Strides in Photo-Realism?

Protozoon · October 2018

Rashad Carter said:

Protozoon said:

That sort of work is on the level of Mal3Imagery!!!!

AMAZING!

Naturally, there are a few giveaways but it's quite good overall. The HDRI is providing very good colors and light dynamics for the shiny metal of the horn to play off of, which classes up and generally increases the overall realism of the scene substancially. The materials on the fabrics are truly excellent. The DOF forces the viewer's mind to concentrate on the areas that are well in focus, in particular the human face. The Edward skin here looks incredible, the SSS on the tip of the nose is just on the cusp of overdone but I'd prefer that to being underdone.

I think there could be people who would see this in a magazine with no heads up about its origin and I suspect many maybe as many as half woudl assume ti was a real photo unless forced to look for artifacts. Tht level of belief suspension is about all we can ask for. Great work!

Thanks all! All in my render was "straight from the box". Edward on it's defaults, military suit for G3/2, hdri + spot from the front. I just wanted to clarify I didn't mess with the character's or any settings.If I remember right no postwork unless slight "auto contrast".

bluejaunte · October 2018

Gregorius said:

Oso3D said:

Gregorius said:
Assuming optimal textures/shaders, a decent physics simulator as a render engine, and high-quality settings, the particular lighting shouldn't matter when it comes to realism.

On what, exactly, are you basing this notion?

It's just a logical consequence of having sufficiently accurate PBR. If the render engine is programmed to handle light in a way that closely emulates real-world optics, which is presumably a part of what it means to be "physics-based," then whatever light(s) is/are in the scene will interact with an object in a way that emulates how it would in the real world (again, assuming you have good textures/shaders).

Now, the light may interact with the object in a way that would make a professional photographer cringe, but it's not going to betray the fact that it's not a real photo. Even if a render looked like a photo that was just spontaneously snapped on a smartphone, I would consider that a success!

If it was rendered with PBR, the only excuse for an image failing to fool anyone is bad geometry and/or bad textures/shaders. The lighting can't be the problem, because no matter how a light is sized/shaped or where it's placed, its interaction with objects in the scene is entirely governed by real-world physics, or at least the computer's algorithmic simulation thereof. If a render looks real but just very amateurishly staged, then you can blame the lighting.

This would all be true if you had a render engine, lights, models, surfaces and shading that is 100% like the real world. But you don't. CG is still an approximation of the real thing with all kinds of limitations. Your model is hollow with a skin that was painted on. To simulate skin pores, you don't even have actual geometry, it's all bump or normal maps which is just fake shader trickery. None of the enormous complexity of light interaction that happens with real skin is going to happen with that and a bit of silly wanna-be SSS which is justr a horrible imitation of the real thing. Seemingly infinite numbers of light photons hitting your skin, interacting with the specular on top, entering the skin, being bounced around in there by actual tissue and veins and all manner of hairs on top and tons of little wrinkles and folds. Look in a mirror and check your skin, the complexity is mind boggling. Skin stretches and compresses as you move, all kinds of color changes happen when you open and close your hand for example. Make a fist and the knuckles become more shiny, bones and tendons are dancing around in there. And that's just what you can see with the naked eye. Zoom in with a microscope and there is even more complexity, all of which may further affect how light interacts with it.

Until we have all this fully simulated in CG with a renderer that can do damn near infinite light rays, you're not going to just throw a PBR character into a scene, add a random light and get a badly lit photo. You are going to get a badly lit CG render. Look at it this way: your skin, your model, your hair, all horribly fake at best. Light is just another element that can help you with photorealism, even if you use it to just to hide shortcomings. But it's very hard, so hard that we hardly ever see a truely photorealistic digital human come out of even the most expensive Hollywood productions. And those we might consider a success, like maybe Rachel from Bladerunner 2049? You can bet she has been lit in the most professional way possible by people who do nothing but lighting all day long for these studios.

8eos8 · October 2018

Here's my contribution to the thread. Lighting really is everything in CG!

