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"Why it’s so hard to make CGI skin look real" - VOX

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  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    Jonstark said:

    One of the surprises for me in finally going through all my character textures were some that I bought on a whim because they were cheap but didn't much care for the promo pics turned out to be very high quality.  Specifically I'm thinking of Liquid Rust.  All the promo pics look airbrushed and a little uninteresting, so I never thought much about them, but they are actually very high quality textures, and always include not just Diffuse, Spec and Bump maps, but also a Diffuse multiplier map as well as in many cases some Displacement maps.  Much higher quality than I expected.   Sometimes (most times!) those old promo renders on the product page just fall way short of giving a fair peek at what the product actually entails.  :)

    Makes me want to run out and buy some Liquid Rust!!! I'll have to dig through my collections and see what Liquid Rust I already have! ;)

     

    Do you happen to have V4 Elite - Reby Sky?

    I'm not sure if Reby Sky for Genesis included the same maps - I'll have to check. But the original has some pretty fun maps to play with in Carrara shaders, as well as inspiring us to see how the hand-painted controller maps were made so we can experiment with making our own - perhaps even going into great detail.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    I also have an awful lot of character maps that I've collected over the years. Being PC+, I would often get some for free during the monthly freebie (possibly not PC+ only?)

    I should really spend more time digging through them again. 

     

    I did do a Lot of digging before finally deciding upon Reby Sky for Rosie 5. Rosie 4 was using V4 High Res that I customized years (Years!!!) ago. Man, I sure was a noob then. I still feel like a noob when it comes to good skin. I like my simple methods for fast renders. Not overly realistic, but not plastic either. Just a basic 'decent'.

     

    After seeing Iray in use, I'd really like to follow you on making much more believable skin!

  • mindsongmindsong Posts: 1,701

    like you jonstark, I can't really dig in right now, but wanted to acknowledge your notes and say 'yay' to your 'liquid rust' figure/skin mention - I've been picking them up on the latest nearly free sales over the last year, noting that while almost too clean, they look really well done, so I'm feeling quite pleased at your comments!

    I'll engage further asap.

    tnx and best,

    --ms

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    Dartanbeck said:

    Jonstark said:

    One of the surprises for me in finally going through all my character textures were some that I bought on a whim because they were cheap but didn't much care for the promo pics turned out to be very high quality.  Specifically I'm thinking of Liquid Rust.  All the promo pics look airbrushed and a little uninteresting, so I never thought much about them, but they are actually very high quality textures, and always include not just Diffuse, Spec and Bump maps, but also a Diffuse multiplier map as well as in many cases some Displacement maps.  Much higher quality than I expected.   Sometimes (most times!) those old promo renders on the product page just fall way short of giving a fair peek at what the product actually entails.  :)

    Makes me want to run out and buy some Liquid Rust!!! I'll have to dig through my collections and see what Liquid Rust I already have! ;)

     

    Do you happen to have V4 Elite - Reby Sky?

    I'm not sure if Reby Sky for Genesis included the same maps - I'll have to check. But the original has some pretty fun maps to play with in Carrara shaders, as well as inspiring us to see how the hand-painted controller maps were made so we can experiment with making our own - perhaps even going into great detail.

    Oh yes, I've got Reby.  I have all the Elite series, even the S5 Joanie, M5 Dave, V5 Valerie... the only one I didn't have up til a few weeks ago was V4 Ariana, which somehow I never saw or heard of before, and to be honest I'm wasn't in love with the promo renders for her, but when it popped up on sale my OCD side said: "must complete Elite collection immediately!" and since I have no impulse control... 

    The Reby sky for Genesis is just a morph for the Reby shape though, it doesn't include any textures.  But yeah the Reby textures are kind of fun to see what kind of hijinx the texture creators were trying to get up to back in the day to make a crude SSS effect (which in fairness worked pretty well).  The SSS maps made me chuckle, looks like a kindergartner with a crayon drew red marks over a diffuse map.  

    Better SSS maps are included with M5 Philip and V5 Bree (the 2 that every Carrarist has as they were included with Carrara).  Though imo everyone has gotten SSS maps wrong in one way or another.  I ended up making my own to make sure that the effect was guided to the right places and not the wrong ones.  (almost everyone who made a SSS map seems under the impression that every character render should have eyes so red it looks like they are in the throes of a terrible malady). 

