The *most* photorealistic skin/settings

sterlenejc

Sorry if this thread has been opened already, but I am looking for the skin that is as close to photorealism as it can get. I was talking to a friend about creating custom skin from my pictures I took off of a model. Each image is roughly 25MB in size, so cropping out parts of each section and "stitching" that together in a photoshop would still give me too large map. Apparently, I don't even need that many details so I decided to search for the character that has overall best settings in official store. What I'm looking for is good SSS settings (I have no idea what sub surface scattering actually is, but I've heard it's really important when it comes to photorealism), clean skin (no baked in body hair, which is mostly female skins; no baked in eyebrows; clean skin without imperfections and most importantly: no or little pubic hair. I own several HD female chatacters and even some older content V4 and so on, but I'm going after gen3/8 characters because of ease of compatibility. I need as "basic", but realistic looking skin so I can alter it to my own taste with several freckles, veins details, bruises?, makeup etc. It's gonna be my first big project adding all of those details. When I get good enough, I will build skin texture from scratch. Thanks to anyone taking time reading/helping with this issue. NS

magog_a4eb71ab

You're looking for 100% blemish-free skin and sorry to say, I don't think there's any here with the exception of possibly anime or toon-type characters, which probably wouldn't be ideal for what you want. What you can do is find a character skin that has the least amount of blemishes and edit them out of the textures.

Quixotry

Try looking at the merchant resource skin texture products that are in the store. They may be helpful to you. There are several for Genesis 3 and Genesis 8.  There's also a merchant resource skin product called Flawless by Hinkypunk on Renderosity. It's for Genesis 2 Female, though, so don't know if it's any help to you unless you want to work it over in an image editor to try it to fit G3/G8 UVs.

outrider42

You kind of have a paradox there, LOL. Most PAs striving for realistic skin are going to have blemishes. Your first choice of making your own is a good one, you can totally use Photoshop and your own photos to make textures. When you save the texture, you only need to save it at 4K, and you can compress it some to cut the file size. There is no reason why you can't get a great texture around 5MB each. There are also programs that let you paint onto the model textures in 3D, allowing you to go over the UV boundaries and truly make it your own.

But otherwise, check out a Bluejaunt character, the more recent ones have cleaner skin, like Sina. If you were prepared to create your own textures, then editing the blemishes out of Sina's skin should be a snap. To get her more fair, simply adjust the translucency values down a bit. You can also use PS to adjust the color of the textures.

Another alternative is to replace the Sina base color textures with a cleaner skin from some other character. This works shockingly well, you can adjust some material settings to dial in a good balance of translucency color. I do this A LOT.

Still another option might be some of the Rarestone and CrocodileLiu characters, which can have extremely clean and fair skins yet the bump and gloss maps may provide a look of realistic skin. The reason I still recommend the BJ girls is because their bumps and gloss maps/settings are just a little better, and their eyes are more real. The RS and Liu girls tend to have more fantasy eye colors.

Cricket

iResourcetextures has some really good textures, too.

pds

Textures only address part of the OP's question. I would love to hear from experienced Daz artists what they prefer to use for the various settings (including SSS) to get the most realistic results in IRay.

There was a different thread where an artist commented that most skins weren't set up correctly because they used the wrong color for SSS, but the artist didn't say much about how to determine the proper color.

I have also seen people refer to blood vessel maps, but not seen anyone reference a source for them that can be used with G3 or G8 figures. 

Insight on that would also be helpful.

outrider42

There is no one size fits all color for SSS and other settings. And it is almost impossible to just say what will work on any given character because any given character may be totally different from another. It all depends on how the textures were created, what color the base textures are, and what the intent is with them. If you desire to have a darker skin tone, then the settings you want will differ from somebody who wants a light skin.

I personally prefer sticking to near white for the base and trans colors, which lets the texture color do the talking so to speak. I like the textures to be closer to what the intended skin is, if possible.

Having said that, I really like how bluejaunte's characters tackle skin (and clearly I am not alone). IMO, it is the gloss maps that take the starring role, they provide the important top layer of skin, and are pretty much unique to BJ characters. They give the skin the tiny cracks that real skin has. Many other characters just use noise generated maps to create bump and gloss maps, not everybody, but a lot. This can work, but they become visible in closeups. Also, many Daz models have too much shine in their skin, like the entire model has shiny skin, I don't think that is right, and it is big part of why Daz models "look like 3D models" instead of more realistic people. The BJ gloss maps are made in a way that they reflect the light more properly, with the natural ridges in our skin being highlighted more correctly because the gloss maps actually have those ridges in fine detail. If you want realism, that matters.

