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That's wonderful to hear, I'm very happy it was helpful and that you liked the render! :D
The problem with normal maps is that they bake in fake shadow detail, so they don't react accurately to light. They also don't stand up when viewed from the side. Displacement maps are much better to use in that respect, though they definitely cost a lot more in terms of resources. Either way, I much prefer actual HD morphs for close ups if I can get them. I will forever be salty that the average user cannot get access to the Super Sekret Morph Loader so we can import our own HD morphs. I'd even pay for it.
I've never heard that normal maps don't react accurately to light. Isn't that one of the advantages they have over bump maps? I'm also not even sure if displacement maps are still working in Studio; I had a ton of huge crashes while I was trying to put together my last image, and they only stopped when I removed all displacement maps from the scene.
Normal mapping doesn't react to light, it's baked shadow detail. (I'm not very familiar with 3Delight as I started off using Iray, but I would liken it to AO mapping.) A good example I can think of off the top of my head is to apply the veins normal maps for Darius 7. The shadows they add to the veins do not move when the lighting moves. Darius actually looks much better if you only apply the HD vein detail (via the slider) and leave off the veins normal map. In regards to displacement, I use it on almost every character I work with so it definitely works fine with the most recent version of Studio. I've attached an example. Her scarification is made with modified color, specular, and displacement mapping. If I were to add in normal mapping (which I did originally) they wouldn't react to light accurately. That being said, normal maps can be helpful in creating height/displacement maps if you aren't baking direct from a 3D model.
*Edit* Oh, I forgot I had another example I can attach. The keloid scars on the bounty hunter's face were made with displacement, color and specular mapping only.
I am not familiar enough with how Daz does things to say this for sure but in general at least, normal maps mean exactly how light reacts when touching a certain point. It gives the direction in which the light should bounce off from that point. That means that the shadow is completely realistic as different direction from rays of light will react differently. That is what a normal map is supposed to do, that why it is a shading texture.
Displacement map needs enough polygons and will push those polygons and actually create the geometry, but only at the time of render. I don't know if Daz and Iray support this.
More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=373kkdmIpf8&t=1s .
Even so, they don't stand up when viewed from the side. That's the biggest downfall. Normal maps can be an alternative to HD morphs and/or displacement, but in the end I much prefer the actual modified topology for realism (obviously at the cost of performance, but I render at SubD 4 already so what's a little more, lol). When baking maps in ZBrush (or whatever 3D program you use), might as well just bake displacement maps while you're at it and use those.
Displacement absolutely does work in Daz and Iray - I use it all the time. You will only see it with a render or in Iray preview mode, but I use Iray preview mode a lot in my workflow so that is a non-issue for me.
Very nice renders Melissa, they look like the stuff that's always in the top banner of the galleries here. :) Thanks for the info, I'll have to test some displacement maps again because when I tried rendering an old Stonemason set that had them, they shut down Studio faster than if I turned the PC's power off.
Which one was it? If I have it, I can try it out.
Sorry, it wasn't a Stonemason set (I'm doing too many things at once), I think it was the add-on textures for the G8 Male Southern Noble set. They're terrific textures, but my scene crashed every single time until I mass-cleared every displacement map in my scene. I don't know for sure if those textures were the issue though, all I know is that once I removed all displacement maps, the render proceeded as expected.
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I HOPE THE DAZ PEOPLE SEE THIS. You guys did a great job with HD Body Shapes Head Morphs, especially the muscular morph. It looks comparable to Ophelia 7's muscular HD morph, and I've been waiting for muscular skin detail via HD for over two years.
This is the most important, you actually did proper renders that show off the HD skin detail. The previous rendering style to show off Genesis 8 HD morphs was terrible, but this new rendering style is a major improvement, it looks like you guys took time to do an IRAY tutorial, good job. My only suggestion is that in the future, you do additional renders with a basic skin shader morph, that will let us see the hd skin detail even better.
You are right, displacement is actually bringing in geometry if you have enough subdivision levels but if you watched the clip I linked, you saw that the combination of displacement and normals is the best.
