Un-Biased Reneder Thread - Post Your Renders!! (Reality/Lux, Luxus/Lux, Octane Render, and others?)

PhilW

Siciliano - I have to say that looks really good, very natural looking!

Siciliano1969

Thanks PhilW - what I love about the shader is it is super simple!  I could never figure out the TonySculptor skin...for me it was way too complicated.  I'm trying to work with the shader Rashad posted and Sorel is using.  I found if you mess with the blue tint of the scattering material you can get that red in the SSS. 

I forgot about this post until I saw Sorel's submission in the gallery and that lead me here.    Here is a screenshot of my material...hopefully you guys can help me improve it.  It is not without issues....fingernails and toenails need a gloss added to the mix since the shader does not like overlapping geometry of the nails.  You must export the .obj with a subD level of 2 or else you get a waffle grid on the skin. 

Siciliano1969

Sorel said:

So I was doing some more experiemtns with skin, I used the tonysculptor R15 skin and made some adjustments. I changed the diffuse node to a glossy node, changed the absorbtion color on one of the specular node so I could get more a red for the sss. I feel like the tony sculptor one makes the skin look closer to it's actual texture map color. I do like both though, what do y'all think? Rashad's version on the left, and edited tonysculptor on the right.

Hey Sorel,

​I have to go with the image in the left for sure.  Excellent job working with Rashad's shader.

Siciliano1969

Rashad Carter said:

Sorel,

One thing is certain, there are a million ways to skin a cat. It's good to play around with the parameters and to find the settings that most appeal to you. I'd say both of these look quite good. I actually do prefer the one on the left for a couple of subtle reasons.

We are not only modeling the skin surface, but the behavior of the flesh beneath it to some degree. The reason for the blue'greenishness of my formula was to draw a greater difference between areas of direct and indirect light. For example, in areas where skin protrudes, such as the ripples of the abdomen muscles or the fingertipe, the SSS becomes redder. But in areas that curve away from the light, the color shifts toward blue/green. The total result means we can literally see the parts lit by strong light "warming up."

I'd say, as a darker skinned person, that it is surprising just how green/blue many paler skinned individuals can be. While everyone strives for the perfect tan, unless they have exactly that, in areas where the skin is the thinnest some amount of blue and green will show forth.

And that brings me to the skin thickness issue. Because of the blue/green to red interplay with light in my forumla, it gives the impression of a thin skin. The image on the right however, has a more uniform redness all over. One of the side effects is that it makes the skin overall seem somewhat thicker, less of the blue blood and blue muscle tissue is visible through the skin.

Along the bridge of the nose is one place where there is a marked difference, The red tinted SSS along the nose on the left image is much thinner than on the image to the right, though its probably too strong on both images. Anyhow. Assuming there is a nostril bone there, the amount of light that should make it to the other side would be lessthan what I am seeing in the right hand image. So I suspect the left hand image is more plausible in that minor regard.

Generally, the one on the left preserves that "raw chicken" appearance, which while not necesarily the most attractive, is quite common and naturalistic amoung paler skinned people. The one on the right looks a bit more like chicken that's been cooked to some degree, which may be more or less attractive depending on the reference. Both solutions are plausible in my view.

I'd say a couple of things

1. The formula I proposed has a good degree of flexibility. You can preserve much more of the original color of the texture simply by increasing the Gamma of the Diffuse within the Glossy Node up from the value 1.4 to a value closer to 2.2. Skin should remain thin looking.

2. Only but so much can be learned about human skin rendering as a subject working with only a narrow range of skin tones. To get to the next level try loading in a much darker skinned character, see how the reds and greens of my and tonysculptor'd recipes interplay beneath the surface, and this will help you get a clearer picture of how choices about these issues affect lighter skin tones as well. If I could credit my progress to any aspect of the study it is that I was searching for universal solutions from the onset, using lots of different skin texture maps. It wasnt enough to make one of them look good, it needed to make all of them look better than they would have otherwise or it wasnt an intrinsic enough solution. Things that made dark skin look better ended up making light skin look better as well, leading me to a more universal solution. Do you have any darker skinned texture maps to play with? Try loaiding up a person from India, notice how much more red you will want compared to a dark skinner person from Africa, where more green will be appropriate. Remember that for darker skin tones the only alteration to the settings you need to make is to increase the Transmission Power up from value 1 to setting sometimes as high as 8. This is because the darker texture images used as Transmission occlude more incoming light so more Transmision Power is needed to compensate. But luckily it works very well with no surprises. If you need a darker skin texture to play with I can send you one I've been developing for M5. It's the one I used for the darker guy in my upload series on the previous page. It isnt a finsihed yet by a long shot, but for study it would do just fine. Let me know.

