Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I'm in need of some lights and render settings to test textures. I use papertiger's a lot, but I have run into a problem. His light sets are all point lights. And I've noticed that if a point light (rectangular) is not large enough then usually specularity below the waist line kind of just goes away. This is when dual lobe shaders are in use. Old style specular doesn't seem to have a problem.
Thanks, @davidtriune. I played with it some more, using a G8 skin and figured out how small changes need to be to get big results. With J. Cade's set up, I could get good results, but the only thing that had a significant impact is the transluency setting. Chaning SSS colors didn't do a lot (or the results were bad). Tiny changes in the translucency color (with the map) were better.
Really? Maybe so, but I don't see how having a Irish-pale character in a sunlit room would make them appear as if they're from Sicily.
EDIT: I wonder if white balance has a lot to do with this? In traditional photography I know it does...
Well I've discovered a great way to solve the difficulty of rendering eyes... lighting so dramatic you cant see them! more seriously, I think nice dramatic lighting can have similar benefits to the polaroid style, in that it give you an excuse to obscure certain details, especially if you're not looking at it full size(also why I like dof no one will know I quartered the size of all the texture in the bg)
This render still needs a hair more cooking, and I may tweak some things yet (though the nice thing about compositing anyway is that its easy to just rerender part of the image)
more seriously, I'm starting to render clothing I'm actual happy with I think I coulds make a square crop of the area of the tie and the vest and it would be hard to tell it was cgi (still not satsfied with the sleeve tho) also not sure if I'm completey showing it here but underbelly came with some real nice normal maps, I plan to spend some time examining them to see what I can learn from them.
bonus! despite this being an 'indoor' scene it actually renders pretty fast, I think I need to learn from this because the lighting is more faked rather than going entirely naturalistic as I usually tend to do, but film and photography does the same all the time so why have I not been?
Vest & tie look unusually like fabric - great job there. Not convinced with the shirt collar. Maybe it is the way it looks too uniformly circular or maybe it needs to be slightly closer to the neck towrds the back? I'm nor sure what it is but I've never seen a shirt collar that looks realistic yet.
I think the problem might be that real shrt collars can have some of the signifiers we associate with cg. a propper suit can have a starched collar: sharp crisp lines and no wrinkles which are also traits we associate with cg clothes. look at this for instance It aready almost looks cg
while the shirt is more rumpled in my image, given the quality of the rest of the clothes it would have started out starched so making it too rumpled looks wrong, because its not what we see in the real world, but unrumpled also looks wrong because the afformentioned cg signifiers. I also considered painting the normal map to have a more wrinkly seam but dressier shirts don't have those
... of course a more obvious problem is that this is a shirt that goes with a tie but the distance from where the last button/hole to the top of the collar is abnormally long and lacks the sticky out bit of most collared shirts youd wear with a tie.. collared shirts are so fiddly.
I'm glad you mentioned the tie though. Because its probably the thing I spent the longest on (although a lot of that was getting distracted making a tiling texture for the pattern which was pretty unnecessary, but hey he now has a tie pattern after a design by Koloman Moser and that makes me happy) I also heaily morphed the tie as its original shape was super flat.
On the other hand I think all i did for the vest was turn up the bump slightly? Srsly Luthbel makes some fantastic stuff. Despite my quibbles about the shirt, I use it a lot (frequently turned into plaid so that my characters can dress like me)
Very nice render. His clothing is excellent!
Was this iray or Blender, J?
Could the "too crisp" in part be due to humans being in constant motion? subject and camera operator? The best Daz renders have always looked like wax statues to me or dead bodies. I tried the low quality jpeg setting in Photoshop and BOOM! That made the difference because the edges became blurred and made it come alive. But even at a high quality setting the edges should be blurred because of constant subtle human motion, even with a high shutter speed I would assume. No living human can sit still like a Daz character.
Also, thanks for sharing all of your knowledge. This thread is amazing! This made my weekend!
Absolutely Amazing!
I'm wondering if using a spotlight as the sun would work instead of using HDRI for outside lighting. Is that possible?
This is a quick render I did using your methods. Obviously the hair looks fake because I didn't even adjust it correctly, but I was shocked at the outcome of the regardless because it only took me about 5 minutes to throw together.
What do you use to make the tv and laptop light up?
This image tells me that a scene can have other lights in the background, but the Daz character has to have a main light from the front that by far overpowers other lights in the scene. What is the scientific explanation for the realism falling apart once the main light is not coming from the camera's angle?
If I want to cast a strong beam of light into a room, I always use a Spotlight placed outside the window to generate that effect (as opposed to using HDRI).
If you're asking why the characters dont look as realistic when not lit from directly in front then I can't say... it's definitely a limitation of my characters...
jeff_someone i really like your renders but this one stands out to me.
I think the gloss on her face really makes her look real. is that using just dual lobe specular?