Displacement will bring in the new geometry but can't also tell light how to bounce off it properly, that's where normal maps come in. That is why the combination is almost the same as having the details in the first place if not exactly the same.
Now regarding only normal maps, it depends on the details you want. I think most of the HD details you would add to the face would be pretty small and would probably be fine with just a normal map unless as you said you are viewing them from the side.
When I used the maps in Blender I usually had all maps prepared but only activated displacement if the angle of my shot didn't fit with the normal maps.
All of this being said, I feel like adding details and baking maps only works on a character basis if you want it to look really good so if you want those details on 5 characters you would have to do the process 5 times which takes time. They would also have to match the skin shader to look 100% natural which is even harder to do. HD morphs in Daz on the other hand would be simple to apply each time and would save time, the more character you want with those details. That is my reason for not baking maps for HD details.
Those scars are gorgeous- but I don't quite understand how you acheived them.
Wow, a lot of misconceptions here.
Ok:
Bump map is a virtual height map on a surface. There is some calculation of shadows, but it's VERY basic.
Normal maps are similar, but the colors encode the surface vector. Which is just a fancy way of saying 'direction.' It communicates to the renderer exactly how the surface is supposed to face. The lighting with Normals is much more detailed than with a bump map.
Displacement map actually distorts the surface.
Displacement is the most... true to life? Light works across displacement because, well, it's a different shape. If you had the ability to have a billion polygons, this would be the most realistic effect.
Buuuut... yeah, that's not practical for a lot of reasons.
Normals, on the other hand, can capture really fine details, very realistically. It accomplishes most of what displacement or HD details can, with much less work from the engine. It will not be accurate around the edges of a figure, obviously, because it doesn't actually change the shape of the figure. But for small scale or subtle distortions of a surface, it works very well.
For Iray, a combination of the two can work really well; displacement can do the heavy lifting of moving features where they need to be, and the Normals can fill in the fiddly accurate details to really make it pop.
Bump shouldn't be ignored, either; while it lacks the punch of Normals, sometimes it adds crucial details. Also you can separate details between Bump and Normals; this can help you address different qualities.
Displacement is rarely necessary unless you have VERY dramatic features (like huge raised scars or... horns), or with very very close up shots. At medium or long range, people are very unlikely to notice a wart isn't actually raised.
I just gave each of them a shot to test and they seem fine. Not sure what would be causing it.
Thanks Melissa, I don't know then. Will have to check them again sometime.
Thanks Oso, that's much more in line with what I had always heard. Maybe you could help me to understand why more people aren't using combinations of normals and displacements to create high-definition skin details then, rather than everyone complaining about not having the HD morph tools. I assume there must be a technical reason, but when I see insane detail on a Zbrush mesh and then hear that you can export a lot of the detail through normals and displacements, I keep wondering why that isn't happening.
Only thing I want actually sculpted in HD detail is body shape, including muscularity. I don't want those details in bump, normal, or displacement maps.
Wrinkes and pores are better left to displacement and it would be nice if DAZ Studio / DAZ compliant models allowed the displacement maps for pores and wrinkles to be programmed in the UI to be swapped for various intervals in the pose / expression dials so that the particular displacement map in use for a particular pose/expression makes sense. And so it seems then that the DAZ Studio iRay shader model would need multiple layers on displacement maps that the material designer could specifiy the order of application to the model for and then apply. And then when you change the pose or expression it's have to calculate all those displacement maps again after potentially programatticaly swapping out displacement maps in use. You'd need a high video RAM GPU and fast GPU most certainly I think. You'd want to easily toggle displacement calcuculations on & off until your scene was created to your liking and then turn on displacement and work on the expressions &/or aging and so on.
