Getting Photorealistic Results, part 2?
AnnikasArt
Posts: 48
Thanks to everyone that responded last time, and especially those that recommended specific products. I tried a bunch of them and got better results. I think I've gotten better at getting photorealistic results but there's still a piece missing. What I notice in actual photos and some AI images is that they seem to have a richer colour palette/spectrum. So this is what I'd like to ask about this time.
Is this something I can improve with the right HDRI set? Is it an Environment or Tone Map setting? Is there something I can do in Photoshop? I tried increasing the colour saturation in PS but that didn't achieve the right result. If you have any ideas about what might help I'd love to hear them. Please be as specific as possible as I'm not very good at turning abstract ideas into Google searches. Thanks!
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
color management is, after lighting, the most important. DAZ has no Color Management, so you have to do it in Photoshop or somewhere else.
Actually you can alter some of the color options inside DS. Just look at the tonemapper tab and options
yes but thats not color management because you cannot change the tonemapper to aces or filmic. you can clamp the brightness for example and keep all details, where DAZ is just overbrightening and everything is too bright
Just an example but you can see how huge the difference is.
iray is supporting open color io since the last update, maybe DAZ can implement it. All big renderer use color management.
If you want more colour depth, it's probably best to render to 32-bit canvases. From there, you have all the colour manipulation options (LUTs, tone mapping) as you would with a RAW photo file (Lightroom, etc), as well as standard photo editing tools.
Search Youtube for "Daz Studio Canvas" and "32-bit Image Editing". These topics have been covered there extensively.
I assume you mean IRay, not DAZ?
The 3Delight shaders I use have loads of options for color management and tonemapping, both on a per surface basis and via light/environment settings. Reinhart- Unreal- and Aces- tonemapping by default, with a slider to mix the amount. Temperature, high/low luminance controls, color doge, color burn, saturation, scene exposure, scene specular exposure, camerabased exposure, to name a few;) You can even choose tonemapping method per surface i.e. use Aces on the environment and Unreal on skins if you prefer that;)
Not that this helps the OP in any way, sorry about that;)
I guess it depends on what you consider color managment. I try very hard NOT to use post on my renders and use the saturation option often to manage the color intensity of my renders.
no I mean iray, I asked the devs if they could Implement some color management and their answer was "no".
the great advantage of the iray implementation now is, that you can see the result while it renders already and not just after a 10h render and you have to change everything again to get the result you desire.
And it would be important to implement it in DAZ because you have to use different settings for lighting (way more light) its hard to anticipate the amount, export the 32bit images and then check that later in photoshop/other apps just to realize it was not enough light.
exposure etc is no color management, it is what DAZ is making out of teh 32bit internal image. ACES is working hard to get more real colors out of a render. all we get is a plane linear image or sRGB images out of DAZ, but nothing color corrected for an 8/10bit screen.
its a very difficult topic, but color correction with color management is the only way to get real lighting and its not possible if you just use DAZ.
I think it depends on what you`re trying to get looking photorealistic.
Inatimate objects are the easiest if the materials a good.
But as an adult artist, It`s organic things that are hard to make photorealistic, and require a combination of lighting, HD morphs, Character selection. poses, materials and post work (in my case basic photoshop).
3DL in my experience is great for inatimates, but for organics, it`s iray for me.
And it also depends on the eye of the viewer too, what they see as photorealistic.
I don`t claim to be able to make photorealistic images, but I have strived since day one to acheive it, and some have said that I can get close at times.
Just my 2 cents
The free Octane render plugin for DAZ already has numerous color management options, and one of the best parts is that you can alter the color management without restarting the render.
Octane render is so much faster than Iray, in fact if someone offered me a GPU upgrade on condition that I use iray, I'd say thanks but I'll keep what i have.
It might be helpful if you could post some examples to get answers that are a bit more targeted at exactly what you are looking for since the whole subject of photo realistic is rather.... ummm .... subjective. Maybe post one of your images that you would like to improve, and 2-3 examples of what you would like to see in your images (links to others images would be fine). I have some possible suggestions, but they could be way off base since I'm not really sure what look you desire.
photorealistic is actually quite objective. if you cannot tell if its real or CGI, then you achived it
I didn't know that octane for DAZ has CM but thats nice. But just a few people use octane. the only free other renderer would be cycles and that could be implemented without license $$.
i don't want the thread to devolve into yet another thread on what is photo realistic. I'll just say your point is correct. Unfortunately the problem is what one person sees as photo realistic another doesn't. I think the image posted by johnjohn808 could serve as an excellent example. For most people unfamiliar with 3D or photography, I'm sure that they would think it was a photo. However, for people familiar with 3D there are a few things that lead you to believe it isn't a photo. For example, the tires on the vehicle don't show any weight deformation, the tires don't sink into the sand, and there are no tire tracks in the sand.
I'm not trying to put down the work presented by johnjohn808, as I think it's an extremely well done image. On first glance it looked very much like a photo to me, but after careful examination I saw a few things that didn't fit with my concepts of reality. So the big question is .... is it photo realistic? I'm sure many (most?) people in the general population would say yes. I also think that many who work casually with 3D might say yes, but there are also a lot of people who would say no. Due to the fact that there will be differing responses to the question based on background, knowledge, and opinion, I think that photo realism is in fact very subjective (and why it's repeatedly discussed on these forums). (Subjective definition from OxfordLanguages: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.)
