures should be lost behind the morphs, not noticabel on their own just as in real life we dont notice skin alone, its an entire package.
Eyebrows, facial hair including stubble, forehead wrinkles, spots and moles and a million other things we think we need real photos to capture are not nearly as important as we'd like to think. And yes, I'll see about proving a bit of it to you if I get the time tonight.
Moles are pigmented by definition.
EDIT: Looks like the term is used more loosely though, so fair enough.
We digress... What is the most realistic looking characters? I would imagine that having one with a "Cindi Crawford" type mole might be a good character.. I wonder if that can be done in a realistic way...
YES!
Hair, too. Painted on eyebrows and flat transmapped hair are huge giveaways that a render is not a photo.
'Baked on' Vs. 'Add on'
It is not a compitition.. Both are valid techniques that may be useful at different times and we should always look to expand the tools that we have at our disposal and in the end, it makes for a wider product opportunity and a diverse marketplace and better experience for the consumer to have access to all the tools in the arsonel and not limited by the idea that ideas compete instead of EGOS.
My first computer was an Apple 2 plus and I had that until the 90's doing text bulliten boards before there was an internet.. LOL... I'm certainly not ashamed that I'm Old School... staying relevant is painful.. leaves scars.. I'm proud of mine... you should be too. #respect
Even that is highly debateable... My favorite all time product creator and a favorite of my other people I know is Danae's Metropolitian collection...
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/the-metropolitan-collection---london-v4-2/97977/
Arguably the most realistic character in V4 history and she won a couple of awards before the economy crashed in Greece and she stopped making characters... but those character all had 'baked on' hair and no hair options and I found both of them to be useful at different times. It's a shame that in 10 years .. few people have followed such a great example... and if she made this AMAZING CHARACTER as a v4.. just imagine what we can do with Genesis 8.. the potential is limitless.
No, the term is used by my dermatologist and not loosely either. She cut one out of my back months ago.
That is an amazing skin indeed, but a ton of lighting is baked in. Light it in a way that doesn't correspond to the baked in light and it falls apart.
And it was still the most realistic looking character in my arsonal because I make several characters in a scene and not have all my resouces consumed by trying to mimic micro-details.. It seems everything must find a balance... :) Both are valid techniques to use.
So what you're looking for is not so much what most of us think of, rather you want lighting and such baked in.
This is a valid position but something the marketplace has moved away from for good reasons. As such I would without sarcasm suggest you get the M4 and V4 remaps for G8 and look for all the really good old characters. Things like danae's characters or SAV's characters. Back then putting the kind of stuff you are interested in directly onto the main texture map was a thing.
Yup, it looks great. I know the skin well. But it's a huge cheat, let's not kid ourselves. That highlight on the nose is completely baked in. Light it at an angle and things will start to look pretty bad pretty quickly. This is literally the easiest way to make a skin. Leave all the highlights in as it was in the photo. Often this looks outright horrible, like the usual Facegen stuff, so kudos of course to Danae for tuning it so well that it does look great. But with this method you get around a lot of the actual challenges like proper skin shading, so taking this as a benchmark skin is a bit problematic.
Snow,
The more options the better in most cases and pretty much always when it comes to artwork. I don't think there is any disagreement from anyone that details are important. My only point of interest is in which details we decide to emphasize, and why we tend to focus more on some things than other things.
This is my attempt to explain in more detail why I feel most of our Daz3d renders don't look like true photos even though we always know real humans even from bad photos captured in real life. So what's going on? Part of this goes to the whole discussion of what's the point of the realism in the first place?
1. As I stated in my above post, there is a difference between skin and a Xerox copy of a skin. A good example is the first image I've included. It features a young female similar to the Danae character. Clearly this is an UNFAIR comparison, but we are talking stark realism here. So many things are done well with the Danae character. I think it looks close enough to the natural thing that my imagination can fill in most of the rest of the blanks in most cases. I feel the artist did an excellent job of giving us the amount of detail we need while not overdoing it. Still, if you were to place the render next to a real photo of a similar looking person our unconscious minds know right away that one is a render. What's missing aside from the real world lighting?
2. In this next image we are looking at a close-up of a human undereye of a seemingly caucasian individual. My question for you is what would you consider to be a good photo capture to be applied to a 3d character? To my eye, while the capture is clearly "real", it would look wrong if I slapped this on a mesh and rendered it. To my eye it would be a mistake to include ANY of the specular information captured in this image; wonderful though it is. All of the leather grain and other surface lumpiness details are being captured by specular, there is very little diffuse variation here. Strip away the specular and you'd be left with a fairly detail-free looking albedo texture.
The presence of these specular highlights interacting with the surrounding light sources are a big part of how we know as viewers that this is a real human skin. Great. But just because it looks real as a texture file doesnt mean it will look real after it has been processed through a render engine. As stated, it is the specular behavior of the surface that affects our perceptions more than anything else in this case. This goes toward my argument that we should be conncered much less with what we think of a surface details like moles and what not baked in, and focus more on the lumpy nature of human skin tissues at the surface. Don't bake the leather undereye into the texture or allow it to remain after the photoshoot. Nope. Better for realism sake to separate the diffuse information from the specular information entirely, and create amazing specular and displacement maps to go on top of your more or less generic diffuse and albedo maps.
3. Here are even more images. Again I argue that color variations and other surface features we think are so important are highly secondary to a truly convincing normal/bump/displacement and proper specular settings. Let me know if you agree.
4. Here are some people with a little more age. Do we need to bake little dots into the texture itself to represent the pores? Etch litereral lines into the texture for wrinkles, or should we use a flat albedo texture and use displacement or normals or bump to get us there? I think we need a combo as you've said. Some degree of baking but not too much, as I'm going to give the rest of the job over to my surfacing details. I feel that only the most EXTREME wrinkles and pores need to be baked into the texture. Otherwise, I think it almost always better to use surfacing tech.
So as you observe here are my questions
1. Do you think that undereye wrinkles on most of these people can look convincing as mere lines on a texture file, or do they require some amount of 3d surface detailing?
2. When you look at the lips, do you think there are actual dark etchings on the lips, or are all those shaded regions merely shadows coming from surface disruptions of some sort? Do you think the lips would look as real if the texture maker sells it to me with those lovely shadows baked into it?
3. Do you observe huge variations in the skin tone? And if so, do you think that these color shifts are more important that the surface specular behavior?
4. Look at the amount of specular and the width of that specular. Have you EVER seen a render at Daz3d that demonstrates bumpiness and specular width like this? Isnt it interesting how it never looks like plastic?
I think in the end, a combination of different techniques being combined will present the best results and in the end.. thats what we all want.. while of course you are absolutely correct about the light on the nose.. which if you know what to look for is ever present... for me the trade off is worth it since I can minimize a shiny nose's impact real easy to offset like in this old 3delight test render.. having poor details always sucks.
The way I see it.. if this was something that was "easy" then I'd just go and 'make my own' as so many have fondly suggested I do in the most polite of terms of course.. LOL No.. there is an art that is involved in knowing the balance of makes a good character.. apparently its very hard work and requires a Rembrandt .. but I've seen the talent here at DAZ and hopefully I can draw it out and if you think about it.. All I'm saying is keep raising the bar.. you are almost their. Keep up the great work and happy rendering.