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No, I don't think the ubershader materials are extremely physically accurate
I'm hoping for some brand new Iray shaders sometime, a break from the constraints of the ubershader would be nice. We seem to currently be bumping into those constraints here in the talk about skin materials using the ubershader. Surely DAZ must currently be developing a custom built Iray skin shader with multiple subdermal skin layers etc., since rendering humans in the main thing their customers do. Would be the obvious thing for DAZ to do, anyway!
i cant test right now (my card must sleep a while i think
- but if a color get's reflected the transmitted lightcolor (not tmc) should be the complementary color... well that's how it should be. in nature .
i dont think that will improve results - Actually what i saw here in the thread this week - and my own results.. come very close to what is possible and is allready very good....
)
what is missed is a peach fuzz layer and a roughness scale (to simualte 16k noise/microstructure)
Skin values... just to give you a example.. if red does not travel further in the skin then let's say 1 - 2mm.... then a correct TMC would be BLACK with TM Distance 2mm..... no way to get a pale skin this way.....
So ehter the whole absorbation simulation in Iray is far away from beeing the same as in humanskin (and also more wavelentgh/colors would not change that really - or light travels way further then skin thickness. and penetration charts saying ....(my opinion
it is not just a skin - it is a face
way more important are one or two really great looking and natural to light reacting example models, Which use real values and good maps - which can create a standard for pa's to follow....
And a better quality control in the store - IRAY = not just some settings.. and strange maps
@Khory
she looks good....
only a good glossinessmap is missed in my eyes - the rest maybe in the bump... skincolor and ears looking good to me....
the hard tests which i do is ... Pixar HDRI - which i dont like - it gives a nonnatural hard skintone there.... and a very diffuse winterscene... and the "brutal" standard sunsky daz render test... also at 12o clock .. if she nowhere clips to much (not more then a standard camera setting would clip to white)... and face contoures looking soft, shadows not to hard....well.. that's it... a good setting
I think the correct word for the "coloured light by going through coloured glass" is caustics.
Edited to add: you have to turn on Caustic Sampler in the render settings ... (I am just adding that in case you forgot)
Todays freebie at RDNA is an Iray red glass shader: http://forum.runtimedna.com/content.php?453-13-Days-of-Christmas-2015-Day-10
ok... i tried again..... and shadow colors on transparent material working like they should.....
@pearbear you are right caustic is realy a dissapointment on spheres - actually i cant see a difference... hmmmmm
Also it is very difficult or impossible to create a half transparant material which has a transparent skin (partial base) and a colored shadow (the green sphere in my image)
Does look very good Khory. And I could use some more good Iray lights...something naturalistic... maybe what you are working on?
When you say naturalistic what do you mean? More neutral color wise? I'm really getting in a quandary about what all I should include with this set. It started out with seeing an image on the internet and going "oh I want that for portraits" then sort of grew with needing lights and props for the space. And it is looking more and more like I will want to do the promos with the settings you folks have worked out but if I do that I will want to include what ever settings I use because other wise the end user will not be able to get the same outcome from the renders. I've had very little input on any of this and I would not want anyone vexed with me for coat tailing on someone else's research though.
Yup, that's a quandry. You don't want to include too much, people will be overwhelmed and you will be overwhelmed trying to put it all together. I would use default materials and maybe slip in 1 render using the good stuff, that way you don't feel obligated to include skin materials into what sounds like a lights and props kind of thing.
Neutral color is good..I like the Caressed by Light 2 series, though I didn't use them often enough. Versatile and not "glamour shoot". Portrait lights are good if they are simple and can be dropped in to other situations.
If Share Glossy Inputs is on, glossy and refraction colors are shared so you need to set glossy color to something different than white/grayscale to color the shadows. Transparency is achieved with refraction weight.
If you turn Share Glossy Inputs off, you get separate glossy color and refraction color which you need to set to something different than white/grayscaled to color the shadows. In both cases for clear glass you can leave Thin Walled On.
For half transparent objects you can use SSS. Set your IOR to 1.0 (otherwise look through the object will be distorted by IOR), refraction weight to 1 and add some SSS to make object murky (if you set you scattering measurement distance to something low like 0.1, you will need very low SSS Amount, like 0.001 or your object will get to thick to let light through and you will get black shadows). Also, with IOR 1.0 you will lose base gloss and reflections. You can add them with top coat which haves its own IOR so you will have gloss, reflections, undistorted look through the murky object and colored shadows.
@ben98120000
thank you.. yes i figured out that also... but it is a very strange kind to set a material such as a grape that way....
far away from reality..... i used also IOR of air (1) to make it transparent while still having sss...... well a grape has something between water and skin... should be a 1.35 - .1.4 but then we see nothing inside of such a material anymore (semeen, kernels)
and that with glossy color - that's even more strange.... a grape HAS a white glossy color and does actually reflect a lot.... this just doesnt make any sense in a PBR engine....
Anyway you confirmed my settings which seem to be the only way how to make it working - thank you....
Can anyone link me to some good lighting setups to learn from? Now that I have Bruna's skin about where I want it I tried a couple of different lighting ideas and well they were either too dark or WAY WAY to light, like rendering white! lol So thought I'd ask!
I have to do a study on your grape ideas Andy. Your right, they do resemble skin translucency pretty well except for their color unless your from Mars!
