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Those details are amazing...
Amazing. Are the skin details procedural?
the skin itself has some procedural bump added, the lips are 100%mesh
zoom out and everything looks less realistic... because it isnt there :)
I dont even want to think how much you'd have to subd genesis to get similar resolution. It is some dense, dense, mesh. My computer would definitely explode on a whole figure.
this is the mesh with multires (subdivided twice) off....
Wow. Thanks for the inside look.
I've had no luck getting making the Solaris Station not look like it is created by a million diamonds using Cycles, so I tried a quick render with Eevee. This actually looks a little closer to what it does in Studio:
@brainmuffin what do you mean ?
@Brainmuffin Try using point lights of a certain diameter instead of emission surfaces.
@brainmuffin I'm not noticing fireflies in your animation. What do you mean by "sparkle too much" ?
Fireflies are "white points" that you see on a render when there's "too much" light. It's a rendering artifact and there are ways around this. But it doesn't seem your case.
A far from finished render, but I thought it made a nice comparison
a 30 second render
vs a 10 minute one.
obviously the cycles one is better, though I could definitely tweak the eevee one more too. However the eevee one is close enough that, not only do both of them share materials, but I set up the materials in entirely eevee and only had to tweak 2 of them for cycles, given Eevees speed this means I can set up my materials with instant feedback which really speeds things up.
Cycles does truly glorious fluff.
@jcade The real difference with cycles is for refractive/reflective materials and animated GI. Since eevee gets limited refraction, screen space reflection, and baked GI. So if your scene mainly uses "solid" non reflective materials and static GI then you will not notice much of a difference between cycles and eevee.
And I like your rendering.
That's some nice looking hair in Cycles...
Styled in DS with the strand editor there funnily enough - then set to a low density and exported as lines - and turned into hair in blender. There wasn't any real reason behind this other than having the hair already made
Some more fun with bette in blender - deciding if I want her dress to match her lipstick or eyeshadow
The seqins on the dress are my first experiment with geometry nodes. Super basic, but amongst other things it has a distribution that actually spreads things evenly without overlap. Finally.
I still need to do more practice with the rigify rig but you can definitely do things you can't in DS - even for stills. For instance adding a bit of curve to the arms, or getting the shoulders that high up and close to the chin without the mesh creasing at all while the arm bend is more useful for toons the much greater shoulder mobility is good for more realistic things to - I can touch my ear to my shoulder just by bending my neck and head
@jcade If you did it yourself, that pose and camera angle is very good. The line of motion and silhouette gives an instant feeling of the character personality, and the whole figure is literally guiding the audience attention suggesting that there's more on the scene and that the character is living a moment in time. Just damn good.
Never played with geometry nodes myself, but I agree that mhx and rigify give you much more flexibility even for posing. As for rigify we resolved the issue with the daz rest pose so now it can be used for daz poses and animations same as mhx. I find that with some poses the deformations may be slightly different though.
https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/498/important-fix-for-rigify-how-to-avoid-pose
Took a test render today. This one took only 1 min 11 seconds. Not bad for a rather dark and moody render. I didn't really take a lot of time tweaking the materials or nothin, I really only slapped them on at first, so I knew what I was done UV mapping and what still needed to be done.
Latest progress. Alexandra has a really nice skin color to work with. Base resolution character with multires (3 sub) and Xin's vector displacement maps. I love, love, love keeping the character at base resolution and then applying displacement maps if and when they are needed. Hair was converted with Thomas's Diffeo. The Cinus convertor is fast and basically one click, whereas diffeo gives options to separate and combine different areas so I had 7 or 8 different particle systems for base hair, top, and fly-aways. It took quite a while to get everything set up and it could still use some improvements here and there. Postwork in Affinity Photo. If anyone is looking for an option to replace Photoshop, Affinity is the bomb.
Teeth are still a pain. Anybody have any good tips on making the teeth look good? I have to work to make them not look like Smeagol from LOTR.
It's been a while since I've posted anything, but I figured I'd show what I'm working on. Well, technically it's not what I'm working on, because the project I was actually working on is NSFW, but this is a stand-in with the same skin and figure. But I'm not quite satisified with it, yet. I think I could do better. I'll have to post my nodes setup later, I don't have time this morning. Also, as for why she has no hair, I haven't gotten around to it - and I was just doing skin tests with this figure anyway. Eventually for the final project I'd do particle hair and eyebrows. Image is slightly edited (tone equalizer, color correction, etc) with Darktable. The figure skin is Olivia for the G8F, by DThuregrif, and the character is a custom sculpt.
