Fiddling with Iray skin settings...

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  • eligodesigneligodesign Posts: 69
    edited October 2020

    thank you very much to everyone who have shared information on skin and hair settings. I'm having very good results with G3. However, I'm struggling a bit with G8F & M skin settings. Also some hair products are still too grainy even after 4h render time. I don't have such issues with G3 or lover. Render time is much faster. Have been reading all possible forum treads and external articles, I'm still stuck with G8. I'd appreciate your help, since I'm looking forward to render some promo images. Thank you in advance :)

    Attached images is the last render with skin settings with the render time over 4h.

    In this image i used V7 skin settings suggested by Arnold. I'm getting realistic results however she looks a bit too wet.

    ED_HAIR_RENDER.jpg
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    ED_SKIN_RENDER.jpg
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    ED_G8F_SKIN_1.jpg
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    ED_G8F_SKIN_2.jpg
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    ED_G8F_SKIN_3.jpg
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    ED_ELVIRA_PORTRAIT.jpg
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    Post edited by eligodesign on
  • ok, I have purchased skin shaders. looking forward to test them

  • Gr00vusGr00vus Posts: 366
    edited October 2020

    Consider increasing the Base Bump and / or Normal Map values, and putting the bump or normal map in the Top Coat Bump channel (set the Top Coat Bump Mode accordingly) and experiment with the value for that channel (start from 1.00 and work from there towards a result you like). That should help break up the highlights and replicate a bit more realistic durmal topology. 

    I also often apply an HD morph with good skin detail that loosley matches the character's features (if you're not already using a character that has an explicit HD morph). That helps replicate a more realistic durmal topology in most cases. I set subdimension to 4 when using HD morphs, I find the details tend to get washed out at lower subdimension values.

    thank you very much to everyone who have shared information on skin and hair settings. I'm having very good results with G3. However, I'm struggling a bit with G8F & M skin settings. Also some hair products are still too grainy even after 4h render time. I don't have such issues with G3 or lover. Render time is much faster. Have been reading all possible forum treads and external articles, I'm still stuck with G8. I'd appreciate your help, since I'm looking forward to render some promo images. Thank you in advance :)

    Attached images is the last render with skin settings with the render time over 4h.

    In this image i used V7 skin settings suggested by Arnold. I'm getting realistic results however she looks a bit too wet.

     

    Post edited by Gr00vus on
  • Leonides02Leonides02 Posts: 1,370

    This was my attempt to combine isidorekeeghan's Chromatic method + NGS2's method. What do you think?

    photoreal test2.png
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  • inquireinquire Posts: 2,088

    Astonishingly fine! And what is the isidorekeeghan's Chromatic method again? Is there a product for this?

  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,217
    inquire said:

    Astonishingly fine! And what is the isidorekeeghan's Chromatic method again? Is there a product for this?

    there's a pdf somewhere https://www.daz3d.com/forums/uploads/FileUpload/f0/0d88f88dea588a65f53d1f82ccfe9d.pdf

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437

    I looked over isidorekeeghan's Chromatic method... there's not a lot of actual, factual stuff in there....In fact, right off the bat the advice is incredibly bad.  Increase the gamma on the skin textures? In what universe is this a good idea? Sure, some of the renders might look alright, but I'm gonna chalk that up to luck rather than skill.

    I cobbled together most of the good settings, along with the links to the actual maths behind the shaders and colors over in this thread here:

    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5335941/#Comment_5335941

     

  • mmkdazmmkdaz Posts: 335

    From both @evilded77 and @isidorekeeghan I request better explaination on UNITS used, VARIABLES selected, and Engine Bias (errors) of the Transmitted Measurement Distance and Scattering Measurement Distance parameters.

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437
    edited December 2020

    I'm sorry, you won't be getting those from me. I freely admit that I don't understand the math. You can read ArnoldC's explanations, which I have linked to. That's the best I can do. Frankly, I'm not even sure what you're asking beyond "units".

