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To reduce the gloss on the legs you'll need to increase the 'roughness' value, assuming you are using the principled bsdf shader in blender. If you post a screenshot of your node setup for the leg material we might be able to help further.
Looking good so far though!
Thanks, I've recreated it.
Great!
One thing I forgot to mention; I found only very small amounts worked, looks seriously odd if it's increased much.
Yes, I discovered that while twisting dials and turning knobs; you must have played with it for a while to find those values that look nice :)
Yeh it took a while. I got it working well on a character, but when I swapped it over, they didn't work so good, so I basically started again; I've tried it on three different characters now and no issues so far.
I knew it should work, as I'd used a similar method for a grid pattern - the lines going both ways - so it was annoying me with the weird effects.
What I'm thinking of doing next is making the nails less perfect; not at the cut end, but the cuticle, nails aren't so perfect - it irritates me.
Like no depth on cloth does too. :)
A test render, but also a pretty good demonstration of how nice the diffeo's conversion is. I haven't touched the skin and dress materials in blender (tbf before exporting I did set the sss scale way high as I feel like something is off with that conversion)
obviously the hair was all set up in blender, as were the pearls (array modifier and curve. for the final version I might convert the curve to a mesh and cloth sim it +have the pearls follow via the surface follow modifier)
Eevee took 8 seconds. Cycles just under 3 minutes. 3 minutes is probably less time than it would take Iray to precompute the hair on my computer
also fun how similar they look. setting up things in eevee with instant feedback and knosing i'll just have to make minor adjustments for cycles is very fun. I mostly styled the hair with eevee running way more fun to style hair when it looks all pretty
I think both renders are somewhat better than I would have expected without adjustments after import into Blender. Would be nice to see the Iray version for comparison. I think that both images lack some specularity but perhaps that wasn't present in the original?
While I believe the cycles conversion is quite good, I'm still working on eevee. Would you elaborate please with the exact details this may help a lot. Unless you imported in cm that's obviuosly wrong for the sss effect as well among other things.
The iray version looks terrible because I specifically set everything up to export and didn't worry abut how it lookied in iray meaning - I copied the diffuse map to translcence and set the translucence to 1 (as these are the settings I knew I'd be using in blender, and are settngs that I also use in Iray, but because of Irays fiddly sss setup do not tend to work well with dark skin) and scaled the SSS up (as generally I find I have to scale the sss up in blender, so I just did it before hand)
Blender really handles sss better than iray on dark skin. I can get results I like in both, but its soooo much less fiddly. And in general too. No weirdness where stuff suddenly gets super dark. Just set the sss to 1 and adjust its scale (my prefered method is to set the sss scale values to 1, 0.35, 0.2 and thed multiply them all down in increments till it looks right)
and now some skin after adjusting but as a video because its real time!
side note: is there a way to embed non youtube mp4s? way smaller file size than gifs
@jcade Both in iray and cycles/eevee setting translucency to 1 will turn off the diffuse color so you can just drop it. As for sss, diffeomorphic doesn't use the scale that is baked in the radius for compatibility between the bsdf and principled nodes. But this gets the same effect.
I see in your blender settings you don't take into account the daz sss colors and always use a reddish tint. For conversion comparisons you can set this tint in daz too.
It is not clear to me why you say your daz scene is meesed up to better work with diffeo. The purpose of diffeo is to convert materials so if it's messed up in daz it should be messed up in blender too. Unless you're talking about the eevee conversion that's actually experimental. Could you please share a daz scene with V8 and your settings so I can make comparisons ?
As for youtube a link to the video will embed it.
I am aware, but since I dont use the sss maps its easier for me to just copy over the diffuse in Daz and theres no particular reason to empty remove the texture from the diffuse slot
Well everytime I export out I have to increase the sss scale, so this time I figured I'd get ahead of the curve and just increase it in DS. it worked pretty well IMO.
