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We discussed this elsewhere already. London skins have lighting baked in. The whole nose tip highlight is baked in. Move the light around a bit and the illusion breaks.
Here are a couple of scenes (keep in mind these aren't my attempts at "realism" - just bringing some environments and DOF together with my girl). So please don't critique these - as realism wasn't really the aim with these (I'd have taken much much longer setting up the scenes and the lighting and the poses/expressions etc if realism had been the aim).
Ack! Now that you've mentioned the nose tip highlight, I can't unsee it! However in one of London's promos with different makeup, the baked in highlight is significantly diminished.
I'd argue that the baked-in lighting is done so well, 99% of people simply wouldn't notice it. Ever. Regardless of angle. Still not ideal to have baked in highlights, but it would be a shame to let old skins go unused because of it. If shooting for photorealism, I'd much rather have baked-in at the wrong lighting angle than no highlights at all, as the highlights make the skin far less uniform and thus far more realistic.
Try some dramatic lighting from the side with no other light, it should look jarring enough. Animate it and it'll look even worse. You cannot fake the complex interaction of skin with light by baking it in. Diffuse maps used to have some shading baked in pre PBR, but not very direction-dependant specular highlights like that. This completely circumvents the shader, you might as well slap on Facegen texture and call it a day. Granted, it is done very well and the texture is otherwise very pleasing. With a bit of work it could be fixed.
Looking at the face alone, my brain's instinctive first evaluation is "photograph". Then the focus widens to include the hair in back, and nope.
You may have a point, and I'm seriously considering starting a new thread dedicated to sharing my attempts at realism and getting feedback. For now, though, here's something a little less WIP-y from me, specifically in response to Toonces' wondering what my current Guinea pig character might look like with a pose, expression, and hair.
This thread seems to have lost its way. The original post from “Ooze3d” was about how people keep offering all of these technical reasons for lack of realistic renders; posts heavy on suggestions about proper lighting, facial expression, and whatnot. And that post also noted that on the Snapchat style media, people post one picture after another with terrible lighting, little to no facial expression, and no thought given to composition, yet no one questions whether they are real people.
And I’ve noticed this thread, which could have been a refreshing change to the norm, seems to have degenerated into yet another thread where a few post images to show off their work and a few get criticized on technical details about their images to no avail. It’s like everyone has forgotten the valid points in the original post.
I am no expert on rendering with this software. I often use the default settings on everything. And I’m always looking for some product that makes everything easier so I don’t have to figure out why there are so many glossy settings or what a top coat or metallic flakes has to do with a woman’s skin. And I don’t share my renders much because, while they are good enough for me, I’m certain they would not be good enough in the eyes of people in these forums. But I do have a personal goal for very convincing, realistic images.
However, in the spirit of the original post, I would like to offer what I’ve observed from my limited viewpoint. And it isn’t much.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, as far as software goes, the best tool for realistic renders seems to be Reality/Luxrender. Just based on such pictures as the scantily clad black man and the character from Beauty and the Beast posted by “Hellboy Soto” some time ago. And the picture of the woman by the water fountain in this thread where everybody was complaining about her toes. And a few other pictures, I think. It seems like LuxRender has produced more realistic humanoid images than anything I’ve seen from Firefly, Superfly, 3Delight, or even the newer Iray.
And all software aside, it seems like one of the biggest factors for producing a realistic image seems to be just not telling people it’s fake.
Also, it seems like enough realistic things in an image help to mask or distract from anything not so realistic. Like the person saying FaceGen is so great. After applying the FaceGen texture and morph, it amounts to not much more than a photoshopped version of the original. There are enough elements from an actual photograph to distract from the DAZ things.
Everybody seems to think the eyes are a big deal. Even my mystic father, who says he can see into people’s soul, seems to think something is different about the CG eyes. He said my character’s eyes seemed dark. But when I looked at the eyes of real people’s photographs, some of them seemed to have the same dark eyes. I don’t know what he sees that I don’t.