The great thing is these gloss maps are very versatile and will work quite well with just about any character and skin with some tweaking on the material settings If you look at the BJ color textures, they surprisingly lack a lot of baked in detail, like creases and folds. Again, that detail comes from the bump and gloss maps, and this is the way I think it should be done most of the time. Normal maps can help, too, to compliment the sculpt. But one has to be careful not to go overboard with normals or details start to look like canyons, which seems to happen to a number of Daz Originals' hands. Generally, normals are for large details, bumps are for small/fine details.

Blood vessels, are you talking about visible under the skin or about the ones that kind of pop out of the skin a bit? If you need ones that pop out, this can be done with either HD morphs or displacement maps, or both. There are vascularity HD products in the store for G3 and G8, and there is a product that uses displacement maps. I can't remember if it is for G2 or G3.

You can make under the skin blood vessels by using translucency maps. Many models use the same map for both base color and trans color, but some don't.  Some do have painted vessels. You can paint in vessels on a base color and use this as a trans map if you want. You can use them in base color maps, too, but be careful as that can backfire and look fake, too. Again, it all depends on how everything else is set up. All of these things have to be balanced with each other to produce the desired effect.

pds

outrider42 said:

There is no one size fits all color for SSS and other settings. And it is almost impossible to just say what will work on any given character because any given character may be totally different from another. It all depends on how the textures were created, what color the base textures are, and what the intent is with them. If you desire to have a darker skin tone, then the settings you want will differ from somebody who wants a light skin.

I personally prefer sticking to near white for the base and trans colors, which lets the texture color do the talking so to speak. I like the textures to be closer to what the intended skin is, if possible.

Having said that, I really like how bluejaunte's characters tackle skin (and clearly I am not alone). IMO, it is the gloss maps that take the starring role, they provide the important top layer of skin, and are pretty much unique to BJ characters. They give the skin the tiny cracks that real skin has. Many other characters just use noise generated maps to create bump and gloss maps, not everybody, but a lot. This can work, but they become visible in closeups. Also, many Daz models have too much shine in their skin, like the entire model has shiny skin, I don't think that is right, and it is big part of why Daz models "look like 3D models" instead of more realistic people. The BJ gloss maps are made in a way that they reflect the light more properly, with the natural ridges in our skin being highlighted more correctly because the gloss maps actually have those ridges in fine detail. If you want realism, that matters.

The great thing is these gloss maps are very versatile and will work quite well with just about any character and skin with some tweaking on the material settings If you look at the BJ color textures, they surprisingly lack a lot of baked in detail, like creases and folds. Again, that detail comes from the bump and gloss maps, and this is the way I think it should be done most of the time. Normal maps can help, too, to compliment the sculpt. But one has to be careful not to go overboard with normals or details start to look like canyons, which seems to happen to a number of Daz Originals' hands. Generally, normals are for large details, bumps are for small/fine details.

Blood vessels, are you talking about visible under the skin or about the ones that kind of pop out of the skin a bit? If you need ones that pop out, this can be done with either HD morphs or displacement maps, or both. There are vascularity HD products in the store for G3 and G8, and there is a product that uses displacement maps. I can't remember if it is for G2 or G3.

You can make under the skin blood vessels by using translucency maps. Many models use the same map for both base color and trans color, but some don't.  Some do have painted vessels. You can paint in vessels on a base color and use this as a trans map if you want. You can use them in base color maps, too, but be careful as that can backfire and look fake, too. Again, it all depends on how everything else is set up. All of these things have to be balanced with each other to produce the desired effect.

I didn't mean to shift the direction of the original post; sorry if it turned out that way. This is all good information, Outrider; thanks for taking the time to share it.

With regard to the blood vessel maps, I was referring to the sub dermal kind. (I have seen the vascularity morph products in the store).

 

 I have several BJ characters, so I will look more closely at how the skins are set up. 