Actually, for the expressions & wrinkles they (DAZ 3D) could get a huge number of sample photos, 3D scannings of people with various expressions, pores, wrinkles, and then derive math formulas that describe those expressions compared to the expressionless version for that same geometry. Then they take those equations and transform them for another model's geometry and then mathematically create displacement maps as needed to be cached after creation for each new model geometry. So then the expressions and wrinkles equations for the G9 bases are portable to future G9 models without having to model them again. I'm talking a restricted domain like a human face, eg, dogs can't smile like humans or get wrinkles either in the same way generally they have to be born with them.
Maybe that can be part of what Genesis 9 Base will actually offer us. That is upgrade worthy I think but the PBR shader model needs those capabilities added to it.
Having read other forum members comments I think normal and bump maps are antiquated technology and should be avoided now.
I know I want access to HD morphs so I can sculpt characters that baking maps wouldn't work for. There is one specific character I want to make for my own fanart use that has spines and facial tentacles and you can't swing that with maps alone. It needs to be HD sculpted. The only way I can do it myself now, without access to the HD morph loader, is to turn his face into a geograft, and that's a whole other pain in the pattoo.
I guess I'm being misunderstood because I'm not suggesting we don't need HD morphs or that we can accomplish sculpt-like mesh deformations with maps. All I want to know is why aren't we using maps to create the kinds of things that current DAZ HD morphs give us - lip, knuckle, and knee detail, small wrinkles, moles, and such. Do we really need to use high definition morphs at subdivision 3 to see large veins in an elderly figure's hands?
SnowSultan: that's a very good question. All I can figure is that people simply don't know how.
I once did a test baking hd details to Normals and found the result nearly identical.
The only times I feel pressed to use hd details is when I need sharp points (like the Oolong spikes).
There are a few out there -
https://www.daz3d.com/ultra-detailed-displacement-maps-for-victoria-7
https://www.daz3d.com/ultra-detailed-displacement-maps-for-genesis-3-base-female
For viens yes,. but for pores, moles, wrinkles, expressions, and similar surface structures no.
I use these often, but you really have to crank up the subd in Iray to make the details shine.
Could be that DAZ wants to have a hold on something DS specific which would be the HD tool only avaliable to PAs. Since using HD mesh to create quality maps is the norm outside of DAZland, maybe this method isn't accepted in the store, you never know. DAZ is a business afterall.
It's less of an issue now we have the Iray preview mode, but most preview modes won't show displacement while they will show HD morphs (albeit, by default, at a lower maximum resolution).
There are vendors doing this, but I think it's primarily only those that don't have access to the HD tool (not a DAZ PA). I think a good example is Cameleon Rose at Rendo. She has a lot of HD detail, all from displacement and normal maps. The down side to using displacement maps instead of HD sculpts is that you still need to increase the subd levels on the mesh to get the HD details, in addition to using high-res maps, both increase the amount of GPU RAM consumed. If Nvidia would either implement out of core texture and geometry or implement micro displacement without increasing mesh density then using displacement maps would be much easier and system friendly. The other big downside with displacement maps is that autofit doesn't see/adjust for them, so you have increased chances for poke through.
has anyone rendered anything wiht the new HD heads? perhaps show some examples. Thanks
Although this might sound a bit daft, I wonder if a lot of the time a DAZ PA will want to add HD morphs is so they can put HD into the product's name, and thus maybe look more modern. I don't know if they would be allowed to put HD in the name if only displacement/normal maps were included.
Well the good side of using morphs is that it's easier to combine them with characters which already use normal or displacement maps.
Morphs have a very high reusability.
You can combine and use them as you want. Of course, here I talk about split morphs like the PAs have. That's why it would be nice if we would also have access to something like that.
It's what I initially thought Daz released. A few individual morphs that could add what details we want. not some generic head shapes with multiple morphs built into them that would not only add a bunch of details toghether but also change the initial shape of the head.
For maps is not as easy. Maybe someone likes some HD details but not others, you would have to have a different map for each combination, or maybe there is a way to do it otherwise but I don't know it if there is.
Here are the heads with textures, no other head morphs dialed in. I think they have tons of character, but I'm really bad at telling the difference between HD morphs and regular morphs unless the detail is super strong.