V.W. Singer · October 2018

8eos8 said:

Here's my contribution to the thread. Lighting really is everything in CG!

Nice work.It's great how fabrics as well as skin are getting better in renders.

Gregorius · October 2018

Okay, guys, here are two renders. The first uses the lighting setup I've used for quite a while, and the second is one experiment in revising that light arrangement to sharpen the shadows and maybe add a bit more depth. Just in case it matters, I didn't quite match up the direction of the character's gaze, but everything else about the character, pose, and camera position is identical.

no nose · October 2018

I feel like when it comes to realism, Genesis 8 has to much of a yellow-ish tint, unless I add spotlights with temperture set to max, which even then I feel like it isn't quite right. I tried making my own skin (The default skin + a multiply layer) in photoshop, it has helped improve but I feel like there are times when it doesn't work to well still.

The first pic is Without any lighting.The second pic is with lighting that has max temperture. And the third is with both lighting (No max temp) and my custom skin.

Outside of the textures for the skin I used, everything you see comes packaged with Daz. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure how I could improve the skin any more, and lighting is always gonna be a pain.

V.W. Singer · October 2018

no nose said:

I feel like when it comes to realism, Genesis 8 has to much of a yellow-ish tint, unless I add spotlights with temperture set to max, which even then I feel like it isn't quite right. I tried making my own skin (The default skin + a multiply layer) in photoshop, it has helped improve but I feel like there are times when it doesn't work to well still.

The first pic is Without any lighting.The second pic is with lighting that has max temperture. And the third is with both lighting (No max temp) and my custom skin.

Outside of the textures for the skin I used, everything you see comes packaged with Daz. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure how I could improve the skin any more, and lighting is always gonna be a pain.

Are you talking about 3DL or Iray?

Iray skin tone is very largely controlled by the lighting. If the lights are cool so is the skin. I assume you disabled the Headlamp light?

no nose · October 2018

V.W. Singer said:

no nose said:

I feel like when it comes to realism, Genesis 8 has to much of a yellow-ish tint, unless I add spotlights with temperture set to max, which even then I feel like it isn't quite right. I tried making my own skin (The default skin + a multiply layer) in photoshop, it has helped improve but I feel like there are times when it doesn't work to well still.

The first pic is Without any lighting.The second pic is with lighting that has max temperture. And the third is with both lighting (No max temp) and my custom skin.

Outside of the textures for the skin I used, everything you see comes packaged with Daz. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure how I could improve the skin any more, and lighting is always gonna be a pain.

Are you talking about 3DL or Iray?

Iray skin tone is very largely controlled by the lighting. If the lights are cool so is the skin. I assume you disabled the Headlamp light?

Yeah i'm using Iray, headlamp is disabled on second and third (Maybe the headlamp is causing the mustardish look, idk). I use 2 spotlights most of the time.

V.W. Singer · October 2018

no nose said:

Yeah i'm using Iray, headlamp is disabled on second and third (Maybe the headlamp is causing the mustardish look, idk). I use 2 spotlights most of the time.

A test render using only Gs8 and the free stuff from Daz Studio (except the hair). No lights other than Environment, headlamps off.

no nose · October 2018

V.W. Singer said:

no nose said:

Yeah i'm using Iray, headlamp is disabled on second and third (Maybe the headlamp is causing the mustardish look, idk). I use 2 spotlights most of the time.

A test render using only Gs8 and the free stuff from Daz Studio (except the hair). No lights other than Environment, headlamps off.

These enviorment settings do seem to somewhat improve it, though I feel like 3.5 is a little bright.

no nose · October 2018

Well immediatly after I tried that I think I found wha't causing the tint, in the surfaces tab, SSS Reflectanence. Every skin surface is set at some variation of a very light yellow-ish color. Setting it to white seems to fix that. Doesn't work to well with my custom skin but it does adress my biggest gripe. Now I just need to find hair that fits, I feel like the generic free hair has something with the lighting

bluejaunte · October 2018

Gregorius said:

Okay, guys, here are two renders. The first uses the lighting setup I've used for quite a while, and the second is one experiment in revising that light arrangement to sharpen the shadows and maybe add a bit more depth. Just in case it matters, I didn't quite match up the direction of the character's gaze, but everything else about the character, pose, and camera position is identical.

