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BTW:
Photo realism is NOT realism.
Not even sure, if realism is realism, by cherry picking it, considering how the human eye or even brain works.
In the end it is about, if we believe, that it is realism, and that might varie from person to person.
A CG trained person might spot a "photo real" render as a render right away, but most other people mostly not.
It works both ways. CG-trained people are primed to be easily impressed if their own achievements in the domain of photorealism are lacking. This thread is an exhibition of some of that mentality with many people patting themselves on the back for not coming even close. Of course, your average lay person may be fooled more easily because they could have a smaller uncanny valley, but they also havent been exposed to CG as much, so their uncanny valley is more well-preserved than people who stare at 3D models everyday and who are thereby more preconditioned to accept 3D models as "normal". Lay people are also likely to make less excuses for artists because they dont know how difficult it is, whereas daz users may be more inclined to give lenient scores to people working towards photorealism. So my point is: I would worry less about fooling or impressing the least critical Daz user or least critical lay person and only focusing on fooling the difficult-to-impress ones from either camp.
Also, let's not get bogged down on the semantics of what people mean by photorealism. The only definition that matters is the one harboured by the difficult-to-impress people i mentioned earlier. They know it when they see it.
There you go, you just need to think a little and actually try to meet the somewhat same conditions the photographer had...
I know what you mean, I'm not deluded to think that my portrait is even close to photorealism, It's a basic 3D portrait.
But Artstation's BLU1304's portrait of Daisy Ridley is on another level.
ArtStation - Rey Skywalker, BLU1304
Very Simple, and this has been said by myself and others outside of this forum, but Iray is not a Path-Tracer, which most, if not all other render engines used in the industry are, and hence why That Skin on the Rey model looks like that.
Iray is too aged at this point to reach this level of realism, and thus, is not used anywhere else in the industry.
not sure that logic makes sense
to be fair, that quality is commonplace these days
https://www.3dscanstore.com/blog/User-Gallery
https://www.artstation.com/ch/texturingxyz?sort_by=trending&dimension=all [this link has a lot of crap in there too]
Still have to say, a general "photoreal" in DS doesn't mean a "humanreal in a portrait render" . They're different things.
As for the former, Iray Engine gives you an unbiased physically based rendering, just like what you get from a photoshooting with a digital camera. Because a digital camera does the similar thing to "capture" what could be seen in real world with human eyes even animal eyes, with photosensitive elements, lens, auxiliary measuring, algorithm, mechanics, etc. That's "photoreal" ... (again, neither photorealistic nor photorealism, which are artistic styles...)
But as for the latter, only a good render engine is not enough, it depends lots of requisite and factors, like the above Rey Skywalker's portait: hight quality head shape, anatomical elements and scupted details, HD textures, nearly perfect groomed hair / vellus, proper SSS VE, not bad lighting, etc. This is "humanreal" or at least a "character-real".
Artists on artstation made these with Wrap, ZB, texturing.xyz, Pt, Maya-XGen...to bring the renders to a higher level. Well, it's not easy for us to directly get such similar "assets" from Daz... I won't babble more on that..
Just saw a new char. - https://www.daz3d.com/alvaro-hd-for-genesis-9... sculpting seems good but dunno about the real quality of textures.. not from photogrammetric data of course.
I can only partially agree with you here.
Iray is about to be quite litterly on it's two last legs, everyone else who was using it in their products have discontinued it, because Nvidia themselfs is slowly but surely pulling Iray off the entire market.
Iray will soon, or already only exists in two programs. Omniverse (and there it only exists for the purpose of whatever purpose it still serves) and Daz (that being said, it's possible they already also have gotten a notice about Iray being pulled to only Omniverse, that is not confirmed because we don't know)
As for your "Iray is a unbiased physically-based render engine", start living in 2023, Today, you even already have Unbiased Physically-correct render engines and Path Tracing. Yes. there is also a difference between Ray-Tracing (what Iray is doing) and Path-Tracing (What Octane, Cycles X, Renderman, and many other engines are doing), which Nvidia explained themselfs very nicely. Path-Tracing is Ray-tracing essentially, but rather then being "Limited to only a few surfaces, Path-Tracing is a full raytraced experience accounting for every surface". In the quite litteral sense, that means everything, even human characters, skin etc etc etc.
It's also no surprise, but Real-time really took off, Unreal Engine 5 being the best example, and Real-Time has already surpassed what Iray needs 5+ minutes to do.
If you really actually Dig into what Iray is, and i do not mean messing around with just shader presets in Daz, but picking up Substance Designer and working with their MDL, you'll come to understand how dated Iray exactly is. Just as for this purpose, i will attach my big experiment here, where i litterly re-created the PBR Skin Shader and Uber Shader in my own way, and how i've read and understood it reading Nvidia's own Documentation on their own MDL Language.