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    Dartanbeck said:

    Jonstark said:

     This probably sounds complex as I'm using words, but it's easy to see visually.  I'll post a mini-tut on just the specularity differences in a different thread... 

    I was able to follow along without any problems and am eager to learn more!

     

    I have to say that, what I've tried with Light Mangler so far didn't work across animations because they require a rendered result to work from - but I'm hoping to learn that I was incorrect in my assumptions!

    Still, even if I have to settle for not using Light Mangler, I think the rest of this will do me a Lot of good! For example, I've never used the Falloff shader.

     

    Thanks man! Looking forward to learning more!

    Oh by the way, even though I'm not animation focused, I still do tons and tons of animations all the time (how else are you going to see the full specular effect of your setting unless you've got a camera orbiting your character's head to see it from all angles?) and I have to say Light Mangler will work fine in animations, not even sure what problem you could be running into.   Light mangler lets the render calculate as it normally would, and in the end puts a mask of some kind (multiply/subtract/add/etc) over it.  So I don't think there's any worries for you about it (hopefully I'm not missing something obvious and promising checks I can't cash, lol) 

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    Cool. Thanks!

    Light mangler allows us to add maps to the SSS channel. Not sure I want to go that route, but time will tell.

     

    I spent so many years just tweaking, learning, tweaking, learning... that I'm going to proceed with what I'm using now to get something finished, then I can go back and start the learning, tweaking, etc., back up again! ;)

    All while continuing forward with the project, of course.

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    mindsong said:

    like you jonstark, I can't really dig in right now, but wanted to acknowledge your notes and say 'yay' to your 'liquid rust' figure/skin mention - I've been picking them up on the latest nearly free sales over the last year, noting that while almost too clean, they look really well done, so I'm feeling quite pleased at your comments!

    I'll engage further asap.

    tnx and best,

    --ms

     

    Wow, just realized that all the Liquid Rust products are on sale today for just $1.00 each.  Some of them are bundles that include character and clothes.

    Also looks like almost all the Surreality 'modern muse' series are also on sale for $1.00 each.  Again, some are bundles.   

    Looks like I'm going to complete my collection lol. 

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    Just a quick FYI:

    While on the subject of Liquid Rust stuff on sale, I'd just like to point out that we can use products like Calvin for V4 for Genesis.

     

    Simple method:

    Load in the Genesis Basic Female character preset and dial off the Basic Female morph and shape Genesis however you'd like.

    Now it's just a simple process of setting up the shaders with Calvin for V4's maps ;)

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    Dartanbeck said:

    Just a quick FYI:

    While on the subject of Liquid Rust stuff on sale, I'd just like to point out that we can use products like Calvin for V4 for Genesis.

     

    Simple method:

    Load in the Genesis Basic Female character preset and dial off the Basic Female morph and shape Genesis however you'd like.

    Now it's just a simple process of setting up the shaders with Calvin for V4's maps ;)

     

     

    Yes, and he's not the only male built for V4 UVs, in fact I was surprised to find a lot of them as I was going through my character sets and saving out a shader set for each one.  V4 was the queen of crossdressing UVs, lol.   Here's the ones I found:

     

    The GW bundle is probably pretty obvious:


    https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-gw1-male-texture
    https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-gw2-male-texture

    https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-gw3-male-texture
    https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-gw4-male-texture

    There was Vittorio, although I don't own that one and it isn't in the store anymore, there are still some textures built to fit Vittorio, which is V4 UV, the ones Morris did for Vittorio:

    https://www.daz3d.com/zere-for-vittorio-4

    https://www.daz3d.com/jinn-for-v4-male-vittorio

    Also Xavier by Morris, but apparently that's no longer available in the store.


    Calvin, as you mentioned, by Liquid Rust: https://www.daz3d.com/calvin-for-v4

    But then I found some that were suprising:

    Aaron for young teen Justin: https://www.daz3d.com/aaron-for-genesis-young-teen-justin

    Edward Odd by Silver/Jessai:  https://www.daz3d.com/emelie-and-edward-odd ;  (probably not surprising that Emelie from that bundle is a V4 UV too)

    Also there was Paul by 3dream over at Rendo

    And I'm not sure how to classify this, but the Genesis Baby also uses V4 UVs.