MelissaGT

Yeah, with chromatic SSS, you pretty much want to use white for the base and transluceny colors. You can alter the skin tone itself a bit using the transmitted color, which is generally a shade from pink to orange. No longer does the rule "lower transluceny for ligher skin" work...with chromatic SSS, you need a higher translucency (all my characters use 75% and higher), even on lighter skinned characters, because you need that SSS map to shine through. The SSS map is where you want all the nice fleshy details and veins. To build a SSS map, I take the color map and blend in AJ's blood vessel maps along with one of the more detailed DO G3 SSS maps (V7 for girls and Lee 7 for boys). The end result is a nicely blended SSS map. It can become tricky when the character you are working on has body hair painted directly onto the color map...which is a whole other issue and I wish it wasn't done but I understand why because not everybody has the horsepower to render modeled body hair (Dain and Michael 7 being prime examples). 

For specular details, you are defiinitely not forced to use the ones that come with the character you're working on. I tend to build out "frankenskins" or mashups of skins...color map from here, specular map from there, etc. As long as they line up relatively decent (and use the base UV), you're good to go. I've attached an example of a mashup...it is LY Bramble's color map, with a rebuilt SSS map, and Victoria 7's specular, bump, and normal maps. Victoria 7 has gorgeous specular details. The second example I've attached is reworked Monique 7 (borrowing Monique 8's eyebrows)...but you can see how gorgeous of specular details Monique 7 has after reworking the skin to use chromatic SSS. The third example is completely reworked Michael 7 to use chromatic SSS. 

It should be noted for render racers, that chromatic SSS will add on to render times rather significantly (it's pretty much the main reason why G8 characters will take longer to render than G3 characters...generally speaking).

lilweep

i feel like im taking in half of what people are info-dumping here without diagrams and a conceptual understanding of what these surface channels actually mean.

outrider42

pds said:

outrider42 said:

There is no one size fits all color for SSS and other settings. And it is almost impossible to just say what will work on any given character because any given character may be totally different from another. It all depends on how the textures were created, what color the base textures are, and what the intent is with them. If you desire to have a darker skin tone, then the settings you want will differ from somebody who wants a light skin.

I personally prefer sticking to near white for the base and trans colors, which lets the texture color do the talking so to speak. I like the textures to be closer to what the intended skin is, if possible.

Having said that, I really like how bluejaunte's characters tackle skin (and clearly I am not alone). IMO, it is the gloss maps that take the starring role, they provide the important top layer of skin, and are pretty much unique to BJ characters. They give the skin the tiny cracks that real skin has. Many other characters just use noise generated maps to create bump and gloss maps, not everybody, but a lot. This can work, but they become visible in closeups. Also, many Daz models have too much shine in their skin, like the entire model has shiny skin, I don't think that is right, and it is big part of why Daz models "look like 3D models" instead of more realistic people. The BJ gloss maps are made in a way that they reflect the light more properly, with the natural ridges in our skin being highlighted more correctly because the gloss maps actually have those ridges in fine detail. If you want realism, that matters.

The great thing is these gloss maps are very versatile and will work quite well with just about any character and skin with some tweaking on the material settings If you look at the BJ color textures, they surprisingly lack a lot of baked in detail, like creases and folds. Again, that detail comes from the bump and gloss maps, and this is the way I think it should be done most of the time. Normal maps can help, too, to compliment the sculpt. But one has to be careful not to go overboard with normals or details start to look like canyons, which seems to happen to a number of Daz Originals' hands. Generally, normals are for large details, bumps are for small/fine details.

Blood vessels, are you talking about visible under the skin or about the ones that kind of pop out of the skin a bit? If you need ones that pop out, this can be done with either HD morphs or displacement maps, or both. There are vascularity HD products in the store for G3 and G8, and there is a product that uses displacement maps. I can't remember if it is for G2 or G3.

You can make under the skin blood vessels by using translucency maps. Many models use the same map for both base color and trans color, but some don't.  Some do have painted vessels. You can paint in vessels on a base color and use this as a trans map if you want. You can use them in base color maps, too, but be careful as that can backfire and look fake, too. Again, it all depends on how everything else is set up. All of these things have to be balanced with each other to produce the desired effect.

I didn't mean to shift the direction of the original post; sorry if it turned out that way. This is all good information, Outrider; thanks for taking the time to share it.

With regard to the blood vessel maps, I was referring to the sub dermal kind. (I have seen the vascularity morph products in the store).

 

 I have several BJ characters, so I will look more closely at how the skins are set up. 

Oh nice. That is exactly what I did, study how those were set up. The gloss maps that BJ uses in the dual lobe specularity are pretty important to that top layer. The SSS works with the translucency for the sub dermal layers. I have blended textures together a lot to get what I want. The translucency maps can be pretty different, but certain key details need to be present on both the color and trans maps in order for them to look correct in the render. Otherwise the maps will compete with each other and will look washed out in the render.

