Translucency Weight and Color

etobares

Hello! I'm dabbling in DAZ Studio and have experience working with Blender and Substance 3D Painter.

Recently, I generated some totally new textures for one of my models and protagonists of the 3D graphic novel I'm writing.

The model was designed in DAZ Studio on a G8.1 Male, exported to Blender to make adjustments as an OBJ and re-imported to DAZ Studio as a morph to be applied directly on a standard G8.1 Male.

I have also generated all the textures with Substance 3D Painter and I got a not very pleasant surprise in the Translucency channels.

What seemed obvious was that Translucency Weight would interpret the Scattering maps generated in Substance Painter as the mask they are and that Translucency Color would interpret the Scattering Color maps as the translucency color it should project. However, this was not the case and, although I have solved it, I do not fully understand where my error of interpretation is.

Let me show you the channel settings on the Face surface:

This is the Base Color or Difusse:

I've incorporated Substance Painter's Ambient Occlusion map to acquire shadow details in the texture:

And this is the Translucency settings:

As you can see, Translucency is working. However, it didn't until I removed the Scattering Color map and replaced it with a solid color. The interesting thing about that map was that it provided exactly the color information of each specific part.

I have not understood something correctly in how DAZ Studio works with Scattering and I would love to know it to be able to avoid problems like these, since I have seen that practically all DAZ Studio models use a Translucency Color map (Scattering Color) and not one of Translucency Weight (Scattering Mask).

lilweep

What problem are you trying to solve by putting a mask there? I suppose if you wanted to control volumetrics you could weight translucency, but do you really need to? 

I would just copy someone else's shader set up rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. 

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/surfaces/shaders/iray_uber_shader/shader_general_concepts/start#translucency

You will need Translucency Weight on and Thin Walled OFF to get volumetric effects like scattering.

Your Dual Lobe Spec settings also look non-standard...

There are some PDFs floating around on the store that descirbe Daz Iray Uber shader somewhat in depth.

lilweep

You also dont really need to bake shadows with ambient occclusion map.  You can if you want, of course.  It's just theoretically wrong to fake shadows when youre using ray tracing renderer i suppose?

etobares

lilweep said:

What problem are you trying to solve by putting a mask there? I suppose if you wanted to control volumetrics you could weight translucency, but do you really need to? 

I would just copy someone else's shader set up rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. 

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/surfaces/shaders/iray_uber_shader/shader_general_concepts/start#translucency

You will need Translucency Weight on and Thin Walled OFF to get volumetric effects like scattering.

Your Dual Lobe Spec settings also look non-standard...

There are some PDFs floating around on the store that descirbe Daz Iray Uber shader somewhat in depth.

Thanks for the slap of reality. I don't know why that didn't cross my mind.

I applied the textures of a model that I like in terms of level of detail, one of those from the store, and replaced the maps with my own. Specular and Glossy adjustments more or less and he turned out perfect! 

No Ambient Occlusion maps and no need for the Scattering mask.

Thank you so much!