Soto's Real Drops

johnbuckeridge

I've been trying out Real Drops (Male edition) by Soto.  My character looks like he's struck oil, rather than getting rained on, because the droplets are mostly reading as black.  Any thoughts onh where I might be going wrong?  It's a night/ dark scene, if that makes any difference, but he's pretty well lit from a nearby window.

hansolocambo

Most Daz shaders projetc a shadow. Problematic for some body fluids. Soto's Real Drops, like most if not all tears, wetness, etc. have a poorly choosen shader, which lets a supposedly very transparent and refractive material, drop an ugly black shadow on the underlying skin.

Select all the surfaces of your drops in the Surfaces Tab. And apply instead to all of them the Daz default shader : \Shader Presets\Iray\DAZ Uber\Water - Thin.

This shader tends to project way less shadow than others. Excellent for tears and water.

You can still play with Surfaces values such as :

- Refraction Weight (about 0.95 to 1.00)

Low refraction weight : material darker allowing less light through.

High refraction weight : material brighter and more transparent.

- Refraction Index (about 1.33 to 1.6)

It's just an approximation. 1.33 being water. 1.6 epoxy.

This way you start with a nice transparent shader that doesn't let light through (no shadows) and you can control how white/visible it is. This is a much better solution for water and other types of body fluids.

Rule of thumb: do not assume that a shader is the best  just because some content creator chose it. There are often way better solutions, using only Daz' default Iray shaders and manually adjusting the surface.

hansolocambo

Soto's drops are round, real 3D geometry... when their surface should be flat against the skin. The geometry itself is wrong. Which doesn't help to create a realistic water effect. And 3D geometry is heavy (Genesis 16K polygons, drops 375K polygons ...) when the same result can be done with just a texture. Having worked during the Playstation 1 era, optimization is my moto ;)

You can make drops (and tons !! of other things such as moss on trees, very voluminous foamy soap, realistic scars, rocks, etc.) using only displacement map on a Daz Geometry Shell. No need to create an actual 3D geometry of 375K polygons drops   щ(ಥДಥщ)

I didn't spend time perfecting the result with a nice custom made Substance Designer procedural texture. Simply used crappy textures found on the web, tiled with Substance 3DSampler. But the test is good enough to give an idea of what can be done in a few clicks with only 3 seamless textures : nice drops, flat at the bottom, round at the top, much more physically accurate than too sperical 3D meshes.

johnbuckeridge

hansolocambo said:

Soto's drops are round, real 3D geometry... when their surface should be flat against the skin. The geometry itself is wrong. Which doesn't help to create a realistic water effect. And 3D geometry is heavy (Genesis 16K polygons, drops 375K polygons ...) when the same result can be done with just a texture. Having worked during the Playstation 1 era, optimization is my moto ;)

You can make drops (and tons !! of other things such as moss on trees, very voluminous foamy soap, realistic scars, rocks, etc.) using only displacement map on a Daz Geometry Shell. No need to create an actual 3D geometry of 375K polygons drops   щ(ಥДಥщ)

I didn't spend time perfecting the result with a nice custom made Substance Designer procedural texture. Simply used crappy textures found on the web, tiled with Substance 3DSampler. But the test is good enough to give an idea of what can be done in a few clicks with only 3 seamless textures : nice drops, flat at the bottom, round at the top, much more physically accurate than too sperical 3D meshes.

Wow, thank you so much - really kind of you to spend so much time on your replies, immensely helpful and a real insight!  I look forward to trying out your suggestions.  Will report back.  Thank you again.