I have seen a variety of characters with sub dermal veins. The one I remember most is actually Victoria 7, yes, Vicky 7, I'm surprised, too, LOL. If you have her, which is likely, take a look at her SSS maps. They have some pretty strong veins. There is a "Victoria 7 for Victoria 8" version, which brings her to the G8 line. As you may know, the original V7 has a unique UV map, so you cannot just pop a V7 map onto G8, that does not work. So you can grab the V7 for V8 product, or you can bake the textures for V7 to match G3. Then when you are done you can use the new textures freely on G8 characters. There is a guide for "baking" the unique UV maps to match the base UV in the forum if you need it.

Anyway, once you have the textures converted to G3/8, what you can do is use GIMP or whatever to paint the veins from the V7 SSS maps onto the SSS maps you want to use. OR you could do the reverse and blend the details of your SSS characters into the V7 SSS maps. Whichever works better. The important part is the face, you want the correct details from brows (or no brows), eye outlines, and lips, and any prominent features like large moles and marks. Then onto the body, the nipples and belly button should probably match, and so on.

pds

melissastjames said:

Yeah, with chromatic SSS, you pretty much want to use white for the base and transluceny colors. You can alter the skin tone itself a bit using the transmitted color, which is generally a shade from pink to orange. No longer does the rule "lower transluceny for ligher skin" work...with chromatic SSS, you need a higher translucency (all my characters use 75% and higher), even on lighter skinned characters, because you need that SSS map to shine through. The SSS map is where you want all the nice fleshy details and veins. To build a SSS map, I take the color map and blend in AJ's blood vessel maps along with one of the more detailed DO G3 SSS maps (V7 for girls and Lee 7 for boys). The end result is a nicely blended SSS map. It can become tricky when the character you are working on has body hair painted directly onto the color map...which is a whole other issue and I wish it wasn't done but I understand why because not everybody has the horsepower to render modeled body hair (Dain and Michael 7 being prime examples). 

For specular details, you are defiinitely not forced to use the ones that come with the character you're working on. I tend to build out "frankenskins" or mashups of skins...color map from here, specular map from there, etc. As long as they line up relatively decent (and use the base UV), you're good to go. I've attached an example of a mashup...it is LY Bramble's color map, with a rebuilt SSS map, and Victoria 7's specular, bump, and normal maps. Victoria 7 has gorgeous specular details. The second example I've attached is reworked Monique 7 (borrowing Monique 8's eyebrows)...but you can see how gorgeous of specular details Monique 7 has after reworking the skin to use chromatic SSS. The third example is completely reworked Michael 7 to use chromatic SSS. 

It should be noted for render racers, that chromatic SSS will add on to render times rather significantly (it's pretty much the main reason why G8 characters will take longer to render than G3 characters...generally speaking).

Great information, thank you! I'd seen your reworked M7 image in another thread and was blown away by how much better it made the character look.

davidtriune

There are settings in Iray that prevent you from rendering realistically no matter what you do.

Iray does not have ACEScg built in, which should be the standard color gamut for 3d renderers. 

So colors in your render will not look correct because it is based on an old color profile setup that was designed originally for CRT monitors.

Here I test ACEScg color setup by exporting non-tonemapped canvas to Nuke. https://github.com/colour-science/OpenColorIO-Configs/tree/feature/aces-1.1-config

To get rid of fireflies, export with these settings instead
https://blog.irayrender.com/post/76948894710/compositing-with-light-path-expressions

more info

MelissaGT

davidtriune said:

There are settings in Iray that prevent you from rendering realistically no matter what you do.

Iray does not have ACEScg built in, which should be the standard color gamut for 3d renderers. 

So colors in your render will not look correct because it is based on an old color profile setup that was designed originally for CRT monitors.

Here I test ACEScg color setup by exporting non-tonemapped canvas to Nuke. https://github.com/colour-science/OpenColorIO-Configs/tree/feature/aces-1.1-config

To get rid of fireflies, export with these settings instead
https://blog.irayrender.com/post/76948894710/compositing-with-light-path-expressions

more info

This is great and all, but how is this applied to Daz rendering? I don't use Blender and I don't render in Blender. I use Daz and do my postwork in Photoshop. And how does it address the issue of screen to print accuracy, or more commonly, your display to mass viewership display accuracy? As far as I know, browsers, and pretty much every web-based app, uses the sRGB color profile...so if you have an image saved in any image space other than sRGB, then the colors and gamma may look all sorts of wonky to your viewers on whatever device they are using to view. In other words, it could look great for you on your custom-calibrated display, but not so great to other people. I've encountered this challenge with managing my color spaces from camera to display to web to print (going back to my photography days). (Or is this not even an issue at all because it's not changing the actual color profile of the output image?)

