How to make pores in skin?
Fae3D
Posts: 2,847
I keep seeing all these renders of portraits, and the skin is covered in tiny little pores. It looks so realistic! Mine always look pretty smooth, even with HD morphs in use.
Could someone please explain to me how you make the pores? I have a little experience in image editing, but not much, so please explain it to me as if I'm an idiot lol!
Also, I'm rendering with 3Delight. I would love to use Iray, but my computer can't handle it, so I'm stuck with 3Delight for now. Please don't tell me it's an Iray only thing, or I might cry :(
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From my own haphazard experience with this (accidentally getting the effect you are after), I would say that you are on the right lines with the HD morphs.
To get that sort of detail in iray, I'd say it's a combination of the texture on the model, the HD morph on the model, the lighting, the resolution of your render and the pixel filtering in the render settings. Try using a HD figure and render at a fairly large size, such as 1920x1080 so that you can zoom in on the picture and crop to show detail. Set the Render SubD level to 4 and in the Render Settings > Filtering set the Pixel Filter Radius to 0.9.
I'm not overly familiar with 3Delight, but setting the Pixel Filter to Gaussian and the X and Y widths to a low value seems to help (I went for 1, but this might be too harsh for the rest of the image). Experiment with using a camera with a focal length of 120 and zooming in on the face (this will allow you to use a lower render resolution whilst experimenting) then try different lighting, or altering the angle of the light (full-on light is more likely to wash out the detail, so light from an angle).
Above all, try out different HD models and lighting that you already have before buying anything new, as there is a good chance that you already have models that can show this effect.
I might be wrong but I think if you want to get these finer details in renders you will need to pump up the render quality settings, and the resolution level in the paremters tab. Your lighting will also need to be set up to bring them out.... a front-on strong light will probably wash-out the details. The character will also need the right skin maps (bump/normal/displacement), possibly individually adjusted. So it's not just one thing that needs to be right for fine skin details to be visible in renders.
Edit - Double posted with DR who gave a much better explanation than I gave.
You mentioned the render quality settings, which I somehow forgot, and also you are quite right about the bump/normal/displacement maps.
@Faeofthe3rdDimension - I have just had a play around with 3Delight settings, but I just can't get the lighting right so the figure comes out a dark orange. However, I did find that Victoria 8 has got a surprisingly detailed face in terms of pores and wrinkles, so if you have that figure then it might be a good place to start.
Get yourself xNormal , Matrelize or Normal Image maker, all free use your diffuse maps or bump maps and put them through one of these free programs. If you have an image editing program you can use that instead by inverting a B&W image of your diffuse map I am sure there are more learned members here that could walk you through the proccess as i don't use photoshop or the like for the proccess. Anyway make a concavity map (polycount has information about concavity, convexity, and curvature maps), also look at Marmoset Tool bag character Artist Saurabh Jethany ! put your newly made concavity map into the diffuse roughness and play around with the settings use the same maps in both dual lobe roughness settings and play around with the sliders in conjuction with the specular map slider. Or you could use texture xyz micro maps they are fab at helping to break down uniformity adding that little bit more of randomness you find in skin. You could try a strong normal map made from your diffuse at lower settings. Dont forget about the other roughness settings like top coat If you read around you will come across artists who use concavity maps in their shader setups to add a little more punch to their renders! also go to top weight and try putting it to a low setting and change from reflect to fresnel i use Fresnel on everything and suprised myself hair has had better highlights skin has better sheen cuts down on the plastic waxy look
in conjuction with sss settingsdifferent colur in the transmission sometimes can bring out detail . Also play around with the SSS directions settings I have found a positve number is better than a negative so play around but i would say that with daz characters you can almost have a set and forget settings but not so with PA characters because as it has well been stated here on the forums every PA approaches the skin shading in a different way so experiment I am still constantly trying to come up with better looking skin so am experimenting all the time
Ditto to everything before. Turn off the limits on the bump and normal maps and crank them to 3 or 4 and 5 or 6, respectively. Test render and reduce/increase as needed. Look at the facial close-ups on the HD Add-on Core figures and find the map with the pores you like (preferably with minimal eye baggage, because you may need to defeat the limits and turn the Head HD up to 150). Unfortunately, nasolabial folds and nostril creases sometimes make this untenable. So, right now, the trade-off is aging the character but having pores or not aging the character and having less noticeable pores.
My G3 favourites: Ophelia 7, Rune 7, Elijah 7, Lucian 7, & Michael 7 (top to bottom)
My G8F favourites: Tasha 8, Zelara 8, Gia 8, (Latonya & Stephanie also have decent pores but must be cranked past the limits, which maxes Latonya's eyebags [they can be moved up out of sight by plus 250 on Eyelid Lower Height morph from DO Head Morphs.
Owen 8 is my go-to for G8M, as the others either add aging details or add very little detail at all. Sadly, Landon's head HD is almost identical to non-HD (i.e., featureless) other than the veins.
Anagenessis adds something called "micropores", which I do think are the skinpores that show up in all the example renders. The product seems to kinda overhaul the shader/lighting workflow, but it's been on my wishlist for the very reason of adding those skinpores on close-ups. I'd still love to hear whether I'm on the right track with my assumptions though.
Here's an example I made last year using 3Delight featuring Ivan 7.
Title: Noon Sighting
Render settings are all default except 'Progressive' turned on.
Ivan's settings are the defaults as supplied by DAZ. No HD add-on. HOWEVER, Ivan's normal maps are exceptionally highly detailed and are doing a lot of the work here! With a lot of the other characters the HD add-on is required but be sure render subd is turned up to at least 4.
Lighting settings: I use the Age of Armour Advanced Lights. The ambient light's 'AO Bias' (uberenvironment's shadow bias) is set to 0.01 and the distant light's 'Shadow Bias' is also 0.01. Fine detail is obscured if these settings are too high, unfortunately lowering them does not boost render speed...
Post processing: I use the Gimp which has a filter called 'Unsharp Mask' which crispens details.
As the shadow shows, the lighting is coming from almost directly above not from the direction of the camera. Lighting, as always, is crucial. Photographers call this 'side lighting' and it is the primary technigue for emphasising suface texture details. If the camera is facing north you want the light to be close to the east-west plane.
Hope this helps.
Hmm, for 3DL rendering SubD level 1 is max. Crank it up as much as you like but the changes will show only in the viewport, not in the final render. So for fine details with 3DL, use bump, displacement and normal maps along with proper render settings. If you're using progressive mode there is no need to adjust shading rate, as the raytracer won't use it anyway, but if you render in the normal "bucket" mode, set the shadowrate to min 0.2, possibly lower to get as much detail as possible.
ETA: I like to use the gaussian pixelfilter with 2x2 settings;) Progressive mode will not use the pixelfilter, it will be reset to box 1x1.
Try adding your skin bump map to the top coat and see if it makes a difference. I set mine about 2.00? You could try that to start :).
Edit: on second thought, don't try that unless 3Delight has a top coat. LOL. I failed to see you were using 3DL the first time.
Laurie
Thanks, everyone! This is a lot of information to process, I'll be playing around with these settings for a while. I had no idea render settings could make that kind of a difference, but I did suspect bump might have had something to do with it. I just wasn't sure how.
I only have the HD maps for Victoria 7 and Elijah 7, those looked like some strong ones to me, and they were a good deal. I don't have any for Gen 8 yet, but I'll pick some up when they go on sale. I'll be sure to skip Landon's though lol.
And I've added AoA Advanced Lights to my wishlist, as well.