Just to clarify my comment about lighting. I didn't mean to imply that lighting was you biggest problem. I was merely commenting on your assumption that lighting shouldn't matter much.

So with that said I guess I cannot let that stand without giving more feedback. I don't think you're anywhere close to photorealism, but keep in mind I am mucking around with characters all day long as a PA and I may have more discerning eyes than the average person out there by now. So I'm not the one you seek to fool. And also keep in mind that this is really hard stuff. Digital humans are pretty much the holy grail of CG and even the best industry veterans struggle with it. I admire you for even trying at all. I personally feel I'm far from that level of the best industry veterans out there and I struggle nonestop with attempting to get more realistic. I'm literally never happy with my own work.

Some issues I see:

Facial anatomy. This is a very basic face, I'd say this could barely pass as a base model meant for people to sculpt on top of. If you don't sculpt yourself, your only option is to get a better model or use existing morphs. I'm not familiar with Poser and so I'm not aware of how this all works there. I'd recommend you hop on the Daz Studio bandwagon. You will get a much better starting point right out of the box with stuff like HD morphs and just outright better characters.
Skin, shader etc. Are there highlights baked into that diffuse texture? That would be a no-no. No variation in specularity (nose tip is supposed to be shinier than the rest of the face for example). Overall still way too flat in terms of skin pores, but I struggle with this too as in Iray I feel we are lacking micro-displacement. There's HD morphs but you need to go up to pretty insane subd levels to get to a point where you could truely depict skin pores in full detail. Like subd level 6 or so, it seems to me, which is just not really possible. That or I'm just trying to blame the tools instead of my own inadequacies! Of course a good normal or bump map can be pretty decent.
Hair. Always a problem, pretty sure you would take a huge step forward if you used Daz Studio and some excellent OOT hair or such and render with Iray. What you have here looks like hair from an early 2000's game or something. Eyebrows look unnatural, skin is elevated around them and catches the light in an ugly way. Are these displaced?
Eyes don't look wet and alive, iris to sclera transition too harsh (although with really dark irises it does seem to look pretty harsh sometimes), probably lacking anatomy again around the eyeballs too.

So yeah overall I don't know why you're making life hard on yourself. If you're truely after photorealism, Daz Studio/Iray and some current content is going to get you much closer. Still nowhere near it (IMO), but closer.

3anson · October 2018

no nose said:

Well immediatly after I tried that I think I found wha't causing the tint, in the surfaces tab, SSS Reflectanence. Every skin surface is set at some variation of a very light yellow-ish color. Setting it to white seems to fix that. Doesn't work to well with my custom skin but it does adress my biggest gripe. Now I just need to find hair that fits, I feel like the generic free hair has something with the lighting

try a very pale blue in the SSS Reflectance channel

3anson · October 2018

hi Gregorious, have you tried GI with a single spot for specular? combined with EZSkin you should get pretty good results( not in Superfly, just plain ole Firefly)

if your aim is getting close to photorealistic results, you will find the above advice should help.

your PBR maps should do fine, with maybe a small bit of tweaking required in the materials room

as others have mentioned, having PBR materials and 'Real World' lighting is only the STARTER. even with the above it is EXTREMELY difficult to get 'photo realistic' results, the big studios still struggle to get 'believable' results.

btw, even with 'PBR' materials, you still need highly detailed bump/displacement/Normal maps in the data channels. do NOT rely on greyscale versions of the Diffuse maps. you need to have full custom, or customized versions of your generated greyscales. ( btw, get xNormal and/or the nVidia plugin for PS( you don't HAVE to have/use nVidia gcards for this ) both will generate good Normal maps from good greyscale bump or displacement maps.)