@johnjohn808 - Hopefully I didn't offend you with my comments. I think you did an outstanding job with the image!! Without careful inspection, I would think it was a photo. Fantastic work!
It helps that the background actually is a photo.
No offence taken .
I pointed out the tire thing as a joke in my original gallery post. https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/user/6395258678018048#gallery=newest&page=1&image=1248332
I made it as a simple test image for EcVh0's Iray Pale Skin Shader, so only the skin mattered at the time :)
Thanks for looking at it!
Yes, it does help!
And I learned a lot from making it as I dont usually use HDRIs as most of my scenes are set indoors, lit mainly with either distant lights or sun-sky only suplimented with ghostlights.
I might be behind the pack as I went 5 years using Daz before even attempting to use an HDRI LOL
The footprints in the sand were made by shoes or VANS not bare feet and toes. Given all the footprints how did the girls get to standing there. As already pointed out the VW Van tire, no tire track, no foot prints in sand at tire door, how did driver get out?
The VW Van shadow is hard but the girls shadow is diffused, looks odd. VW Van windows should be almost mirrors given the length of the shadow of the girls. I think the window transparency/reflects needs work. The van is pristine restored vintage VW Van, why does the bumper have chipping and the undercarriage but the rest of the van is showroom ready.
leaning girl, look at the hair. The whispy strand would not stay there and look odd. The yellow bikini top looks with flower patterns makes it look like she has 2" aureoles showing through. Girl leans forward but the string between the breasts is glued to the skin, there would be a slight lean forward breast pull gap.
Standing pointing girl. The left arm is posed oddly and that is not a natural pose of the hand. Stand up, no I mean it, stand up and put your self in her pose. Where is your arm naturally posed, the wrist, thumb pointing. Looks like the photographer caught her raising her hand or moving her arm, throw a bit of blur there or lower the arm and poser more naturally. When your intimate with someone or know them well, a sister perhaps, and you point there is a natural tendency to lean the head slightly to the side a few degrees, not always but if you lower the arm and pose the hand more naturally in a relaxed
Forum be eating my post.
sorry, not trying to be harsh, just pointing out little things that make the render look less natural and photographic.
No problem at all.
As I stated it originally was a test image for a skin shader, actually just one of 18 that I made using different environments, settings, and materials.
The actual image that I was testing the shader for had nothing to do with a beach or a van, and did not use an HDRI and the girls were`nt wearing anything.. LOL
You forgot the most important flaw, Iray's developer's reluctance to allow for an environmentally accurate shadow colour, according to them, all shadows are black, which undermines all attempts at realism with outdoor scenes, it's F*'d by design as real shadows take on the colour of their environment!
just if you use only HDRI for lighting, shadowcolors can of course change
Sorry, I should have been more specific, I meant the ground shadows with HDRIs, but when using a prop/plane in the scene they do.
With my current attempts at photorealism, I hit another plateau. Currently, I try to get more out of the Iray cameras, by emulating actual cameras. But thanks to a lack of documentation a lot of the settings don't make any sense to me. Especially the "Lense thickness". Currently, I'm using the measurements given by the manufacturers for any given lens, with nearly invisible results. So I wonder if there is a way to permanently pinpoint focus on an object in the scene for Iray cameras, b/c I would like to do some experiments with a Siemensstern on a plane. So far I only know about the reposition button, but as soon as I move the camera too far the focus will naturally shift.
The octane plug in is a PITA to use. Haven't used it in a while, so I don't know, if actually improved.
Octane itself is just great and I loved it, so I wish DAZ would have integrated Octane instead of IRAy back in the days. (Unless there is an overall great shader converting tool on export.)
The reality is just, we have to make the best out of IRAY.
The current version of the DAZ Octane plugin does a much better job of material conversion than the one from a couple of years back. Iray lights are auto converted to Octane emitters for example. That's not to say you can load any DAZ scene and press the Octane render button, some things like for example the Iray decal don't work in Octane, and strand hair is way too resource heavy. Generally I like to alter things to create the look I'm after, so modifying a few shaders is something I would do anyway, whatever renderer I was using.
Back when I used Iray it would take so long to start to see what a completed render was going to look like that I often couldn't motivate myself to fix poke through/ lighting problems and render again. Now i can see within 30 seconds after I start a render if there are any issues, so it's much less hassle to tweak things and render again.
Having written the above I would not recommend Octane to anyone who prefers to load content and then just hit the render button and assume the result will look good.
Okay, that's good to know.
I might give octane another chance some time.
I couldn't agree more. I'm debating incorporating Blender into my workflow strictly for the filmic colorspace. The results speak for themselves. I just wish there was a native option inside Iray/DS.
~ deleted ~
For anyone using Affinity Photo for postwork, there are macros available, that make all the necessary adjustments to obtain the results you would with Blender Filmic, as long as you are rendering to 32-bit canvases.
Blender Filmic Macros for Affinity Photo—get the Filmic look instantly! - YouTube
yes but you have to render with way higher light values and thats hard to anticipate,
you can use opencolor io in photoshop too.
Actually its a must that DAZ implements color management, the visual upgrade is just massive like day and night. all users would be way happier and it is open source.
Sure it takes some work to implement but thats peanutes compared to other stuff.
I'm pretty happy with spectral rendering and the different colour models for it. Sure it is not filmic but it works just fine.