What do I have to offer/best use of my skills?
The Diigitals
Posts: 380
Hey!
I'm desperate to get creating something that will benefit the community, but what would be the best use of my skills? And, Do I have to do everything myself or can I team up with a PA?
A little about me;
I'm a fashion photographer with over 10 years experience and have also enjoyed illustrating my entire life. I've been lucky enough to work on campaigns for amazing brands and with models and celebrities. I've made some amazing and very beautiful friends that would be perfect for creating skins from (if I knew how).
You can see my work here - http://adrenalinmanagement.com/photos/cameron-james-wilson/
I feel like I do have a unique skill set that I can use, but I'm just not sure how is best, and what I should concentrate on.
What would you like to see that you think I could work well on?
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Comments
You'd be welll suited to offer human "Photo References" Basically the raw stock images that could be developed into textures for skins.
The fact that you have unique origianl skin content is a huge plus cause sometimes skins are reused over and over again.
Here's an example of a site that offers similar raw resources. https://www.3d.sk/
offering it purely as an information gathering exercise.
Another option is to use front facing portraits of your models (they would need to have a neutral expression) for creating character morphs in combination with an app like https://www.daz3d.com/facegen-artist-pro
You could then partner with a PA who would make some amendments to the basic morphs, maybe add HD details etc to create a new character.
This definitely looks interesting and pretty straight forward. However, the fact that in affect the models would have to agree for me to post and sell nude images would limit my choices. If I was to work with someone who could take my reference photos and turn them into skins before posting that could increase the number of people willing to do it because it retains maybe some anonymity.
Ohh, that sounds like fun, I have years of references that could work for this and could easily take more.
Think I have plenty from all sides, so should defibitely be covered.
I was definitely thinking of something that could be easily done whilst shooting, like a lighting test and just say take a quick few headshots before the shoot.
Look into Facegen, because combos of careful front/profile images would be invaluable in creating head morphs
+1 to each of what has been said above.
To avoid recognizable model nudity issues, I would recommend looking into partnering with an existing PA like Forbidden Whisper or others who make merchant resource skin maps. Or, maybe reach out to a relatively new or aspiring character creating PA like Divasmakeup and provide that person with skins that could be unique to a new character morph being created by her or him in ZBrush. You might even look into converting the maps yourself with Facegen as a supplement, but not the whole process.
+1 on this...i know i would love good resources
Yeah that :D
If going for skin references I think it's worth mentioning that it needs a very different approach to fashion photography. You want the most diffuse, flat lighting with as little shadows as possible. Ideally you would even use double polarizer techniques to remove shading completely.
Awesome, I've had a look before but got a little lost, I know it's highly recommended so I'll definitely check it out.
Yes, this definitely sounds like something viable, I need to get this facegen!
OK, great so there's definitely a demand and willing people!
Yes it will definitely be a learning curve on that part.. very, very different. However, I think it's a good starting point, I think I could also get a few good models by offering my normal shoots in return.
I was also thinking that I have some good contacts with make-up artists and hair stylist.. but not sure how this could help in anyway. I feel like with makeup I could somehow photograph the model with it on? Or is that all usually done in post?
For skin references it's best to have no makeup at all. We need the skin natural and pure, makeup just covers up what we need. Though makeup could surely be an alternative, just as separate reference especially coming from talented makeup artists. Doubt most character artists know a whole lot about makeup, at least I don't.
As for polarizing, something like this ideally:
Retain as much skin detail as possible, all the wondeful color variation that skin has while eliminating specular highlights. Pretty horrible for a photographer to be honest. No creativity, no light sculpting, no posing. It's more science than art :)
I'll definitely look into this, see what set up is required. I've heard dark skin and ethnic models are hard to come by so I was thinking of focusing mostly on that.
Yes I was definitely thinking about doing a clean skin and a makeup variant of the same person, because it's very hard to recreate the exact look of foundation over skin in 3d, it definitely has a different way of catching the light and different details.
Sounds great. Then ideally cover every inch of the body in sufficient resolution and you have a winner :)
The key is that lighting is going to come from the render engine. What you really want to capture is the 'dry' look of the skin as a base, a directionless capture of how shiny different parts of the skin are, and then a height map of the small features of the skin.
Note that the height map may not strictly be necessary; there is a product ( NGS Anagenessis) that uses nothing more than the color map to create amazing skins.
But customers will probably demand a specular and bump map.
(I'll show some examples when I have time)
Do you know if they use any products on the skin to achieve the matte 'dry' look? I know I could achieve a lot with lighting but there are products I could also use that are invisible to help.
My experience is only on the CGI end. :)
Most of the character makers I know (including myself), prefer to paint makeup by hand instead of using photosourced makeups. Especially with the new iray shader with the diffuse overlay option, it's just much more versatile. Using photosourced makeups means you have to match the skin tone and what not, and that's a pain. Photosourced makeup will also have things like wrinkles and eyefolds baked in which, to me, looks really weird when those aren't consistent between makeup styles. A lot of us gals try out makeup on ourselves to see if it works.
Male and ethnic skins are both in short supply and would be great.
To kill shine on a face-- Nyx makes a product called Shine Killer. My skin is quite oily, and I live in a very humid climate, so I picked some up to try it out, and it works *remarkably* well. It smooths out pores as well for foundation.
By the way, just so we're on the same page here. Skin reference resources are used by PA's to make skins, not by consumers buying at Daz. If you wanted to sell actual skins ready for end users or whole characters here you'd obviously have to aquire a lot more 3D production skills. Or indeed collaborate with a PA. Can't hurt to shoot me a PM in that case, I may be interested.
You know, surely you have a lot of lighting experience. You could possibly create all kinds of lighting products as well. Such stuff sells frequently here.
ha Ok :D
Ok great! Food for thought! And yes that's exactly the kind of product I was thinking!
Ah ok! For sure, once I'm set up to start I'll definitely want to find someone to collab with!
I'll definitely want to create my own lighting, the new product about creating your own HDRI's looks really interesting to me!
Yeah there's the HDRI world open to you too obviously. Here's a thread containing a bit of a disccussion I had about photography technicalities with MEC4D who sells very fine HDRI packs.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/182196/mec4d/p4
I think selling high-quality high res images to use as Merchant Resources would be awesome and probably a big seller among the PAs if the price is right. I'd for sure be interested in something like that, as I find that high res high-quality photo resources are hard to find and/or pretty expensive. The fact that you have access to beautiful people to photograph is a big plus!
You might be tempted to retouch the photos or get rid of the flaws - but keep those in! :) The more realistic looking the skin, the better.
Yes, Saiyaness has taught me the beauty of imperfection in 3D and how it's better to have lots of tiny flaws and details in your render and then if you want less to retouch it out of the finished render afterwards.
Looks like I'm pretty set with where I should be focusing my efforts!
Sounds good!
Even if you can't get your models to pose totally nude, maybe you could convince them to wear a tiny bikini instead. :)
this may sound odd but with your photographic skills, creating 'shaders' might just be up your alley.
good PS skills give it a lock.
Shaders involve a lot more technical skills than just artistry (especially if you actually mean shaders and not just presets). There are also several very active (and very good) PA's for shaders/shader presets, and there's a new PA that I believe is a shader person that just joined the fold. Photosourced skin resources, on the other hand, are few and far between. There are only about 3 PA's that do them, and not very frequently. If you look, there are no skin MR's in the store yet for G8 at all, female or male. I don't think there are any at the other sites either. I'm not saying shaders aren't a good thing to do, just that skin MR's have a lot less established competition.