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Oof. Sorry about that. Don't know what I was thinking there.
Yes, NGS can really mess up the skin-tone since it relies only on the diffuse map to build everything up. It's great for characters Genesis 2 and older, since it breathes new life into their skin. Having said that, I still love NGS and have come to learn a few tweaks that can help restore some of the colors in characters' skin (have only tested these tweaks on light-colored skins, though. For other types of skin I usually use Altern8 for a quick fix).
High res found here. This is more or less the process I'm showing with the renders:
The Result (Render 6):
Thanks InTheFlesh, I don't think I ever noticed those extra selection settings.
Great job Fenix, that is a substantial improvement. Those renders are all with my scene setup too? Like I don't enough to do right now, now I kinda want to experiment with NGS again. ;)
Since I liked Jurou's skin so much, I thought I'd do an experiment to see how Lee 7 would look borrowing Jurou's skin settings. I'm sharing the results because they are interesting. It looks like Lee has been toasted under the sun, complete with oily skin and everything!
That's an interesting example of how saving just the surface settings of texture presets can be useful. I did it with Olympia 7's SSS maps and it made a bit of a difference in textures I applied it to. Thanks for sharing that. :)
This is Alziir for Nix 8.
See the full resolution on DA:http://fav.me/ddmu6w4
Getting this character now. His skin looks great out of the box!
Mug Shot comparison of some of the Generation 3 dark skin characters I owe. Full-res version here.
Isaac for Darius 7
Jax for The Guy 7
As expected, NGS really improved the skin by making it react to light better. Applying the tweak (swapping the translucency channel with the SSS channel colors) help restore the original tone of the skin. I remember NGS was updated at some point to introduce additional presets to deal with dark skins. So I've applied the preset called: "Anagenessis 2 Dark Skin Genesis 3" for this test.
Ivan & Dante 7 [hi-res here]
Observations:
Elijah & Leo [hi-res here]
Observations:
I'm linking the images from my Deviantart since the forum's isn't allowing me to attach the renders tonight.
Tristan 8 and Tristan 8 HD
Went back and added links to my posts to make it easier to find the products and also give link back to this thread if someone is using the Daz Dealz plugin.
Ok, so this thread does have the word "improvement" in the title. You tell me if you think this is an improvement, and I'll tell you how to do some basic tweaks to get a more realistic looking skin out of almost* any texture set.
Of course, you may not think this is an improvement. Feel free to express that as well.
Michael 8 Revisited
I'm in, @evilded777. Your Michael 8 is awesome!
I am noting that the "seam" that one can observe when using spectral rendering does in fact cover the entire seam around the face. I'm going to look at this further and see what I can see. M8 Revisited did not use Spectral for this reason, the seam was quite obvious. Skin does look much better, so that seam is quite annoying.
I will make a further post tomorrow night with the steps. I can only take credit for cobbling together lots of little bits from folks much smarter than me.
Edward 8 HD really stands out of the crowd with that line-up
Ok, so for anyone who's interested in trying these settings, you can find most of them explained in the somewhat dusty at this point thread on iRay Skin Rendering, I forget the exact title. I will look it up and link to it later.
I recommend, but this is not required, V3Digitimes Ultimate Iray Skin Manager as a tool. You don't need it, but it can make your life easier. You will need a graphic's editor that can sample the color from your skin textures, and you will need to know where to find those.
If you use the Skin Manager, changing these settings are going to be easy. If you do it by hand, it could be a little more tedious.
On your skin surfaces, change the Translucency Color to pure white (255, 255,255). You should have some texture in this slot, either the diffuse texture or some desaturated or otherwise manipulated version of the diffuse color.
Have the Translucency Weight set anywhere between 65-80. I wouldn't go much higher, but with these settings you may be able to get away with it and not have the Rudolph effect.
Set the Base Color Effect to Scatter & Transmit. And set the SSS Reflectance Tint to 250,255,255 (this is very caucasian, and a cool color. You can alter these settings to give a different undertone... try 245,255,250 for a slight olive tone; this color can be experimented with, but keep the values high).
Thin Walled should, obviously be off. Set the Transmitted Measurement Distance to 1. We'll come back to the Transmitted Color and the reasons for this setting in a bit.