As for the Rest you mentioned, SSS, Lights, Hair, those are all mainly shader based to archieve the results, but more-over, because it's coupled with an actual Physically-correct Path tracing render engine, which has a few changes that Iray does not:
The Daz Shaders are using logarithm SSS, in things like Cycles X etc, that's a thing of the past, and their Physically-correct render engines are paired with a Physically-correct SSS menthod called "Random Walk", Renderman even explains that you need a "3-way" SSS Setup to even come close getting a realistic human character.
And as for lightning, Well, In a Path-tracer, and a real one, Light sources are unbound and unlimited, meaning that every light in a Path-Tracer scene is shooting out it's own rays into a scene, and is no longer limited by your POV or camera, Path-Tracing figures and renders a scene entirely different then how Iray is rendering it. Quite ironicly, You can Compare Iray with Unreal Engine 4's lightning, while the rest of the industry and render engines are on a Unreal Engine 5 Recipe.
It's as simple as that.
As for my Shader, you all can do and play around with that as you please, but i would recommend reading the read-me file carefully, as this is not just your typically Daz installation of "Shaders".
As a last, i've seen this picture on the thread too here being used as an example, the true origin is also from art-station, and the truth about this image is also: it is not rendered in Iray at all, it was rendered in Maya. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/18YPRX - From the actual creator herself.
Oh... pls forgive my bad English that took me quite a couple of minutes to understand what you were talking about. I was wondering if your post digressed... at least from the points in my post.
I was talking about 2 concepts : photoreal and humanreal in portrait renders and some KSFs that may lead to great humanreal renders like Rey's one. And I just said Iray Engine gives you an unbiased physically based rendering which is amost fully quoted from Daz blog. I neither cooked up the wording nor exaggerate anything about it. So what was the problem there ?
I'm not a tech guy and have no intention to compare render engines at this moment, however, I know that Daz + Iray / 3DL is still an ecosystem in here. We'd love to listen to different opinions as per a thread or a post but first of all, pls make the points relevant.
By the way, I also use Cycles and Arnold, even Renderman (testing) but I still love Iray... because in my language, we call it "情怀" as I've been with it for 6 years...
There is also no comparing you can do as Iray will simply fall short of archieving what the others can do at this point. Iray was simply said, along with the now dead Mental Ray (Bigger brother of Iray) one of the first PBR engines that hit the market all the way back in 2011 or something, or even earlier, Mental Ray since has fallen short of archieving it's goals ever since other major players entered the field, and that was the nail in the coffin for Mental Ray.
For me, Iray died along with Mental Ray the day it did, but they simply kept Iray alive because it's based on the same MDL Language, which they still need, that's the only reason Iray still exists to me, for the MDL language behind it and nothing else, but also no, Iray was not the better engine, it's a "Lite" version of Mental Ray that was not made to overtake it, but to lead people to Mental Ray and show it's capabilities in some form.
I guess the good thing is we can theoretically have all such things in Daz, on the proviso that PA's stop resting on laurels and that Tafi/Daz as a company works more to secure licenses to quality assets for PAs. They used texturing.xyz assets for Michael and Victoria 8.1. They should be building relationships with 3D scanners or creating their own assets as merchant resources. I worry they will be completely left behind. And it's not because of Iray limitations or whatever that poster keeps referring to, although maybe that is limiting too, but seems like less consequential than asset quality.
Not to say there arent some people making good quality assets, there are some.
So what ? We still use it. BTW, no need to tell us what we've already known... pointless.
Agreed...
One of my friends told me he bought a product from HLME3D and IM package is 3.3GB... I, eh.. am looking forward to having the renders from him...
Right. My character is stylized. Not Sol.
Link doesn't seem to work anymore, but I agree with what you're saying here.
I've read the comebacks that followed this and, well... come on folks.
There are some artists who can achieve higher levels of actual realism with much older biassed engines than other artists using the brand-spanking shiny, most expensive alternatives. So just because Iray isn't up to par with some of the other big dogs has absolutely nothing to do with an artist's capabilities with it - especially what that artist might do with it after the render.
Some of the most "Photo-realistic" images I've seen shown here lack something that it takes to make them look actually real - and that's having subtle assymetrical pose changes of the eyelids, lips, facial muscles in general. A zeroed facial position with fantastic rendering and lighting. But look at those pores!
It all makes me glad that I never bother myself with trying to get 'that freaking real' with everything. But if someone really wants to, I am certain that they could achieve plenty of realism using Iray with what they have to work with in Daz Studio - and that's just plain freaking free. That's something.
Something I've noticed from my own experiments is that HDRI lighting can be a real bugger for realism on faces and the rest of the body. Some of the 16k are so detailed that, unless the artist does something else with the settings, the shadows will be so crisp that they just look fake to my eyes. Even 8K can have this affect. Not picking any out of the crowd because I no longer use them so I don't recall which they are.