As a side-note, Daz also has the option to use the spectral render setting, which I haven't really done much with at all because it seems to wash stuff out pretty heavily. I'm not sure if that in any way is related to what the video above is showing. 

davidtriune

Sorry I should've said tonemapping settings, not color profile. The color profile is correct.

The tone mapper in DAZ is mapping HDR values into LDR in an old way that only looks good on CRT monitors. So you have to export the HDR file and tone map in a separate program.

btw i didn't use blender at all. all that was rendered in DAZ then exported to Nuke. I linked the video to show that blender also used the wrong tone mapping settings, but was fixed later.

Asari

@melissastjames Your work is certainly impressive and I really admire your approach to photorealistic fan art. I'm currently tinkering around doing something similar and your work is certainly an inspiration.

MelissaGT

davidtriune said:

Sorry I should've said tonemapping settings, not color profile. The color profile is correct.

The tone mapper in DAZ is mapping HDR values into LDR in an old way that only looks good on CRT monitors. So you have to export the HDR file and tone map in a separate program.

btw i didn't use blender at all. all that was rendered in DAZ then exported to Nuke. I linked the video to show that blender also used the wrong tone mapping settings, but was fixed later.

Gotcha...I was thinking that you had somehow figured out how to apply that profile the video talks aboout, made for Blender, in Daz. I've never done much using beauty canvas and importing the .exr into Photoshop for post. Do you know if the in-render bloom filter will still work? I use this heavily on some of my pieces, and though I know that you can do bloom in Photoshop (or whatever post program one chooses to use), I really prefer to use the in-render filter as I have a really good handle on it. However, I'm not sure if it will work with a beauty canvas. I know it doesn't work right if you render in multiple layers. 

MelissaGT

Asari said:

@melissastjames Your work is certainly impressive and I really admire your approach to photorealistic fan art. I'm currently tinkering around doing something similar and your work is certainly an inspiration.

Thanks and glad I could be of help! The stuff that @davidtriune posted up is interesting which prompted me to search for other threads on the same subject so I'll see what comes of incorporating some of those techniques as well. 

amyw12

I try to do a lot of photo-realistic art. I think the skins from Mousso may fit the bill if you want "smooth and nonblemished". But all photorealistic skins will have blemishes one way or another. I find what helps with realism is turning down the brightness of the sclera and iris, playing with translusency weight of the skin, and manipulating the lighting of the setting so that the shadows create a more realistic look.

Ironically, one of the most photo-realistic skins I've used was from London, a V4 character. You can use V4 skins on G3/G8 with a product called Legacy UVs for Genesis 8: Victoria 4 by Cayman Studios (also has a G3 equivalent). Then, use N.G.S. Anagenessis 2 - Revolution to make the skin iRay compatible.

Danae has made some beautiful photorealistic skins that even today, hold up really well. You can also find more under the "Metropolitan Collection", some other characters like Lyon, Paris, Tokyo, etc, are all well done too. I don't know how easy they are to add onto but I know they look realistic out of the box.

Another helpful, non-DAZ technique is to take the render into Photoshop and adjust it, brightness/contrast/filters can bring out even more of the realism.

Sevrin

melissastjames said:

davidtriune said:

Gotcha...I was thinking that you had somehow figured out how to apply that profile the video talks aboout, made for Blender, in Daz. I've never done much using beauty canvas and importing the .exr into Photoshop for post. Do you know if the in-render bloom filter will still work? I use this heavily on some of my pieces, and though I know that you can do bloom in Photoshop (or whatever post program one chooses to use), I really prefer to use the in-render filter as I have a really good handle on it. However, I'm not sure if it will work with a beauty canvas. I know it doesn't work right if you render in multiple layers. 

The bloom setting is under filtering and will still work fine, with Iray tonemapping on or off.  When using bloom, and even when not, you may want to set up your light sources as separate canvasses to increase your control.  There's not a ton to be gained from canvasses if all you do is manipulate a beauty canvas.

