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Thanks for all the feedback. I'll work on implimenting them and post an update. I really appreciate it and didn't take any of it as being mean, rather it is extremely helpful. This is exactly what I was asking for when posting here. Thanks for taking the time to look and comment.
@jeff_someone - Are these brighter renders still using a single light or HDRI?
Can you recommend a single light setting, or HDRI, as control? There is so much I need to learn and lighting affects everything. Having a fixed bright environment as a control variable makes easier to learn about tweaking other stuff. Shadows make it easier to fool the brain but as soon as I move the camera or change the pose whatever degree of convinsibility I had went out the window.
@jeff_someone This is really good!
Only criticism I can offer is that the curve of the hair on her right shoulder looks a bit off. The hair on her left shoulder looks a little bit like it's penetrating rather than flowing over her shoulder, but you have to look really close to notice.
Another try, altered based on your suggestions. Would love your thoughts.
I think it suffers the same problem I had (check my render above) where the skin looks a little too much like wax. In terms of shape the eyes and mouth look pretty good though, the expression is also very convincing. So I think you're close, but no sigar yet :)
I've been thinking about the "skin too wax" problem, and basically it boils down to having the light penetrate the skin, but not too deep (wax effect), and the light needs to scatter and 'sing' along the top layers of the skin, with strength depending on softness of the area (say cheeks), or proximity to bone structure (skin around temple or forehead)
Yes, even though the skin there isn't a uniform color it looks as if it has uniform pores, uniform oiliness, uniform 'SSS' (or whatever they want to call that') and that's just not how people are. It would hide the problem to a degree if you had a blouse on but not completely.
You can get away with it by blowing out the contrast & lighting like polaroid picture but not in a protrait like you have.
Interesting! Thank you for the feedback. Her SSS is set at 0.85 and I've added veins, etc. Here I've bumped them up a little:
JCade,
Here are two Octane renders I put togehter for this thread. It's only fair that I should upload some of my own recent studies with pale skin so that you can help me to further improve. Part of what I am trying to learn to do as an artist is to figure out exactly what it is about a skin that makes us as viewers decide what the "tone" of said skin may be. Even in low light we can usually discern a pale skin from a darker one.. but how? Does a skin need to appear bright in order to appear pale? I'm the last one to know I suspect.
Here are two renders of the same face. To my eye on is more 'realistic" than the other, however both miss the mark in my view. I could appraise the issuesd with these renders but I'd rather leave the floor open for viewers to share whatever issues they observe of their own accord. Naturally, I am going for pale skin that doesnt not lose its apparent details, doesnt compete with the specular...etc. There is not a lot of visible specualr reflections on the skin simply due to the way the room generally is lit. in the first example the lighting is that of the room, but in th esecond version I have added an additional light at the position of the camera, to create a sort of "flash" effect. To me there is a loss of believeability when this light is added however i could well be biased and suffering from a selective blindness.
much better!
Thank you! Oddly I had them that visible before, but reduced them because they appeared too prominent in brightly-lit scenes.
I think the sad truth is that our assets can't be photoreal in every lighting condition.
Hi Rashad, I will also offer some feedback as I use Octane as well as Iray, so I know the Octane parts too. One on left is far more believable, you are good on the eyes. The eyelashes are too blond or something, I think darkening would get it more real because it already looks very uniform. The face's skin looks too perfect almost, for 2 reasons. One, the detail is great, but the 'shape' of the mesh is very flat....maybe hit it with some more overt displacement somehow to get it contoured with bags under eyes and creases by chin and lips. Or, in Daz just morph face shape details, if you will, because the skin looks very 'facelift'.
The second is the texture of the skin itself. It looks good but is very surface monochrome, maybe multiply/add in a detail map of some sort to break it up with color splotches or something. Use Path Tracing to reveal subtle SSS if you were using Direct Lighting, and maybe adjust the kernel Filter to soften it up, if you want. Changing aperture will give a DOF effect, could obscure some of the super consistent detail. If you're using the plugin I would try throwing it over to the standalone to mess with the settings on a universal, I find it way easier there to play with Randolm walk SSS, Metallic, coating, and sheen there...to me using the plugin interface is not as easy as the standalone, but that's just me.
