Monique 8/Iray Skin
Valkeerie
Posts: 156
This posted was prompted by me taking a look at Monique 7 & 8 in the same render. I went through the shader settings in detail, and as always, it left me feeling perplexed. I use V4 a lot and I am accustomed to turning V4 skins into Iray 4.10 skins. The issue I find is that when I buy a premium DAZ model I expect some consistency in the skin settings, and what I actually find is so varied it feels like developers are just making it up. No-one has a clue. I would like to feel that isn't the case, so I am writing this to "draw fire", to see if any issues become clearer in discussion.
So, Monique 8 has a skin translucency of 0.9. This is an incredibly high value (because translucency interacts with SSS) and so the first thing I noticed was that Monique 8 was extremely speckly and the render took thousands of iterations to converge. This is what happens when translucency is high - light is endlessly scattered, and renders take forever. I believe this value is just wrong. I then took a look at Monique 7, whose translucency is a high 50% and it is set to scatter/transmit (which darkens her colour *a lot*).
So here is the first thing. No-one developing this content seems to understand the interaction between translucency, scatter or scatter/transmit, translucency colour, SSS reflectance tint, and SSS itself. I find the weirdest combinations, the strangest colour values. Some of the out-of-the-box DAZ models ought to look pale and aetherial and instead look like Donald Trump with a bad spray tan. There is such a strong interaction between translucency and SSS Transmitted colour and I despair of what I find. People are fudging the values, and using lighting and even post processing to correct the weird skin colours. One would expect some informed agreement, but I'm not finding that. [And yes, I know the render engine changed between 4.8 & 4.8, and SSS reflectance tint was used as a fix - but it was often a bad fix].
Here is what I do. I set SSS Transmitted colour to the colour of blood. I've read a lot of papers on SSS in skin, and that seems to me the only sensible answer. Red. I set translucency in the range 30-50% depending on the model. That now makes the model much too red. Too much light is entering the skin, so I set Translucency to Scatter only, and the translucency colour to white. Now things start to look right. I get rid of Translucency maps, because they are usually just the Diffuse map and that is profoundly wrong and can produce the weirdest results (but can be used cleverly with a proper map to let the under-skin colour show through).
I look for a Specular map and stick that in Glossy Reflectivity, and jack that up to 1. The key thing here is that any good specular map will do. By default I use the spec map from Danae's 'London' on all my V4 models. Specular colours should always be white. Always.
In the past I would try to be quite clever with the top coat. I would stick the Spec map in the top coat Reflectivity. Some people set the Top Coat Layering Mode to Fresnel, and then set up the refractive index properly. It depends on the model. It is a good way to model the slightly oily sheen of skin. Currently I am experimenting with Dual Lobe Specular, which is a more sophisticated specular model and overrides the basic gloss/roughness. A key thing to remember is that light reflected cannot enter the surface, so there will be an interaction between the amount of light reflecting off the surface and the amount of light scattering within it.
There are lots of other things to do, but to me the key thing is to set SSS to blood, and I don't mess with the Translucency colours unless I want a model dipped in chocolate or Trump orange. I can then alter the SSS intrinsic settings to achieve the effect I want - there is far more control over SSS settings than translucency, which is a blunt instrument. Much of the delicacy of skin comes from the specular, and the top coat can be used to great effect if used with care.
A corollary to this is that once one has converted a skin to Iray (and the Iray Uber shader will do fine) it doesn't matter which generation it began as - V4, G1, G2, G3, G8 - the outcome depends on the quality of the maps, not on the model generation.
As for Monique 8: if you have the model, take a look and tell me what you think.
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Comments
Your assessment may be incorrect because the Genesis 8 skins use settings such as "Diffuse Overlay Strength" and " Dual lobe specular weight", which weren't available at the release of Genesis 3, so any discussion about what was done in one versus another is irrelevant. The new generation is simply using a different method for materials that wasn't available. Using any new setting will definately change any related values to work with the new features. Also material discussions are going to be subjective anyway as different people have different tastes in settings, so use what you feel is best for your renders as the lighting you use will cause you to change material settings as well.
Monique 7 also has Dual Lobe settings. I checked. My experiments suggest that Dual Lobe is a reflectivity refinement and doesn't alter the function of translucency/SSS.
It will always be the case that there will be subjectivity, but good insight into shader settings is another matter.