I'm really liking those freckles!
Definately a good start. SSS on the ears looks good and lips have a nice texture. Maybe a little glossy/waxy on the neck and chest, but I'm sure that will work itself out.
Not sure what your plan is for eyebrows, but I really like the Ultimate Eyebrows by PhilW.
I have some registration invites for Pillowfort if you or anyone else wants a place to blog and post your NSFW projects.
Keep us posted on the progress...
Thanks, and as for the brows (and hair), I was going to try using particle hair, though I was going to buy the Hair addon bundle by VFX Grace, which probably would help a great deal. The link is here: https://blendermarket.com/products/collection-of-hair-plugins
I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to get to the levels of realism I've seen in your renders, and some others here, though. I mean, if I knew what to change or modify, that would be one thing, but I'm not entirely sure. In any case I'll try to explain my node setup here. I kept it highly modular so I could easily use it across the multiple Daz body materials.
I also put my textures in a group, for neatness:
This is what's inside the Principled.Skin.Main node group:
The Skin Noise Texture frame adds in noise to the bump/normals, in the group to the right. It's fairly simple:
And the Diffuse/SSS Color Adjust group is simple too, just a collection color nodes, most of which aren't being used at the moment. The VeinsMix node to the left of it just is a mix node with some options for color adjustment, and I've mixed in the veins map with the base diffuse map at 18% (0.18). The vein maps aren't common in Daz figures, I've noticed, but some of Dthuregrif's figures have them, like this one (Olivia for G8F).
The SSS Multiplier node I borrowed from a commercial tri-layer skin setup I bought on BlenderMarket awhile ago. It's also not very complicated, but I may just use manual settings for the SSS radii if I can find a good set of numbers to work with. I think the multiplier # is more of a divisor, reducing the radius of the SSS values. Lower values result in higher SSS. I've tried values between 8-15, with varying results.
Anyway, if anyone has some ideas on how to improve this node setup, I'd appreciate it.
You probably don't want to be using an add shader - It has some occasional specific uses but usually breaks physical accuracy. When you add 2 shaders together more light bounces off the surface than origially hit it ie it emits its own light
really you shouldnt need SSS and translucency at all SSS you use translucency if your using volumetric sss of the Iray style, but if youre using the SSS of the pricipled shader (as you should because it is faster and less fiddly) you shouldnt need any added translucency
I saw that sort of arrangement in another setup and thought I'd try it, and did and never thought much of it after that, although even just by removing it, it seems to come out a bit better. I still need to figure out what's missing from the realism aspect. Even with similar node setups, I don't get the same kind, or similar results... I figure lighting is the missing part, though. For that matter, I am not so sure using HDRI maps always works so well. Are there certain types of HDRI maps (outdoors, cloudy, etc) that work better for this sort of thing?
Random Walk - Good, better than CB.
Base Color - I'm assuming you are using Daz maps and adjusting the colors a bit. I've found that increasing the gamma slightly often helps with the very light Daz skin maps.
Subsurface Value and Subsurface Radius - I've watched a ton of videos and looked at many other node setups. The subsurface value is both a mix between the base color map and the subsurface color map, and also a multiplier for the subsurface radius values, which can be very confusing. The blendswap link in my signature has a light setup but also a node setup for SSS values so you can adjust the mix between the texture maps without multiplying the sss depth values. If you download the SSS Math node, set it to 0.5 for the subsurface mix (this will mix the diffuse map and subsurface map 50/50, so each map will have 50% effect), and set the red radius to 0.08. This will give you a good starting point. You can test your sss effect by shining a bright spotlight behind the ears and look for the red glow.
For veins, I do a color mix node, use a mask (veins are white, everything else black), and mix the regular subsurface map and a blue/green color for the veins. I can find a screenshot if it would help.
I set specular to 0.375 and that's it. If I remember correctly, blender uses a metal/roughness workflow in the bsdf shader and the specular slider can be placed around 0.5 for almost all non-metals. Page 2 of the PBR guide below explains.
https://academy.substance3d.com/courses/the-pbr-guide-part-1
Roughness - I do the same thing you did, invert the specular map and adjust with color ramp. Another thing you can do is blur the map a little since they are always so sharp.
