Show Us Your Iray Renders. Part II
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Oh sure. I have the Gore Dom thing, and while I'm unlikely to use the shader (now that I'm doing Iray), it essentially has a bunch of goopy maps of varying kind I can convert to grayscale. Plus I have a bunch of other textures, droplet stuff from cgtextures, etc.
Thanks for the inspiration. ;)
Just converted M6 to Iray Optimized G2M MAT. Haven't touched the shaders
Environment Mode = Dome and Scene
Dome Mode = Finite Sphere
Environment Map = HDRI Pixar
Adjusted Tone Mapping
3 Photometric Lights
Am new to Daz Studio so don't know what I should be changing/adjusting in the "Surfaces Tab".
Have left everything in their default state.
All I know is Base Mixing = PBR Metallicity/Roughness
Can someone advice what needs to be done to create more "Photorealism" for the skin.
I know creating realistic renders is a complex subject and all kinds of good advice are scattered in the forum threads.
It can get a little confusing!
Thank You.
Edit:
Iray iteration = 1205
Elapsed Time = 1 hour, 11 minutes
That looks really good. What hair is that? I don't think I've seen it before.
Thanks, that's Real Short Hair at DAZ (I hear there is a product called something similar elsewhere)
That's a really beautiful render. It's interesting to see how well the Macro textures work in Iray. Thanks for your comment on my render...for the hair, as I recall I used the settings found here as a starting point: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/801146/ I used the default textures (black color) rather than swapping them out as Kamion99 does.
I did make some changes, mainly darkening the base, glossy, translucency, and top coat colors (I think I could perhaps have gone even darker). I think I had to reduce the glossiness too. I can dig up the exact settings I used later, when I'm back at my rendering computer.
Scottidog,
In my experience, each texture set is different and is going to require its own little twist for the best results. I'm a bit of a maverick, so my process is a bit different than others.
My first step is to ditch any specular or other control maps from the all the color and weight channels so that all I have left are diffuse (base), and bump/displacement/normal maps.
Then I turn off the translucence, glossy and top coat layers to get a look at what I am really dealing with for the base diffuse. I adjust the base channel to my liking, aiming for a natural but very dry skin. Then I work in the translucence, adjusting until I like the color and depth. Glossy comes next, looking for my major reflectance... broad specular lightness that really starts to give the skin its depth and finally I add in the Top Coat for that final bit of shine.
I sometimes have to dip into the volume settings and adjust the Transmitted color if I am not quite getting what I want.
I've tried most of the hacks, different control maps for specular and translucence... found them too unreliable, too heavy handed and not versatile enough.
This method has gotten me the best results, and I like it that I am not relying on hacks or special maps. If I had a good, complete set of translucence maps (for anyone reading, complete means you include the guy's junk) that were not too heavy-handed, I'd probably use them. Specular maps the jury is still out on, if I ever see one that does what it is supposed to do and not just kill the specular altogether I might be convinced to try it. I have had an increasing distaste for specular maps for quite a while.
Yeah, I really like the Iray Optimized female's translucence color map, but otherwise I set Trans to about .25, some appropriate shade of pink, and be done with it.
Tried something else today for a change
render time 25 min over 1 million poly
I hope you like ;)
evilded777, Thank You for your prospective.
I will give it a try and see what I get.
If The Wizard of Oz was remade as a science fiction movie it would look something like this. Spectacular!
Cheers,
Alex.
I don't buy allot of skins these days but after going through the product info and all the promos I was sold. The quality is beyond fabulous! Just hope there is a similar set for the males at some point!
That looks incredibly real. So Macro Skin is a good buy for Iray users? I held off because I wasn't sure.
The Iray base presets don't come with any maps. If you have a map in that channel it came from the texture set you converted. Just saying...
It would have been pretty nifty if they had come with translucence maps, but, alas, no they did not.
Oooooh. Interesting, I think I figured it out!
The default G2F skin has a color map for Subsurface color.
The default G2M skin does NOT, instead it has a weight map + color.
When converted to Iray, the system, for G2F, pipes the subsurface color to translucence color. For G2M, the subsurface color becomes a translucence grayscale for the translucence color.
This explains a lot.
Among other things, wtf is the G2M skin different?
Edit: Poking around, the ONLY skin I have that has a subsurface color map that isn't just a copy/paste of a diffuse map is the Bree skins.
Interesting.
Editx2: What irritates me about this is that the Bree skin is G2F 'base female' UV, which doesn't mesh with the bulk of skins I have (which are V5)
Different texture artists present different maps with their sets, or resort to hacks like putting the color texture in the different channels (I truly hate it when people put diffuse color maps in the bump channel and/or the specular channel).
Seems like we are having a discussion about standards somewhere.... like what maps should be included, how the right maps ought to be constructed, etc. Just saying "you must have a specular map in your product" does not mean that the customer is going to get a good specular map, or even an actual specular map. My favorite texture artists, who do fantastic work in most regards, do not produce particularly good specular maps.
Different texture artists present different maps with their sets, or resort to hacks like putting the color texture in the different channels (I truly hate it when people put diffuse color maps in the bump channel and/or the specular channel).
Seems like we are having a discussion about standards somewhere.... like what maps should be included, how the right maps ought to be constructed, etc. Just saying "you must have a specular map in your product" does not mean that the customer is going to get a good specular map, or even an actual specular map. My favorite texture artists, who do fantastic work in most regards, do not produce particularly good specular maps.Just to attempt to defuse this a bit.