Set the SSS Mode to Chromatic. Set the Scattering Measurement Distance to 0.010 and the SSS Color to 236, 208, 207. The Scattering Measurement Distance and this SSS Color are interrelated, and to be perfectly honest I don't understand the maths. You can read about it the skin thread, maybe you will understand it and can explain it to me. Either way, this is from measured data (it is for caucasian skin tones, but seems to work just fine for everything I've throw it at, especially if you finagle that SSS Reflectance Tint).
The last thing you need to do is bring up the face diffuse texture in a graphics editor like PhotoShop or The Gimp. You want to use the Eye Dropper/Color Sampler tool (set the sample size to 3x3 Average or 5x5 Average). Then you are going to sample a color from the face texture. This advice goes way back to the early days of iRay, and though it didn't have a solid technical reason back then, I have always found it to be a useful technique. The original and ongoing advice has been to sample a color from the edge of the forehead. I've gone for this, but I have also tried from under the eyes, around the nose.... lots of places. Currently I use sample from the ear (because that's where you see the most obvious results of light scattering). Once you get this sample, you are going to plug that RGB value into your Transmitted Color.
Here's the reason for the Transmitted Measurement Distance setting and the color you've picked from the texture. Setting TMD to 1 tells the render engine to look at the Transmitted Color for its information. So the engine does its sss calculations based on a color you've picked from the texture, and works in a range that is more natural looking based on that. Again, the science and math are explained better by ArnoldC over in that other thread. (Arnold C explains Transmitted Color and Transmitted Measurement Distance)
Here's a look at the settings in Iray Skin Manager
Here's the Iray Skin Settings thread. As noted, its a little dusty... there hasn't been a lot of action in there in a while and there is a lot to take in. At some point, I'll go in there and distill the relevant posts and make links.
There's geat stuff in there for Specular, Nails, Eyes...
I'm going to toss out my specular settings, because I think they work nicely and are getting more near real.
Your going to use ALL the Specular options. Oh, and I should have stated I am using Metallic Roughness for all this,
Set the Glossy Layered Weight to .1 and the Glossy Color Effect to Scatter Only. Glossy Color should be pure White.
Glossy Roughness is .54, Glossy Reflectivity is .58
Set Dual Lobe Specular Weight to .15, DLS Refl to .60, DLS Ratio to .85
Lobe 1 Roughness should be .53, Lobe 2 Roughness should be .33
Feel free to tweak the Rougness values and the overall Weights to get the effect you want.
Now, set the Top Coat Weight to .15, set the TC Color to pure white. TC COlor Effect should be Scatter and Transmit and the Layering Mode should be Fresnel.
Set the TC Roughness to .49 and the TC IOR should be 1.5
You can plug the bump or normal map into the TC Bump channel, or if you have a noise maps you like for this, plug those in here.
Eyes are very important, but there are a lot of ways to tackle the eyes. I prefer Dimension Theory's Project EyeRay in most cases.
Nails are also going to need some tweaking, but that is going to depend on a number of factors and sometimes there's just nothing you can do about them.
WOW! Thank you for the great details, @evilded777!
This is the skin tone you'd expect from a John Travolta lookalike if the DAZ Orginals skin materials & iRay were acting like we expected. LOL, or at least it seems that way to me but it's been decades since Grease, Welcome Back Kotter, Urban Cowboy, and Saturday Night Fever.
Annotated the first post with links back to the Iray skin thread for folks who want to see the justification and the maths.
That's enough for now.
Here's my take on Lee 7 - Uses all of his maps in both renders, just with Genesis 8 style shader for the right-hand one:
I tried using Evilded777's settings on Lewis G8M by Emrys, a PC Club item. (I also gave him new SSS maps. He was using his diffuse in the Translucency channel before.) I did wind up having to pull way back on the gloss/specular settings; his maps are different enough that using those settings turned him into a really bright mirror. Default on the left, new version on the right. Turned out pretty well, on the whole.
Looks good... Funny, I've not had the sort of issue with Emry's specular maps... or maybe I have. I have a tendency to ditch specular maps at the first hint of something unexpected happening. Emrys does great textures, but those glowing red noses kill me.
Here's my contribution to the list. This post was really helpful for me so I hope I can add to it. I didn't have the same light setup so just used what I had consistently across all the faces. Click the image or the attachment for the full size: