Put shine on genesis skin

VicS · January 2022

How do I make genesis skin have a shine to it without converting it to PBR Iray?

Richard Haseltine · January 2022

Which Genesis? Are you using the base materials or an add-on set?

VicS · January 2022

It is both for base material or genesis with another genesis character's skin appled to it. Is the technoque different for both?

Richard Haseltine · January 2022

It would depend on the shader used. Assuming you use Iray to render you could go to the Surfaces pane and in the Editor tab select all the skin surfaces, then switch to the Presets tab and apply the Iray Uber Base shader. Once you had that you could make sure the Glossy layered Weight was non-zero and adjust the settings under that - Weight itself cotnrols the amount, the color is self-explanatory, Effect is what happens to the light (Scatter is probably the best strting point), Reflectivity is how shiny it is, and roughness how even.

nicstt · January 2022

I would ask the question first: what is causing the shininess?

Skin doesn't shine much, unless there it is very oily or wet. Both of those look quite different.

Just adding shine will look fake.

VicS · January 2022

I try to add a little shine in hopes to make the skin look interesting.

marble · January 2022

vic3d said:

I try to add a little shine in hopes to make the skin look interesting.

I do the opposite. I try to avoid that plastic doll look so I tone down any shine and I attempt to increase Subsurface Scattering although that's usually trial and error because I don't know how.

Granville · January 2022

You could add a geoshell and then set it to a water shader.

VicS · January 2022

I never heard of that before, looks very nice, thanks, if you know of anything else off the beaten track so good like that please let me know.

cgidesign · January 2022

You wrote

... without converting it to PBR Iray?

I am not sure what you mean by this, but if you are ok with using the Iray Uber Base shader (which is a PBR shader) there is a tip in the thread below.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7273166/#Comment_7273166

charles_2239525 · January 2022

I prefer the Uber PBR shader over the new PBR shader. But I'm an old fart stuck in ones ways. The best way to add SHINE to your character is by using Dual Specual Lobe maps. I am not sure EXACTLY what your objective is, screenshots are always great for letting us see where you are going. But like was mentioned we usually try and reduce glossy looks unless the character is wet. There are good ways and bad ways to adding glossy/shine and that really depends on the shader in use. We're not in your head so we don't know what your ultimate goal is, but if you give enough details and screenshots I sure as hell bet we can put you on the right track.

VicS · January 2022

I guess genesis skin was not even uber shader so therre were no options that could be found to make any shine, once i added the daz iray PBRskin then all the options come on for gloss,

Since for whatever reason my renders don't come out like any promo even though I have bought every concivable product including fast computer and written to artsits on daz site and here on the forum for advice, until now my renders continue to look flat and boring in comparison, M and V4 do look less flat for me than g8 renders but now I found with genesis I have made the skin, with the help of shine and tweaking, at least look like it is the skin of a doll and that does bring more reality into the render, they are like a joke compared to any skin in a good ppromo image but at least they look like something actually 3d.

The best tip I have gotten was to use only one spotilte per fgiure (previously I was using multiple and up close), and place it far away and maske the hdri low, this seem sto make the renders look better than they used to.

Here is a sample of the skin. I am happy with, again if I can render skin like the promos or even many free item render images on rendorosity I would be100 times more happy so I still do wish someone will help me get my renders the same but I don't get any advice that makes a difference, I guess for now In havegiven up and am thankful at least I finally like a skin style I can live with, the only way I can the render the ful lscene half way decent is to use DOF enough, if there is no or little DOF then it probably will not too interesting. I ahve seen so many renders with no DOF, or very little, like the Organ room one user posted at my organ room question post, it is so crisp and clear, even with 3dlite, those renders also looks way more intersting than my iray renders do. If I rendered a scene of the organ room without some heavy DOF it would really look like a big flat mush, not beautifully crisp. I also have to be careful to only use products that render good many, especially those with water or grass or most any ground or buildings do not fool the eye for one second that it is a 3d world as the promo images do. Many times I buy stuff only to find that it doesn't look top good when I render it. Becasue of this I only use 15-20% of the tons of stuff I bought from daz or rendorosity, I have a disease, since I love color and color depth so much when I see a great render I sometimes can't resist to buy that product, the disease is my mind doesn't logically tell me "remermber what happened last time that another purchase didn't render too good-dont keep buying more and more stuff thinking that will change the look the render" no matter what it is svery hard for me to resist to buy things, at least I have the patience usually to wait until they go on a big sale.

Richard I didn't know there was an oid and new PBR I assume this is the new one I'm using but what is the old one (or new one), called or where is it found

VicS · January 2022

Weird what prompted me to write all of that was what Richard had written, now on my end there is no recent entry from Ricahard.

VicS · January 2022

Another image

Leana · January 2022

vic3d said:

I guess genesis skin was not even uber shader

Iray did not exist in DS when Genesis was released, it was added years later. So no, the materials for Genesis won't use Iray uber shader at all, they will use 3DL shaders.

VicS · January 2022

But applying daz iray PBRskin then it is Iray and no lonbger 3DL correct?