    I also found a lot of other oddities, strangest perhaps of all was that Stephanie 5 is a crossdresser too!

    Hayden for young teens is built on a Steph5 UV:  https://www.daz3d.com/hayden-for-young-teen


    On the other side of the coin, I could only find one female texture that was built for an M4 UV, which was Mina by pdxjim, apparently no longer available in the DAZ store.

     

    But the weirdness didn't stop there.  I found several products that were advertised as being Michael5 exclusives, but found that the UV was actually Michael4:
     

    Ohia:  https://www.daz3d.com/ohia-for-michael-5

    Nigel:  https://www.daz3d.com/nigel-for-m5

    Tyrese:  https://www.daz3d.com/tyrese-for-m5


    In the same vein, I found a lot of Michael 6 products that were actually built with Michael 5 UVs, here's some examples:

    Ash for teen Jayden: https://www.daz3d.com/fw-ash-character-and-accessories  ;

    Dan for M6:  https://www.daz3d.com/fw-dan-megapack

    Ja-long for Lee 6:  https://www.daz3d.com/fw-ja-long-hd-for-lee-6

     

    There were even more on the female side that use different UV maps than the figure they advertise, such as V6 characters actually built with V5 uv maps, but I kind of ran out of oomph to go find and list them all (maybe later I'll edit to add more).

    Btw, I don't think of it as false advertising, since in each case the character does actually require the advertised morph, even if it's built using a different UV.  It's just odd that they don't advertise it as also being compatible with the character of the UV it's actually using.

    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    I think they might have found that UV mapping to produce less distortion, perhaps? Hard to say.

     

    The cross-gender V4 was mainly due to the  l o n g  wait for M4 to hit the shelves. V4 came out quite a bit before Michael. So a lot of vehicles of that time came with driver/passenger, etc., poses for V4 and M3! LOL

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323
    edited September 2021

    This is by no means a good render - settings are about as low as Carrara goes. But I did add roughly 70,000 more strands of hair than the pictures I've shown lately, while reducing the size of the strands as well. When I started a render with the hair's render settings at max on the slider (500 - I think it goes higher by manual entry), it was going to take too long for this simple still shot.

     

    I basically wanted to show a small example of how Rosie's eye gleam works during an animation, though it's a still... so it's still not showing what I want. 

     

    Feels good to be rendering Rosie 5.2 in Carrara though!

     

    Doing this short demonstration animation got me wanting to go back to the drawing board with another new version of Rosie. Again, start by building a preset for her in Daz Studio so I have a backup preset in case I add morphs that I want to add to her later.

     

    This hair is so much more "Alive" than the dForce hair I'm using in DS. I think that, learning from what I've done so far, I should dig into Rosie's dynamic hair again and shhot for something even better.

     

    I have enough rendered of the DS version for the project I want to finish now ASAP, so the timing feels right to me.

    G1_2_R52_End_FCneA.png
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    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    Dartanbeck said:

    This is by no means a good render - settings are about as low as Carrara goes. But I did add roughly 70,000 more strands of hair than the pictures I've shown lately, while reducing the size of the strands as well. When I started a render with the hair's render settings at max on the slider (500 - I think it goes higher by manual entry), it was going to take too long for this simple still shot.

     

    I basically wanted to show a small example of how Rosie's eye gleam works during an animation, though it's a still... so it's still not showing what I want. 

     

    Feels good to be rendering Rosie 5.2 in Carrara though!

     

    Doing this short demonstration animation got me wanting to go back to the drawing board with another new version of Rosie. Again, start by building a preset for her in Daz Studio so I have a backup preset in case I add morphs that I want to add to her later.

     

    This hair is so much more "Alive" than the dForce hair I'm using in DS. I think that, learning from what I've done so far, I should dig into Rosie's dynamic hair again and shhot for something even better.

     

    I have enough rendered of the DS version for the project I want to finish now ASAP, so the timing feels right to me.

