Skin tones - why isn't there a baseline?
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I'd really appreciate if DAZ implements the suggestion of having a standard environment/scene for at least 2 promo pictures (head shot and full body). Some of the figures I bought in the past look way different out of the box. Turns out the promos have light settings that would wash out other objects.
You really cannot have a standard scene for all texture types.
I make creatures that often tend to be meant for dark shadowy places. To make things that look good for those environments require a vastly different shader setup than you would need for a character who looks good in the bright sun.
Also, everyone has different ways they set up a render and that will make things also look diferent. What may work for one person will not look good for another. I have a number of brilliant looking characters from other pa's in my library, but I know to get them to match my own, i have to tweak them, simply because of how I set up my renders.
The other characters are not built wrong, they are just optimised to look good the way that pa planned them to look.
One thing you can do if you have a character who you do not like how it renders is to load it, then click on the material preset of a character you do like, while holding CTRL, then telling it to ignore the maps.......that will apply the shader settings you like, with the maps of the character you want. I will note that this is not a scenerio that works all the time, as pa's will make their maps to accentuate their setup, but it is worth a try to see if it suits your needs better.
I don't care that it wouldn't look good in a standard lighting render. I still want one in the promo's. That gives me an idea of what the model actually looks like and what I will need to do to make it look decent.
You totally missed the point.
There is no one render setup that will look the same as how you set up renders, there are way too many vairaibles.
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Well the standard DS Iray setup might be used as a reference. Perhaps with dome rotation changed a bit.
I have to admit I don't really understand what many variables there are? I mean, you load Daz default settings and a HDRI, and just render. There's not really that many variables, and it should look the same no matter who renders it.
Yeah...that would look the same......but nobody renders with default settings, so what you see there will never look like what you do for your render settings, and it will still pointless for you.
The default settings already include an HDRI.
That wouldn't work as I have my own setup scene which already has changes to the default settings which loads when Studio starts. No matter what I load looks different even before I start changing any surface settings. Also what I see on my monitor may not be the same as anyone else sees on theirs depending on their monitor settings, white balance, colour balance, contrast, brightness and ambient light in the room they are sitting in.
Lighting can _drastically_ change the look of a scene. There are entire studies on such things. And even beyond that, how color appears in a scene.
Movies, for example, make a lot of use of color toning to create a look and feel, and there have been a few cases where, say, you get a movie released with one color tone, and then a director's cut with a different one. (off the top of my head, Payback is an example)
And I'm finding this all hilarious right now as I have had to redo thumbnails for a project four times because the lighting isn't right.
(That is, the lighting doesn't blow out the lighter versions of the figure, shows detail on the darker versions, is neutral rather than yellowed, etc)
And, heck, look into the history of photography and dark skin for more lessons in how fluid and inconsistent stuff can be.
Well I have saved a preset of the DS default Iray settings, so if I use another setup I can easily shift to default. It's just about having a reference, and the DS default setup is fine for that.
As for monitor settings that's true, but this is about personal preferences and your own monitor is your own reference in this context and that which you base your decision on - whether it looks good on another person's monitor or not doesn't matter, it's how it looks on your own that matters. It's the same when you create a scene, you adjust things so they look good on your own monitor, without knowing how it looks on other people's monitors.
Ideally, all monitors should be calibrated and set up the same way of course, but I doubt that will ever happen, for people have their own preferences.
The original discussion was about using a 5600k, white, light so we'd actually know what the model really looks like.It is not terribly hard to find a neutral background and render a model in a white light so everyone gets a clear look at it in a neutral light. I personally am tired of getting models that look great in the promos that turn out to have just absurd skin tones that require completely ridiculous lighting to ake them look like the promo which rules out using them in any sort of scene. I don't do portraits I do VN's.
There is no such thing as a default setup, or rather it's arbitrary and won't look good for some set of models.
Again, check out history of photography and black and white skin; lighting and tone that works for one will look lousy for the other, and it takes a lot of work to have vivid, compelling images that satisfy different skins.
All a 'standard' setup will do is make a number of skins look terrible.
