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There are a lot of tells In 3d art which make some images more real than others. I think what matters is that you enjoy doing it and the result is what you hope to achieve.
Personally I like images which tell stories.
I think the posing of the torso is kind of stiff. Also, sense of flesh is one of those giveaways for me humans are squishy, when we lean against stuff we compress. CG characters often feel like they're floating in the ether, and don't quite connect with the environment (though this one does a better job than some)
Good point, the body in that render is about as realistic, and perhaps moreso, than a photoshopped centerfold in Playboy.
Also people are being a bit disingenious when they say they've not seen photorealistic renders in Daz. Photorealism does not just apply to renders of people, but objects as well, and I've seen several renders of autos that are about as realistic as you could want. Same for some room interiors and building exteriors I've seen.
I dunno. Let's be honest. Is 'commercial-realistic' and 'centerfold-realistic' and 'underwear-ad realistic' really the same as 'photorealistic'? :-)
Has anybody seen anything with more than one character that even came close to photorealistic? I certainly haven't. I HAVE however seen plenty that didn't scream 'rendered'.
This is a real Vogue cover. Could this be done in DS? Absolutely...
I'll throw my hat into the ring here
I'll admit longer hair is harder but Garibaldi is very effective for shirt hairstyles, and in Iray at least, since you don't need a bunch of textures, fits surprisingly well on gpu's (this scene fit easily on my 2gb gpu)
Mind you styling takes time. its not a 15 minute endeavor
There's still room for improvement, I am still fiddling with the hair shader for instance and I have some hair growing too low on the hairline
Stop fiddling with the hair shader IMO, that looks spot on.
That's really impressive - much better than anything I've produced. If I were to be a little picky I'd say that the roots emerging from the scalp looks a little off but maybe that's just to my eyes.There are a few angular bends but a little smoothing should soften that.
I spent about 2 days trying to produce a pony tail style and gave up in frustration. I admit my patience threshold is low by any standards, though.
Wow, that's the most realistic hair I've seen in DAZ (that I remember).
Gravity. Even for simple things. Dangling earrings have ruined more really good images. Hair not hanging down when the head is leaning. Those things (along with the lack of good draping cloth etc....) are really annoying in a picture. If you are going to take a week to put an image together, don't leave the darn earrings, hair and such, defying gravity. And on the oposite spectrum....if you are creating the look of wind, all those things need to be affected the same way. Same direction etc....
While I agree, it gets tricky if you're not using dynamics and/or the clothes/morphs won't cooperate (either because the apropriate morphs don't exist, or because the pose drives them to such extreems that they distort.
Just pointing out that in some cases it's a limit of the technology being used, rather than a lack of attention to detail.
I agree with all of that and it is technology we are waiting for. I don't think the gravity thing will be solved until we have clothing that not only fits to the figure but also drapes automatically. Even then, we need to be able to drag the cloth around so, for example, one dress strap can hang off-shoulder or a skirt can cover the knee while sitting or slide up the thigh. Shirts must open and zippers must unzip. I'm not asking for much, am I?
The technology is almost there but needs to be brought together. I read that there might be a GPU version of VWD dynamic cloth & hair soon - that would increase the draping speeds dramatically and the cloth can already be dragged around while the drape is happening.
That sort of thing is just now becoming available (it's actually been available for a while) and importantly, usable with improved consumer HW & SW, in game engines like Unity. I did watch an TV digital animation on PBS the other day and noticed none of these cloth or hair dynamics were used by those animators so I guess that means it's not available even for professional organizations either except a few of them doing IR&D.
Whether DAZ modernizes their animation and adds physics and such well I don't know. It's been done multiple times by multple businesses already so I'm guessing there are very concise university research whitepapers and technical specifications on how to do such things, if not MIT or other freely available SW that can be used.
Photo realistic the way most people use the term simple means that the image "looks" real regardless of whether the objects in the picture are known to exist or not. That was one of the things people said about Star Wars back in '77. It looked like a real, lived in world. Things had dirt and scratches etc. Basically all the things that help a good render look real. The subject doesn't really matter. If I see a render of a tree, a house or a car, and I can't tell they were made in a computer, then photorealism has been acheived, Simple as that.
