Over-saturated textures
background
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in The Commons
Are over saturated textures on products an art style I'm not aware of, or a problem with the vendors monitor setup? Either way I find them almost impossible to correct to anything like a realistic skintone, so as nice as some of those products are I have to pass. Does DAZ QA have any standards for texture saturation?
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To clarify, you are claiming the textures are oversaturated because you cannot achieve a realistic skin tone with them. Im not sure your conclusion (oversaturated textures) necessarily follows from your observation (not being able to render realistic skin tones with them). How sure are we that the saturaiton is actually the problem or are we jumping to conclusions?
Having a lot of color information in the base color maps is usually necessary to get good skin. Maybe if you inspect the base color/albedo map by itself it looks saturated, but that might be necessary for the skin material when rendered.
If you have an issue with a vendor's included materials, it's probably better to just complain about the particular product's materials, and substantiate with examples/evidence, rather than make blanket statement about oversaturated textures being the root of all evil.
I don't think I'm too bad at achieving realistic skintones, example below. Maybe a little red, but note that the walls are pale gray with no colour, so the light has a slightly warm tint. The sclera's are not right though, unless she's been crying.
Edited to add:
I think if the render still looks realistic when converted to monochrome, then I'm somewhere near.
background,
"... or a problem with the vendors monitor setup?" That raises an interesting point. Are color spaces and monitor callibration a matter people (PA, QA or end-user) take note of?
Not being cheeky here, but the lack of a common standard of how color "appears" to different people can be a point of confusion. To that end, display callibration systems, such as Spyder, plus agreeing on a common color space (sRGB, Adobe, etc.), help with assessing color accuracy. It helps with arriving at some form of common ground.
Just wondering if anyone has taken it up as part of their workflow.
Cheers!
I don't have any particular monitor calibration tools. I have a range of reference photos which I use to compare how a render looks, to how a similar photograph looks. It's a whole complex issue though. Professional photographers will often adjust and tint lighting on a model for an indoor shot. For outdoor shots it depends on the weather and time of day etc.Skin detail on textures is also a tricky thing. Too many shadows/highlights or too much contrast and those details are going to be in the end result, wanted or not.
Cant you just adjust the transparency layer to reduce overal saturation?
I've run across this problem with creating thread colour reference files for cross stitch embroidery. It really isn't possible to do with precision unless you're spending silly amounts of money. In the end my solution was to take a photo of every thread sample at the same time on a white background and correct for white balance at 5 points in the photo, correcting every pixel by a correction factor based on location between those spots. The net result was a photo that was fractionally different and each thread was normalised a fraction. It took time and effort and was only really worth it because I was aiming for precision of each thread colour relative to each & every other one of the 447 colours.
In the case here.. no not practical.
You could alter the SSS with a map if you feel the strength of the problem warrants it.
Not sure it does. BUT... I admit many times I feel my sharp nosed favourite character could benefit from reduced translucency on her nose. It is a little pinker than I think is reasonable. She doesn't tipple, so that can't be the reason.
Regards,
Richard
Your models scleras look much better than mine. Re the nose, maybe she's been out in the snow ;-). I'm not trying to claim my rendeers are particularly good ( or bad ), just that it's an uphill struggle if the starting materials look .. erm.. 'off'. I know there are a variety of skin shaders setups, so maybe the one I'm using is particularly sensitive to saturation, but I based my original comment on the advertising renders in the store here, so I'm assuming ( maybe wrongly ) that's how the vendor thinks the product should look in a render.
Generally I judge a render as "If I met someone who looked like that, in the street, or at a party, would I say 'Hi', or would I run and call emergency services.
background,
Yup, tricky indeed!
Sticking with your photographer example, If he produced photos for his own consumption, then everything would be fine ... for him. But if he had to pass his output to someone else down the production line -- his creative editor, then, say, to retoucher, then to the fellow integrating the image into a desktop publishing app, then finally down to the printer -- and each one had different color and display specs, would the photographer's original vision survive the process? Even though folks downstream agreed to the photographer's creative intent, there's likely to be drift in terms of hue or saturation or brightness, unless everyone had standardized on the same tools and callibrated these accordingly.