PS, you generally need to invert 'desaturated' maps that are to be used for bump/displacement

Gregorius · October 2018

bluejaunte said:

Facial anatomy. This is a very basic face, I'd say this could barely pass as a base model meant for people to sculpt on top of. If you don't sculpt yourself, your only option is to get a better model or use existing morphs. I'm not familiar with Poser and so I'm not aware of how this all works there. I'd recommend you hop on the Daz Studio bandwagon. You will get a much better starting point right out of the box with stuff like HD morphs and just outright better characters.

Skin, shader etc. Are there highlights baked into that diffuse texture? That would be a no-no. No variation in specularity (nose tip is supposed to be shinier than the rest of the face for example). Overall still way too flat in terms of skin pores, but I struggle with this too as in Iray I feel we are lacking micro-displacement. There's HD morphs but you need to go up to pretty insane subd levels to get to a point where you could truely depict skin pores in full detail. Like subd level 6 or so, it seems to me, which is just not really possible. That or I'm just trying to blame the tools instead of my own inadequacies! Of course a good normal or bump map can be pretty decent.

Hair. Always a problem, pretty sure you would take a huge step forward if you used Daz Studio and some excellent OOT hair or such and render with Iray. What you have here looks like hair from an early 2000's game or something. Eyebrows look unnatural, skin is elevated around them and catches the light in an ugly way. Are these displaced?

Eyes don't look wet and alive, iris to sclera transition too harsh (although with really dark irises it does seem to look pretty harsh sometimes), probably lacking anatomy again around the eyeballs too.

So yeah overall I don't know why you're making life hard on yourself. If you're truely after photorealism, Daz Studio/Iray and some current content is going to get you much closer. Still nowhere near it (IMO), but closer.

On the face, you do realize that this is a significantly custom-morphed G8F, right? You most likely do. I just wanted to clear that up, just in case you thought I was using an out-of-the-box SmithMicro figure, which are notoriously bad.
On the skin, there may be some mild baked-in highlights, but between my own editing work on the original merchant resource and the shader, it seems rather washed out to my eye. Are you sure it's not the density of the nose freckles that's making the sides merely appear darker than the bridge? Nevertheless, I have tinkered with ways to mitigate this directly on the maps themselves and will likely continue to do so. As far as the bump, while I can't be sure, some subtle detail may have been lost in Daz's JPG compression when I uploaded and resized the image. Also, I can't help but suspect that many CGI artists have a hypercorrective tendency to expect things to be rougher than they often are in actual photos. In a typical photo, can you really pick out individual pores on young, healthy skin without some extreme zooming? Or have my expectations just been warped by looking at too many glamour shots that are almost certainly airbrushed to some degree or other? I hate to sound defensive or obstinate, but nor do I want to be overly deferential. It's very possible and indeed likely that my bump/displacement maps still have a way to go. But at the same time, you did say you probably look at these images with different eyes than the average person because you spend so much time staring at this stuff. It's very difficult to ascertain the relative degrees to which those two influences contribute to the final impression.
Really? I thought the hair used in my latest renders would at least be a significant improvement over what came before, but apparently not. I actually do have multiple OOT hair sets and use them fairly frequently. Amber Hair is a particularly good one. Let me ask you this: what in particular seems so lacking in the hair?
I've never quite been happy with the eyes either, though my current shaders are still the best I've been able to muster while taking a very scientific/anatomical approach to them.

Can anyone tell me what IRay can do that SuperFly perhaps can't?

no nose · October 2018

3anson said:

no nose said:

Well immediatly after I tried that I think I found wha't causing the tint, in the surfaces tab, SSS Reflectanence. Every skin surface is set at some variation of a very light yellow-ish color. Setting it to white seems to fix that. Doesn't work to well with my custom skin but it does adress my biggest gripe. Now I just need to find hair that fits, I feel like the generic free hair has something with the lighting

try a very pale blue in the SSS Reflectance channel

Seems to just give the skin a blue-ish color, I tried messing with that area but I don't think it works to well.

Sven Dullah · October 2018

V.W. Singer said:

Are you talking about 3DL or Iray?

Iray skin tone is very largely controlled by the lighting. If the lights are cool so is the skin. I assume you disabled the Headlamp light?