I suggest making the leap to using canvasses, rather than trying to make all lighting adjustments in Daz.  Once you have your light set up in layers in your image editing program, it's far faster to make adjustments than it is in Daz.  I give a really basic example of what you can do with a single render in this thread.  Besides, you can always go back to doing it all in Daz if you don't like it.

Leonides02

I import my rendered exr's into Blender specifically to take advantage of the filmic color space. Then I export to Photoshop for final touches.

 

emotionaldreams2

melissastjames said:

Yeah, with chromatic SSS, you pretty much want to use white for the base and transluceny colors. You can alter the skin tone itself a bit using the transmitted color, which is generally a shade from pink to orange. No longer does the rule "lower transluceny for ligher skin" work...with chromatic SSS, you need a higher translucency (all my characters use 75% and higher), even on lighter skinned characters, because you need that SSS map to shine through. The SSS map is where you want all the nice fleshy details and veins. To build a SSS map, I take the color map and blend in AJ's blood vessel maps along with one of the more detailed DO G3 SSS maps (V7 for girls and Lee 7 for boys). The end result is a nicely blended SSS map. It can become tricky when the character you are working on has body hair painted directly onto the color map...which is a whole other issue and I wish it wasn't done but I understand why because not everybody has the horsepower to render modeled body hair (Dain and Michael 7 being prime examples). 

For specular details, you are defiinitely not forced to use the ones that come with the character you're working on. I tend to build out "frankenskins" or mashups of skins...color map from here, specular map from there, etc. As long as they line up relatively decent (and use the base UV), you're good to go. I've attached an example of a mashup...it is LY Bramble's color map, with a rebuilt SSS map, and Victoria 7's specular, bump, and normal maps. Victoria 7 has gorgeous specular details. The second example I've attached is reworked Monique 7 (borrowing Monique 8's eyebrows)...but you can see how gorgeous of specular details Monique 7 has after reworking the skin to use chromatic SSS. The third example is completely reworked Michael 7 to use chromatic SSS. 

It should be noted for render racers, that chromatic SSS will add on to render times rather significantly (it's pretty much the main reason why G8 characters will take longer to render than G3 characters...generally speaking).

hmmm.. tips i've been looking for 

MelissaGT

Sevrin said:

melissastjames said:

davidtriune said:

Gotcha...I was thinking that you had somehow figured out how to apply that profile the video talks aboout, made for Blender, in Daz. I've never done much using beauty canvas and importing the .exr into Photoshop for post. Do you know if the in-render bloom filter will still work? I use this heavily on some of my pieces, and though I know that you can do bloom in Photoshop (or whatever post program one chooses to use), I really prefer to use the in-render filter as I have a really good handle on it. However, I'm not sure if it will work with a beauty canvas. I know it doesn't work right if you render in multiple layers. 

The bloom setting is under filtering and will still work fine, with Iray tonemapping on or off.  When using bloom, and even when not, you may want to set up your light sources as separate canvasses to increase your control.  There's not a ton to be gained from canvasses if all you do is manipulate a beauty canvas.

I suggest making the leap to using canvasses, rather than trying to make all lighting adjustments in Daz.  Once you have your light set up in layers in your image editing program, it's far faster to make adjustments than it is in Daz.  I give a really basic example of what you can do with a single render in this thread.  Besides, you can always go back to doing it all in Daz if you don't like it.

Thanks - I've considered doing separate canvases for lights, but I just don't have the time and energy for it. I do one main render and then sometimes end up doing a lot of spot renders to fix things like clipping that I might have missed or to render out one particularly stubborn section with the denoiser to get rid of grain. I use a lot of geoshells for things like dirt, etc and sometimes I'll render one pass with and one without so I can control and customize the look in post. Separate lighting canvases are just not an option in those siituations. I like to set up lighting and tweak in Daz using the Iray preview and then just let it render overnight, moving to post and on-the-fly spot renders the next day. I really don't want to have to sit there and render several times. This is especially true when most of the time my main lighting is HDRI with maybe one spot and the rest environmental emissives. 

davidtriune

Here is more info about ACES tone mapping. It compares the old tone mapping technique (used by DAZ) vs ACES tone mapping 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ColorGrading/index.html

Sevrin

melissastjames said:

Sevrin said:

melissastjames said:

davidtriune said:

Gotcha...I was thinking that you had somehow figured out how to apply that profile the video talks aboout, made for Blender, in Daz. I've never done much using beauty canvas and importing the .exr into Photoshop for post. Do you know if the in-render bloom filter will still work? I use this heavily on some of my pieces, and though I know that you can do bloom in Photoshop (or whatever post program one chooses to use), I really prefer to use the in-render filter as I have a really good handle on it. However, I'm not sure if it will work with a beauty canvas. I know it doesn't work right if you render in multiple layers. 

