Can you tell me more about this step?
Sure thing. Basically, I looked over several videos on Youtube about creating skin materials. With Daz you get the mesh, the UV projections, and multiple textures -- the specific ones might depend on the model, but in general you get the diffuse, the bump map, the normal map, a specular map, and a subsurface scattering map. Here's the node setup I use:
The subsurface scattering isn't being used, that's not a mistake. It seems to look fine with the diffuse used in both channels.
For hair, I've had good results dumping the Diffeo created shader setup for a simple Principled Hair BSDF using the melanin mode. The principled hair bsdf does things like subsurface scattering and such -- the hair looks much more interesting as a result. It catches the light, has nice shiny spots, things like that.
I have to say that the setup looks ridiculously simple. I might add a color ramp here or there to see if I can affect the skin in interesting ways, but for naughty VN renders, you don't need to go crazy. Really, the trick is good lighting.
One problem I do have with the Daz setup is the UV maps. The body map and the face map are the same size even though a face is much less skin than a whole torso. That means the face texture is very nicely detailed, but the same bumps and freckles on the body look smeared out. That's because the same size image is being stretched over a much larger body map.
Here's a closeup. To the left is the lower jaw and the right is the neck. At the boundary you can really see the difference in the quality.
Not sure what I can do about this. As long as I don't zoom in, I suppose it'll be ok. A touch of post-processing would help too. I might also look through my assets to see if there is a model with a larger torso texture sized to match the UV map.
Or maybe find a properly sized set of textures and re-map the UVs to that. I have a set that might work, but sheesh, the trouble in redoing the UVs!