     

    Arnold's explanation begins here

     

    "The real reason I used (and had to) a SMD of 0.01 was, that subsurface scattering is multiple times higher than transmission. Since Iray requires you to use a linear value between 0.00 and 1.00 to work properly, the SMD had to be lowered to get a color value below 1.00. That's not 0.01 meter, but 0.01 centimeter!"

    mmkdaz said:

    From both @evilded77 and @isidorekeeghan I request better explaination on UNITS used, VARIABLES selected, and Engine Bias (errors) of the Transmitted Measurement Distance and Scattering Measurement Distance parameters.

    Post edited by evilded777 on
  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437
    edited December 2020

    You shouldn't need different settings for spectral rendering.  Nor should you need to change your lights

    Spectral Rendering

    Here's Underbelly with the settings defined by mostly the work done by people in this thread.  I rendered this in linear color space then very slightly tonemapped it afterwards to give it a little more "natural" look. I did not do a lot of work on the specular, and that part is not great... I literally threw this together in a couple minutes.

    underbelly3-Beauty.jpg
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    Post edited by evilded777 on
  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310
    edited December 2020

    While you *shouldn't* need different settings for spectral rendering there is a rather nasty bug that forms dark lines along all the seams of the character if you use a color in transmitted color you can see it right on the shoulder.

    Say what you else you will about isadorekeegan's method but it absolutely fixes it 

    set the transmitted color to .99/.99/.99 and the transmited distance to somewhere around .02 and you get practically the same result as a skin colored transmitted color and a transmitted distance of 1 just without the buggy lines 

    And I can vaguely explain the maths as to why it looks so similar. the transmitted distance tells the shader at what depth it should reach the transmitted color (in meters) so if you set your transmitted color to skin color and the transmitted distance to 1. the volume will hit that color once it passes through a meter of material - of course our ears and noses aren't  a meter thick nor is any of us - thin bits like ears are 1-2 milimeters so they get to roughly 1-2 hundredths of that color skin color, which is basically white, thus the results are very similar to telling the shader to be .99/.99/.99 at 2mm (.02 transmitted distance)

     

     

    this is a pretty mild example too. depending on the lighting the bug is very noticable I've attached an example with very noticable black lines around the lips

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    Post edited by j cade on
  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437

    j cade said:

    While you *shouldn't* need different settings for spectral rendering there is a rather nasty bug that forms dark lines along all the seams of the character if you use a color in transmitted color you can see it right on the shoulder.

     

    Say what you else you will about isadorekeegan's method but it absolutely fixes it 

    set the transmitted color to .99/.99/.99 and the transmited distance to somewhere around .02 and you get practically the same result as a skin colored transmitted color and a transmitted distance of 1 just without the buggy lines 

    And I can vaguely explain the maths as to why it looks so similar. the transmitted distance tells the shader at what depth it should reach the transmitted color (in meters) so if you set your transmitted color to skin color and the transmitted distance to 1. the volume will hit that color once it passes through a meter of material - of course our ears and noses aren't  a meter thick nor is any of us - thin bits like ears are 1-2 milimeters so they get to roughly 1-2 hundredths of that color skin color, which is basically white, thus the results are very similar to telling the shader to be .99/.99/.99 at 2mm (.02 transmitted distance)

    this is a pretty mild example too. depending on the lighting the bug is very noticable I've attached an example with very noticable black lines around the lips

     I could say A LOT about the rest of the "method", but I won't. That wouldn't be constructive, and I've said enough already.

    Are you sure about that meters part? Because if I understand it correctly, the rest of it is in centimeters. Not trying to be argumentative (well, in a negative way... nothing gets accomplished without argument). The only place I have ever seen the those lines is under the chin/neck, and not consistently.

  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310
    edited December 2020

    evilded777 said:

    j cade said:

    While you *shouldn't* need different settings for spectral rendering there is a rather nasty bug that forms dark lines along all the seams of the character if you use a color in transmitted color you can see it right on the shoulder.

