Its 2024, whats your stance on UBER vs PBR shader?
icemage1993
Posts: 68
in The Commons
So the UBER shader has:
+Mono and chromatic SSS
+Alpha maps
+Scatter and transmit setting
PBR shader has:
+Detail maps
+Chromatic only
+No alpha
Personally I prefer the good old UBER, since you can easily make your character skins darker or lighter or turn them into blue elf or something easily. Chromatic SSS kinda locked your skin shade in(in my experience at least, maybe its just me being bad)
Also Breast Utilities 2 gives you the option to use detail maps on UBER shader which is a great plus I think.
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Comments
For skins, I go with uber shaders only.
PBR doesn't work for me, for only dark skin tones look really good with PBR. Light skin tones look very much like dry plastic.
I feel like my PBR creations are better than the Uber ones and largely switched to PBR in the latter part of last year, but am not experienced enough to really be sure. I'm continuing to test and learn.
Most of the time I use PBRSkin shader which is much better than Iray Uber for human / creature skin surfaces, especially for making various subtle effects.
Josh Darling & Silas3D brought a PBR Skin Plus product in which Opacity and Emission were added. And you also can customize PBRSkin with other bricks / layers / shader properties in Shader Mixer.
Iam curious, is it just your preference or does the PBR shader skin really look better visually? Can I have some pictures, please?
I believe you, but I cannot reproduce this on my system at all.
I'm not sure what the differences are between UBER and PBR.
I switched over to Genesis 9 a few months ago. All I can see is that after using Genesis 8 for years, Genesis 9 is so much more realistic in my opinion. They look similar at first glance, and G8 is a wonderful generation, but there is definitely a more "human" look to the G9 figures when you start rendering and posing them. The expressions for G9 are also much more life-like.
I know G9 uses PBR, so I'm glad I finally came on board with G9.
Slight preference for UBER. I know my way around those settings by now. Also, PBR skin with its additional maps uses more VRAM but doesn't really give better results, IMO.
That being said, I don't hate PBR skin, I'll use it. I just prefere UBER.
I think Uber and PBR are equally capable of looking good (or bad
). They are both great tools for the tool box, but each have their streanths and weaknesses, and what lighting looks good for one may not be best for the other.
I find PBR to be a bit eaiser to work with, it is a little more forgiving than Uber, and that PBR has a larger "sweet spot" for lighting in the type of images I want to create. PBR also presents a little more predictable color shift when tone mapping in postwork. I also like the extra normal channel when doing custom work. These qualities make the PBR skin shader my go to, for characters.
Both of these images utilize the PBR skin shader.
I've been struggling to find reasons to like g9. Part of the reason why I lean towards g8 is because I just don't like the way g9 looks. Sounds kinda silly I know, just make it look the way you want to right? I've tried haha. Shaping g9 is even a bit of a pain to me and I can't seem to ever get it "just right" and as a bit of an OCD-like perfectionist, if I don't get it right I keep trying until I get frustrated and quit.
I know this is pbr vs uber, not g9 vs g8... but I can't help but feel like part of the reason why i dislike g9 is because of pbr. my system is more than capable of handling a bunch of g9 fully decked out at once and rendering so its not a resource issue, it really does just boil down to the way they look. uber just seemed more straight forward to me while i was learning ds (and still am learning). that said, ive encountered plenty of long standing issues with the uber shader that has certainly thrown me for a loop. everything from glowing mouths to about a week into ds mixing pbr and uber together because i didnt know any better resulting in really weird everything lol.
i havent used pbr to the extent i have uber, so its possible pbr has it's own little quirky things i'd have to get used to.. or i could just stay on g8 forever lol. you know this just made me think a good test for me might be to convert some of the g9 pbr based models i have to uber and see if i like them any better or not....hmm.
also i'm not sure about how much effect the shaders can have on the eyes, but i can't stand g9 eyes. i can't ever get them to look right, they always gave a dry, milky or "dead" eye look across like, every g9 model. the few times i had gotten them to look alright, they only ever looked "alright" and not great where some of the g8 eyes are just pools of hope to lose your soul inside. someone had advised to turn opacity off on the g9 eyes and that helped a great deal, but that trick still doesn't fully bring a vibrant eye to g9.
funnily anything i buy that is strictly for g9 i buy with the intention to immediately convert it for my horde of g8's lol.
ive been so engrossed in g8 that maybe now that i have slightly more experience in ds i should maybe revisit g9 and see if i can't find it easier to work with or some sort of redeeming qualities....
sorry for wall of rambling text, it's late.. i'm bored and rendering, lol. :)
You are not missing a good part of the reason. From my point of view and personal experience: Until very recently I have been avoiding everything that had to do with G9 exclusively. Genesis 8/8.1 is a great product/work from DAZ. G8 is really good. I already know that it is not perfect and that we have a natural tendency to want more...
