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Thank you Jon and Rashad - I like the results but the nose and ears look a bit off suggesting I need to play with Transimssion and Medium settings.
Rashad - I got the idea for the extra colour swatch by looking at the average 3Delight shader in Daz. It is usualy left white but it can be used to tint or correct the skin texure (which in this case is Marie). I have found some texture maps to be a bit washed out so it can be useful to reduce the brightness or add a slight tint to balance the skin tone. It can also be used to provide more drastic solutions such as red or green skin for non-human characters. This could also be achieved with the colour correction nodes (corDiff and corTrans) but it's easier to choose a colour than a number.
That makes sense. Thanks for explaining that. I think the reason the nose and the ears look slightly odd is twofold. First, I suspect you do not need to engage Fake Shadows. That suggestion only came up because there is probably a bug of some sort with the DS Octane plug-in thus making it a requirement for those working withe the DS version of the plug-in. For the rest of us, applying Fake Sahdows will oversaturate the result in a manner similar to what we are seeing here. On the second fold, I suspect the scaling might not be fully agreeing with the settings. I have no idea what the scaling in Blender is, but I think you will need to increase the Distance from 1000 to some higher value. Siciliano uses 2900, so dont be shy raising it as high as you need to until the SSS on the nose becomes less spread out. But generally this is a very plausible render exactly as it is.
Hey Rashad, I am damn glad you are here on this thread! I will mess with some of those pointers you gave and see if that helps. I usually find myself going into Gimp and trying to even out the baked in spec and shadows. These skin shaders actually can help even subtle amounts in a texture but this texture had alot and perfect for my point.
Gosh, you don't look at this thread for 24 hours and there is so much to catch up on. I'm really enjoying the discussion. Just to pick up on a couple of points, I previously wondered about the dispersion coefficient, and have done a couple of comparison renders, and couldn't see the difference between the results, except that the one with dispersion had more noise initially and therefore took a little longer to clear, so I don't use any dispersion in my formula.
I re-did my Elite Marie texture, making the transmission more (reduced gamma and higher power), which made the skin too light, and then compensating with more absorbtion in the medium. I guess this is pretty true to life as the light entering the skin may be similar to caucasian skin, but there is more melanin pigmentation within the skin layers which absorbs light. I was also able to tame the bump map using Color Correction (which I am finding so useful in many ways!), and I have been able to get what I wanted just using the specular material, so I have dumped the glossy mix on this formula. You may notice that there is no lipstick on this one either.
Although the outline formula may be similar, I think there will be no one "magic" formula for use with every texture, as maps vary, so too will the fine tuning adjustments for each set of skin textures. As an extension of this thought, the color correction mode on the transmission will allow you to easily create some wild looking alien skins from existing maps, and with an underlying "red" medium, it should still have that skin-like quality.
Looking good Phil. You've got the SSS under control.
Rashad - thanks for the advice. I got in to the habit of leaving Fake Shadows on so I would not have thought of this. I will have another go later. I export everything to Blender at a scale of 1% so the characters are the height they would be if they were real people. I read that scale is very important in unbiased engines especially when working with effects such as SSS.
I also have Fake Shadows turned on, everything goes much too dark otherwise.
Yes, SSS is a scale dependent effect - the more light travels through a material, the more it is absorbed and/or scattered, and so the setting of Scale in the Medium will relate to the scale of your model. This is unlike surface effects such as reflection and diffuse, which are scale independent.
In doing a little research on skin, I read that 94% of the light hitting the surface passes into the skin, leaving only 6% for reflective shine. Thus I think that Octane's specular material is the right choice, either as a single material (which I am finding with the right settings can be used very successfully) or as the dominant element in a Mix material. I am a fan of keeping things as simple as possible if the right results can be achieved that way, and the specular material can be adjusted to give both SSS and shine/reflection which are the defining characteristics of skin - my old approach used mix of diffuse for the SSS and glossy for the shine, but a single specular material allows a good combination of both to achieve very realistic results.
This Marie render looks very plausible as well, Phil! I agree with your statement that there is no one magic formula. I think it's surprising just how many options there are. Beauty really is only skin deep, made more apparent than ever by an unbiased rendering engine. Like you said, with these approaches we can make most anything look like skin in a plausible manner.
Im admittedly perplexed by the Fake Shadows. For my own testing, enabling fake shadows did not affect the apparent brightness in any way, it only seemed to increase saturation by around 30%. Testing again just now gives the same results. In order to reign the saturation back in I have to lower the color correction saturation channel from 1.0 down to 0.75. Other than that the two settings should be ideally the same. Fake Shadows on or off isnt a major point of concern, but it is interesting how we can learn things about our own shader systems when we allow others to make use of these tools. More options is always better.
