Why PBR skins looks so ugly?
Imronin
Posts: 15
in The Commons
I don't know why people still use PBR skin since they look so flat. I like to use Uber skin but the choices are very limited. Is there a way to convert PBR skin to Uber? Or is there a way to make PBR skins less ugly? And I've noticed another thing: my renders are always a little bit darker than normal. Why is that?
hailee test 1.png
1440 x 1085 - 1M
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Unnatural looking oil-free dry skin. LOL, my legs can look like that in winter. So, a lack of sheen/glossiness and needs more translucency on that particular example.
1. Are you using lighting techniques and render settings with PBR skin that you used with Iray Uber skin? I'd love to have one set of lights and just one render setting that was equally good for everything, but thinking you can use the same lights and same render settings with different shaders is naive. You need to be able to make adjustments to lights, render settings, and to be able to make adjustments in the "Surfaces" tab.
Unfortunately, given the state of Daz documentation (Stop laughing and/or crying!) and the company's attitude towards customer education and training, there really isn't anything to do but start the application, load various models, and start tinkering. I suppose you could try to glean some useful info by searching the forums and YouTube, but you'd be sorting through mostly outdated (shader types change and Iray versions change) stuff, stuff that was never correct in the first place, and stuff that has useful info. that is inefficiently or confusingly communicated to the reader or viewer. I'd save my time and go straight to the trial-and-error--the joy of incremental movement of sliders and 300-sample test renders.
2. "Flat" and "darker than normal". Looking at the test shot you've attached I'd say that (a) the lighting isn't intense enough and (b) the skin shader may have a "hidden" graying, bluing, or purpling quality. I find that the most frequent Surface tab adjustments I'm making to skin shaders is neutralizing or whitening values intended to produce illusions of depth or chiaroscuro-type effects (or sometimes just bad attempts at creating darker skin tones). Open the Surfaces tab and make sure. Adjust and test render.
What's the gray background in your included render? The Viewport Void? A gray HDRI background? A gray prop background? The same model rendered in different environments may be perceived very differently, even when lighting and render settings remain the same or very similar.
I have been griping about PBRSkin surfaces to a friend of mine since they first began appearing (and the poor man's probably sick to death of it by now). I will say that it seems like a lot of the Really Bad PBRSkin surfaces were some of the first ones to come out, and in the last few months I've seen several PBRSkin surfaces on characters that are actually quite nice. I think people needed a while to learn how to make those surfaces well.
But, yes. The Really Bad PBRSkin surfaces are incredibly uniform--no variations in skin tone, no blemishes, etc--and incredibly matte and flat, like the person has been dipped in a vat of powdered chalk. Sometimes I look at one of these surfaces and I need to go get a glass of water immediately because I can feel the moisture leaving my body.
If you have one of these on a character you want to use, I personally think you won't be able to light it so it looks good. I don't think it's possible. For the characters I own like that, I put a different skin on them when I use them. You can TRY what nonesuch suggests, but I haven't had much success upping the gloss and translucency with the Really Bad skins.
For what it's worth, regular Iray surfaces aren't immune to this; I bought a character just this morning which uses regular-Iray surfaces and yet manages to look exactly like a Really Bad PBRSkin character: absolutely matte, and an unnatural dusty pink, like she's covered every inch of her body in foundation that's the wrong shade for her skin.
Well, I'm creating scenes with multiple characters. This means there gonna be different shaders under the same lighting and render settings. I didn't have this problem with Genesis 8 Uber models (Mostly MSO). Then I switched to G9 PBR models. Look at this sample. This is a G8 Uber.
Is there anyone except Mousso who creates Uber shaders for G9?
The issue is with the SSS settings. You have to manually tweak them to get desirable results. It took me a long time to warm up to the PBR Skin shader, and I still have issues with it...but I've learned to work with it and get desirable results. It's all in the SSS. I don't have many Mousso characters for G9, but here is an example with Lorienne. I did not change any maps. It's all SSS settings that were changed. Took about 30sec to do. The issue is that most PA's (and even the core figures) are still using the same old SSS settings from years ago. They don't work anymore. They produce ORANGE PEOPLE. They need to be tweaked hardcore for the PBR Skin shader. They even need to be tweaked if you're still using Uber skins.
Same tweaks for Joan 9 (plus better brows because the ones that load out of the box are hooorible) -
Here is Angela 9 Space Infantry. Darker skin tones with PBR Skin tend to look much better out of the box than lighter skin tones. Still, here are some tweaks on Angela 9. The tweaks are a slight bit different, but still very easy to do.
FN Edith
I will note that there seems to be a bug where some shaders that are loaded after the initial scene load do not load properly, and this bug seems to worsen further down the timeline (quite a nuisance for someone who likes to build scenes on Frame 30 to give room to do dForce simulation if needed).
