Step-by-Step: Using the new PBR Skin on Genesis 8
aldoraeno
Posts: 16
It took me a while to figure out what I was missing here, so hopefully this will help other people avoid some of the same confusion.
Prerequisites
- The latest Daz Studio 4.15
- The latest package update for Genesis 8 Male/Female Starter Essentials
Applying to a Genesis 8 character
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Load your Genesis 8 character. It doesn't have to be on an 8.1 figure base, a regular Genesis 8 is fine.
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In the Surfaces pane, select the surfaces you want the shader for, most likely your character's Skin and Lips.
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In the Smart Content or Content Library pane, find and load the "Daz Iray PBRSkin" shader. (Your character probably now looks like a pale white ghost in Iray.)
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Type "Enable" into the search box a the top of the Surfaces pane. You'll see a long list of On/Off buttons, with only Diffuse Enable turned on.
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Turn on Translucency Enable. (You should now have a darker but transparent-looking ghost character in Iray.)
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At the bottom of the list, turn on Transmission Enable and SSS Enable (these buttons didn't exist before step 5). This should make your character finally appear corporeal.
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Turn on any other shader features your original skin material used:
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Most Iray skin uses Bump and Dual Lobe Specular.
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Some unusual skin materials or makeup may use Top Coat, Metallic Flakes, and/or Metallicity.
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At this point, your character when rendered in Iray should have skin fairly similar to what you had before applying the PBR Skin shader. Hopefully it looks better in some ways. It might be shinier, lighter, darker, etc. Clear the search box and tweak any settings to adjust for whatever you're looking for.
Note: If your character is way too shiny after turning on Dual Lobe Specular Enable, you may want to also turn on Specular Occlusion Enable and greatly reduce the Grazing and/or Facing values under it to get a more subtle sheen. An occlusion mask texture is not required for this.
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Comments
Thanks for the instructions.
This is awesome thank you for the info on what needs to be done..
PBR does look promising, as I finally worked out how to get non human skintones working, since a lot of the old settings have either been removed or renamed..
I've been working with the new PBRSkin as well and have ran into a few problems. First I want to say I am really glad they made a PBR skin, the uber skin shader looks great, but is inconsistant, especially in low keys. Having a character one can move between scenes and lighting conditions without having to make lots of tweaks to the skin will be a huge time saver and PBR I guess is moving the characters towards industry standards.
There is no Base Color Effect for Scatter & Transmit.
There is also no SSS Reflectance Tint to reduce reds. I assume this was done because the reds should be reduced in the sss map instead of relying on this feature?
There is no glossy, but DualLobe pretty much replaced that anyway.
There is no refraction options.
There is no Base Thin Film, but I was using that for my own microskin and with the new microdetail I don't need it and don't have worry about 8k maps for that anymore.
No Thin Wall, I only rarely used this but it allowed light to transmit through like ears and noses and fingers and such, does anyone know how to get this with the new shader? One solution I had got axed as well because of the next line.
Probably the biggest concer is the lack of any cutout opacity setting. Unless like so many things it has been assigned somwhere else. This is a big concern to me because I sometimes do illustrations of internals, like during fight scenes bones breaking, organs squishing and would use the opacity setting to see through the skin and had the anatomy m4 elements inside the character and I could render what I wanted in one shot without making multiple renders and post layer editing.
Hey,
I just did some tests with Mei Lin.
After loading the figure, I selected all skin materials and applied the new pbr shader and enabled these settings:
The result
Original Uber skin:
PBR Skin:
Original Uber skin:
PBR Skin:
The only difference seems to be, that the old uber skin has some highlights in the shadows, which the new pbr skin is missing.
Hard to tell if this is better or worse.
The only befenfit of the shader for old skin seems to be, that I can apply these micro displacement.
Or are there other benefits which I don't see. For me it looks like that just appling the new shader to old skins doesn't make the render result autmatically better.
My understanding about PBR is that one of the benefits will be that if you get the skin looking good in Filament it will look just as good in Iray. Is that right?
I agree. Out of the box, the old skin looks better to me too, The new skin looks to be in dire need of moisturizer.
I posted these in the other thread as well, but I spent a lot of time messing with the shader last night and my converted figure's skin (RY Alison) looks very different with it on and set up. Unfortunately I'm at work so I can't do a side-by-side render, but the closest comparison I can think of is N.G.S. 2. I've increased translucency since I rendered these out, which helped with detail.
The differences didn't become super clear until I went into Victoria 8.1's texture folder and started plugging in her AO and detail weight maps. I also used the height detail map instead of the normal.
I'm not sure it's more realistic--it didn't take a figure intended to look like a video game character and make her look like a cosplayer, obviously--but it's definitely more consistent, which is a big help to me.