     

    Ah, that really is beautiful hair Dart.  Dang it, I shouldn't be up this late, but a combination of coincidences has kept me up diddling around on nonsense.  It started when I found an old M4 texture that looked really quite decent and kinda familiar.  Paired with a morph I found, and then I was like 'do I have something like the armor in one of my top 5 favorite sword fights of all time?'    Then Dart gets me thinking about hair, and how I'm way overdue to get back to playing with it, and I wonder 'could I whip up a messy mullet in a few minutes?'    Ah, the nonsense I fritter my time away doing...   :)

     

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    BradHoplite4.png
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    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588

    Jonstark said:

    One of the surprises for me in finally going through all my character textures were some that I bought on a whim because they were cheap but didn't much care for the promo pics turned out to be very high quality.  Specifically I'm thinking of Liquid Rust.  All the promo pics look airbrushed and a little uninteresting, so I never thought much about them, but they are actually very high quality textures, and always include not just Diffuse, Spec and Bump maps, but also a Diffuse multiplier map as well as in many cases some Displacement maps.  Much higher quality than I expected.   Sometimes (most times!) those old promo renders on the product page just fall way short of giving a fair peek at what the product actually entails.  :)

    I don't understand the love for LR skin textures.  I have an even dozen of them, and they all look relatively smooth and undifferentated.  Most don't even have specular maps.  Plus, zero of them in my collection have displacement maps.

    Can you offer suggestions on specific LR products where there is skin color variation?

    Can you also explain the value of a "diffuse multiplier" map?  Some of the products have these maps, but I have no idea how to apply.  In viewing the files, I can't see how this (or displacement) can differentiate skin coloration.

  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,037

    yeah as well as our own Veronica (Vyusur) there are many other other PAs I prefer over Liquid Rust

     

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    UnifiedBrain said:

    Jonstark said:

    One of the surprises for me in finally going through all my character textures were some that I bought on a whim because they were cheap but didn't much care for the promo pics turned out to be very high quality.  Specifically I'm thinking of Liquid Rust.  All the promo pics look airbrushed and a little uninteresting, so I never thought much about them, but they are actually very high quality textures, and always include not just Diffuse, Spec and Bump maps, but also a Diffuse multiplier map as well as in many cases some Displacement maps.  Much higher quality than I expected.   Sometimes (most times!) those old promo renders on the product page just fall way short of giving a fair peek at what the product actually entails.  :)

    I don't understand the love for LR skin textures.  I have an even dozen of them, and they all look relatively smooth and undifferentated.  Most don't even have specular maps.  Plus, zero of them in my collection have displacement maps.

    Can you offer suggestions on specific LR products where there is skin color variation?

    Can you also explain the value of a "diffuse multiplier" map?  Some of the products have these maps, but I have no idea how to apply.  In viewing the files, I can't see how this (or displacement) can differentiate skin coloration.

    I figured out how to use the diffuse multiplier map after studying how it applies in Studio, but to be honest it's harder to make a case for the value of it, except that without it you're not getting the PA's intended collor in your diffuse channel.

    Basically instead of putting just the diffuse map into the color channel, the method is to put a multiply operator in, and in the first channel put the diffuse map, while in the second channel put the diffuse multiplier map.  The diffuse multiplier map looks mostly white (I mistook it for a displacement map at first).  When multiplied by the normal texture map, it darkens the skin (well not just darkens, as it does contain its own colors as well) in specific places, as well as overall.  The idea is to enhance the color of the skin.

    One might ask: why not just make the diffuse map as good as possible in the first place, without needing any other map to enhance it?  I don't know the answer for sure, but I did see one of the old timer PAs complaining about how difficult/expensive/time-consuming it was to make the Elite maps, and that was why DAZ eventually stopped making them.   So maybe this was an easier/less expensive way to enhance the rendered texture?   Not sure, but it does make a difference when using them.

    I agree 100% that Liquid Rust goes for the airbrushed 'clean' look.  Of course lots of other PAs go for that look too, so Rust isn't alone on that.  Always reminded me of 'glamour photos' from the 80s and 90s, just a very smooth look, and I'm sure its intentional.  Liquid Rust does not give 'good acne', lol.  On the other hand, since I quite like the 'beautified' look, I'm ok with that.  Surreality texture sets are the ones I remember seeing so many falling down to compliment on their beauty, and to me most of the Surreality ones are kinda ugly/weird.  (Still, I picked up a few last night, the ones that were only $1 in the sale, so I'll give em a try to find out in real life how they perform)

    All of the LR sets I've opened have spec maps though, and I literally bought all the other ones that exist last night ($1 apiece was too much of a good deal to pass up), though I haven't downloaded them  or opened them to see.  Sabby/Seven is the PA who doesn't use specular maps that I know of, instead either giving a flat % in the spec channel or using the bump maps in the spec channel (which works surprisingly well).  