     

    Say what you else you will about isadorekeegan's method but it absolutely fixes it 

    set the transmitted color to .99/.99/.99 and the transmited distance to somewhere around .02 and you get practically the same result as a skin colored transmitted color and a transmitted distance of 1 just without the buggy lines 

    And I can vaguely explain the maths as to why it looks so similar. the transmitted distance tells the shader at what depth it should reach the transmitted color (in meters) so if you set your transmitted color to skin color and the transmitted distance to 1. the volume will hit that color once it passes through a meter of material - of course our ears and noses aren't  a meter thick nor is any of us - thin bits like ears are 1-2 milimeters so they get to roughly 1-2 hundredths of that color skin color, which is basically white, thus the results are very similar to telling the shader to be .99/.99/.99 at 2mm (.02 transmitted distance)

    this is a pretty mild example too. depending on the lighting the bug is very noticable I've attached an example with very noticable black lines around the lips

     I could say A LOT about the rest of the "method", but I won't. That wouldn't be constructive, and I've said enough already.

    Are you sure about that meters part? Because if I understand it correctly, the rest of it is in centimeters. Not trying to be argumentative (well, in a negative way... nothing gets accomplished without argument). The only place I have ever seen the those lines is under the chin/neck, and not consistently.

    The bug seems to happen most if you have strong lighting from the side - as in my second example - bits that are being directly hit tend to not have it as much - as I tend to do a lot of side and back lighting I was hitting it constantly between not rendering in spectral and swiching to colorless transmitted color I decided the latter was the better option 

    I am probably off on the scale (I do wich you could do like one does in blender and just type in the units), but since the relationship is still very bright color at .02 vs darker color at 1 the reciprical nature of transmitted color and distance comes into play

    one of the two images has a transmitted distance of 1 the other .02 the only other setting I changed was transmitted color - can you tell which is which? even if a transmitted distance of 1 represents some more accurate scientific truth if you can get identical settings with other settings why not?

     

    Honestly my current skin settings use metalic flakes so I'm really not bothered with scientific accuracy. (you can set the scale of the flakes way down so the reflection looks broken up without having to use tiling bump maps)

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    ssst2.jpg
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    Post edited by j cade on
  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437

    TMD of 1 doesn't represent any sort of "truth". It tells the engine what to do: scatter until you reach the color set in Transmitted Color. Its a hack, actually. Its a simplification. But an elegant one when you pick the TC from the texture map.

    And no, I can not tell which one is which, but I can see that they are different. I also tend to do a lot of side and back lighting (I use Painter's Lights for basically everything). I am also sort of attached to my old fashioned tiling bump maps, I've been using them since the days of Generation 2....

  • davlo88davlo88 Posts: 11

    j cade said:

    Okay, I got my hair settings together (I've been distracted by hockey).

    Some notes:

    Translucence can be spotty. If you're using a hair where the hair from the back of the neck is very noticeable from the front, it might be best to turn it off (This is more a problem with the nature of trans-mapped hair)

    I replace all hair textures with OOT's since, it makes it easier for me to make presets and get predictable results I also go into the image editor and set the horizontal tiling to 2 or higher to make it crisper (when did daz add that? its made my life so much easier. I used to do do many weird tricks to try to tile textures without effecting opacity) You don't have to do that, but if you have any favorite hair textures that are tillable, I recommend it

    These settings are for brown hair, for blond hair I have to turn the spec way up.

    The other reason I recommend tiling textures is editing purposes, I did 99% of the setup on a sphere, It renders quickly, so its easy to have your aux view in rendered mode, and its way easier to see which way the anisotropy is actually going.

    The other image is the displacement map I'm using it makes the hair strandier, and is especially useful on flatter hairs. Watch out for the displacement on hairs that have modeled strands, I forgot to turn down the subD on the strands on one of goldtassel's hairs and slowed my computer to a crawl. When I turned it off for the strands it did look fantastic though.

     

     

    What character is that? she looks amazing!

  • Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,798
    edited January 2021

    davlo88 said:

    j cade said:

    Okay, I got my hair settings together (I've been distracted by hockey).