Really cool, dig it. It looks real as in photo-real, but it could be made more asset-real. But it does look like you photograpphed a mannequin of a blond guy at some convention! LOL
Thank you all so much for your mighty kind words! I think I'll come back to this scene some times again to improve it. I feel like her chest area deserve some irregularities, and I'll fool around with a couple of shaders in the back.
@Leonides02: Thank you, that looks great! I bought the set immediately and am excited to see how they'll improve things :)
He recommended a single point light, but interesting what you propose, a universal lighting benchmark to assess textures irrespective of shadow. This is interesting as some texture sets will look better under certain lightings, and not others. The character textures he is using are not Daz 'regular' textures from a set. He generated those from FaceGen, or FaceTransfer, or manually mapped a photo face onto the Daz face shape. They have no choice but to look like a photo regardless of what the lighting is. They can only be blown out or too dark.
To a degree this will be the case with a background as well, the more 'photo scanned' will yield more 'photo looking' results. Theoretically a lighting can negate an actual photo on a 2D plane, rendeerd in Iray, it wil only be because it is too extreme in one direction or another.
Does anyone know how many lumens put out, or have a reference for soft lights? I'm trying to set up a single soft box studio portrait using as close to real-world measurements as I can, but my initial (not very thorough) look for portrait lights show their outputs referred to in stops. That's excellent for photographers, but not very useful for me.
Different character, some changes. Thoughts?
great improvements! i especially like the faint dark spots on her face. Is that a DAZ skin?
Thanks! The base skin is KALLISTO, but I used SkinBuilder to add in all sorts of details and then applied Bluejuante's shaders + my own eye / teeth shader adjustments.
For comparison, here is the original KALLISTO skin:
You're makig incredible strides!
The area on her left, where the light hits her skin looks all photo real to me.
Her mouth and her teeth are the only week points here.
(Lips just do stretch and get thinner, when opening the mouth or smiling.)
Hey! Thanks for looking and providing feedback! The renders are with the PMC kernel. These were made with the OR4C aka octane for Carrara. I agree 100% that the way the tools are designed in the Ds interface is very bloky and not nearly as well laid out as the tools are in the Standalone. This is one reason why I encourage all new Octane users to spend a little time with the standalone instead of only interacting with Octane through a plug in. My goal has been to get skin solved in Octane first, and then try to reproduce those results as closely as possible in Iray when the time comes.
Both renders would benefit from less aggressive settings from the height mapping...in this case normal maps. As less height would allow more specular highlights to show. The model itself is very flat as you observe, there's no HD going on here. Once I start working again in DS I'll get more into that. I dont want to derail the thread too much just wanted to show Jcade what I was hoping to demonstrate in that I personally don't have any doubts in my mind that the guy I rendered has pale skin even though the pixels themselves are not super bright and not in a way "overexposed" or burned out. Anyhow thanks for your time Notiusweb!
It stays in the same relation to its surroundings, It doesnt matter how much or little light there is, I stay the same color of the white wall I'm standing in front of. In low light everything gets darker and less saturated looking but at the exact same ratio (things dont actually get less saturated we are just less able to distinguish). Have you ever taken taken a long exposure photo at night with a full moon? Its amazing there will be stars in the sky, but the grass and trees and all their shadows are pretty indistinguishable from day right down to the crisp shadows the moon casts.
