Tips and Tricks for Base G8 Figure Skin?

Blando Calrissian

I've purchased/downloaded freebie skins made by some very good artists, so I'm not lacking in ways to instantly improve the look of my Gen8 figures, but I keep looking at that poor base figure and thinking "is there any way I can make him/her look a little more lifelike?" Are there settings that can be tweaked to bring out more realism? Is it a matter of setting up a proper lighting rig to bring G8 out of its shell? Curious to see what people have managed to accomplish with the tools that Daz gives us for free. Thanks!

Hylas

It's easier to give feedback if you post an image :)

Spacious

A great place to start is to create color translucency maps for them.  You could just copy the diffuse maps to the translucency slot but that won't quite look right.  An effective way to do this is by layering the stock translucency maps with the stock diffuse maps.  You could do this with the Layered Image Editor built in to DAZ Studio, or an outside program like Photoshop or GIMP.  This will give you a slightly brighter image with some hard to see veins, and that will allow you to get the high translucency values without your figure getting to dark.

After messing with the translucency a bunch they will already be looking much more lifelike.  The stock G8 figures do not come with normal maps.  You could add normals from any other G8 or many G3 figures use the same UVs.  If you don't have any normal maps that will work you can make your own if you've got GIMP (free and open source in case you're not familliar).  It's sure easy just open the bump maps for the figure and find Make Normal Map in the menus.

In the most recent versions of Daz Studio there appear to be several new skins for Genesis 8 figures that I've never noticed before.  They aren't the best skins I've ever seen, but variety is nice and these same techniques will work with those as well.

I've experimented quite a bit with layering/blending various G8 and G3 textures in crazy combinations and you can come up with all sorts of interesting and also realistic textures.

Edit : Just remembered I should maybe link to this thing I made that could also help. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/474936/check-out-these-genesis-8-and-8-1-male-and-female-skin-overlays/p1

Blando Calrissian

This is a dumb question, but which skin maps are which?

The stock G8 character seems to have four base maps per body part: B, D, S, and SSS. 

Spacious

There are no dumb questions.  Fortunately, these are pretty standard abreviations in 3D.

B Is Bump, D is Difffuse (called Base Color in DAZ sometimes labeled Albedo), S is Specular (basically shininiess), and SSS stands for Sub-Surface Scattering (in Daz we use this for Translucency and we have additional settings for the actual SSS).

Lot's of DAZ and other 3D figures will also have Normal maps (easy to spot because they are blue, purple, and pink - usually labeled with the letter N).  There's also Roughness maps , Opacity Cutout maps, Displacement maps, There's alot of different kinds of maps and depending on who made the model they can be labeled all sorts of things.  The good news is that after working with them for a bit you'll start to recognize them without needing to read the labels.

 

 

Blando Calrissian

Just wanted to say thanks! I haven't had a chance to try out these tweaks, but I'm looking forward to it!

charles

There is a really long thread on Photorealism in the main forum that could help if your goal is realism.  But you are right, there are many artists making many characters for sale here and elsewhere and they have their own styles, not all of them strive for realism, or do but miss the mark. Taking the time to research and really examine their work to find the ones that work for you is sometihng one should do. I'm very picky these days on what characters I buy and from whom.  There are some threads on this you can dig up. Also character tweaking, materials, lighting, camera all that is important to get over the uncanny valley. If it's really your goal to get there, you'll have to take a journey of discovery and experimentation to get there, but it's a fun rewarding one....it can also be really frustrating as hell too.