Imagine two people agreeing to meet at a set time, but both use clocks off by a few minutes. Within reasonable limits, they'd meet up, but not without some arguments as to whose timing was off.
Cheers!
The sclera are G8F (because the character is), from CB Guilia if that's any use. As for the rest of the character's textures, I took the CB Guilia skin textures and reduced the 'Lightness' (as in Hue, Saturation & Lightness) in PaintShopPro 5 by a constant percentage. What that percentage was, I can no-longer remember, sorry. Also had to edit out a baked in buttock-leg crease which was in the wrong place for my character, but that's by-the-by. Anyway, I do think this texture was really good - but that may just be me.
Regards,
Richard
My old FHD 24" Acer monitor from 2006 was such a muddy yellow from being 2700K, and not a good monitor in hindsight I guess, that it actually hid lots of artifacts from geoshells and the like after I rendered. I only discovered how bad the artifacts that were hidden on my monitor were when I switched to a new 27" FHD Sansui monitors and set it to use 5000K or "noon sunlight" K (not sure which, I think it's 5000K) lighting.
The human textures have been improving a lot since iRay but sometimes they are slanted grey, and I'm not talking aliens or monsters, sometimes green, or sometimes yellow.
Yes well that's why this problem has already been mostly solved by using polarizing filters and proper lighting rig. Any texture source marketplace sells professional standard albedo maps without much baked in light/shadows, e.g., Texturingxyz, 3dscanstore, 3dsk, triplegangers, and so on and so on, to say nothing of free resources.
Right, so from this why are we concluding the base color maps are too saturated?
It could be 10 trillion other combinations of settings on the shader that generate an effect you don't like.
Anyway, the actual question that should be answered: would daz studio benefit from adding standard lighting and color reference for vendors and users to calibrate skin shaders against
answer: yes
Fair enough, so if the advertising images for a character show an effect I don't like, I can either assume the texture is fine, and it's the shader used that looks strange to me, or I can just 'pass'. Duly noted. If the character is from a vendor that I have previously bought products from, and found the textures oversaturated, then I will assume nothing has changed there and the vendor and I can continue on our own separate ways.
I think that falls into a similar category as: would daz studio benefit from adding a standard colour code for morph parameter dials ( eg expressions, correctives, etc etc ) yes, but "If i wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here".
Yes you can safely assume there is a myriad of causes for why something doesnt look correct, one of them might be textures or it might be shader parameters. In either case, if the vendor cannot make the character look good in a promo, it's not unreasonable to pass on it.
My original point was simply that you cannot safely assume the cause is texture saturation. It might be, but assuming that is flawed reasoning.
nonesuch00,
Exactomundo!
Building off of your example, I have a budget laptop and a desktop with a monitor that has more oomph where I do, quote-unquote, art. Ahem. The two display systems operate on different color specs. I don't even bother to match up their settings because the desktop monitor will be far more performant according to industry standards. For the same image, there will always be subtle differences and which version turns out to be "better" is arguably a matter of taste.
Beauty (literally) is in the eye of the beholder. Beyond a reasonable extent, any ultimate standard is elusive. To muddy the waters a bit further, here's another factor that affects color perception: the age and health of our eyes. With all these factors in the mix, is it any wonder why we perceive things differently?
Cheers!
I mean, i dont see your point about making an equivalence between those things. Having calibration standards allows all vendors and users to work to a common setting and eliminates guess work and variation in look development, and makes render results for products more reproducible.
You are not rendering out parameter dials, so it's not like that has any actual consequences (And they do have some conventions for parameter dials (for hidden properties they do anyway))
indeed colour perception is a strange thing. A couple of examples I have encoutered directly:-
I have a regular need for 'Brunswick Green' aka 'British Racing Green' paint. You wouldn't belive the range of colours which are all sold as this. I'm having to refer to RAL numbers instead of descriptions.
I tried in vain to mix paints to achive 'Khaki' colour, and only later found out it is a mixture of yellow and black, and not a shade of green, which it appears to be.
I find skin textures usually have a lot more detail in them than first appears. To bring that out, I tend to under-saturate figure skin in render settings, using canvases to composite a final image and reach a result I'm happier with. Some very good skins in the store, including those that look stylised in their promos. Try playing around with tone mapping and canvases - I think you may be pleasantly surprised.