Sheen - can be used to simulate fine hair on the sides of the face.
Clearcoat - I don't use but let me know how this works for you if you like it.
Bumps / Normals. I've read that there are some shading issues with some bump maps and combining bump and normals can be a pain for me, so I convert everything to normals (using the link below) and combine. I like having a macro normal for larger lines, wrinkles, grooves, etc., and a micro normal for skin texture (I like Skin Detail Resource 1 by Handspan Studios, lots of 4k micro detail maps). You can do the same with bump maps too, just test with a dark flat diffuse color to see the effects. Also, keep in mind that you need a normal map mixing node; we can't just use a mix color node to combine normal maps. Using a noise texture instead of a micro map works too. :)
http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/
I've never tried adding transluceny. What effect does it have? Maybe I'll experiment with it when I have time.
SSS Values taken from old Blender Internal (ratios are the important part, not necessarily the actual numbers):
Skin 1
3.673
1.367
0.683
Skin 2
4.821
1.694
1.090
Got this from a message board somewhere:
Here are some examples of dieletric spec values based on their IOR:
Diamond 2.150
Quartz 0.570
Glass Acrylic 0.486
Glass 0.500
Glass Plexi 0.5
Beer 0.264
Milk 0.277
Water 0.255
Water ice 0.225
Snow 0.870
Eye, Cornea 0.309 - 0.349
Human skin 0.350 - 0.406
Moss 0.572
Plastic 0.437
Rubber 0.531
Styrofoam 0.657
Hope this helps, not everyone will agree with everything I said, and that's ok. I'm still learning myself...
@highStrangeness @jcade As for translucency with the principled shader. The issue is that the principled shader only supports translucency for solid objects, that is, it doesn't provide translucency for surfaces. So *adding* a translucent node is a workaround for this limitation. Must be used add instead of mix to avoid losing specularity for high translucent materials.
So the translucency setup with the add shader does in fact work? Interesting.
Meanwhile, I used the SSS Math Node that @Krampus has in his Blend Swap link, for the 3-point lighting. It seems to work a bit better, and I modified the lighting as well. This is the result - although I am not quite sure why her eyes look like that.
The eye material setup is, if I recall, the default Diffeo one. I'll have to try some other arrangement, here. Still, I'd like to find ways to add more detail to the figure. Possibly the normals methods that Krampus mentioned above. Also, I did some minor editing on the image above, with Darktable, to the tone equalizer and a slight color correction as well.
I think the color is good. You have detail in the skin. I think the gloss/roughness is off a little. It gives it that waxy plastic kind of look. Check out the links below from unsplash.com. We can shine some bright lights on a face and it doesn't give us a sharp specular reflection. I can usually spot a Daz render right away because the skin is usually too glossy. Edit the gloss/rougness map in a photo editor, try a spec map from another model, mix a sharp map with a blurred map, leave the map out and let the bump break up the reflections, etc. Experiment and see what works for you.
Look forward to seeing what you come up with...
https://unsplash.com/photos/3GkURhNXqAM
https://unsplash.com/photos/2rIs8OH5ng0
It might "work" in certain situations. But it generally completely breaks conservation of energy so if your goal is realism it should be used sparingly and with explicit reasoning behind it as to why it is not breaking conservation of energy, which you can explain.
consider glow in the dark suzanne here - the only lighting in the scene is the very dim environment than which she is brighter. because the translucency is added to the principled shader, more light bounces off her than hits her. Thus she is functionally emitting light. obviously with more normal lighting situations it will be less noticable but it will still be there breaking physical accuracy
again there are specific instances where it is a very useful node (dispersive glass or counteracting known energy loss in a shader) but if you don't have a specific reason for using it, you should avoid it.
also in terms of lighting one thing that will help infinitely is not rendering in "the void." Outside of the depths of space, we are surrounded by walls, floors, the ground, trees, etc things lights can bounce off. And the whole purpose of a path tracer is to trace the path of light as it bounces off things so not having anything to bounce off defeats the purpose a bit. Even just adding a floor plane and backdrop can help
also in general I think there tends to be too much focus on shaders relative to other elements. If your lighting, morph, or hair isn't realistic adding veins isn't really going to do much one way or the other. (I'm definitely guilty of this myself)