Monique 7 doesn't have those Dual Lobe Settings unless you are using DS 4.10.+ and the Dual Lobe, amoung other features, is why DAZ 3D tells customers that Monique 8 needs DS 4.10.+ to work as intented. So if you open an model with iRay skin texture in DS 4.10.x, the Dual Lobe Settings were set to some default intended to have little to no effect on the models current iRay surfaces settings effect on the rendered model.
If anything you should take and set the Dual Lobe settings on Monique 7 to Monique 8's value and do a render, if you have a video card that renders so fast you can try such things quickly enough to be efficient.
Daz (and PAs) also provide presets to make quick adjustments to skin settings so that you don't have to dig into the complexity of the Uber shader unless you want to. And you've actually picked the Genesis 8 DAZ Original that I have had the biggest complaint about, since the others actually look decent to me out of the box.
Incorrect. Monique has a dial that is inherited from the the changes in DAZ Studio.
Dual Lobe specular was introduced in DS 4.9.4 in June to coincide with Genesis 8, months after Monique 7 was released in 2016. As such your experiments are fundamentally flawed.
NOTE: This version also includes other features added that affect subsurface scattering as well. So in effect you are comparing two separate methodologies in making materials.
I have used several of those skin products - it was curiousity about the very different choices they made that started me looking at shaders. Monique is the only G8 DAZ product I have tried. I have several DAZ G3, but the quality was so variable I refused to spend more money and went back to V4 (on the basis that if I'm going to spend a couple of hours messing with a skin, why pay good money for it?). My problem (and I know I am not alone in this) was an inability to get good results with the stock model, and a sense of frustration (then) that I didn't where to begin fixing it. IRay is supposed to be PBR, and there are lots of studies on the interaction of skin with light. It shouldn't be rocket science to have a consistent approach across the model range.
I'm not sure where you are going with this. You are criticising me and adding nothing of value; if you understand the pre and post 4.9.4 changes well enough to explain them, then it would be useful to do so rather than just gesturing with them.
I have checked the current Dual Lobe settings with V7, Monique 7 & Monique 8 as they appear in 4.9.4 and they are almost identical. Despite that, other settings are very different. (e.g. 90% translucency versus 50%, which is massive). I have been using 4.9.4 intensively for skin renders and I don't find it as mysterious and inscrutable as you make it sound. What I do find strange is the wildly varying approaches (as described in my original post), and the disappointing results I have had with several DAZ models out-of-the-box.
I was not referring to add-on skin modification products; I was referring to settings included with the content you bought.
I don't understand this. V7 & M7 were out-of-the-box, and not applied to a G8 model. The dual-lobe settings work fine. I'm currently using them on a V4. I understand Iray uses the shader settings and isn't dependent on the underlying geometry, so the gen of the character is irrelevant. I find the whole dual-lobe thing a bit of a red herring - I set the glossy mixed weight to zero and use dual lobe as an alternative specular model, it doesn't seem complicated or obscure (unless someone can tell me different).
The M7/V7 Iray shader settings did not, at release of those figures, have a dual-lobe specularity setting, as they were originally released when DAZ Studio 4.8 was the version of Studio available; even their updated ones after the release of 4.9 did not, since the dual-lobe specularity setting did not exist in the shader until 4.9.4. That they do have it, albeit set to 0 (turned off) is due to inheriting it from the defaults of the shader.
The shader itself was changed, and now has and shows when appropriate, the DLS setting - even for material settings that were saved before it was available.
Just to ground the discussion (it seems to have wandered a bit) I have spent 30 mins converting an average V4 (Medusa the Gorgon) that I bought for a couple of dollars in the recent sale. I set up the skin according to the prescription in the original post, to wit:
I haven't spent time tweaking. SSS is very noticeable as a reddening around the edges of shadows (where it isn't masked by the reflected component). I might consider reducing the translucency to 30-35%. The eyes aren't great - they came with the model and I should have swapped them out for something less toony. The Dual Lobe Specular is "quite nice" and subtle in its gradations, but adds a huge amount of time to the render.
My goal in posting this is to try to help anyone who is struggling with the look of a model - e.g. an older model, or even a brand new model like Monique 8. Just dive in, it ain't hard.
I don't know, she actually looks fine to me. This is a Monique render, no color correction, default skin settings.
Human skin does tend to come out a bit orange to me by default though, so I usually knock that out in Photoshop.