Fun fun.

Hey Rashad,

Thank you so much for this it really helps after years of messing with shaders in Octane!

 

Rashad Carter

Siciliano1969 said:

Thanks PhilW - what I love about the shader is it is super simple!  I could never figure out the TonySculptor skin...for me it was way too complicated.  I'm trying to work with the shader Rashad posted and Sorel is using.  I found if you mess with the blue tint of the scattering material you can get that red in the SSS. 

I forgot about this post until I saw Sorel's submission in the gallery and that lead me here.    Here is a screenshot of my material...hopefully you guys can help me improve it.  It is not without issues....fingernails and toenails need a gloss added to the mix since the shader does not like overlapping geometry of the nails.  You must export the .obj with a subD level of 2 or else you get a waffle grid on the skin. 

Thanks for your kind words regarding my shader work. In the case of your shader, I love this shader you've developed. There are a few things I really like about it, including the slight Dispersion coefficient creating a chromatic noise in the SSS instead of a bland uniform red. The waffle effect to my mind is a corruption that occurs where normals smoothing momentarily becomes disabled. I too found this was occurring when I built the original skin as a Specular only. It turns out that adding a Glossy or Diffuse node via Mix Material, even if the mix is 1.0 in the direction favoring the specular, it still fixes the smoothing issue without ruining the good aspects of the shader. This should be welcome news as all that SubD can get really expensive. But yeah, you're definitely onto something grand.

Siciliano1969

Wow, thanks a bunch Rashad!  I will add in the mix like you said and that should do the trick.  I can't wait to see how this progresses!  Thanks for the kind words and I will post something a bit later.  Oh, my workflow working in Octane Standalone is export the .obj out of DAZ at the DAZ scale (cm).  I set the scale in Octane to cm (meters is native for octane).  What scale do you use?

Thanks again for the kind words!

Rashad Carter

I use the default scaling for Carrara when importing Daz items which should be more or less to scale.One of the reasons for the 1000 value Distance setting is to make the shader somewhat scale proofed. In most situations it works pretty much the same way.

Siciliano1969

Rashad Carter said:

I use the default scaling for Carrara when importing Daz items which should be more or less to scale.One of the reasons for the 1000 value Distance setting is to make the shader somewhat scale proofed. In most situations it works pretty much the same way.

Ah that make sense....funny my scale setting is 2900!  Maybe something is up with my scale but, 2900 seems to be that balance for me between too much translucency and not enough.  

 

Siciliano1969

You know Rashad, with these ideas on specular and mix etc I find myself going back to old scenes and its amazing how much better they look....I think we are on the right track here.  My next step is to start working with darker skintones. 

Siciliano1969

Another issue with the shader is the overlapping fingernail and toenail geometry of Vicky 4 and Genesis 3 - not a problem with Genesis 2.  You can see the toenails under the skin cause shadows which means extra modeling to bend those polygons down and away from the skin of the toe. 

Sorel

So I just spent the last few days (8+ hours each day) playing with the different Tonysculptor skins and think I finally got what I liked. I have an image rendering right now, but while I wait to show that, I was wondering for characters that have shiny makeups, how do we keep the fleshyness of the skin while maintaining the metalic or matte sheen of the makeups?

Jonstark

Ok it's been a few days, so I'm a little behind, but I have loaded up an 'interior' Octane-lit scene by meshlights just to get an idea of how the skin shaders might look in such a scenario, and whether I'd have to crank the lighting intensities up to such levels that it might 'blow out' the textures of other things in the room (I'm lazy and really don't want to have to adjust every single shader in the scene :)  )

First here's a render of the room in question, a 3dc prop set from rendo, all textures are at the default as it loads in from Carrara, except I made the light textures into octane emitters (also worth mentioning the room is completely enclosed as well).  I loaded up one of my old M4 characters and put him sort of in the center of the room, this is by no means any kind of photo-studio light setup, instead it's meant to be fairly random, with lots of light sources coming from all kinds of directions.  Since for the skin shader results I wanted to do close ups, this render is simply to show the room in a broader perspective to show what it looks like and where the different lights and shadows are coming from.

 

Jonstark

 

Next, I did a close up shot of the M4, again not touching a thing on the shaders, this is just the default conversion of my Carrara shaders into Octane by the Octane for Carrara plugin.  It's actually useable as is if I'm not finicky.  (Sidenote to say that sighman, the creator of Octane4Carrara has made a really excellent converter, even more impressive is what it does with Carrara dynamic hair, which looks fantastic in Octane :)

 

Jonstark

 

Next, I switched to the Octane shader that I've been using for skin in Octane up til now, which isn't really mine but one on the skin shaders I saw was included in the Octane shaders that are part of Octane4Carrara, essentially it's a combo of Diffuse/Glossy.  Not really that much different, a little better in some ways.