I’m not going to reinstall Reality or Poser until they come out with something newer than Iray. So Iray it is. But seriously, my plan going forward is going to be to always use ray tracers, put glasses on my characters to distract from the eyes, and just not mention that they’re created with DAZ Studio. I also have some comments about other things in this thread but this post is much longer and snippy than I wanted it to be already.
Hellboy is just very very good, I've seen him produce amazingly realistic results with whatever renderer he is using.
@NylonGirl, well, for whatever it's worth, I too have often wondered just how much the mere knowledge that an image is CGI biases the viewer to notice things they might not otherwise notice. In particular, I'm sometimes tempted to ask those who say the skin is too smooth and perfect if they've seen any magazine covers lately. A Photoshopped and/or airbrushed photo is still a photo and rarely confused with a CGI render. Maybe someone here could do an experiment where they present a particularly good render to a pool of people without saying a word about its origins and see how many people say anything like, "It looks odd or fake somehow."
Plus, I've also dealt with the confusion between simple photo-realism and emulating professional photographic technique. Over at the Smith Micro forum, a critic recently told me that there was something really wrong with my lighting, and I had to ask if she meant that it seemed unrealistic or just amateurishly arranged. As I told her, my first priority is rendering an image that could pass for a photo, even if a starkly or poorly lit one. The fact that I use a three-point lighting arrangement has more to do with it being a fairly nice and neutral setup for testing purposes than with actually imitating the work of skilled photographers. Now, I have since softened my lighting, but for me, that was a bonus rather than the actual point.
Anyway, here's one more from me, again FWIW.
She looks improved and her expression looks like she dares anyone to say she doesn't look realistic.
I don't think your posts are derailing the thread because you are asking for comment in what is lacking to make them realistic. The thread likely would have been long finished without your posts.
Anyone have any recommedations for camera settings for portraits? right now my camera is about 10 ft away from the target. Should I tighten up the distance?
Thanks for the tips.I do have couple of other really pale skin textures that I like. I will try them and see if they are so easily over lit as well.
Thanks! For the moment, I'll keep posting here unless more people agree that I'm derailing the thread. Here's an experimental update to my Superman portrait. What do you think? Does he look any less cartoonish in shape and/or more real overall than he did before?
No, I can't get past that chin. Could you post the reference images you use to make his face?
Although, if I just give a quick glance of your render it looks more like Christopher Reeve than if I study the render so that tells me your texturing for Christropher Reeve needs a major overhaul.
For headshots 6-8 feet is traditional in photography, go closer and you will get more distortion (good or bad), go further and the face will flatten out (considered good for people with long noses)
For body shots it depends on the pose.
Is it the size, the cleft, or both? Does it look cartoonish (i.e. not like any real person would ever look) or just inaccurate to the specific person it's meant to resemble? Just search for "Christopher Reeve" on Google Images, and you'll have the pool of pictures that I used. One that might be particularly good for showing the proportions of his jaw and chin might be this one.
Cleft looks inaccurate. I've never seen a real person with a cleft like that. Also your reference photo hides some of the shape of his nose. And his face is too thin / cheeks too drawn.
Also his complete head is too long and cheek bones too pronounced. What you have is a caricature - not a portrait. There is enough similarity there to recognise who you are trying to portray, but it is not a realistic portrayal
Okay, I have a couple things I'm going to try. This is #1. Does this look any less caricaturish?
All your renders still look look like Ken or Barbie, like a pixar render (a good thing but not for this thread)
These look great, @divamakeup! It’s so challenging to not only get skin to look realistic, but also to get the figures to match the environment.
- Greg
You couldn't have taken enough time to evaluate and resculpt your work to come back with another post so quickly. What I do see is you have made his cleft more believable but still not what I've seen in any of the pictures I've seen of Christopher Reeve.
I'm trying the simplest revisions first, even if for no other reason than to eliminate them as solutions. Since exaggeration is a key feature of both cartoons and caricatures, I decided to first try just dialing the face morph strength back from 1 to 0.75, which seemed to work great for Elvis (based on recent comments), so I decided to try it on Chris before changing anything else. I also wanted to test just how minimally I could dial it back and still end up in a realistic zone, so the past two renders have had Chris at 0.875 and then 0.75 respectively. I guess neither setting really did the trick in this case.