Now I am back to trying to reproduce these types of results in Iray. Wish me luck.
Edit:
I decided to try something else with the Fake Shadows, and discovered that indeed yes, it does seem to brighten things up a bit more than I had previously observed. I agree, maybe fake shadows is ideal. Thanks for this insight. Fake Shadows it is!!!!!
Nice job Phil!
You guys have done some amazing renders here. I want Octane SO bad, just can't aford it right now. I'm getting tired of Luxrenders slow speed and iray is decent but theres just not something I like about it (might just be me not understanding how to use it and no documentation).
Keep posting more so I can sit here and drool over all the awesomeness.
iRay has the major benefit of being integrated into Daz Studio, and so there will be increasing support for it. So there are already lighting sets, textures, etc ready to just plug and render and I am sure there will be more. Having said that, Octane is so fast, easy to use and produces such great results that I have not really been tempted away from my Carrara/Octane platform at the moment.
Not to mention the Octane4Carrara plugin can render carrara dynamic hair, which just makes for superb realism.
Yes, that is a huge plus point, especially for me!
I'm still wondering if the Daz Plugin for octane will ever support LAHM. I know I have seen it been said that such a thing was being worked on but alas I dont think anyone has heard of it for a while.
You can render LAMH in Octane - here's an example I did - http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/89315/
You just need to convert it to a .obj first. Same applies to iRay
oh I have done that as well, I just mean being able to render it as it is instead of having to export into a large file.
That looks really good Phil!
My Winchester 1893 shotgun project is going along nicely.
Only a couple of springs still need to be modeled, then everything must be properly UV'd so I can make 'wear and tear' textures.
Rendered in Octane Render for DAZ Studio.
Cheers!
edit: new version, new improved Colt SAA.
Nice image! What is Octane Render?
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
They have plugins for Daz Studio, Poser and Carrara, it is a more expensive option than some others, but the speed, interactivity and realism are superb!
Started to play a bit with displacement maps - they are hard buggers to get right, especially alongside bumps
High res here - http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/94844
Although I'm still not 100% happy with the rear of the receiver I've started doing some texture work on it.
Pretty difficult to get right that thing: concave on convex on concave, all in one graceful swoop and in a tiny, tiny area.
Too bad there's no way to find out just how those guys at Winchester made those things 120 year ago!
Knowing more about that would certainly help recreating it, even in a 2015 state-of-the-art CAD program.
Cheers!
Oh, rendered in Octane Render for DAZ Studio of course!
Very very nice
A lot of the detailing used to be done by hand
Thank you Robert, I had a hunch you'd like it : )
Even done by hand, I imagine they would probably have used jigs and patterns/supports in order to work quickly and still end up within tolerances.
I tried to mimic such a way of removing material in 'virtual 3D', but the chance of getting the right profile along the right path on the exact right angle is infinitely small it seems.
These particular Winchesters are quite rare the way, most of them were called back by the factory and subsequently destroyed because they couldn't withstand the pressure of smokeless powder.
I kind of thought the weak spot would be obvious on close inspection, but I didn't find anything suspicious so far : )
Cheers!
The receiver material was to thin and couldn't handle the pressures of smokeless powder
It was replaced by the 1897 which is basically a rework of the 1893 with the issues fixed
Great work Erik! The detail is outstanding. I would guess they had a jig to do the back of the reciver. I'm constantly amazed at how tight the tolerances are on a lot of the firearms from the 1800's. a lot of pride in their work. I have a Model 97 made in 1901 - looks almost exactly like your 93 model, but not in great condition. Still love your blued steel shader.
Specta - very impressive, so much detail!
Erik...I was quickly scrolling through the thread and saw the first pic without reading what you wrote...I had to stop, take a closer look and read. I first thought it was a magazine picture or print ad.
Damn...that's looking very good.
Thanks guys : )
I've added a 1873 SAA I found on GRABCAD (and some 2 5/8" shells) for scale, but the flutes on the cilinder aren't quite right.
My blued-steel settings really are quite simple, here are a couple of them:
Diffuse 18-18-18 Specular 145-142-153 Roughness 0.1 IOR 3.5
Diffuse 5-5-5 Specular 128-117-119 Roughness 0.15 IOR 4.5
Diffuse 18-18-18 Specular 133-138-153 Roughness 0.05 IOR 3.5
Cheers!
edit: I made a new cilinder and frame for the Colt SAA.
Thanks PhilW :)