What a strange thing to say, so tell me, what is controlling the skin tone in 3DL?

Toonces · October 2018

Gregorius said:

bluejaunte said:

Can anyone tell me what IRay can do that SuperFly perhaps can't?

Just give Iray a shot. You'll never go back. :)

For example, this Iray render posted earlier in thread. The specular is amazing. The skin looks perhaps a bit too oily, but that's also what makes it soooo realistic. The white reflection on her cheeks, chin, tip of nose; the imperfections of skin, the whispy hairs -- they all scream 'real picture'.

On the other hand, your renders come across as 'flat'. The specular on the left temple in your render above exists, but the rest of the face looks too matte and unreal. The hair has specular highlights, but it comes across as gray/white hair more than anything.

Iray/Daz constantly update with new features to increase photorealism, e.g., dual lobe specularity. So give it a shot and you may be pleasantly surprised!

Masterstroke · October 2018

Toonces said:

Is there any secret, that you might like to share? The level of photo.realism in your renders is ... just outstanding.

Gregorius · October 2018

I think it would be fairly easy to replicate at least the shine of that IRay skin in SuperFly. The problem is that, if I did, at least some people would probably switch from saying it looks too flat to saying it looks too oily (maybe even metallic). In fact, I'm pretty sure that the specularity of my current shaders were in no small part a reaction precisely to comments that the previous version looked too oily. I suspect that, at least with respect to specularity, it's more a matter of getting the parameters just right to strike the perfect balance between dry and oily. There's a sweet spot there somewhere, and maybe I'm being naive, but for the moment, I still think I have enough hope of zeroing in on it.

Plus, what kind of lighting and shaders did that render use? Those are a couple of variables that need to be accounted for. In any case, I do envy the skill of the person who made that sample IRay render!

Finally, what exactly is dual-lobe specularity? I may have arrived at something similar via shader nodes, but I can't be sure until I know what it is.

Toonces · October 2018

Masterstroke said:

Toonces said:

Is there any secret, that you might like to share? The level of photo.realism in your renders is ... just outstanding.

Haha, not my render. I was just showing a render Jeff posted earlier in this thread. I'm sure he'll appreciate the compliment tho!

chevybabe25 · October 2018

Gregorius, Id just like to add a few tips :)

* Try adding some normal maps either from another texture set( as long as you will not be redestributing it) or extracted from a much more detailed sculpt.

*Try refining your morph with more detail - its amazing how a few lines under the eyes, extra definition of a feature llike lips, or a small wrinkle on the forehead can improve the overall look.

*Lighting - Others have mentioned this too. Try rotating your lights around - sometimes extra shadows can really make a figure pop.

Bump maps - I know you said you have them on there - but they are not doing you any favors as is. Maybe try turning their strength up more?

Specular maps - If you are using them - maybe try adjusting the levels more (so that there is a larger difference between the lights and darks)

Toonces · October 2018

Gregorius said:

I think it would be fairly easy to replicate at least the shine of that IRay skin in SuperFly. The problem is that, if I did, at least some people would probably switch from saying it looks too flat to saying it looks too oily (maybe even metallic). In fact, I'm pretty sure that the specularity of my current shaders were in no small part a reaction precisely to comments that the previous version looked too oily. I suspect that, at least with respect to specularity, it's more a matter of getting the parameters just right to strike the perfect balance between dry and oily. There's a sweet spot there somewhere, and maybe I'm being naive, but for the moment, I still think I have enough hope of zeroing in on it.

Plus, what kind of lighting and shaders did that render use? Those are a couple of variables that need to be accounted for. In any case, I do envy the skill of the person who made that sample IRay render!

Finally, what exactly is dual-lobe specularity? I may have arrived at something similar via shader nodes, but I can't be sure until I know what it is.

I too envy his skill! From what I recall, his lighting is fairly simplistic in iray -- a single spotlight with rectangle or disc geometry, same transforms as camera. Mimics a flash photo quite nicely in my opinion.