Iray! (though blender was involved in both morphing several of the objects and postworking) There's been some definite frustration, but I am finally starting to make some progress on getting clothes to look better, which was one of my aims with this image
I actually find short hair easier/ more natural in Studio. garibaldi/strand editor have some really nice features particularly wrt naturalistic clumping, on the other hand once ou hit a certain length getting it not to clump through the head is very painful. so far the only method ive found is scrolling through 50 clumping seeds until you find the one that happens to work, and then ghanging a few hairs and you have to do it again.
j cade, that is an amaing render, especially the clothes. How did you get the thickness to the clothes? I know some render engines allow a map for thickness, is that a Cycles render using some kind of thickness channel? Or did you model the thickness? That vest, in particular, is stunning—as good as anything I've ever seen for cgi cloth.
All that said, the wrinkles on the collar look off to me. I never iron, let alone starch, my collars, but none of them have that kind of micro wrinkle thing going on. Collars don't get folded much to form those wrinkles and light cotton tends to drap fairly smoothly. The coat's low-level wrinkles look manufactured (e.g., the cloth was manufactured to have a crinkley texture)—I'm assuming that's some kind of perlin noise applied to it. it's a very cool look, and entirely "real." The colar, though, doesn't match any of the clothing I own or, way back in pre-virus days when I occassionally went into offices where people wore dress shirts, have seen.
The thickness is in the model. the outfit is luthbel's Eldritch Seeker and the model has thickness (the lining has texture even!)
which means theres probably no way to remotely dforce it, but it does look good
tbf with regards to starching, between the lighting and the style of the clothing itself I was very much going for some indeterninate time from 1910-1940 in looking for reference any colar paired with a suit pretty much didn't have any wrinkles *at all* enen rumpled and disreputable private detectives
we might not startch now but back in the day
of couurse making it look as straight and stiff in the render looked clearly fake so I figured it was better to at least clearly look like cloth
(also that reference theres totally a visuble seam arond the edge, so I probably should have done that)
Sure, j cade, through Bogey ito it. Now how can I argue?
:p
Now I'm wondering if what I'm seeing as too much wrinkling is part of the (perhaps too rough) texture for the cloth, so we're talking about two different things. But stitches are definitely visible on the collars I have. On a related note, that photo reminds me how good Hollywood clothing designers are at thiking about not just the clothes, but how the character would wear the clothes. Definitely a good example for anybody making art to follow.
Thanks, yes it does.
Waxiness! Yes, that's a good way to put it.
Jeff these are amazing! Was turning her back to the sun the key to making these images work? I'm dying to know what settings you used. Did you still use a spotlight positioned from the camera? And what were the render settings? Did you have to turn up the Gamma?
The 1st and 4th images have a hint of "Daz"ness to them in the facial area. I'm not sure if it's the nose area, eyes, or the expression itself, but on a scale of 1-10 I would give both a 9. However, the 5th image, the close-up I would give a shining 10! You nailed that one. Genius work!
Here's my effort, I tend to find I enjoy so called natural lighting and play around with the f stop settings and iso.
Very good! I'd only suggest that the image is a tad too sharp. As rilla pointed out, no human being is perfectly still when a photo is taken.
Also rotate the iris texture on one eye so that they don't match perfectly. Otherwise, you absolutely nailed it!
Thanks, I actually sharpened the image after the render in my photo editor so I shall give that stage a miss now.
Damn, that's a good tip.
Also, recommend getting rid of the depth of field or make it far less prominent... i know its hard to resist but it just doesnt lend itself to realism.
@Jeff Again, as for lights and camera lens your renderings are not "realistic" at all. This last advice about not using depth of field is nonsense if you want to mimic a real camera. Even human eyes have focus. Then again your technique is good enough to resemble old 70s cameras with a strong flash in a dimmed environment, but that's all. And I do love your renderings especially the characters are very good.
In professional photography the depth of field (focal lenght) is used to isolate the subject from the environment and the same is done in movies.
I really like how Sahira 8's skin turned out: (Click to seet the full resolution in the gallery)
The skin is right out of the box. Lighting is done using a single HDRI from HDRI Haven.
Nice.Did you Dforce the cushion she's on to get the foot indentations, or get that in another way. It definitely adds to the realism It's a pleasant irony that contemporary 3D rendering is so much better with dark skin, given how often photographic film was poor for dark skin.
j cade, I have a question about your shader set-up. After playing with it, I love it on my darker skinned character, but when I applied it to a character using iSource's Catriona's skins, I noticed the mouth area got dark, as did the skin around a toe ring. I don't have a nVidia card for easy testing of solutions since this doesn't become clear in rendering until more passes than I have time to expirament with. Do you have any suggestions of what could be modified. It appears the SSS or translucency is calculating too far, but my attempts to modify SSS depth didn't solve the problem (within the limited testing I could do).
To be fair to iSourceTextures, their skins tend to look excellent out of the box, so I might be seeking gains that can't be had.
Thanks!
The cushion she's sitting on already had a nice high density mesh. So I just used Mesh Grabber
It was merely a matter of minutes to get it right.