So I was wondering for a while how to get all that awesome micronormal detail the 8.1 brings to the table. To nobody's surprise, rendering at high res is the trick. So, I imitated the camera that I used for the camera settings on the render, a Canon 90D. Problem is, with a 35.2 megapixel resolution in the APS-C sensor, that translates to a 6960x4640 image resolution in a 3x2 aspect ratio.
So I set that for the render target and started the render. About 10h in and it's at 23% of Convergence with a convergence ratio of 99.8%. While this process would result in an amazing image, that if used with the correct settings and good lighting would be as close to a photograph as possible (the quality of the assets would be the limiting factor for a photorealistic result), the render itself would take me about..5 days on a 6700HQ cpu.
So I stopped the render, dropped the image res down to 2560x1707 and did some manual denoising/bluring in photoshop. And while I /will/ do the full render once I'm happy with how it looks, for now I'll leave it at that and attempt to fix the few issues I have. One, is the classic problem with stockings. They float. Another, is that I haven't added the freckles yet (still trying to find a good product that works with 8.1 figures), and lastly, I need to do something with the nails. They look like simple black shapes right now, no surface details on them.
And for those interested, scene is lit with 1 diffuser, 90x90 cm with a 20d hex grid for directionality, set at around 3m away from the model with a 45 degree angle looking down and back to the model's face and a simple 18cm spotlight at the back for some edge definition on her right side. The rest of the light is simply reflected on a very light grey infinity cove that makes up the scene. Both lights are set with emissive surfaces at real world luminance values for the type of light they are. Shutter speed at 125 with 100 ISO and f-stop at 8 with adjusted gamma.
This is the downrezzed image. If someone wants I can upload the render too, but I didn't yet, since the file is about 60mb in size.
Any suggestions on how I can make it better? And I'm not talking about the model itself or the pose, but as far as lighting goes or suggestions about the rendering process to make it more in line with a real photography set. For example, I know in Blender I have the option to change the dynamic range to filmic, which takes it from 8 stops to 25 stops. That would result in a much better image, more realistic and without me having to mess with the gamma of the image. Is there such an option anywhere in iray? Whether baked into Daz or as a plugin?
Eventually in my quest for photorealism (which means exactly what the word says, not what people mean by it colloquially), I will end up rendering the final result in Blender. Most likely with Luxcore too instead of cycles, but I'm a long way away from that yet. I don't even know how to convert the materials from BSDF to whatever Luxcore uses. So until I'm 100% finished with the model and materials in Iray, I'll be sticking to Daz rendering. Then possibly cycles with the use of Diffeomorphic but that's a ways off still.
Fun fact, at the original size I'm rendering at of 4640x6960, the size of it when at 100% is really damn close to a real life size of a person.