I'm sorry I commented. I'm never after photoreal so I really have no business being here. But it drives me nuts that so many people are so quick to blame the software. I know folks that are using their own special techniques to do amazing images using 3Delight and Carrara's photoreal engine, which is now Really old. These folks are thinking outside the box to find creative ways to achieve new heights with the tools that they have. Kudos!
I'm with you...especially on the last point. I rarely pursuit "photoreal" 'cause it's naturally there with Iray if I set everything properly, then I just make my chars. look great by all necessary means. There's an idiom in my country - 萝卜青菜各有所爱 which more or less means that one man's meat is another man's poison.
So just do what we're happy with and always be learning to improve them in a constructive way rather than deconstructive, e.g. killing "damn iRay or 3DL" first, then come on, where' my new all-mighty engine ?!
Blender, Completely Free and has all the tools, bells and whistles to do as you please and would want, Diffeomorphic makes it as easy as possible bringing over your characters and has a very good and solid reason why it's a standard industry for free.
The reason why HDRI's are difficult in Daz, or especially outdoor ones, is simply because Iray can't entirely correctly interpret the lightning from it. There are a very few of them i actually Like in Iray that just do what they are supposed to do, others are very quickly overexposed and way too hard and harsh on the lightning.
Most of the people i know do not use Iray for one reason only, and that's simply put, the lights suck and fail to really give the feeling of a "Light", which i can agree on, a single Emissive "Lamp" on real values of what a lamp would have, is so weak in Iray it barely lits something. What you end up with is a dim and underlit scene.
I won't say that there aren't assets with high quality, there are many to be honest, such as the SU hairs and outfits, and so on, and i won't say either Iray can't archieve photorealism, many of the points you stated are correct.
it's simple however, if you are using for example Blender, the "Struggle" of getting it right is mostly gone, and to be fair with you, i've already tried blender and was blown away, you have Ultimate freedom in Blender and so many tools at your disposal it's crazy to not use it.
Although, i will just say this, I give it perhaps 1 or 2 more years before Iray will be at a stage of being irrelevant mostly, Blender has started with bringing their real-time engine Eevee even closer to Cycles X, including Real-time Displacement previewing which can already be tested, Unreal Engine 5's Raytracing keeps improving performance wise with every UE5 update they bring out, making it less and less of a struggle to game with Raytracing on and without DLSS even, the shader stutterings keeps decreasing as time progresses, if anything, Nvidia's latest presentation made it clear in the very beginning of it that "Rendering Graphics" on engines that needs time is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and that is becoming more and more clear, Real-time Raytracing and later on, Real-time Path-Tracing is the future, Ray-tracing has already begun carving that path out.
Mostly commonplace ~~ Only thumb up for one point about SU... products from Sue Yee, she's a friend of mine. I have to say thank you ~
我斗胆说一句，您老2020年注册，忽然跳出来将大部分时间和精力都贡献给此帖，其情可悯... 不过，建议你分出时间也给其他帖子贡献一些有价值的东西。
And here is the difference between realism and photo realism.
Proffesional Photos are mostley already postworked. Especially on human models. Pores, pimpels and moles are often removed and those models still look real.
Amateur photos might not have the quality to show those details.
If it is not a portrait, the photo resolution isn't even high enough to see those natural flaws.
Talking about pores: Iit is really difficult to have decent pores in DS. Even with HD morphes, normal or displacement maps very often, it just looks like dark spots on cheeks.
So unless you are changing your software, this is what you are caught with in DS iray rendering.
(The funny part is, that for rendering, we used to do quite the opposite of what we'd do with real photos when it comes to post work.)
And there is more about it, in order to make a character look real.
Very often you might see pictures, that suppose to look like paintings of a human model and still you can tell, if it's hand drawn/painted or a photo, photoshopped into a fake - painting.
So postures and shapse are obvious important, but still underestimated elements.
My advise to spose a character for renders is, to give your character some gravity, by e.g. have shoulders hanging down on relaxed standing characters.
I posted earlier the references by MelissaGT et al. that i used to make the shader using iray uber. It was not anything special. I do have characters for sale at various places.
Yes, and you can see in that Rey picture posted earlier that the realistic pose and expressoin are contributing a lot. The soft tissue sculpt on her neck is also nice, so small details like that cannot be discounted either. Again, at the risk of repeating what everyone already said, it is a constellation of many things from hair, vellus, skin, pose, etc that all contribute to the whole.
I Love that saying!!! The simplified literal translation, I mean... Turnip Greens All have Love!
...and I completely agree - the beauty of realism just comes naturally in Iray. For my sort of cinematography in Iray, I might use my outdoor HDRI for outdoor environments (though I usually render many skies separately and simply use the Iray Sun/Sky settings I've leanred from Andrey Pestyakov scenes) but then match the essential mood on my character renders using JoeLeGecko's HDRI Photoshoot - beautiful tones, excellent lighting setups and nice, subtle, soft shadows.
