Kanade 8: Alternative Bump & Normals
magog_a4eb71ab
Posts: 769
Is it just me or is Kanade 8's skin bump & normal maps way too extreme? I tried setting the bump as low as 0.20 with the normal at 0.5 compared to the original settings(which are way way too high) and finally gave up and swapped K8's bump out with Aiko 8's bump & just removed the normals... I find it odd that one would use these kinds of bump/normals for an anime-type character. I looked at each in an image editor comparing them to other characters and the difference is like night & day.
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Kanade's mats load with bump at half strength and normals double strength. You can adjust them if you like without losing her textures.
That's the problem. If I lower them down too much, it raises the question of what's the point of using them? They look something awful on the character's face, like as if they were meant for a much older type of character, if that explanation makes sense. Some areas its too strong while in others on the same texture map its not strong enough. Its noticeable in some of the promo images( https://www.daz3d.com/kanade-8 ). I'm a bit curious of some of the lighting they used, too. The default colors for translucency & base give the character's skin a slight gray-ash color to it with a color temp lighting of 6750, so I set the skin base color to 0.98 0.94 0.81, lowered the translucency to 0.55, and made the translucency color 1.00 0.90 0.94 . Looks really nice with A8's base bump, so I'll have to do some full renders.
You can do whatever you like, but there's a reason we have the sliders. Typically, it's a good idea to use lower settings for close-up images, and higher settings for greater distance.
This default Kanade. I don't do a lot with stylized characters, and it's good to remember that Kanade is not intended to be "photorealistic", but I dunno, seems fine?
What version of DAZ Studio are you using? I think you'll find with version 4.14.0.8 the bumps/normals are stronger than they used to be which for some characters also exposes that they unfortunately aren't scaled correctly.
I'm still using version 4.10. I got the Kanade 8 base back when it first came out and had the same issue with the face texture, but figured it was a combination of bad lighting & surface settings on my part.
Sevrin, you're missing my point. When the bump/normals are too extreme on one part of the texture vs the rest of it, setting them low enough may correct the areas on that part of the texture but the lowered settings will affect the whole texture resulting in it being too low in other areas. Its like any other texture map: if it doesn't have the appropriate consistency and/or gradient its not going to matter how high or low the sliders are adjusted.