    Some notes:

    Translucence can be spotty. If you're using a hair where the hair from the back of the neck is very noticeable from the front, it might be best to turn it off (This is more a problem with the nature of trans-mapped hair)

    I replace all hair textures with OOT's since, it makes it easier for me to make presets and get predictable results I also go into the image editor and set the horizontal tiling to 2 or higher to make it crisper (when did daz add that? its made my life so much easier. I used to do do many weird tricks to try to tile textures without effecting opacity) You don't have to do that, but if you have any favorite hair textures that are tillable, I recommend it

    These settings are for brown hair, for blond hair I have to turn the spec way up.

    The other reason I recommend tiling textures is editing purposes, I did 99% of the setup on a sphere, It renders quickly, so its easy to have your aux view in rendered mode, and its way easier to see which way the anisotropy is actually going.

    The other image is the displacement map I'm using it makes the hair strandier, and is especially useful on flatter hairs. Watch out for the displacement on hairs that have modeled strands, I forgot to turn down the subD on the strands on one of goldtassel's hairs and slowed my computer to a crawl. When I turned it off for the strands it did look fantastic though.

     

     

    What character is that? she looks amazing!

    Post edited by Rashad Carter on
  • Rashad CarterRashad Carter Posts: 1,798
    edited January 2021

    Not sure wha happened during the post but...

    All of JCades renders look amazing. Regardless of character skin or morph. It's the rendering skills, not the skin textures. He/She even alters his/her skin textures as needed. True master, Leaves nothing to chance, makes decisions as an artist should. And it shows.

    Edit:

    I'll even go so far to say that JCade has visited EVERY ASPECT of character rendering multiple times... to the point of the incusion of vellus hair.... From modeling polygon fidelity to textures ti lighting to render settings... Exhaustive work, likely unmatched by most users. I learn so much from his/her posts. JCade is saving us all a lot of time with his/her approach, testing the things we'd all love to test if we had the time.

    Post edited by Rashad Carter on
  • MendomanMendoman Posts: 400
    edited January 2021

    I'd be open to see new skin shader too. Using something like https://texturing.xyz/collections/microskin, and using multiple layers with tiling and blending like in  https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader we could build pretty detailed skins, and those microskin textures wouldn't need to be 4k. Maybe one 4k map for entire body to control translucency and bunch of 1-2k maps to control blending of those microtextures, but other than that I think 1k maps should be plenty enough for those microtextures, so maybe we'd even save some resources.

    Post edited by Mendoman on
  • ragamuffin57ragamuffin57 Posts: 132
    edited January 2021

    Mendoman said:

    I'd be open to see new skin shader too. Using something like https://texturing.xyz/collections/microskin, and using multiple layers with tiling and blending like in  https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader we could build pretty detailed skins, and those microskin textures wouldn't need to be 4k. Maybe one 4k map for entire body to control translucency and bunch of 1-2k maps to control blending of those microtextures, but other than that I think 1k maps should be plenty enough for those microtextures, so maybe we'd even save some resources.

    There is a new mdl skin shader in the works it is mean't t be already in in the new beta but we do not have any access to it at the moment. 

    So with that in mind I am hopeful to see a much emproved Studio with a nice shiny skin shader hopefully like random walk ! But with Daz best not to keep your hopes up :)

     

    Post edited by ragamuffin57 on
  • Leonides02Leonides02 Posts: 1,370
    edited January 2021

    evilded777 said:

     

     I could say A LOT about the rest of the "method", but I won't. That wouldn't be constructive, and I've said enough already.

    Are you sure about that meters part? Because if I understand it correctly, the rest of it is in centimeters. Not trying to be argumentative (well, in a negative way... nothing gets accomplished without argument). The only place I have ever seen the those lines is under the chin/neck, and not consistently.

    Isadorekeegan's method absolutely works, and works well. 

    I've attached the PDF for anyone who wants to give it a shot. 

     

    pdf
    pdf
    CHROMATIC SKIN SHADER GUIDE.pdf
    1M
    Post edited by Leonides02 on
  • AsariAsari Posts: 703

    Mendoman said:

    I'd be open to see new skin shader too. Using something like https://texturing.xyz/collections/microskin, and using multiple layers with tiling and blending like in  https://www.daz3d.com/muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader we could build pretty detailed skins, and those microskin textures wouldn't need to be 4k. Maybe one 4k map for entire body to control translucency and bunch of 1-2k maps to control blending of those microtextures, but other than that I think 1k maps should be plenty enough for those microtextures, so maybe we'd even save some resources.