I've attached examples with Jada 8.1's PBRskin and the standard Ultrascenery shader, respectively at frames 0, 15 and 30 of the timeline (if you're using the Iray preview, you need to reinitialise for this to show). I don't immediately have an example, but I've come to conclude that even Frame 0 is not quite correct.
Saving and reloading the scene resolves it, but it's a complete pain to have to keep doing that. This definitely affects at least these two shaders, but I believe it might also impact other shaders too (as the parameters affected here seem to be different for each shader - for PBRSkin, glossiness and possibly something to do with translucency/volume are affected, but for Ultrascenery, tiling is wrong, so I'm wondering if there's some parameter in shaders like Uber that is affected, but is less often used or more minor).
I did report this to Daz a year ago (and I noticed it some time before that, but took some time to convince myself it wasn't my fault), but unfortunately the ticket has languished entirely unresponded to, despite me trying to follow it up more than once. (If anyone else can replicate this issue and send it in, please do so, because it may convince Daz to look at it).
TL;DR: PBRSkin does not load correctly if it's applied after the initial scene load, so that might be part of the problem people are experiencing.
I think generally speaking, IRAY Uber skins tend to look more idealised and glamorous, like a fashion editorial or a movie poster. PBR Skin is trying to be more realistic than that, in an everyday, person-on-the-street way. But as far as the Genesis figures have come over the years, they still mostly aren't photorealistic enough to be mistaken for an actual photo, they mostly tend to look a little (or a lot) artificial. And the more idealised IRAY Uber skin shader tends to pair better with the slightly artificial look of the Genesis figures than the more realistic PBR Skin shader.
That's my interpretation, anyway. I do use PBR Skin sometimes, but I prefere IRAY Uber.
... and every skin tone, but PBR in particular are way to dark compared to the environment. Turning down the translucency weight doesn't help, because that makes the skin look flat.
Thanks for the comments guys. So this time I tried differently. Used HDRI lighting and a few changes in Tonemapping settings. Then I got this. At least now I know I can do something with PBR skins LOL
It looks much better now. PBRSkin Shader is great with no doubt though there's some limitation in it. (There's also a PBRSkin Plus shader...) Anyway, in most of the cases, it's always 80% lighting patterns + 20% shader settings. Poor lighting patterns ruins your skin shader settings as well as texutre maps...
MelissaGT, I would love to hear more about what you tweaked on Angela 9 and Joan 9 to get those results. They look great.
As someone with content going far back into the catalog, I know it's difficult to get different generations of content to work together. I could, for example, stick a PBR character into an older MSO/IrayUber environment, throw in another character with an AoA Subsurface shader (intended for 3Delight use), and then add some really old props that were for older versions of Poser and never intended for Daz Studio. You can't expect to get this stuff to work together seamlessly, even stuff that is Iray native--Iray native covers different shader types.
As can be seen from this thread (and other threads), people have widely varying opinions about what skin should look like in Daz Studio renders, and that puts Daz and the PAs in a rather difficult position. They can't be certain what lighting and render settings will be used, and users have different preferences. Some like to depict Caucasian characters with corpselike whiteness, while I prefer some degree of tan or pinkishness (still well shy of sunburn pink or fake orange tan). Some people tend toward skin without any reflectivity, and others go to the extreme of making everyone look like they're freshly dipped in peanut oil. And don't get me started on those primarily interested in skin microdetail.
While a ticket should have been passed on it may be worth posting this to the beta thread, assuming it is still an issue, with the steps to reproduce.
100% agree with that. For me, nothing can beat the combination of an MSO model and Paper Tiger's HDRI lighting. I'm open to suggestions if you know G9 models with similar quality but different facial structures. Especially male ones.
Hey MelissaGT, your renders in DevientArt are amazing. Can you make a tutorial for indoor lighting? Or suggest any HDRI lightings to buy.
A very easy/fast way to reduce orange in a skin is to drop the brightness of Transmitted color a small amount (like 5-10).
If skin looks too dry, some easy things to do: Increase Dual Lobe Specular Reflectivity (I like ~.5, maybe a touch higher). Also, decrease Specular Lobe 2 Roughness Mult to, oh, .2.
You can also experiment with some top coat, but I don't think it's necessary.
Ooh, thank you! That is very useful information. Unfortunately, SSS is one of the things in skin surface settings I understand the least, so I'll have to just fart around by trial and error. But this could potentially rescue a few PBRSkin surfaces I gave up on as unusable ...
I've found one issue with native PBRSkin's is the introduction of the detail weight - this combined with the specular weight can create a very matte, almost grey-toned effect on some skins.
Lowering both of these can inject life back into the skin, but experimentation is needed as every skin will be different and lighting plays a huge part too.
Also shameless plug - my 1-Click PBRSkin product developed with Josh Darling makes it easy to adjust these settings: https://www.daz3d.com/1-click-pbrskin