This has been my general experience so far, too. The shader looks roughly the same, but makes the skin appear either extra-wet or extra-dry, depending on specular occlusion settings and the surrounding lighting.
I would be interested to see if it looks better with an occlusion map texture (the problem may just be that the specular occlusion is too "flat"), but since I haven't purchased Victoria 8.1, I don't have a texture that was intended for this purpose.
The occlusion seems to make a real difference. While messing around in Substance I was actually wishing that I could try using AO on Daz figures, because it seems like there are some neat things you can do with it. That said, I have no expertise in this area but the AO maps don't look very different from specular maps included with some previous G8 characters.
I've enabled occulsion in my comparsion, but it didn't improve the skin. From what kind of difference are you talking?
What is AO?
Maybe https://www.daz3d.com/skin-detail-resource-1 is for you?
AO is ambient occlusion, and it basically lets you use an image map to define how much light reaches parts of your model that should be in shadow. So if you have a building set and use an AO map you can deepen shadows in the corners and where edges meet (this is where I'm most familiar with it). I think the idea was that Iray didn't need AO--please don't quote me--but when I compared a skin straight from the normal material preset to the same one with the shader and an AO map, the latter's facial details were clearer in dim light.
(On a side note it is always kind of scary discussing this stuff from a layperson's perspective as I figure it out, so I would love more information from people who are better versed in it but if I get details wrong I promise I am not intentionally oversimplifying or anything. I'm just sharing what I find as I poke around.)
@plasma_ring How do you create an AO map?
The ones I used came with Victoria 8.1, but hers actually look different than the AO maps I've seen before. If you google "ambient occlusion map" you'll see that they generally just have the shadowed areas defined where creases or corners are, but the ones in her AO slots when I load her have way more detail spread out across the face.
If you use a texture painting program like Substance Painter it includes AO when you export your final maps, but I think you can also make them in Photoshop.
Edit: Kicking this over to a dev who actually knows how it works. :V
What are your guys' best settings for the Detail tab so far?
Also, you can use Materialize to make AO maps, so that's cool.
I have FilterForge, is it possible to make them with that?
I've never used it, but it looks like it's one of the options for map generation!
Thank you, I understand. But these maps seems for me more usefull for rendering and postwork.
Maybe I'm wrong, because lack of expierence, but why should I want such a map on a model? Isn't this the job of scene lightnign?
Some questions about the new shader.
The old shader is called !Iray Uber Base.
The new one is Daz Iray PBR Skin.
After doing some reasearch, for my understanding BOTH shaders are PBR and Uber shaders.
Uber seems to mean only that this shader simplified, we are using these handy controls instead of nodes.
While PBR is the phyiscally render methods.
Is this correct?
Next question.
Here a quote from the new G8.1 release:
What do I have to do to get the improvements for Subsurface Scattering? As I proved, just using the new shader does nothing.
And what did they changed exactly to achtive the improved Subsurface Scattering?
I hope someone can create a generalized Iray Uber to PBRSkin script, because simply enabling all features gives me flat looking skin.
Where does this come from? Is this real hair or texture map detail?
My problem is this shader does not display anything but a smooth white shell in my D/S4.12.
However I did throw it into Shader Mixer ... I did manage to add a cutout opacity dial HOWEVER I also deleted something which I know not what it does {because it became a loner when I added the cutout}. The new shader has some overriding features though because the proper name for the cutout did not come through and I'm rather suspicious that some of the other dials may not be quite right. But I mention all this because maybe somebody else could get such an item working. If they do, remember to rename the Shader, Save the new Shader, and then save out desired Shader presets.
Did you enable the Makeup option? A similar thing happens if you apply makeup or other overlay textures in the uber shader diffuse channel and then remove them without turning down the weight, so I think that might be where those go now. I kept it turned off because I was getting a white shell effect and wasn't sure what to do with it yet.
No. The Daz Iray PBR Skin is an extra Shading Preset in its own folder. !Iray Uber Base etc. still exist ;-)
Whether enabled or not, everything is white. I can make it appear some colour in the viewport, but upon rendering, everything is white. Bright white. Just for fun I tried a small section using 3D. Then it was brilliant bright white! In applying the shader the program was told to ignore textures, so yes, the surfaces have textures.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of a franken-skin I put together (mostly Babina 8)(I only updated the head, so please ignore any funk in the neck on the right) -
And here is the HDRI I used in case anybody wants to replicate the lighting - https://hdrihaven.com/hdri/?h=studio_small_03
You might want to specify that IM00013176-42_DefaultResourcesforDAZStudio415.zip is needed as well. I didn't realize that the latest DS had an additional resource .zip to be downloaded, which is where the PBR shader is.
@Catherine3678ab If im remembering correctly I think you have to have 4.15 for the shader to work properly.