In this specific instace however most of the reason it looked terrible in DS is because it was dark skin. this is a problem specific to dark skin In iray so a v8 example wouldn't demonstrate anything useful. In Iray dark skin + translucency set to 1 yeilds black skin unless you fiddle with it for an hour and get lucky. Since its an Iray specific issue, and I wasn't rendering in Iray, I didn't worry about it.
using an sss shader rather than the iray style volume + translucence is one of the main reasons I'm exporting to blender. and this is a pretty perfect example. the sss shader is so much less fussy with dark skin its ridiculous.
non youtube mp4
In the up to date version of diffeo the sss scale is fixed in the radius to 0.02 then it is multiplied by the iray sss colors. So varying the scale in iray doesn't get any effect on the sss skin. While it does on the volumetric skin. May be your'e using an "old" version you may like to try the up to date development version.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/129/better-sss-experimental
I continued my Eevee testing, and I think I'm getting there. It's not one-to-one, but considering render times, Eevee is not really that much worse
Iray render time about 4 minutes:
Eevee render time about 4 seconds:
@Mendoman In eevee you may try to increase the ambient occlusion to get better shadows in the cavities, see the nose for example.
Impressive for a 4 second render time. Perfect for animations...
Yup, I already tried that and also set shadows to max ( 4k ) but that's not really enough. Luckily I found a nice idea of Eevee shadowcatcher ( https://b3d.interplanety.org/en/eevee-shadow-catcher/ ). I added that to Diffeomorphic shader and it looks like this now:
And result in Eevee looks like this:
Not perfect, but much better result in my opinion
With colorramp and that extra diffuse node I can change the "extra" shadows intensity. Final solution would probably had to be a bit more elegant, but for a quick test it's not bad, and certainly has potential....
Now if only I could get the hair shader look "sharper" and shinier, I'd be a happy puppy.
@Mendoman I do like the shadow catcher idea and how you apply it to occlusion, though I'm not sure I get it entirely. It's just odd that the standard occlusion doesn't work for you. It does for me. Below a quick G8F in eevee with occlusion = 1 then occlusion = 2. The difference is visible. Just plain export from diffeo.
edit. Or probably you mean that with the shadow catcher you have more control over it since you can ramp the shadow falloff.
Hmmm, I don't know why it didn't work for me, but I'm comparing against Iray render. Maybe that occulusion = 2 is still too subtle if you had a real Iray or Cycles image you compare against. Anyways, I played a little with the hair, and I think it's "sharper" and glossy highlights show a bit more, but...... hmmm, I don't know. Maybe a little better but probably still needs some tweaking
All and all, still I think Eevee is a really nice render engine. If normal portrait render times are 4 minutes vs 4 seconds, and if it's indoors environment, the difference is probably even bigger. If I'd start our project now, I think I would definitely go with Eevee. Animations and stuff are lightning fast compared to Iray/Cycles where even with very well optimized scene and shaders full HD renders take 2+ minutes per frame
A, relatively, quick render in Studio compared to a default Cycles render after converting via Diffeomorphic. Studio render on Mac (yellow drone, supposed to be orange). Blender render in Linux (blue drone).
@Mendoman Your eevee renders are excellent of course, mine are minor suggestions. Thank you for pointing out the shadow catcher that's very interesting.
Work in progress. Skin is a 3 layer node setup. Hair was Leyton hair (I think) imported by Diffeomorphic, with lots of extra grooming. I'm so glad that is working again, especially since Blender has working hair physics in 2.83. I even got Diffeo to convert eyebrows. Eyes were Project EYEray by dimensiontheory. Diffeo was able to import the UV's since they are different.
Looks good Krampus
Salura 8. Aiko 3 (yes Aiko 3, not Aiko 7 for G3) hair converted with Diffeo and some 3DU clothes.
Nice. Very nice.
It is an animation and the Cycles settings need to be adjusted to remove more of the fireflies and grain, but here's a first pass. The description as links to all the things used. Big shoutout to Dreamlight for creating some Iray materials for one of Stonemason's sets:
Sorry I missed these. It should make the hair look corerect. Bascially since the hair is done with an opacity/alpha map, you need more transparency bounces so that all of the hair will be rendered, rather than it cutting off after a certain point. I typically set mine for Daz hair to between 96 and 192. It slows down the rendering of the hair a ton, but it looks a lot better.
Personally, I convert to strand based.
Here's an old one (from 2016!).
This was back in the before-times when things had to be done more manually; I posed the character in DAZ Studio then exported her and each individual plant as an OBJ, which I then imported in Blender, where I manually set up all the textures and scattered the grass props with particles. The ground was a quickly sculpted plane with a procedural texture and some equally quickly modeled rocks scattered via another particle system and there are some more particles floating in the air. This was a Cycles render (no Eevee at the time
).
Uses the following DAZ assets:
nice one
I've been working on a node system that allows for some texture free backgrounds, using gradients, repetative shapes and vertical & horizontal stripes, not shown here but the position of the stripes can be changes as can their size.