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Moles & small skin disturbances showing as indented not outdented...bug?

CypherFOXCypherFOX Posts: 3,401
in The Commons

Greetings,

This is a super-detail-oriented thing, but I've been seeing it more and more in renders and the occasional promo.  Characters that should have moles, large freckles, or more slight beauty spots where the texture implies raising up above the skin, but the render looks like it's indented.  While most of the time, it's subtle, this image in a different thread caught my eye: English Village Golden Hour.  It's a great image, a little pinup-y but that's fine by me.  But it's a great image for showing what I'm talking about.

If you zoom into it, and look at the darker freckles/moles, you'll see that they are clearly INWARD into the skin, probably a Normal or Bump mapping.  My problem is that I'm seeing this a LOT more, recently...in promos at 'rosity, and occasionally here (although the skin is rarely as closely visible as that image above).

I'm worried that it's a bug in Iray or DAZ Studio that's causing textures that should be showing a (bump? normal?) to protrude upwards, to instead sink down into the skin.  I worry about bug because the folks doing those images are pretty darn good, otherwise speaking.

If it's not a bug, then there's some kind of setting that folks aren't aware of, and probably I'm not either.  It might be NGS2, also, as several images that I've noticed have it explicitly call out that they used NGS2, but I really, honestly don't know.  I want more input.

I'd love to hear if others have been noticing this trend at all, and if so, what they think might be responsible for it.

--  Morgan

 

Comments

  • agent unawaresagent unawares Posts: 3,513
    edited September 2017

    It happens because people make bump maps by desaturating the diffuse maps. EDIT: NGS2 straight up uses the diffuse maps as bump maps which is why you would see it there.

    Post edited by agent unawares on
  • DestinysGardenDestinysGarden Posts: 2,550

    Doesn't NGS2 put the base color map in the bump channel? I'm not sure, but I thought that is how it works. Anyway, if the mole is dark on the color map, then that gets put in the bump, yes, it will be indented instead of extruded. Black goes down, white goes up.

    Another thing is Daz Studio wants normal maps to be in Open Gl format, and a lot of the common texturing programs default to to exporting normal maps in Direct X format, which is also reversed for our renderer. It is a simple matter to flip the green channel in an image editor, but it is way easy to miss.

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 14,914

    I love NGS2, but that's one place where it falters.

    It's easy to fix, though, by plugging a proper bump map into that top coat bump channel

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