I don't think translucency should be necessarily low. In human skin a high amount of light is actually scattered through the skin. About 94% of reflectance comes from SSS. Problem is, this really looks the most right with Chromatic SSS, and that is bugged to high heaven in DS. So often when I am setting up skin I still use mono SSS and lower translucency to avoid a single-color takeover of my skin. This is preventing me from developing and releasing skin shader settings right now, I really wish it would get fixed. :\
Thanks, I'd noticed the Chromatic SSS in M8, and your comments make sense of that in combination with the high translucency. I agree, the skin looks okay (eventually, when it converges), but the settings are so different from other similar skins like M7 that a person like myself goes WTF! and Why? and of course it would be supremely helpful if Daz produced an explanatory crib sheet to help anyone with a large stock of older skins. One could use a product, but that isn't helpful overall IMO because the shader is such a fundamental part of the process - I have these products, and I still want to understand the (sometimes weird) choices they make.
I think DAZ is trying to move towards rendering human skin more realistically hence all the changes. People make these shader choices because they thought they looked good, I think you will have a hard time trying to find rhyme or reason behind some of them.
Exactly; different people have different ideas of how skin should look, so naturally they are going to use different settings.
For what little it may be worth: the difficulty I have with Monique 8's settings is that her translucency, in particular, should not be high. At the very least, it shouldn't be as high as Victoria 8/Michael/Olympia/Stephanie/Lucas, but every single Daz base character has translucency set at 0.9. Dark skin simply isn't as translucent as paler skin; that is quite literally one of the evolutionary reasons for its existence. But as soon as you set translucency lower, SSS Chromatic makes the character go translucent. Hopefully, someday, that issue will be fixed.
Honestly, even if SSS Chromatic weren't incredibly buggy, I'm not entirely convinced that the increased realism is worth the spectacular hit on render times. That said, if it weren't buggy, maybe SSS Chromatic wouldn't hit render times the way it does.
I get, to some extent, why Daz has handled things this way. They're using translucency as a major contributor for skin color. In fairer people, it may be -- I'm not entirely sure about that. In darker skinned people, it cannot be, at least not at the same level, and still be realistic. (Except maybe for soles and palms -- but those aren't separate surface areas, and so have to be handled with the rest of the texture -- and mouths, of course, which are separate surfaces.)
So far, all the changes I've tried with Monique 8 make her either dull and grayish, or trying to become invisible.
This is true, but melanin is mostly at the basal layer of the epidermis, not sitting on the surface, so dark skinned characters would still have a very significant SSS contribution. I would expect the scattering and depth to be different. I don't find much references on this when I look.
I have trouble trying to bring DAZ darker characters to lower translucency also. Like lighter characters they get much more pale, and it's harder to tint diffuse without flattening the skin tone. It might require actually editing the diffuse in an image editor which won't kill detail like that.
I'm not criticizing, I'm pointing out a invalid comparsion. Genesis 8 has DS 4.9.4 for it's requirement because it uses a different method to achieve SSS, The other settings for the different as you noticed, because of those new values, other settings are different to compensate. If you are having issues with your renders, you probably need at other aspects of rendering such as your lighting setup. For example, I ran the same scene, just replacing the skins with Monique 7 and 8. Monique 8 seems to be using less specular than Monique 7 so you would look at adjusting the lighting setup to compensate. But in this case this makes sense snce the light set i'm using was made during Genesis 3 so it's made to make that skin look good. I suppose you can get more specular in the skin by adjusting the roughness value for starters. However, I think learning how to adjust your lighting in your scenes to get the desired result from the skin is the approach that needs to be taken instead of saying the materials are wrong, because it isn't; it's just a different way that SSS is done and needs to be accounted for. when setting up your scenes.
Thank you for the various suggestions. I had not realised the changes to skin in G8 - Monique 8 was my first G8 purchase, and the only one I had seen that caught my eye.
What I have done today is try to get up to speed on how the new shader settings compare with the old. I set up Monique in an attempt to copy your pose and lighting, and did two things. The first was a stock render. The second was my best attempt to reproduce the stock result in "the old way" using the exact same pose and lighting.
I found it difficult and I nearly gave up. There was nothing obvious or intuitive about it. Some points to note:
Overall, I love the model and love the render result. On the other hand, I no longer have a good intuition as to how to work with the model (and by inference the whole of G8). If I had spent an entire day on a good V4 (as I have just done with G8) I feel sure I could have done something just as good and felt more comfortable with the process. The exercise has been worthwhile; I spent the summer outdoors and missed a lot of changes. Just to repeat, image 1 is stock with chromatic SSS, and image two is mono SSS and much arm-waving and cursing. Now that I see them side-by-side, I could reduce the dual lobe reflectivity just a smidge.