In the image I have converted to daz iray PBRskin and added dual lobe for mthe shine, it does look a lot more 3d , I am open to suggestions to imrove it more.

Richard Haseltine · January 2022

Correct, but it won't have the optimal settings - indeed, the older 3Delight sets will not have the same maps for properties as the newer shaders (including newer 3Delight shaders) so don't expect this to be a one-click fix.

cgidesign · January 2022

It seems, you are not purely asking about shiny skin but lighting and image editing in general.

There are thousends of answers to this and none will be the magic one that makes a rendered image look good (and there are anyway so many opinions about what looks good and what does not). But at least they help to get ideas.

Regarding the promos: Keep in mind most of them are polished in post (meaning they were put into an image editor to make them look better).

My no. 1 tip: Search for tutorials about photo editing (not all of the know how works for rendered images but a lot do - you want something about jpg or png editing because DS does not output raw images, so, tutorials about raw processing are not what you are searching for). First topics you might want to check are "white balance" and "curve adjustments".

Example of your last render:

What I see there is:

to blue - maybe that is your intention but to me it looks way to cool and repelling
to flat - I would like more contrast
skins to red or to grey - again just my opinion

Just for fun I droped your image into Affinity Photo and dialed a few sliders.

More contrasty image:

More contrasty night style image:

For the editing I used the adjustments shown here (Affinity Photo in my case, but any editor will do):

Even a render with a complex light setup needs some post work. If you download the two orignal images from the attachment area of the post and compare them side by side you will notice that one is a bit dull and the other more contrasty. The dull one is the Iray output, the contrasty got a slight curve adjustment like I used on your image. You might also notice that the skin of the figure is not very shiny. If you like me to do so, I can post some info about how the scene is set up.

VicS · January 2022

So many people I asked says they do not use postwork so that is goiod to know that you told me.

I like what you did in terms of contrast but so much of the color has been lost.

Here's an image I really like that looks like it may be simple to recreate for someone who knows how (which of course I don't ) can you give me any tips how you think theye acheived this result, do you suspect there is postwork involved in this also? The skin is great-no shine either lol!

Thanks for showing me this cgidesign!

cgidesign · January 2022

Regarding the color:

There are adjustments for that:

Regarding postwork:

You can achive a lot in Iray directly but it takes a lot of time to render again and again just to get a bit more contrast. I know people are doing it anyway (me to sometimes ;-) And, sometimes doing a little curves adjustment is not considered being postwork. Some define postwork as "adding good rays" or "adding sun flares". But, there is no wrong or right - you can decide to do pure Iray or combine it with postwork.

Regarding the image you posted - let me check.

cgidesign · January 2022

Is this one ok? If yes, I'll explain it in detail.

And, yes, the image you posted was postworked. The background was not rendered but put in afterwards.

VicS · January 2022

Yes cgidesign I like the way yours looks also, please explain, thank you ! I would be happy to make G8 skin look like you have made it.

cgidesign · January 2022

It takes a bit:

Here is the first part:

cgidesign · January 2022

Part 2, Tone Mapping and Environment:

Base for everything is: Tone Mapping.

In this case an Exposure Value of 11.80 works well (no need to fiddle with the other values, they change automatically according to Exposure Value). In general: the brighter a scene is (e.g. outdoor with sun, HDRI Environment with high ev. values) the higher the Exposure Value shoud be set.

Environment:

The scene will use the environment light and a scene light - Mode must be Dome and Scene for this.

Draw Dome is active in this example to get the sky and ground rendered. Your posted image did not use this. Instead a transparent background was rendered to put a background image in postwork.

Environment Map: We don't use one in this example. If no map is used DS automatically switches to it's build in Sun/Sky simulation system.

Environment Intensity: This control how bright the enviroment light is. 0.75 worked well for this scene.

Environment Tint: According to "Observation 4" the environment needs to be a bit warm yellowish. Therfore I set a color that works for that.

SS Sun Disk Intensity: This one is set to 0.00 because I don't want to use the sun that is build into the environment lighting. Instead we use a Spot Light for this.

Other SS values: They control the position of the sun and subsequently it's incluence to the sky. E.g. if you set the sun's position to midnight then the sky will become pitch black. Even when SS Sun Disk Intensity is 0.00 this effect to the sky is still relevant. I just set values in this example scene that worked.

Render with environment only:

VicS · January 2022

CGas soon as I can try what you wrote me Ill show you the results, thank you!!

One question, is it possible to get the skin brighter so It is bright a sthe original? I do like the skin you made though, I'm excited t olearn this!

cgidesign · January 2022

Part 3, Spot Light:

First a few basics:

Intensity: How bright the light is (I leave this at 100% - always)

Luminous Flux: How bright the light is (this I use for brightness control) - Rule of thumb: A point light with 1500 Lumen is approximately a representation of a 100 watt light bulb; a candle flame has around 12 lumen. A spot light is "brighter" than a point light because it is concentrating the light into a specific direction.

Two Sided, Light Portal, Shadow Type: not relevant for Iray (Light Portal function gets replaced by "Guided Sampling" in render settings (it is in the beta already)).

To be continued ... (need to sleep)