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Stephanie 6 all skin surfaces 50% diffuse strength?

msorrelsmsorrels Posts: 44
edited February 2014 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

So I picked up Stephanie 6 and like some others have pointed out she is very dark. Looking at the material settings on her default skin, if you select the Skin material helper in the Surfaces panel you will see that the Diffuse Strength is set to 50% for all skin surfaces. This doesn't seem right to me. Bumping that up to 100% creates a much more usable character, still a little tan but not inhuman.

I'm also seeing a different, lighter, shading on the lower part of her legs, the calf/shin area. It's noticeably lighter past her knees. This is true if you leave the 50% diffuse or up it to 100%.

So am I just wrong and she is supposed to be like this or is it just sloppy materials with no quality control?

Post note: After looking at all the G2F base materials they pretty much all are using 50% diffuse strength. Which seems a bit low unless your textures are designed for it. Maybe it should be like this, but S6 still seems way too dark though.

Post edited by msorrels on

Comments

  • KeryaKerya Posts: 10,943
    edited December 1969

    Don't have her - but it may have to do with the SSS settings:
    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/21557/

    Diffuse + SSS should be 100%

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    msorrels said:
    So I picked up Stephanie 6 and like some others have pointed out she is very dark. Looking at the material settings on her default skin, if you select the Skin material helper in the Surfaces panel you will see that the Diffuse Strength is set to 50% for all skin surfaces. This doesn't seem right to me. Bumping that up to 100% creates a much more usable character, still a little tan but not inhuman.

    I'm also seeing a different, lighter, shading on the lower part of her legs, the calf/shin area. It's noticeably lighter past her knees. This is true if you leave the 50% diffuse or up it to 100%.

    So am I just wrong and she is supposed to be like this or is it just sloppy materials with no quality control?

    Post note: After looking at all the G2F base materials they pretty much all are using 50% diffuse strength. Which seems a bit low unless your textures are designed for it. Maybe it should be like this, but S6 still seems way too dark though.

    Is she too dark in a 3DL render, using a good light setup?

  • msorrelsmsorrels Posts: 44
    edited December 1969

    mjc1016 said:

    Is she too dark in a 3DL render, using a good light setup?

    Yes, I think she's too dark no matter what lighting I use (and I only use 3DL for rendering). But I've thought a number of the G2F character texture/material setups weren't very good, but S6 seems extra wrong. And the color of the lower part of the legs seems wrong no matter what I do.

    Maybe it's just me. But at least with the S6 diffuse texture I think 50% diffuse strength is too low, though perhaps a better solution would be some adjustment layers to the texture itself.

  • KhoryKhory Posts: 3,854
    edited December 1969

    I have not looked at the texture but if it uses the AoA SSS then 50% for diffuse with a post sss setting is likely right because of how the diffuse is calculated after the SSS.

  • millighostmillighost Posts: 261
    edited December 1969

    msorrels said:
    So I picked up Stephanie 6 and like some others have pointed out she is very dark. Looking at the material settings on her default skin, if you select the Skin material helper in the Surfaces panel you will see that the Diffuse Strength is set to 50% for all skin surfaces. This doesn't seem right to me. Bumping that up to 100% creates a much more usable character, still a little tan but not inhuman.

    I'm also seeing a different, lighter, shading on the lower part of her legs, the calf/shin area. It's noticeably lighter past her knees. This is true if you leave the 50% diffuse or up it to 100%.

    So am I just wrong and she is supposed to be like this or is it just sloppy materials with no quality control?

    Post note: After looking at all the G2F base materials they pretty much all are using 50% diffuse strength. Which seems a bit low unless your textures are designed for it. Maybe it should be like this, but S6 still seems way too dark though.

    With the subsurface shader and the pre-post-sss setting to 1, the scattered light gets multiplied by the diffuse texture. There is also an input for "Subsurface color" in the shader where you can assign a color texture. That latter texture gets multiplied with the light the surface receives before the sss-calculation is done. If you have both, the textures will effectively multiplied by each other. A lot of material settings simply set those two textures to the same image file, resulting in a diffuse texture being multiplied by itself (i.e. it is squared). Very small effect for bright textures, but greater effect for darker textures (and while putting artistic considerations aside for a moment, simply wrong in any case). So with the pre-post-sss setting at 1, it is advisable not to use the "subsurface color" input and leave it white.

  • KhoryKhory Posts: 3,854
    edited December 1969

    it is advisable not to use the “subsurface color” input and leave it white.

    And select Skin A or Skin B.

  • msorrelsmsorrels Posts: 44
    edited December 1969

    S6 has the same image for both the diffuse color and subsurface color inputs. Perhaps that's the cause of the issue. Removing the subsurface color image does seem to improve the color and tone a lot. Though the lower leg problem isn't effected, I think it's more a problem with the actual texture map itself.

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