    There is a new mdl skin shader in the works it is mean't t be already in in the new beta but we do not have any access to it at the moment. 

    So with that in mind I am hopeful to see a much emproved Studio with a nice shiny skin shader hopefully like random walk ! But with Daz best not to keep your hopes up :)

     

    Can DAZ implement a surface shader with random wslk SSS, or is that something which Iray and Nvidia need to implement first? I've read somewhere that Iray does not yet support random walk SSS, has newer Iray updates implemented random walk?
  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437

    Still not entirely convinced that Spectral Rendering is really all that necessary. In my own experiments it does more for the dual lobe hair shader than it does for skin, even the new improved skin shader for Gen 8.1 which is on display here on Genesis 7 (Darius 7). The specular is hugely improved, and if we could get some specular maps that ACTUALLY reflect (no pun intended) the areas of the face that ARE more reflective/shiny we'd be in a much better place.

     

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437
    edited January 2021

    Can you tell which is which?

    The only difference between these two is the use of  Spectral Rendering (faithful/64) and the transmission settings for it (no lights or other render settings where changed) and the other does not use Spectral Rendering and the transmission settings are colored and TMD of 1.

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    1.jpg
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    Post edited by evilded777 on
  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 17,890

    evilded777 said:

    Can you tell which is which?

    The only difference between these two is the use of  Spectral Rendering (faithful/64) and the transmission settings for it (no lights or other render settings where changed) and the other does not use Spectral Rendering and the transmission settings are colored and TMD of 1.

    The darker hued skin render is the one you turned on spectral rendering for. I've filed a ticket with DAZ 3D about that in 2019 because it seems to make photometric lights loose strength by orders of magnitude (which more be correct for all I know but it seems odd to me).

  • evilded777evilded777 Posts: 2,437

    nonesuch00 said:

    evilded777 said:

    Can you tell which is which?

    The only difference between these two is the use of  Spectral Rendering (faithful/64) and the transmission settings for it (no lights or other render settings where changed) and the other does not use Spectral Rendering and the transmission settings are colored and TMD of 1.

    The darker hued skin render is the one you turned on spectral rendering for. I've filed a ticket with DAZ 3D about that in 2019 because it seems to make photometric lights loose strength by orders of magnitude (which more be correct for all I know but it seems odd to me).

    I answered nonesuch00 privately so as not to give it away. Any other takers?

    Spectral rendering bug aside, adjusting the gamma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction) of your source texture maps is not how you go about things. That is more likely to lead to unpredictable results.  You want to talk about adjusting other things like: brightness/contrast or hue/saturation... fine, these things are aesthetic choices, gamma is not.

  • davlo88davlo88 Posts: 11

    j cade said:

    Okay, I got my hair settings together (I've been distracted by hockey).

    Some notes:

    Translucence can be spotty. If you're using a hair where the hair from the back of the neck is very noticeable from the front, it might be best to turn it off (This is more a problem with the nature of trans-mapped hair)

    I replace all hair textures with OOT's since, it makes it easier for me to make presets and get predictable results I also go into the image editor and set the horizontal tiling to 2 or higher to make it crisper (when did daz add that? its made my life so much easier. I used to do do many weird tricks to try to tile textures without effecting opacity) You don't have to do that, but if you have any favorite hair textures that are tillable, I recommend it

    These settings are for brown hair, for blond hair I have to turn the spec way up.

    The other reason I recommend tiling textures is editing purposes, I did 99% of the setup on a sphere, It renders quickly, so its easy to have your aux view in rendered mode, and its way easier to see which way the anisotropy is actually going.

    The other image is the displacement map I'm using it makes the hair strandier, and is especially useful on flatter hairs. Watch out for the displacement on hairs that have modeled strands, I forgot to turn down the subD on the strands on one of goldtassel's hairs and slowed my computer to a crawl. When I turned it off for the strands it did look fantastic though.

    is she a characer from the store or is she custom?

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