    Here's LR's Heartbreaker with and without diffuse multiplier maps, to give an idea

     

    Heartbreaker1.png
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    Heartbreaker2.png
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    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588

    Thank you for that explanation, Jonstark!  Interesting comments too.  I will hopefully have more time to respond tomorrow.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    I love the one with the multiplier. Also... Damn! Look at that sheen you have! I'd love to see how you're lighting, rendering and shading these images!!!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    Maybe we could get together sometime - bring our computers and refreshments. I'll bring my PhilW training collection and we could have a Carrara Fest!

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    Dartanbeck said:

    I love the one with the multiplier. Also... Damn! Look at that sheen you have! I'd love to see how you're lighting, rendering and shading these images!!!

     

    I promise it's coming, I'm just in a constant state of not quite tinkering/improving.  I'm pretty sure I'm done... but then something else occurs to me to try.  And now I'm re-evaluating everyingthing since I picked up Materialize and can now generate Normal maps.  Should I re-work all my shaders to include Normals?  I'm kind of leaning towards yes...   And I don't want to lead anyone astray by giving a bad suggestion.  Then something else comes up and distracts me, like I spent all my free time today trying to develop a library of dynamic hair shaders that would work with any hairsets and give realistic colors.  

    Dang, I also realize I had butchered adding the render from last night and it's not showing.  I'll have to fix it.

     

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    That is Awesome!

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    Dartanbeck said:

    That is Awesome!

     

    Thanks  :)  I'm pretty unhappy with the hair though.  I only messed around for about 10 min last night with it.  Decided I would come back to it and make a more proper messy mullet when I have more time.  

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,323

    Maybe a little less color saturation too?

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    Dartanbeck said:

    Maybe a little less color saturation too?

     

    Gave it another try, actually started from scratch.  It's been a while, so I started off doing a super-short hairstyle for practice, then moved on to something a lot closer stylistically to what I remember from the movie.  

    I was thinking of putting it up as a freebie on sharecg (it's rigged for Genesis1) but it's got a strange but harmless bug.  When first loaded into the scen, it loads sideways and wonky and way too big.  So the first thing you see is this mass of hair hanging in the air, looking like a crazy tangled bunch of wires.  But once it's fitted to Genesis1 everything snaps in place just fine.  Don't know if that would be too annoying for people to want to work with even though it's not a real problem, so not sure if I should put it out there or not.  Also I'm not sure I've really got the shader dialed in where I want it.  But I'm much more happy than with my first try: 

     

    Oh and the short hair that I 'practice' made has the same sort of bug.  Perfectly useable though, so I should probably put that up on sharecg too:

     

    AchillesHair1.png
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    AchillesHair3.png
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    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • WendyLuvsCatzWendyLuvsCatz Posts: 38,037

    nothing a medicated shampoo and a fine louse comb won't fix cheeky but he's lookin hawt so a few might sit too close before he treats the bug devil

  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738

    WendyLuvsCatz said:

    nothing a medicated shampoo and a fine louse comb won't fix cheeky but he's lookin hawt so a few might sit too close before he treats the bug devil

     

    Heheh, that hair shader bothered me all day while I was at work, came home and did some re-working and tuning to get a bit closer to what I wanted, and hopefully a little less 'greasy'.  Used PhilW's suggested method of duplicating the hair, lowering the hair count hugely, then making it just so slightly bigger than the original hair (he recommends scaling up to 102% or so, if my memory isn't betraying me, but I just used the 'push' tool in the hair room to push it out further) and using that I created highly specular 'fly-away' hair strands to catch the light and give it some more detail overall.  Together with the main hair, I'm a bit happier.  :)

     

     

  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588
    edited September 2021

    Jonstark said:

    Basically instead of putting just the diffuse map into the color channel, the method is to put a multiply operator in, and in the first channel put the diffuse map, while in the second channel put the diffuse multiplier map.  The diffuse multiplier map looks mostly white (I mistook it for a displacement map at first).  When multiplied by the normal texture map, it darkens the skin (well not just darkens, as it does contain its own colors as well) in specific places, as well as overall.  The idea is to enhance the color of the skin.