In this scenario, to unseat your own product you have to offer a really good replacement that significantly improves the capabilities of what you are already capable of offering with a mature product such as Genesis 8. This has not happened when DAZ offered G9 for use. G9 came out with many flaws, especially in the bends in the joints. The Genesis 9 situation was like an elephant in the room.
The new integration with the PBR Skin hasn't helped much either. PBR-S and Uber are practically the same. But with the drawback that they have their own techniques to achieve the same result. This usually clashes with the natural resistance to changing something, especially when there is apparently no great advantage. So far my little experience in using PBR-S is that it is usually more comfortable for the textures of the characters' skins. I don't think someone who has a lot of control with Uber would have much need to switch to PBR-S in most of their situations. Especially when for what are not skin textures PBR-S doesn't really provide anything that Uber doesn't have (there will be some exceptions, I don't deny it).
I recently tried using G9 again and many of its initial problems have been corrected (or at least I haven't had that horrible experience at the beginning). This has made me begin the path of slow and progressive transition towards G9.
The situation I have seen is that G9 still lacks plugins that G8 already has (especially for me those from Zev0 ) and that make G8 look much better and more realistic than the base figure. I suppose that over time these plugins will appear and the problems that are discovered in Genesis 9 will be corrected...
Even so, Genesis 8 is already a great product and it will take G9 years to simply catch up to its level and much more to overthrow it (from my point of view). The only starting advantage that I have seen in G9 as a user is its improvement in expressions (as a modeler it is surely different).
Obviously all this is my personal point of view (neither good nor bad), other people's may surely vary radically.
My advice, in case it can help someone and wants it, is to gradually make that transition to Genesis 9. It is a great figure and although it does not represent a radical leap in results, it is worth it and it is a bet to long term. The same with the use of the PBR-S. G8 and Uber can coexist perfectly with G9 and PBR-S and increase the range of tools at our disposal... That is the path that I am taking myself.
(note: If you have read this far, I am very sorry for having gone on so long).
I absolutely love PBRSkin and G9 for much the same reason: It is so much easier to get the results I want.
When I want good-looking, realistic (or fantastic!) skin, PBRSkin is so much more predictable than a general shader than Uber. The deeper I get into building custom characters from scratch, the more I appreciate this – I can build the characters separately and trust that they will all come out looking like they are from the same world, even if their skins are wildly different.
It's also just simpler to work with: Being a specialised shader means there are simply fewer ways of doing it wrong, and it doesn't have to compromise between reaching multiple different goals.
When it comes to G9, I think the proportion dials alone are a good enough reason to leave G8 behind. I am not a sculptor; I have to work with whatever shapes are available. That doesn't mean I want to stick to the base shape! I want tall guys, short guys, musclebound guys, skinny guys, chubby guys, wide guys, narrow guys, all sorts of guys – and for anything diverging noticably from G8's "tall and fit" base shape, I would find myself fighting the base the whole way. With luck there would be a full sculpt approximating what I wanted (I got so much use out of Fifer as a base for building short, slim guys), but that did not happen anywhere near often enough.
With G9, it just effortlessly becomes the shape I want, while retaining realistic (or deliberately unrealistic) proportions. I've pulled several of my custom characters forward from G8 to G9, and they are finally looking like themselves instead of an "eh, close enough" likeness. Again I'm also finding it much more predictable, letting me build my characters separately instead of having to keep a second character in the scene for reference.
The differences between Uber/PBRSkin and G8/G9 seem trivial at a glance, but in practice I'm finding both to be massive improvements.
And, with that in mind, I would ask that you not add this to the list of threads that get derailed and closed because someone tried to turn it into yet another "this is why G9 is awful" thread.
Honestly, there's little enough difference between the end results of Uber and PBRskin that if you think PBRskin is the problem, you're probably mistaken.
The difference, I find, is how you get results from them (that is, what they're like to work with) rather than necessarily what results you can get.
Excluding fundamental points like base PBRskin not supporting opacity, anyway. (But that's something that was removed deliberately, as it is a shader specialised for skin, which needs volumetric effects to render properly; Given activating Cutout Opacity triggers a hardwired function within the render engine that disables volumetric rendering, it's not something you can actually activate on skin without breaking things. Sure, PBRSkinPlus does reinstate the opacity block, but it still has this hardwired limitation, so the actual functionality of adding it is limited).
@Matt_Castle - There's no hidden message in what I wrote, and I never said that. Nor was I aware that the forum was having such a problem, I don't visit "The Commons." If anyone took it that way I apologize.
Actually using a G9 right now for a scene because I did what I said I would in my previous post...