I think this thread is interesting and useful, especially since I still use G3 skins. :-) Thanks. A better understanding of how all the bits work is useful.
I use everything from V4 to G3. My interests are quirky and I like reasonably authentic historical clothes, so I cherry-pick clothing through the DAZ generations and then have to bodge a model to wear the item(s). Skin conversion products are fine as a starter, but I often find myself wanting to re-create an unusual skin effect I see in a V4 Poser render (for example) and then I have to wing it. I am still learning about the strange interactions between the translucency channel and settings and SSS - two ideas that are linked and fly in close formation and yet interact in ways that are inscrutable. I haven't found much online.
I wonder if maybe the issue, or an issue, is that the shader needs to have separate epidermis/dermis/subdermal layers -- represented specifically as such, rather than mixed together within the model the way they are.
That aside ... For what it's worth, I just compared the settings for the newly released Darius 8 to last month's Lucas 8. The settings are identical. Absolutely identical. Same strengths, same colors for everything. I'll bet the same is true for Monique and the rest of the G8 females. That can't possibly be right.
The values for scattering and transmitted measurement distance are identical, and the values are so small that there's not a lot of space to pull them lower. I'm not sure how you could make the shader model they're using work for both dark and light skins.
As it stands, because they've got translucency on blast, they artificially darkened the palms and soles for Darius and Monique 8. Looking at their textures in the directory makes me want to weep, especially because Daz had done a very good job with the textures on their dark-skinned base characters, all the way back to Mil4. Their hands and feet probably look terrible in 3Delight, or else their Subsurface settings are just as wonky as everything else.
If you wind up with glowing hands and feet, then change your settings, don't ruin the damn texture.
That said, the fact that Darius and Monique don't look horrible in Iray points strongly to the settings for literally every other character this generation being very wrong, because they do look excessively orange and tan.
I can see where you might have been confused. If you apply a G8 skin that uses Dual Lobe settings, and then apply any other Iray skin preset that does not use Dual Lobe, the Dual Lobe values will remain in effect. As the the older skin settings have no Dual Lobe parameter values, not even "0", the settings will stay in place.
Additionally, any time Dual Lobe is set above 0 it will automatically over ride traditional glossy settings, no matter what values you have dialed for them. So if you do go swapping a G8 character skin with a G3 skin, you will need to manually change the Dual Lobe value back to 0 (to turn it off) to achieve the original intended glossy values for that preset.
This threw me for a loop the first time doing it because I didn't notice what was happeining.
Daz Original characters are designed by different PAs, and everybody has their own ideas as to what works best. But I do agree with some of what you say, as many G8 figures just look weird and waxy in their promos, and it has been a major turn off for me from this whole generation. (That and I just don't think G8 is at all necessary.) However, like you, Monique 8 is the very first G8 figure I thought looked good in her promos. I even bought her, and that is my very first G8 purchase. In my brief testing, she looked fine, and I persoanlly think she looks better on the Monique 7 shape.
It would be really nice to have something like this.
Yeah, there's something about their new settings that still needs work. I haven't figured out what it is yet.
Theoretically this is what the chromatic sss solves vs the older mono (the traditional 3 layer setup has a blend of a bluish version a yellowish/greenish version and a redish version of the textures that one sets different scattering distance for, chromatic sss has one map, lets you set the ammount the reds, greens and blues scatter). I say theoretical because its... fiddly. And I'm the sort of person who likes fiddling with material settings.
The easiest basic fix is still to set the translucency strength lower .5 or point .6 (the translucency medium preset in the character materials does this) why this isn't the default... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and because it comes up often in these sorts of threads... proof raising translucency doesn't intrinsically and always darken the figure. In this render the figure has their translucency set all the way on. Yes. 100% translucency, and yet no massive red, no darkening, etc. (no maps because I was doing a lot of expirimenting and I wanted to see what was going on without any distraction)
(now because it uses all translucency and sss it is still quite slow to render)
What do the same settings look like with 0% translucency?
On the very odd shot that they read the forums, I should apologize to the Daz person who made Darius 8 and Monique 8. I looked at the textures for the 7's in their directories, and the palms and soles aren't that much lighter. It's likely that they simply found a donor texture with darker palms and soles (we do vary, after all), knowing that they'd need it. I do think that they tinted the palms and soles -- Darius 8, at least, gets some ferocious red fireflies on his hands that eventually render out, and tinting them would help control that -- but they didn't substantially darken the palms and soles.