The bloom setting is under filtering and will still work fine, with Iray tonemapping on or off.  When using bloom, and even when not, you may want to set up your light sources as separate canvasses to increase your control.  There's not a ton to be gained from canvasses if all you do is manipulate a beauty canvas.

I suggest making the leap to using canvasses, rather than trying to make all lighting adjustments in Daz.  Once you have your light set up in layers in your image editing program, it's far faster to make adjustments than it is in Daz.  I give a really basic example of what you can do with a single render in this thread.  Besides, you can always go back to doing it all in Daz if you don't like it.

Thanks - I've considered doing separate canvases for lights, but I just don't have the time and energy for it. I do one main render and then sometimes end up doing a lot of spot renders to fix things like clipping that I might have missed or to render out one particularly stubborn section with the denoiser to get rid of grain. I use a lot of geoshells for things like dirt, etc and sometimes I'll render one pass with and one without so I can control and customize the look in post. Separate lighting canvases are just not an option in those siituations. I like to set up lighting and tweak in Daz using the Iray preview and then just let it render overnight, moving to post and on-the-fly spot renders the next day. I really don't want to have to sit there and render several times. This is especially true when most of the time my main lighting is HDRI with maybe one spot and the rest environmental emissives. 

Using canvasses doesn't take any longer than a single image.  They all render at the same time and the different canvasses are saved in a folder in your render directory.  Overall, I've found they save time, since playing with light levels in Daz in Iray preview can take forever.  As an additional bonus, you can pump up the luminence for faster Iray renders since you'll be adjusting exposure later anyway.

The decision is yours, of course, but you can always try rendering one of your old scenes with canvasses.  You'd have an environment canvas for the HDRI, a light group canvas with your spot selected as node 1, and you could either have your emissives all as a single node 2 in a second light group canvas, or individually depending on how much lighting they contribute to the scene.  If your emissives themselves feature in the scene, you'd want an Emission canvas with those, as well.  In the scene in the thread I linked, I didn't have a beauty canvas, but you can use one if you like, mostly for reference.  I usually make a separate beauty layer for individual characters.  If reflective surfaces play a major role, you can add specular canvas.

Then it's just a matter of selecting all the EXR and opening them in your 2d editor (Nuke if you ever wanna get real fancy) and reducing the exposure to where it looks right and using them all as layers (add mode) and use the opacity slider to adjust lighting.  You can adjust make any adjustments including masking to the individual layers or to the overall image.

I understand the hesitation, especially when you're already getting good results, and it took me a long time before I made the change, but now I can't see myself working on a project with more than one light source any other way.  It's made post work a lot more fun, and lighting in Daz much less of a headache, while providing much more freedom. 

lilweep

Leonides02 said:

I import my rendered exr's into Blender specifically to take advantage of the filmic color space. Then I export to Photoshop for final touches.

 

I think I am fundamentally misunderstanding some of these concepts.

Does importing to blender make a difference? are you just importing the exr to blender and then exporting a new exr for photoshop?

Leonides02

lilweep said:

Leonides02 said:

I import my rendered exr's into Blender specifically to take advantage of the filmic color space. Then I export to Photoshop for final touches.

 

I think I am fundamentally misunderstanding some of these concepts.

Does importing to blender make a difference? are you just importing the exr to blender and then exporting a new exr for photoshop?

Yes. I import the exr to blender in order to take advantage of the "filmic" colorspace (which even Photoshop doesn't have), and then I export a PNG for any Photoshop manipulation.

 

 

davidtriune said:

Here is more info about ACES tone mapping. It compares the old tone mapping technique (used by DAZ) vs ACES tone mapping 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ColorGrading/index.html

I just found an easy way to apply ACES tone mapping to an exr render in photoshop. I must say, it does make quite a difference. Notably, reds are much more muted and this does make the render appear more real. 

I have also been applying the filmic blender preset to these images, but I don't know if I'm "double-dipping." davidtriune would you happen to know? You seem quite knowledgeable here. 

davidtriune

Leonides02 said:

lilweep said:

Leonides02 said:

I import my rendered exr's into Blender specifically to take advantage of the filmic color space. Then I export to Photoshop for final touches.

 

I think I am fundamentally misunderstanding some of these concepts.