If someone wanted to say they've never seen a render of a person that they couldn't tell was a render, I might give them that, but to make the blanket statement that photo realism is impossible to attain is completely false, even ifwe're restricting the tools to just Daz3d.
This to me is photoreal rendering o faces and I've not seen it in any actual production yet. Not sure why, maybe it still takes too long to render or there are other hurdles.
The impression I got was that there was little wrong with Tarkin himself. However, composited into a scene with actual humans who had been filmed with an actual camera, it was clear that he didn't quite match.
Totally agree about the technology for dynamics. :) The things I mentioned are things that can be done now. Make the earrings hang down. Adjust the hair so it matches the scene (wind/no wind) etc...Simple details that are often overlooked. :)
I don't think some of these things are overlooked so much as Daz users simply don't know how to correct them. Even the people who aren't necessarily thriving for complete photorealism would fix a lot of these problems, but either can't find specific tutorials, or documentation -- and yet you still have people claiming a Daz manual is unnecessary with one breath, when disparaging the level of artwork done by people who have to figure out a lot of the inner working of the software on their own.*
* not referring to you specifically DLD, but referencing previous conversations that relate to this particular aspect of the present conversation.
It sometimes seems to me that some photographers are, in turn, trying to achieve a more CG-ish look nowadays. I especially see this with not-very-realistic tonemaps applied to HDR images.
Actually, with the hair, sometimes there is a problem. I've just done a picture where there should be a strong wind (the flags on the ship are fully out - note the flags don't have morphs at all, and it would take a lot of work with d-formers to get them to drape correctly) with three differnt characters. One hair wound up distorting and looking insanely long when I adjusted it (admittedly, it was a refit from Genesis to Genesis 2) to have the right amount of wind, and the other two the morphs weren't strong enough to simulate the amount of wind correctly.
And I know I've run into a couple of sets of earrings (usually freebies, occasionally older products that were early in a given PA's career) where I couldn't adjust them individually, so I could have one hanging loose and the other one cutting into her head, or else have one leaning against her jaw and the other one at an angle it shouldn't be hanging at.
So even those of us who know much of what we're doing still run into issues with the limits of what the designer allowed for.
I've definitely run into times when I want to fix a problem, but realize I don't have the modeling chops to do it—and the problem can't be solved without some model-adjustment. Most hair props don't work upside down. Most fx props only work within a limited range. Even the best moving clothes run into poses where they don't work. I guess for most hobbiests, the key to photorealism is recognizing what you're able to reproduce well, and hide or disguise problem areas.
There are clearly severe limitations with conforming items. I agree about the hair that grows alarmingly when a wind morph is applied - seen that a lot. It happens with clothing too - the Hongu bikinis, for example, which have morphing straps which suddenly become four feet long when untied.
I've posted this observation in other threads but I have to mention it here too. The groin/inner thigh area of shorts and undies just stretches unnaturally when the leg is bent sideways. Real pants don't do that. Conforming shorts look like they are glued to the thigh and stretch badly when extended. I'm not even sure that dynamics would help that but I can, with a lot of tinkering, make a correcting morph for each leg by dragging the vertices back to where they should be. I'm surprised the PAs don't notice this because it is common to all short pants/panties/swimwear. I did get a helpful response from The3DWizard recently but his solution was to supply a different UV for the shorts (I can understand this though because his shorts are not really shorts, they are the long Jeanz with an opacity map to make the legs invisible).
The problem with earings not being able to be controlled individually can be solved by adding them twice, and hiding the left and right respectively on each. I have had to do this with shoes in the past when they are just lying around, rather than worn, as I could not move each shoe individually.
Usually when this problem occurs, the earrings are modeled as a single prop, rather than something that can be hidden left or right. As I said, usually freebies or some really old first products, when people didn't think it through. Earrings like that would never make it through QA today (at least, I don't think they would)
The geometry editor is one's friend. Admittedly, it's a PitA to have to stop what you are doing and go break up a prop to get two separate pieces out of it.