 

Jonstark

 

Next, I tried Rashad's method of skin shaders.  As it first began to render I thought it would be too dark and I would have to crank the lights up, but as I let it render I thought it lightened up enough to be useable as is without forcing me to change every single shader in the clothing, walls, etc to match.  Really is very lovely skin, this is top notch, superior work Rashad.  Render times though are longer, not just does every render pass take longer, but I went all the way to 3000 passes to get this, with the prior shaders I really could have stopped somewhere around 1000 passes.

 

Jonstark

 

Next I tried the 'specular only' approach Siciliano was kind enough to post.  This also gives quite lovely and real looking skin, and you guys have really sold me on the idea that specular is the most important ingredient in realistic 'touchable-looking' skin.  But there's no doubt though that taking this approach will lead to a longer render time.  In this case, at 3000 passes, there still are noticeable fireflies, so I went to 10,000 passes (next image down) and it's cleaned up a lot more, but still could use more passes.

 

My little laptop only has a bitty 2Gb Nvidia card (740M) which is not exactly biggest/fastest and so in my personal circumstance I would have to be careful about this approach due to the longer render times required.  I am thinking of upgrading my rig next year to something which has much more firepower as far as gpu rendering for this very reason though.

PhilW

You guys have been thoroughly distracting me into playing with skin formulas again, this one is largely a specular material with just a little glossy at the falloff edges - I'm not even sure it is enough to really make a difference.  I am liking the results though.

Siciliano1969

Jonstark said:

 

Next I tried the 'specular only' approach Siciliano was kind enough to post.  This also gives quite lovely and real looking skin, and you guys have really sold me on the idea that specular is the most important ingredient in realistic 'touchable-looking' skin.  But there's no doubt though that taking this approach will lead to a longer render time.  In this case, at 3000 passes, there still are noticeable fireflies, so I went to 10,000 passes (next image down) and it's cleaned up a lot more, but still could use more passes.

 

My little laptop only has a bitty 2Gb Nvidia card (740M) which is not exactly biggest/fastest and so in my personal circumstance I would have to be careful about this approach due to the longer render times required.  I am thinking of upgrading my rig next year to something which has much more firepower as far as gpu rendering for this very reason though.

Great job Jonstark!!

 

Siciliano1969

PhilW said:

You guys have been thoroughly distracting me into playing with skin formulas again, this one is largely a specular material with just a little glossy at the falloff edges - I'm not even sure it is enough to really make a difference.  I am liking the results though.

Fantastic PhilW!  Phil is a great name as well since its my name!

 

Siciliano1969

Here is a 1 area light deal using Vincenzia textures as I test and try to break my skin shader......  I wanted to see a huge contrast of shadow and light

PhilW

Siciliano - you are getting terrific results, amongst the most realistic I can remember seeing!  I'm going to have to revisit your posts to see where we differ...

Jonstark

Siciliano1969 said:

Here is a 1 area light deal using Vincenzia textures as I test and try to break my skin shader......  I wanted to see a huge contrast of shadow and light

Another very very strikingly realistic render!  Did you put dynamic hair on the eyebrows?  The eyebrow on the left especially seems to have its own specular effect on the individual hairs which seems clearly deliniated from the rest of the face skin, making me think that at the very least you've separated the textures of the face and they eyebrows.  Great work!

By the way, the teeth also look great in this one (and the previous you posted).  I think you mentioned you were using some variant of a marble shader?

Siciliano1969

Jonstark said:

Siciliano1969 said:

Here is a 1 area light deal using Vincenzia textures as I test and try to break my skin shader......  I wanted to see a huge contrast of shadow and light

Another very very strikingly realistic render!  Did you put dynamic hair on the eyebrows?  The eyebrow on the left especially seems to have its own specular effect on the individual hairs which seems clearly deliniated from the rest of the face skin, making me think that at the very least you've separated the textures of the face and they eyebrows.  Great work!

By the way, the teeth also look great in this one (and the previous you posted).  I think you mentioned you were using some variant of a marble shader?

Thanks Jonstark,  Nope just using the same shader but added a bit of gloss into the mix just like Rashad Carter indicated in his skin shader (mix ratio of 980 favoring the specular).  I added the diffuse map as a bump map and inverted it and low and behold it does a great job....got that glint of eyebrow on her right side.  I export out of DAZ using the DAZ scale (100% scale value) and set the scale in Octane to centimeters to get the proper effect.  The teeth I use the same shader but the scattering color is light grey and scale of the SSS is 2000.