    I don't see any color information in the diffuse multiplier map.  When I use it, it looks the same as when you used it.  It darkens the skin.  

    One might ask: why not just make the diffuse map as good as possible in the first place, without needing any other map to enhance it?  I don't know the answer for sure, but I did see one of the old timer PAs complaining about how difficult/expensive/time-consuming it was to make the Elite maps, and that was why DAZ eventually stopped making them.   So maybe this was an easier/less expensive way to enhance the rendered texture?   Not sure, but it does make a difference when using them.

    I can believe that those Elite maps where hard to make.  They are excellent, and vastly underrated, IMO.

    I agree 100% that Liquid Rust goes for the airbrushed 'clean' look.  Of course lots of other PAs go for that look too, so Rust isn't alone on that.  Always reminded me of 'glamour photos' from the 80s and 90s, just a very smooth look, and I'm sure its intentional.  Liquid Rust does not give 'good acne', lol.

    My main objective is realistic closeups.  The LR maps aren't great, but they are better than I thought.  I just wasn't pushing the textures enough.  Yesterday, I loaded in a LR map from Bailarin-del-fuego, and was able to get some differentiation.  The cheeks were good, but It was a little uneven around the nose area.  And the ears were weird (blotchy), but I hid them with hair.  Nothing fancy here regarding lighting.  Lit with a single distant light, ambient on 20, and HDR for the eye reflection.

     

      On the other hand, since I quite like the 'beautified' look, I'm ok with that.  Surreality texture sets are the ones I remember seeing so many falling down to compliment on their beauty, and to me most of the Surreality ones are kinda ugly/weird.  (Still, I picked up a few last night, the ones that were only $1 in the sale, so I'll give em a try to find out in real life how they perform)

    I have a couple of unused Surreality characters, so I will try them out as well.

    All of the LR sets I've opened have spec maps though,

    Of the 12 I have, 6 don't have specular maps - Brooke 2, Jamie, JM 2, Kittie, Sin, and Wendy.

    The mullet you posted above looks good.  The outer edge, however, looks outlined.  Is there some reason for that?

    V4 LR bailarin-del-fuego skin.png
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    Post edited by UnifiedBrain on
  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    UnifiedBrain said:

    Jonstark said:

    Basically instead of putting just the diffuse map into the color channel, the method is to put a multiply operator in, and in the first channel put the diffuse map, while in the second channel put the diffuse multiplier map.  The diffuse multiplier map looks mostly white (I mistook it for a displacement map at first).  When multiplied by the normal texture map, it darkens the skin (well not just darkens, as it does contain its own colors as well) in specific places, as well as overall.  The idea is to enhance the color of the skin.

    I don't see any color information in the diffuse multiplier map.  When I use it, it looks the same as when you used it.  It darkens the skin.  

     

    I loaded up one of the diffuse multiplier maps in Gimp to take a closer look, and I think you're right.  I don't really see any color information (there's probably a way to use Gimp to find out for sure), it looks completely grayscale to my eye, so the purpose must only be to add details by darkenening specific bits of the color map.  It's a little bit of a quandry, because for some of the characters I think it goes a little too dark, but without the multiplier it's a little too light.  Fenric's Color Balance plugin will let me get to 'just right', if I want to spend the time, I guess.  

    I've never seen this approach used by any other PA in any other texture set I own, so it was a little surprising.  I couldn't figure out what those maps were for, until I loaded up the texture in Studio to find out where they go.

     

    One might ask: why not just make the diffuse map as good as possible in the first place, without needing any other map to enhance it?  I don't know the answer for sure, but I did see one of the old timer PAs complaining about how difficult/expensive/time-consuming it was to make the Elite maps, and that was why DAZ eventually stopped making them.   So maybe this was an easier/less expensive way to enhance the rendered texture?   Not sure, but it does make a difference when using them.

