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Making characters look natural with a single sun light (not like ghosts)

jamesramirez6734jamesramirez6734 Posts: 84
edited September 2021 in Blender Discussion

In Daz Studio with the 'Sun/Sky only' Iray settings, it's extremely easy to very quickly get a natural looking render of a figure.

In Blender with Cycles and a sun light, whatever I do the render always seems to have a sepia-like filter over it, as if the characters are appearing as ghosts.

I can't seem to achieve a warm naturally looking skin - if I reduce the strength of the sun it makes the model too dark. The skin always has that slightly angelic whiteness as if the image has been drained of colour by a filter.

I know I can't match Iray exactly, but does anyone have any ideas for achieving a more natural 'warmer' look which is closer to Daz? I'm using Diffeomorphic which is great btw.

Post edited by jamesramirez6734 on

Comments

  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,558

    I noticed that your sun is just a white light, try the Starlight & Atmospheric plugin, or the Sky Shader included with Blender.

    You didn't show your node setup for the skin, but it looks like you don't have any SSS, or it is too low.

    And I don't know if this is still true with Diffeo, but two things:

    1) You used to have to make sure you were in Render View with Cycles selected instead of EEVEE when you did the import, in order for the materials conversion to work best.

    2) There were two ways to convert materials: via the Principle BSDF, or via Diffeo's node setup. I can't remember how to select one or the other, but for maximum fidelity you want to use Diffeo's node setup, not the Principled BSDF.

     

  • brainmuffinbrainmuffin Posts: 1,051

    TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

    I noticed that your sun is just a white light, try the Starlight & Atmospheric plugin, or the Sky Shader included with Blender.

    You didn't show your node setup for the skin, but it looks like you don't have any SSS, or it is too low.

    And I don't know if this is still true with Diffeo, but two things:

    1) You used to have to make sure you were in Render View with Cycles selected instead of EEVEE when you did the import, in order for the materials conversion to work best.

    Yeah, I don't know if it is still necessary to switch to Cycles rendering before importing, but I still do. I can't seem to make Blender understand I want Cycles by default.

  • PadonePadone Posts: 2,946
    edited September 2021

    As for diffeo it is not necessary to switch to cycles or eevee before importing. The material conversion will be determined by the material options in the global settings. As Donald reports, bsdf is better than principled as iray conversion, because the principled shader is limited compared to iray. But the bsdf conversion will not work fine with eevee, because eevee too is limited compared to iray. So if you want to use eevee then the principled conversion is better.

    • bsdf: faithful iray conversion, intended to work fine with cycles
    • principled: approximated iray conversion, intended to work fine both with cycles and eevee

    As for the gray skin it may also depend on the dual lobe fresnel effect, that is not exactly the same in blender. So you may try to decrease the fresnel in blender to get a more natural skin look.

    https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/656/skin-difference-between-blender-and-daz

     

    edit. Personally I suspect that the fresnel in iray is white, that is, it doesn't reflect the environment. But that wouldn't be physically accurate. Or it may be a bug in the daz uber shader. Didn't have time to do deep tests so this is just a wild guess.

    Post edited by Padone on
  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,558

    Padone said:

    As for diffeo it is not necessary to switch to cycles or eevee before importing. The material conversion will be determined by the material options in the global settings.

    Hi @Padone Can you please clarify this? I'm unclear which options this is referring to, and where they are.

  • PadonePadone Posts: 2,946
    edited September 2021

    It's in the global settings, you can choose the material method independently for solid, sss, refraction and hair.

    materials.jpg
    453 x 163 - 21K
    Post edited by Padone on
  • TheMysteryIsThePointTheMysteryIsThePoint Posts: 2,558

    @Padone Oh, you ment Diffeo's global settings, not Blender's. Found it, thank you.

  • jamesramirez6734jamesramirez6734 Posts: 84

    Thanks all. Looks like I have no SSS method in my global settings Materials section (Method and Refactive are there) - is there something which needs to be configured to get it to appear?

  • PadonePadone Posts: 2,946

    you probably need to update

  • jamesramirez6734jamesramirez6734 Posts: 84

    Ah good spot!

    New update functionalities look great. Not sure 1.6 is quite ready for release though as I get several white specs on the model's face which weren't present with 1.5

  • PadonePadone Posts: 2,946

    you can report bugs at bitbucket

    https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues

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