As for Blender and the various ways to make it work, I have to say that thye have something Really special going there. When I tried Diffeomorphic I had nothing but great things to think about it. When I tried Daz 3d's DS to Blender I was also very impressed - say what you will, they're trying for something great here too - kudos to the team.
The part that hung me up was the hair. Trying to get good, long and curly simulated hair was becoming such a nightmare for me. That's when I also realised that All the Rest of it - animating, rendering, figuring out how to make my characters 'come to life'... I'm just not schooled in that.
In Daz Studio, I apply Linday's hair (I have quite a few and love working with them in dForce - I welcomed the learning curve and excperimentation trials) and I caught on to many different techniques to get the hair to behave in an acceptable manner for what I'm doing. Well... then I just just hit render because by the time I apply the hair I'm all done (or nearly so) animating.
The tools that Daz 3d have so graciously paid for and slipped under the hood of Studio make it a very organic process for me to take my zeroed figures into a living breathing thing. I'm sure that I could get there one day with Blender, but after a couple months of pulling my hair out, I finally asked "Why?"
The ONLY reason "Why" was because people in this forum told me that I must.
I went back into Studio. It felt like I was taking the most wonderful bath ever. Warm and soothing. I flip a few coins to folks that make my life easier and it all just works without my having to go to school to figure out what to do.
I have looked. Maybe it's just me. I have completely failed to find anyone doing hair like this in Blender that actually looks like something
Nothing Against Blender!!! That's why I began that last post how I did. I just think that Iray in Daz Studio is FANTASTIC especially considering how quickly I can get everything up and running - and then rendered.
The description of the above video on YouTube shows the time spent rendering the frames.
That wonderful comment that crosswind made about Iray just naturally making things look realistic, I'd just like to show a quick example. This is a single frame of animation that is set at really low quality so that, even with the reflections and translucency, this one only took one and a half minutes to render.
Speed rendering is mostly all I do to get my animations spit out in an acceptable amount of time for me. Rosie is wearing Sol's materials, which I've discovered have their own Wet look built into the shader. The maps are in place but the slider is at 0.00 by default - default producing this look here - a nice natural sheen on dry skin. Turn up the slide just a touch and she just got done running or it's getting a bit hot. Crank it all the way up and she's beautifully soaking wet. I love these materials. Due to how the shaders are set up, things that are made to "Control Skin" don't work properly on her. But she really doesn't need it.
The animation of Cy'Lara (Thorne's Lara for G8F wearing Ansiko's Bot Store Cyborg wearable) helping soaking wet and naked Rosie to this med bay turned out absolutely stunning! Too bad there's that darned TOS thing, or I'd show it.
Rosie is dry in this shot, but the other, she just got out of a bacta tank and is still not fully functional. Using LimbStick and some creative animation work, I was able to get the effect So much better than originally expected! During the struggling walk, she actually gets a surge of pychic energy from the ship (haunted star ship) and Cy'Lara catches her. Until it was fully rendered and played back, I really didn't realise how amazing it was going to turn out - but it did. The motions, the reactions, the look of the soaking wet skin and absolutely soaked hair (Linday's newer dForce Wet Style Curly Hair for G8 and 9) and the reactions of helpful tugs from Cy'Lara turned out So Freaking Good!!!
I am having So Much Fun!!!
Haha, the render explains everything.
The image above is actually a much longer animation than usual for me. Rosie's sitting still - or so it feels like to her. But she's actually playing with her hands anxious to get going as Cy'Lara scans her for physical anomalies that her death may havce caused. As it turns out, the healing powers of the bacta (and unknown to them, the ghost within the ship) did a remarkable job of breathing life back into her.
She died saving the cyborg, Cy'Lara, from utter malicious slavery. With her wealthy master dead, Cy'Lara ceased his accounts and bought the ghost ship for a really good price - due to it being haunted.
EDIT: Oh. but it looks really cool how much subtle, natural movement Rosie goes through as she "Sits Still". Cy'Lara actually giggles about it a bit later in the animation.
The above image is the shot of Cy'Lara. There are two more render cams. One in motion orbiting the two for several seconds before zooming in a bit, and the other is like this one but focussed on Rosie and her fidgeting.
Continued efford, and this is the closest i got. (Also using my Custom SSS Node, and self-made non-SBH Fiber shader on her brows and vellus hair for those that do spot it)
Translucency Weight mapping is perfected to a point where i can't get any closer.
As for the hair shader itself, that you can put together over a coffee knowing where to look (Sorry uncannyvalet, but i've not used your shader and instead done it myself. Knew of it's existance already, but i won't drop them here either as i've completely done them, and for Both SBH and Non-SBH)