    I can believe that those Elite maps where hard to make.  They are excellent, and vastly underrated, IMO.

     

    I 100% agree, Elite maps are terrific and I'm very glad to have them.  Shame that DAZ did away with the Elite series.  I would argue that some of the flagship characters of Genesis1 were likely made in the same process and with the same quality, such as Philip(Michael 5) and Bree (Victoria 5), likely as well as David 5, Aiko 5, Freak 5, and even the ultra-ugly (because of the face shape that not even a mother could love lol) Steph5.  Which makes sense, because as far as I know the Elite series ended in that generation, with M5 Elite Dave, V5 Elite Valerie, and S5 Elite Joanie.

    I agree 100% that Liquid Rust goes for the airbrushed 'clean' look.  Of course lots of other PAs go for that look too, so Rust isn't alone on that.  Always reminded me of 'glamour photos' from the 80s and 90s, just a very smooth look, and I'm sure its intentional.  Liquid Rust does not give 'good acne', lol.

    My main objective is realistic closeups.  The LR maps aren't great, but they are better than I thought.  I just wasn't pushing the textures enough.  Yesterday, I loaded in a LR map from Bailarin-del-fuego, and was able to get some differentiation.  The cheeks were good, but It was a little uneven around the nose area.  And the ears were weird (blotchy), but I hid them with hair.  Nothing fancy here regarding lighting.  Lit with a single distant light, ambient on 20, and HDR for the eye reflection.

     

    I just Bailerin del Fuego in that sale, she looks quite good in that render. I'm interested to open it up and give it a whirl, to see the ears like you mentioned.  When I zoom in on the bigger picture, I can see the nose is a smoother than I would like.  However now that I've got my hands on Materialize thanks to Dart's recommendation, I'm excited about the ability to add normal maps (heck, I think I might prefer to make my own Bump and Specular maps just from the base diffuse textures rather than rely on the whims of the PAs).

    Really nice render, actually, proves you don't need to have Full GI and wait 2 hours for calculations to get a decent render.  One distant light and 20 for ambient gets the job done, bet it was blink-and-you-missed it quick.

    BTW is that Moda hair?  There's one 'bob' type hairstyle in the Moda sets that's quite appealing, just needs some loving to add some more segments to the hairs and even them out, so they don't look too jinky at the bends

     

      On the other hand, since I quite like the 'beautified' look, I'm ok with that.  Surreality texture sets are the ones I remember seeing so many falling down to compliment on their beauty, and to me most of the Surreality ones are kinda ugly/weird.  (Still, I picked up a few last night, the ones that were only $1 in the sale, so I'll give em a try to find out in real life how they perform)

    I have a couple of unused Surreality characters, so I will try them out as well.

    All of the LR sets I've opened have spec maps though,

    Of the 12 I have, 6 don't have specular maps - Brooke 2, Jamie, JM 2, Kittie, Sin, and Wendy.

     

    Yup, those were all ones I didn't own previously, but I just opened up Wendy to take a look.  Sure enough, no spec maps.  From the render quality of the promos, I'm guessing that all of Liquid Rust's earliest products don't have spec maps.  Maybe it goes back so far that spec maps weren't in common use back then?  Interesting to speculate.  Speculating on specularity, hah.  :)

    Seriously, though, I'm impressed with Materialize, what a great freebie to play with.  For instance my impromtu Achilles, the texture I'm using is from an incredibly old M4 texture set that didn't even come with spec maps, just kinda crappy bump maps, which I used in the specularity channel anyway just to make do.  But there's just no real spec detail at all, it looks pretty bad.  But now with Materialize I can make my own spec maps, and better bump maps, and add in some normal maps to really tune this shader up.

    The mullet you posted above looks good.  The outer edge, however, looks outlined.  Is there some reason for that?

     

    There's 2 rimlights in the studio that are focused right on the hair, this was from PhilW's setup of the studio product.  I wanted to see the edges of the hair, you can also see it edging the specularity on the limbs too.  I don't like the rimlights and usually have them off, but I wanted to make sure I could see all the edges of the hair as I was refining it.  I'm still not happy with it, ended up spending a few hours last night tinkering with it.  Humbling to realize how much I have to learn about hair shadiing sadly. 

