what's the tl;dr on N.G.S. Anagenessis 2 - Revolution?
in The Commons
It's thread is very long .. what's the short take on the product? I'm looking mostly at portraits. I purchased the original product but never had great luck with it.

Comments
It works wonderfully for conveying the 'feel' of skin but the color tones may need to be tweaked since it attempts to faithfully represent whatever's in the diffuse map and if that's been heavily tweaked by other parts of the shader, the figure may come out looking a different color than you expected.
I love it. Great product, easy to use, and I like the results.
Greetings,
I've had very good luck with it. It does make character materials look amazingly better. My main concern is that I don't know what I'm giving up for that; it seems all-too-odd that the character creators were CREATING great skins (because it uses their materials) but somehow weren't making them look their best. There's always a tradeoff, and right now I haven't been able to find what that tradeoff is, so it makes me nervous. I have been using it with high quality characters in the first place, but I've heard great things about what it does even for older V4 characters.
Dark/dusty characters need a little more tweaking with it than lighter, but light skinned characters can end up a little too green-ish sometimes. There's a fix for that. It's also a little fiddly; don't have any surfaces selected when you do it, or things go a smidge haywire.
There's a manual, but it's in QA right now, and it'll be released in a few days.
And now you know what I know. :)
-- Morgan
Yes, it works very nice and I am using it a lot for converting Victoria 4 and Michael 4 characters materials to iray.
Then using Cayman Studios UVs for Genesis 3, I can apply those materials to Genesis 3 female and Genesis 3 male.
I've had mixed results with it and I'm not 100% sure I like the product. That said, when it works, it looks really good.
So hey.
The price tag is pretty hefty so I'm definitely on the fence about it. There is no way I could afford it at this price but hope that it will eventually get a really deep discount sale - that is if I decide to try and shoot for it. What about the product don't you like?
Sometimes the color is wildly ... weird, too dark, etc. The top coat bump should probably be tiled twice as much for limbs/torso as face, which it isn't (mind you, this is trivial to change, but weird that it doesn't start that way).
That said, there's always a learning curve, and I've already found some simple tweaks to get much better (for me) results.
That is my feeling too, I have already bought a couple of iRay skin shaders, and I am not sure I am ready to drop that amount for another one. I am however looking at the results others are getting, and I may pick up at some point in the future.
This.
Laurie
The cost has me on the fence about it as well. And some of the conversions look red and blotchy, but some look fantastic. From my reading in the vendor thread, it seems to also fly in the face of some of the conventions such as glossy colour on skin should always be white. So is it just taking an artistic approach to getting nicer skin but the technical is iffy?
I've purchased other converters as well, so I'm hesitant to buy this one (especially with the current exchange rate) unless it really is that indispensible. I definitely want to have the nicest skin in Iray I can get, but my hobbyist budget and hubby's tolerance for spending on it only goes so far.
I've gotten mixed results. Lucian looks great right off the bat...only needs a little more glossy. Gwenbleiz looks super pale, Scott 6 looks super red....I haven't been able to get consistent results. I'm not going to rule out operator error tho ;).
Laurie