Well since Iray is PBR there's technically no such thing as "looking good", only "looking real", which I would call the default setup or the reference. So IMO it's not about whether a 3D model looks good (which is a subjective thing), but about whether it looks like a person with the same skin characteristics and color does in real life, under similar light conditions.
I have to disagree with the you can’t have one render setup. I mean, the criticism is valid, it wont always look as intended, but you’ll get the idea of how a neutral light responds to a surface, and thats the whole idea. Thats how you use a light box in print, thats why you do a neutral white test before a photography shoot, so you have a baseline.
Problem is when you’re not trained to look at things like this, you might not be able to make full use of it.
If you make a painting in tungsten light, your painting will have a colour cast because your eye compensated for you, so if you move it to a different light location it will look different in colour. Thats why a neutral white 5600k is useful, it gets rid of some guessing.
That's the entire problem. A good Daz provided "default setup" would help with this.
ETA: Also if skin shader is PBR, it should behave pretty well in all lighting conditions. Sure, it might not look perfect in some lighting, but it shouldn't look totally alien either as long as we are talking about normal lighting conditions. When you have to start tonemapping etc. to get skins look decent, there's something wrong with product, since if we have several characters, we can't tonemap for all of them.
I agree 100%.
Mod Edit :- To correct the quote
Not sure what happened with the quotes there, but I didn't say that and don't really agree with that. I think nested quotes and maybe a saved draft there mixed up the code.
Perhaps one render done with the default light setup on the same computer would at least create some consistency. Then at least all renders have the same lights and computer configuration so a comparison could be made.
Sorry, my bad. Quotes got too nested.
REAL skin doesn't behave well in all lighting conditions. And real world photographs are tonemapped all the time. If you still get pictures developed physically, there's machines that are doing tonemapping to produce vibrant, corrected images.
Hypothetically, if there was a standard scene with predefined camera, light, background, clothes, and hair... how would that even work. Imagine a taller than average character, would you adjust the camera so that the figure fits in the frame? Well that's now not standard... and the focus of the light might now be at the character's neck instead of their face... so again... it's not even possible to have a theoretically "standard" scene since any such would require tweaks to frame the variety of figures.
This isn't this hard. Specify a specific background. A 5600k light at a specific distance, angle from the model and a specific luminance. Specify camera settings. The camera position isn't part of that at all. If the vendor wants to show the back of the head or the shadowed side of the model well I imagine there would be repercussions to those decissions. The point of this is to stop getting models which are heavily tanned that the promo images have been tone mapped to not look orange so that when we get them and start rendering them we find them useless and have to through the hassle of the refund process.
Understand exactly what op is sharing. All fabulous feedback. My opinion is, specially in my case, it's not the products themselves, but the lack of knowledge to achieve desired results. Learning/understanding Iray surfaces. I'll see a certain promo image, thinking how was that image achieved ? Can I do the same if I purchase character, some are favorarble, while others are not even close. Most PA's and assistance are professionals while customers are hobbyist. Many PA's commission out render work. So of course promo images will look extravagantly beautiful.
I agree characters should be shown as non tweaked, standard lighting, etc..... along with promo images. Perfect example would be all PA's use Daz starter scene. All is setup for base figure.
I just hope we avoid a "Shirley Card" fiasco...
Nemesis: yeah, that’s part of what I’ve been referring to
I totally agree with this.
Aren't promos supposed to show us what we are buying?
I just had a conversation with someone about why movie trailers often contain scenes that are not in the movie.... Promos are advertising and nothing more than that. On the Daz3d site, there is documentation that describes the detailed contents of every product; I often point new people on how to use the product number to find out what is listed with the product so that. no, the scene, lighting cameras, hair, clothes, and props do not come with the product described as a figure texture.... The default Daz Studio scene doesno favors to dark skin (see "Shirley Card" link); may we have a default scene where dark skin shows detail and light skin looks like dead frog belly in a headlight? I suspect there might be criticism that the skin looked so much better than the promos: "She's not grey-blue...she is flesh colored!". The problem is there is no "default" scene that accurately lights light and dark skin...