    Regarding rimlights, this is the exact same hair as before (this one's unchanged, I was tinkering with a duplicate version in another Carrara window for my experiments), but this render is without the rimlights:

    AchillesHair4.png
    900 x 1350 - 774K
    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • JonstarkJonstark Posts: 2,738
    edited September 2021

    Just to give an idea of what 'Materialize' can do.  This is the V4 Merchant resource kit:  https://www.daz3d.com/skinsource-v4 ;    I bought it during a sale a long time ago and didn't really know what it was or how to use it, so I was disappointed that it was texture maps only.  Not very useful as is.  Here's what it looks like:

    So I took that base color map into Materialize, then generated a Bump map, and from that point I generated a Normal map and a Metallic map (spec map).  Added them to the texture and the difference is pronounced:

     

     

    It's not perfect; certainly it's not in Elite texture territory, but boy does it revitalize an old texture map.  I had saved a lot of those older character texture sets that were laying around collecting dust, but if I can figure out how to master Materialize I'm thinking I could give them a whole new life :)

    MaterializeV4Merchant1.png
    900 x 1200 - 1015K
    MaterializeV4Merchant2.png
    900 x 1200 - 1M
    MaterializeV4Merchant2.png
    900 x 1200 - 1M
    Post edited by Jonstark on
  • Philemo_CarraraPhilemo_Carrara Posts: 1,175
    edited September 2021

     

    Jonstark said:

    Oh yes, I've got Reby.  I have all the Elite series, even the S5 Joanie, M5 Dave, V5 Valerie... the only one I didn't have up til a few weeks ago was V4 Ariana, which somehow I never saw or heard of before, and to be honest I'm wasn't in love with the promo renders for her, but when it popped up on sale my OCD side said: "must complete Elite collection immediately!" and since I have no impulse control... 

    The Reby sky for Genesis is just a morph for the Reby shape though, it doesn't include any textures.  But yeah the Reby textures are kind of fun to see what kind of hijinx the texture creators were trying to get up to back in the day to make a crude SSS effect (which in fairness worked pretty well).  The SSS maps made me chuckle, looks like a kindergartner with a crayon drew red marks over a diffuse map.  

    Better SSS maps are included with M5 Philip and V5 Bree (the 2 that every Carrarist has as they were included with Carrara).  Though imo everyone has gotten SSS maps wrong in one way or another.  I ended up making my own to make sure that the effect was guided to the right places and not the wrong ones.  (almost everyone who made a SSS map seems under the impression that every character render should have eyes so red it looks like they are in the throes of a terrible malady). 

    That reminded me I also had nearly all of them. I agree they're great. I decided to give it another try.

    This is V5 Valerie:

    V5 Valerie

    V5Valerie.jpg
    682 x 1023 - 376K
    Post edited by Philemo_Carrara on
  • UnifiedBrainUnifiedBrain Posts: 3,588
    edited September 2021

    Jonstark said:

    I've never seen this approach used by any other PA in any other texture set I own, so it was a little surprising.  I couldn't figure out what those maps were for, until I loaded up the texture in Studio to find out where they go.

    Well, that by irself is clever.  I would have never thought of it.

    I 100% agree, Elite maps are terrific and I'm very glad to have them.  Shame that DAZ did away with the Elite series.  I would argue that some of the flagship characters of Genesis1 were likely made in the same process and with the same quality, such as Philip(Michael 5) and Bree (Victoria 5), likely as well as David 5, Aiko 5, Freak 5

    Fortunately, there are some other great maps in Genesis besides the flagship ones.

    BTW is that Moda hair?  There's one 'bob' type hairstyle in the Moda sets that's quite appealing, just needs some loving to add some more segments to the hairs and even them out, so they don't look too jinky at the bends

    You have a great eye for Carrara hair!  Yes, that is a Modacut.  First time I ever loaded it.  I just wanted to cover her head, so I didn't attempt to adjust it, other than color.

     

    Regarding rimlights, this is the exact same hair as before (this one's unchanged, I was tinkering with a duplicate version in another Carrara window for my experiments), but this render is without the rimlights:

    I like this one better.  To my eye the hair is more natural.

    Post edited by UnifiedBrain on
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