I agree about the wrong maps in the bump, or displacement strength, lol.
In the past, with 3delight, some things didn't make much difference compared to the amount of work it takes to do them. Other things are kind of brain-fart moments, lol. The PA's are human as well.
(EDIT)
Case and point. Do I feel like making a complete set of color maps for ALL the bump maps I made to day, vs How much am I getting paied to make them.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/805183/
They have red and blue, and it is easy enough to change the colors to your liking in most image editors, or just not use them.
Welcome to TomorrowLand! Nice change of pace :-)
That looks great!
Did we need defusing? I don't think I said anything too inflamatory.
I'm not pointing fingers, I'm just saying. But if I am going to pay you to do something, I think I can expect you to do it right, not take shortcuts, and give me a product I can use. I just realized that one of my favorite artists produced a set where the torso is significantly more red than the limbs or face. I'm thinking about putting in a bug report and asking that it be fixed. Its a great set, but... its kinda hard to use under good lighting conditions because the color mismatch is horribly evident.
Anyway... I do appreciate the texture artists out there, some of my favorites: FWArt, Morris, JS Graphics, Raiya (sp?). I wish LRP was still around. I know he mostly did women (and I mostly don't) but he did some great guys and you could count on him for an exemplary product.
Thanks Alex,
I was thinking science fiction version of Disney Land year 3000 lol
If The Wizard of Oz was remade as a science fiction movie it would look something like this. Spectacular!
Cheers,
Alex.
Thanks a lot !!!
That looks great!
pearbear that image is amazing! Forgetting about the sweat effect for a minute, how much tweaking did you have to do to the Macro Skin textures in order to get them to come out so well in Iray? Do the textures come out well in Iray right off the bat, or do you really need to know your surfaces to get them looking good?
Anybody looking for light ? lol
Sorry Mec .... this is not like ..... this is love it! :-)
...wow.
Different texture artists present different maps with their sets, or resort to hacks like putting the color texture in the different channels (I truly hate it when people put diffuse color maps in the bump channel and/or the specular channel).
Seems like we are having a discussion about standards somewhere.... like what maps should be included, how the right maps ought to be constructed, etc. Just saying "you must have a specular map in your product" does not mean that the customer is going to get a good specular map, or even an actual specular map. My favorite texture artists, who do fantastic work in most regards, do not produce particularly good specular maps.
...in that case, couldn't you simply take the diffuse colour map into a 2D programme, convert it to greyscale and save it with a "bmp" or "spec" label?
...need a Robo Tinkerbell.
...nice.
...OK here's a finished test of the station scene setting the units to the Watts setting on the platform lights.
As I mentioned the lights now reflect in the wet surfaces of the platform and rails. However, the halo effect around the lights still seems to have too much noise in it.
Thanks for the kind words!
I have tweaked the shader settings a lot, so my settings are quite different from the default Iray G2F skin shader. The only change I made to the actual Macro Skin texture files themselves was adjusting the gamma of the color map in Photoshop, because the way I have my Iray shader set up requires it. In the future, I expect I won't have to this when they get the gamma controls working in the DAZ Surfaces Image Editor (as it is now, the Surfaces Editor's Image Editor gamma controls are broken and don't do anything).
The way I have my skin set up now is pretty different from the normal approach in DAZ. It's built off of what I learned about skin shaders by using Octane Render. A commonly used approach in Octane Render was to build the skin entirely from Specular materials, without any Diffuse. This allowed the light to subtly bleed through it in a much more skin-like way. The main Octane shader that popularized this method was called TonySculptor Skin R20. If you search for info on it, and look in the Octane message boards you'll see some great renders by the guy who developed it, and a lot of discussion and tips. The settings won't be the same as in DAZ of course, but the theory is what is important, and you can try to figure out how to apply it to a DAZ shader (that's what I'm trying to do!) In my attempt to emulate TonySculptor Skin R20 in DAZ, I don't even have any texture plugged into Base Color. My skin's (gamma corrected) color map is plugged into Translucency Color, and Translucency Weight is turned all the way up to 1.00. Then by adjusting the scattering settings, I get what feels to me more like a living, subtly translucent skin. It isn't perfect, and some of the things I want to do with it aren't possible now due to what may be bugs in the beta software. For instance, I want to plug a map into Transmitted Color in the Scattering section of the shader, but no matter what color of map I put in (even a pure black or white one), the entire skin turns the same crazy neon yellow. So for now, I just have a uniform color in Transmission Color and no map, and hopefully this will be fixed soon.
I'm pretty confident that when DAZ does the full release of 4.8 and starts putting content made for Iray into the marketplace, that they'll have a fantastic skin shader ready to hit the market, and we won't need to figure it out on our own. There are lots of methods of making photorealistic skin shaders in other software, and hopefully no reason why those techniques can't be applied to Iray by people who really know how to make custom shaders in DAZ. I'm hoping that updated official skin shaders from DAZ will come out that make my experiments look like the work of a caveman flailing around in the dark. But in the meantime, it's fun to experiment.
Here's a render with no post-work done of dry skin using my tweaked shader, with all the skin textures coming from Macro Skin. I just love the Macro Skin high res Normal maps, couldn't do without em now! I hope something like that comes along for G2M.
Beautiful render pear!
About the macroskin, I was wondering, is it like a shader that works with other characters skin textures or does it only work with the skin textures that come with it?