Honestly It sounds a bit like you're under the impression that I think pale skin *has* to be "overexposed" to look pale eg
far from it, I just personally find pale skin more #aestetic with more high key lighting (and I dont think I'm in the minority on this If you look up someone like Emma Stone or Elle Fanning + photoshoot its about 85% highkey lighting or any pretty much and studio photo of an actress from 1950 or earlier yes lot of black and white but 99.9% clearly high key [also whole we're on it theres the cultural backround where women will get more brightly lit than men because #society but thats waaaaay out of the purview of this thread])
Honestly Its hard to judge the skin in your renders because theyre a bit undercooked/noisy + I'm guessing you are primarily using an HDRI for lighting? For instance in the 1st image the way the is shining on the nose is much brighter than the rest of the face but the transition from that brightness to the rest of the face looks off but I cant tell if thats a shader thing or HDRI weirdness (in general I find HDRI that didnt capture the full dynamic rage of their lovation tend to create mushy shadows + weird color washes that nothing looks quite right in)
In the second render lit from the front, I would say that the shadows look pretty undersaturated (in the other as well, but I noticed it more immediately in this one). If I'm lit from the front primarily by a single light the shadow my nose casts on my nostril is going to be pretty red. Even in lower light it will be darker, but still have that saturation especially at the edges, same thing on the neck, If I go over a photo of my skin with a color picker as we go into the shadows things generally become more saturated, In that one pic of my face for instance the flat well lit part of my face has a saturation level of 20% (looking at the HSL in a color picker) the somewhat shadowed part of my ear 40% the dark shadow in my nostril 50% I checked some other images and this stayed pretty consistent for all of them. For comparison your images do the exact opposite the lit parts are much more saturated than the shadows in both your images the shadow on the neck is hanging around 10-15% saturation as opposed to the flatly lit portions at 40% and the brightly lit sections (like the nose in the first one) in the 90% range. Some of this is probably tonemapping, Renders straight out of Iray have the same saturated highlights (which is why I run them through Filmic, thats one of its stated purposes) although after a quick search through my render folder and photos I've taken (including people who arent me) I've yet to find a shadows on skin with saturation as low as 10-15%
This is something that is particularly noticable on lighter skin, but also something that is pretty hard to pinpoint. When i first looked at it it seemed more like a lighting thing and I still couldnt tell you exactly what is the root cause it It may indeed just be lighting, but there was something there that niggled and went "this is off something with the light and shadows maybe?"
though the frirt thing I noticed was that the brow, beard, and lash strands look way to thick (the individual strands not the density thereof although the eyelashes seem like both) especially as blond hair is generally the thinnest hair (again in terms of individual strands, generally there are actually more strands they're just all thinner)
This is a brilliant idea! :D Very cool effect!
I know plenty of real life women and men that are that sort of 'highkey' overlit pale equally viewed with human eyes and it's only getting more common as folk don't farm, garden, play outside and so on anymore. There only time outdoors is often just going back and forth to the vehicle from the different building they drive too. Women used to be encouraged to stay whatever their natural indoor winter color was as to keep a clear complexion more so than a pale complexion. In the 70s, maybe sooner, but the 70s is when I remember it, there was tremendous social pressure in the United States to get a tan and to have darkened brunette or bleached blond hair, but of course if your skin and hair won't do those things they just won't do those things but that's what was definitately being pushed in pop culture. Things have come full circle and now men & women are encouraged, no matter how easily they tan, to avoid excessive sun exposure and many actually do. There is the problem of lack of sun light causing Vitamin D deficiencies and that in turn causing greater susceptability to respiratory infections and other problems though.
Picture nr. 1 is a straight DAZ Studio IRAY render.
Picture nr. 2 is the photoshopped version of it.
Oh wait: No canvases were used.
Nice @Masterstroke, although I'd say her "peach fuzz" is too thick. Maybe lower the opacity?
That hair is the dead give away for now. :-(
Hey, if you can find a real good realistic looking hair for DAZ studio, please let me know.
Very few exist. I always go with OOT. It's the best of the bunch, in my view.
I think "Dyed Hair for IRAY" helps. It seems to turn bad hair into okay hair, and maybe turn okay hair into good hair.