Rashad Carter

Sorel said:

So I just spent the last few days (8+ hours each day) playing with the different Tonysculptor skins and think I finally got what I liked. I have an image rendering right now, but while I wait to show that, I was wondering for characters that have shiny makeups, how do we keep the fleshyness of the skin while maintaining the metalic or matte sheen of the makeups?

The answer to this question depends entirely on how you've built up the final recipe. I have no idea which Tonysculptor you're using. If I'm not mistaken there are a few of this that are ridiculously complex, with several mix materials, backscattering nodes...a whole lot of stuff as if trying to model ech and every layer of the skin. Seems like overkill to me so I'm more inclined toward simpler solutions. That said, even if skin has make-up on it, it would need to be extremely thick and pasty make-up to block the incoming light that we need for the SSS. So I suppose the areas where the metallic effect occurs is only on the surface and will need something from the Specular or the Reflection that isolates those areas and makes them pop more than the rest of the skin. But to do this without washing out the colors of the paint with the white specular is the trick. So the solution probably lies here. It is well known that the specular from human skin is white...but the specular from your average mineral based foundation or powder make-up has a color tinted specular due to the metallic aspects of the make-up. Think of make-up as a collection of tiny bits of crystals and metal shards, catching and reflecting light in a highly specular manner and tintint the color of the reflections as it does so.

Rashad Carter

PhilW,

I've always liked this character. In this case and in some others now that I think of it, her color seems very much toward the orange ranges. I'm not sure of this is due to lights or some aspect of the skin texture itself. I think that less saturation and orangenesswould increase the believability overall. Because the SSS is going to be red tintedm if the skin itself is already too red-orange shifted then the effect of the SSS will fail to be noticeable. I'd also say that from this head on lighting angle, it is difficult to appreciate the SSS behavior under the surface of the skin because the magic rally reveals itself where light and shadow are both present in the shot.

Rashad Carter

Jonstark,

Thanks for taking the time to study these various approaches. As you can see once we get going on the right track (specular model) there is hardly a single solution that one needs to be stuck with. There is some degree of flexibility that retains the benefits without losing much of anything. My shader set-up renders faster than Siciliano's so far, but his set-up is extremely scaling dependent. I can see a lot of light shining through his hears, more than I'd expect. You might either need to add some absorption or adjust the scaling of the modle and scene to better match the original design. But I'll let Siciliano comment on that as he would likely know how to break or fix his own shader set-up. But no matter how you slice it, we've more mure realism today than we had last week and none of us will ever look back. Fun fun!

PhilW

Rashad - I had the same thoughts myself, I have added a color correction to the transmission channel (which I noticed Siciliano also has) which allows me to modify the hue and saturation to correct for this. This is a more recent test, also showing specular meterials on the teeth, tongue and mouth.

PhilW

If our characters get any more realsitic, they will be demanding voting rights!

Rashad Carter

Siciliano,

I've been looking for any aspects of your shader set-up that might be improved and I don't really think I see anything more that can be done in this context. For my own tastes, I think you could afford to use at least a little bit of Absoprtion. While Scattering is great, and you can  use it to create that redness effect, Absoprtion can also aid in that. Absorption works the opposite of scattering, so that you absorb blue which allows red to transmit. Combine that with the Scattering effects (scatter blue allowing red to remain on path), and now you've got more control. Absorption added in will also make the texture more flexible, and not so scaling dependent.

As I said before, I think a few things I've been saying about skin will become more apparent when you start working with different skin tones under different lighting conditions.

Rashad Carter

Overall guys and gals I'd say we're getting there. I still think many of us are playing it safe here...still far too married to particular textures files, and that is going to slow our growth. Sorel, in this case I'd say you really need to test with something other than M6 default testure. This is because every skin texture has its intrinsic strengths and weaknesses. For example, some textures already have lots of red baked into them (m6 base textue). So if you are studying skin using only that one textue you will get a false impression of how much red should be coming from the SSS. Some textures are overall higher in saturation than others. Working only with a highly saturated texture can cause you to under-estimate how much color should be coming from or absorbed by the SSS. Which is why I cannot stress enough that we each need to take a very broad approach to skin rendering in a gerenal sense. You might be working hard at finding a solution to skin rendering only to end up with something that only works for a narrow range of skin tones in a narrow range of lighting conditions. We should all have reason to render people of varying races from time to time, and no better time than now to explore those universal truths. You will be surprised.

Come on guys, lets step outside our comfort zone. Try taking a texture you've barely ever used and make it look as real as the one you've been using every day for the last three years. Let's shake it up a bit. Bring on the skin tone ranges.