Also, the chin cleft is a relatively easy detail to fix, which is why I'm more focused on the general impression right now.
Oh, I thought you had stopped morph dialing and were sculpting. I think you need a better set of reference photo, from different angles, and some in greyscale that better should facial geometry.
After discussing this subject with others, I am going to completely take back what I said about details. Fact is, we put on makeup, bleach our skin, and airbrush our photos afterwards. So, details don't matter so much in the finished product. They really matter to me, but my ideals are definitely not shared.
Regarding your model, the eyes look better at this angle. I don't see the long rectangular light reflection. This may be an illusion because the nose is blocking part of the light in the right eye, and the eyelid cuts off the reflection in the left eye.
There is no doubt your model is Christopher Reeves, but right now it looks more like a toy version than human to me..
Actual sculpting is always a last resort for me because of my poor dexterity. Like with actual texture painting, it's not impossible, but it takes more concentration and effort than it would for the average person. For any custom face morph, including a celebrity look-alike, it's mostly if not entirely a matter of spinning dozens of dials in the right proportions and combinations (I tend to invest quite a bit in merchant resource morph packs). So it's not really that I stopped sculpting. I never did much sculpting in the first place. Chris did ultimately require a bit of custom sculpting around the mouth, but even for him, the solid majority of what you see is dial-spun.
There is no way you can get a perfect likeness with dial spinning. Let alone a photoreal one. Only very few highly skilled sculpters ever succeed at such a thing. You're just setting yourself up for failure because everyone knows how your character is supposed to look like. If it's a little off there goes every chance of photorealism out the window without even considering any other aspects. If it's a custom character, you can at least circumvent that part. Even then it's still hard as heck.
I'm not necessarily aiming for a likeness that's perfect to the pore. For me, it's enough that a majority of people viewing it readily recognize the same person in the render. Even if they know it's not a literal photo of the actual celebrity, I'm happy if it at least looks like a real, living person that, if seen randomly on the street, would make them look twice and marvel, "Is that...? Wow! It's probably not actually him/her, but he/she's a dead-ringer for So-and-so!" (with the caveat that the close resemblance appears natural and without any obvious plastic surgery).
I don't really understand the conflation of photo-realism with absolute accuracy in capturing a specific likeness. If the character is textured/shaded well enough and shaped within the bounds of normal human anatomy, then even if I'm not 100% dead-on with respect to a target celebrity, wouldn't that leave me with a photo-realistic image of a close-but-no-cigar look-alike rather than a clearly CGI image of the actual celebrity? Take my Elvis morph, for example. Hypothetically, if I hit all the right notes in terms of realism but the geometry isn't quite a perfect likeness of the genuine article, wouldn't the render still pass for a photo of a particularly uncanny impersonator?
The main reason I'm currently focusing on my Christopher Reeve morph is because it's been described as cartoony and caricaturish (or at least surgically manipulated), not simply inaccurate, which means something about it is outside the constraints of natural human anatomy, and so it doesn't even look like a real person who happens to greatly resemble him. In a thread dedicated to photo-realism, maybe I shouldn't have used my celebrity look-alike morphs as Guinea pigs, as in doing so, I may have unnecessarily complicated the critical analysis of test renders.
Well if you are limited by your dexerity there isn't alot you can do except change your approach from one of trying to dial spin to get a realistic likeness to dial spinning to get a recognizable and funny caricature of Chris Reeve. Maybe you should try that. A smile or good laugh is always welcome.
Not necessarily. Call me naive, but I'm still optimistic that I can dial-spin my way to a realistic semblance of Reeve. It's just a matter of adjusting the proportions (i.e. re-spinning some dials). If I could make Elvis look realistic (or at least, markedly less caricatured than he apparently did before), I think I can do it for Chris.
Anyway, here's one more attempt. At the very least, his face should look a bit more square and less elongated.