Does importing to blender make a difference? are you just importing the exr to blender and then exporting a new exr for photoshop?

Yes. I import the exr to blender in order to take advantage of the "filmic" colorspace (which even Photoshop doesn't have), and then I export a PNG for any Photoshop manipulation.

 

 

davidtriune said:

Here is more info about ACES tone mapping. It compares the old tone mapping technique (used by DAZ) vs ACES tone mapping 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ColorGrading/index.html

I just found an easy way to apply ACES tone mapping to an exr render in photoshop. I must say, it does make quite a difference. Notably, reds are much more muted and this does make the render appear more real. 

I have also been applying the filmic blender preset to these images, but I don't know if I'm "double-dipping." davidtriune would you happen to know? You seem quite knowledgeable here. 

I've also been experimenting too. I just found out how to apply it recently.

I would guess you are double applying it. A good way to tell is if you crank up the exposure a lot. If the highlights become more and more desaturated, then it is correct. If it becomes more saturated, then it's probably wrong. (Except when the only lighting is a single spotlight. I don't know why, but sometimes highlights become more saturated regardless)

Blender's filmic mapping seems to look a little different from ACEScg. When I compared them, Blender seems a little more saturated. I prefer ACEScg a little more. See pics.

Also, I've read in different places that you need to convert all your textures to ACES, not just the final render. Although when I do this my renders often turn greenish. So I'm still figuring out things here

magog_a4eb71ab

Just out of curiosity, since we're in the topic of realistic skin, I thought I would ask, please see

https://www.daz3d.com/studio-light-pro-iray-hdri-180-maps

and explain to me what's going on in the 3rd and last promo picture with the character's leg texture vs the rest of her body? I use to always think I've somehow messed up the lighting of the character in the scenes or overall incompatible surface settings for a skin texture set. However, after coming across the above product and seeing that someone else that knows lighting has the same phenomena occur with character textures, then perhaps its not just me. So what gives? I notice this on legs, arms, hands, etc., and it just looks wierd. Sometimes its both darker & a slightly different color shade compared to the rest of the body.

MelissaGT

magog_a4eb71ab said:

Just out of curiosity, since we're in the topic of realistic skin, I thought I would ask, please see

https://www.daz3d.com/studio-light-pro-iray-hdri-180-maps

and explain to me what's going on in the 3rd and last promo picture with the character's leg texture vs the rest of her body? I use to always think I've somehow messed up the lighting of the character in the scenes or overall incompatible surface settings for a skin texture set. However, after coming across the above product and seeing that someone else that knows lighting has the same phenomena occur with character textures, then perhaps its not just me. So what gives? I notice this on legs, arms, hands, etc., and it just looks wierd. Sometimes its both darker & a slightly different color shade compared to the rest of the body.

I'm not sure what you mean other than her legs appear more saturated than the rest of the body. I've noticed this with a lot of characters, but that's the actual textures...that the legs are literally red in some case. My legs aren't a different color than the rest of my body so I dunno? *shrugs*

magog_a4eb71ab

melissastjames said:

magog_a4eb71ab said:

Just out of curiosity, since we're in the topic of realistic skin, I thought I would ask, please see

https://www.daz3d.com/studio-light-pro-iray-hdri-180-maps

and explain to me what's going on in the 3rd and last promo picture with the character's leg texture vs the rest of her body? I use to always think I've somehow messed up the lighting of the character in the scenes or overall incompatible surface settings for a skin texture set. However, after coming across the above product and seeing that someone else that knows lighting has the same phenomena occur with character textures, then perhaps its not just me. So what gives? I notice this on legs, arms, hands, etc., and it just looks wierd. Sometimes its both darker & a slightly different color shade compared to the rest of the body.

I'm not sure what you mean other than her legs appear more saturated than the rest of the body. I've noticed this with a lot of characters, but that's the actual textures...that the legs are literally red in some case. My legs aren't a different color than the rest of my body so I dunno? *shrugs*

THANK YOU! So its not just me, my monitor, my lighting, or surface settings, but rather the textures themselves. Having darker & lighter skin on the same character isn't a problem; especially if it generally matches the arms, legs, and/or face, transitions to the rest of the skin's color evenly(i.e. the skin coloration makes sense). However, the thing that looks strange or somewhat silly to me is when it looks like the lower half of the body was exposed to the sun for too long while the upper half was dipped in carbon tetra-chloride or hasn't seen the sun as much.