Thank you evilded. I think that I am very much falling into the "product creep" hole with this one. In fact I'm going to save a couple of the light props for a different product where they will be more suitable. When I say portrait most of the time I am thinking "makes people look good". One reason I would like to see the standards for skin settings to move more toward what has been discussed here is because then characters will look good in a wider variety of lights and light levels. It would also mean that I wouldn't have to check how a dozen characters look in the lights to know if they are flexible enough. I was really surprised yesterday that that very pale skin looked good in not just a light level that we would expect for a general portrait but also in lights that were lower and much higher than regular levels. That simply is not true with some of the settings we see now for characters. I would love to be able to make it all about setting up lights just for the space/intent and not have to factor in skin settings that made the character too light hungry or adverse.
Ramwolf I am about to run out to do the last of the pre holiday grocery shopping but I'll look at some light stuff for you when I get back.
I googled some grape pictures. Didnt see anything inside it on any of them and not much shadow coloring going on. But yeah, pretty glossy.
I think that is part of the reason I stepped out of Iray, aside from the Hour per test render for each adjustment step made to each setting. It was just way to much to juggle all at once, and not a single measuring stick anywhere to start from. Not for lights or surfaces, or even render settings. Without a basic fundamental ground zero to start from, nothing will match up. To make matters worse, while some will argue that light levels can be infinite, the monitor that is displaying the image has a very finite range it can display regardless of what light levels are being portrayed in the scene. The entire Iray system makes working with Negative temperature Nuclear spins, Childs play in comparison.
Honestly, if a figure skin settings require specific illumination isolated from the environment to look like it was part of the same photo, it's not your fault nor your responsibility Khory. The best I can suggest, is to use a 'Scale' on a sphere (or something similar), and set the lights up like they would be in reality for a 'portrait'. You already have a contradictory struggle there alone between blue (for bringing out fine details) and red (for making skin look soft and worm), lol.
actually i dont understand why people buy light sets for Iray.... what they really need is a basic understanding how light works IN THE REALITY... if people can buy a light bulb in the next shop - they can also set up a photometric bulb in iray
... the problem is trial and error... then changing rendersettings, then change the models paramêters - then change the light - and back to the rendersettings 
...
A material or a skin must look good in the blue standard doom, in the standard sunsky, and lit with 1 - 3 photometric lights - with bulb geometry (disc 5cm) which use between 1500 - 10000 lumen and 4800 - 6500k... that's it.... before it does not look good in this 3 settings - the material is wrong.. not the render settings, and not the camera values .
So better offer a light tutorial then another fix light set which just works well when the materials are set like the one the author used for his promo.
A lot of times people buy sets of whatever to save time, or for applied ideas they might not have thought of.
So they fixed that then. I have not been around much since the Beta. Back then you needed 120 second exposure with ISO 1600 in a room filled with 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lumen lights to get anything other then pure black, lol. That realy was the final straw, for me making an Iray "Test chamber". The lights needed a redicules number of zeros to get anything out of them. As I had posted elsewwhere somewhat jokingly;
Two "Gama-ray-burst generator" panels, and a XBO lamp... Something is seriously WRONG here.
Dawn the radiation goggles and take cover y'all, I finally have something resembling, light . lol.
well - here is one... grapes react extrem to light because of their translucency AND transparency... a challenge for IRay
Arrrgggg.. Don't say that! Some of us make our living off things like like sets! Ok sorry, had to get that out of my system. The reason that people buy anything including light sets is that there are not enough hours in the day to learn absolutly everything about everything and still have time to create some form of final art.
Can I second that... and pass the motion.
There are not enough hours in the day to learn absolutely everything about everything and still have time to create some form of final art.
You make the lights, they make the skin settings and figures, so I can try to find the "Instant art" button, lol.
@ZarconDeeGrissom
- just many people which did not understand how to use it - gave wrong advice in the forum and tutorials on the "other" domain...
light was never broken works since beta 4.8
Only if you didn't pay attention to people repeatedly saying to make adjustments to the tone mapping....
well - then hope that nobody else does it before you
....
... i thiink that's why daz does not implement a better forum - so that they can sale the same products again and again 
i posted somewhere a basic (how light works) tutorial in the forum in april or mai.. but because we have here the worst search function in a forum ever - i can not find it anymore
Can we please put away the elitist attitude? I don't expect everyone in the world to know how to do a hand-rolled hem or how to insert an invisible zipper just becuase I do.
We all have different areas where we excel. I'm not good at the shader math you guys do in here. That doesn't make me any less of a person. I'm not the greatest at lighting. That doesn't make me any less of an artist.
I've got a full time job and a kid. Please cut me and my crappy lighting skills some slack.
Also, thank you to the vendors who put out time-saving products like light sets and cool shaders, and to the people here in the forum that guide us shader-blind folks into better pictures. You make the precious time I chose to spend in this hobby less harrowing and far more enjoyable.
@Hanabi that is not a elitst attidue - one of the basic things in iray and for art is light.. i have nothing against creative lightsets....
but there are some problems - how to use them when the skin does not react like it should ... so .. the missunderstandung is that light in iray is difficult - it was and is way more difficult in 3delight then in Iray...
and for a good portrait light is really only for ONE pose.... one must "move" the lights as soon as the model moves.....
So what would make sense and a good product idea - lights with matching poses.. as example. saved as full scenes...
Yes. This is why if DS is currently basing too much of the color of shadows on reflection color, I would expect the shadows to be uncolored since everyone's using white as glossy color.
A number of the posters in this thread come across as patronizing and dismissive of one another. It's a bit draining trying to keep up with the thread.
I assume in at least some cases it's due to language familiarity, but it would do everyone a lot of good to assume that the people they are talking to may very well know a lot about the subject at hand, and share more in a spirit of 'hey, here's a neat thing' than 'this is how it works, and all those other attempts are ignorant and misguided.'