I can't explain the technical aspects behind dual lobe. I'm sure someone else can. From a layperson perspective, it adds a 'layer of realistic shine' in a controllable way to where the underlying texture is still visible as desired.

I'd be curious to see your figure rendered in Daz using Jeff's simple spotlight approach. Since Daz is free, seems like it's worth a try!

wolf359 · October 2018

Really? I thought the hair used in my latest renders would at least be a significant improvement over what came before, but apparently not. ...... Let me ask you this: what in particular seems so lacking in the hair?

Everything is lacking with hair.....Everything
the trans map used appears very PAINTED with white streaks that appear very flat and artifical.

Can anyone tell me what IRay can do that SuperFly perhaps can't?

Indeed that is the great mystery ,for me at least.
Posers "Superfly" is allegedly
the Blender Cycles render engine ported to poser.
the "real" blender Cycles is every bit as realistc as IRay and actually has more options for scene optimization in Branched path tracing mode and has as excellent NPR for ton shading as well

Here is the default ,unmorphed Genesis 2 female with the "Leyton" hair by AprilSH.

The skin is an old Victoria 4 set called "Hhorizon" by Syyd Raven of the former RNDA.

Sent to blender 2.79 with the free Teleblender script from"MCasual"
Not attempting "photorealism" as I did not let it finish enough samples to even clean up the fireflies.
Still Compare the hair, in this unfinished render, to the
finshed hair render in your Poser version of "Cycles"

Surely you can see your problem..yes??

Gregorius · October 2018

Okay, guys. I devised an experimental way to get rid of baked-in highlights on my texture maps, mildly increased the bump strength, added some contrast to my specular maps, and adjusted my specular shader settings. This is the result. Better? Worse? About the same?

Gregorius · October 2018

And mostly just for the heck of it, here's what a mid-range shot of Superman looks like with my revised textures/shaders.

joseft · October 2018

while i have seen some renders of daz models that look very realisitic, i still think daz models are not created to achieve hyper-realism. The most realistic renders of daz figures i have seen have been achieved using custom maps created from photos of real people.

The most realistic human renders i have seen were done by someone who modeled the human from scratch with no intention of it being a posable/animated re-usable figure

an example that comes to mind popped up in my facebook feed not long ago, i am not sure i can post any of his work here, but if you would like to see it, search Abdelrahman Kubisi on facebook. His work is brilliant.

chevybabe25 · October 2018

Gregorius - I think it's an improvement ( a little shiny for my taste - but that's just me). I think the eyebrow shape is nice but the low resolution brow should be replaced. Either with a finer detailed one, or with some nicer fibremesh. The displacement also seems a little odd on it as well ( not sure if this is because you used a basic mask for it, or because the brow appears low res). Again, I really think you should try using some normal maps if you can, they can bring characters to life if done right - would make a huge improvement.

hyteckit · November 2018

jeffam112368_9a28fbd572 said:

For what its worth, a few of my latest Daz renders -- different type of photo-realism, but figured I'd share anyhow...

Haha... I love it. As I mentioned before, I love your lighting. You are simulating bad lighting from cameras. Looks like realistic bad lighting. It looks "authentic".

Gregorius · November 2018

I may have made something of a breakthrough with Chevybabe25's normal mapping suggestion (so thanks for that, Chevy), but I'll let you guys be the judge. There are many functions for which Poser has two nodes each, one original to Poser and the other imported from Blender Cycles. Those include many of the major shader components (diffuse, SSS, specularity, etc.), and the only way to do any normal mapping is to use the Cycles nodes. I'm still cheating a bit, since I'm using a Bump node from Cycles to essentially convert a bump map into a normal map, which probably isn't quite the same as a real normal map. Even so, merely swapping out Poser's native SSS and specular nodes for the imported Blender counterparts seems to have made a significant improvement. Heck, I may be hallucinating, but even the eyebrows seem to have benefited a bit from the shift!

I'm starting to think that the Blender Cycles nodes are just generally better than the ones original to Poser.

Here are a couple of updated eye close-ups. Thoughts?

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