Daz Help with quality DAZ skins

[BlitzMcGee]

In all my renders my skins look like plastic crap.

I've tried using built in skins and shaders for several models (Novak, Fabian, Sebastian). I've also tried the Altern8 skin shader system (using both maps and no maps) and nothing seems to help. I looked into modifying settings in the "surfaces" tab, but I don't know what any of it means or where to start.

I've also tried several different render settings presets without luck.

I'm willing to read articles, watch videos, whatever. I just need to get this sorted.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

(darkness in hands picture is intentional, part of the scene I'm building.)

 

[MidnightArrow]

For "Rain Test 2.png" your lights are too harsh. She looks like she's got a floodlight pointed at her.

You know how in Star Trek they'd smear vasoline on the lens whenever a woman shows up? It's to reduce the hard shadows and the bright lights. If you want your women/pretty boys to look sexy you need some soft even lighting.

Increase the geometry size of the light and adjust the lumens so there's not so much highlights washing out the detail on her skin. You can also turn the light temperature down. The lower you go the more it'll look like candlelight. Turn it higher and it will be like a harsh blue-ish ultraviolet (which isn't what you want.)

You can also mess with tonemapper options like gamma, burn highlights, and crush blacks but those are for power users.

When it comes to skins themselves it all depends on how good the PA is. Some make fucking garbage materials and some make excellent materials.

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is probably the best one. If you hold control while clicking to load materials it'll let you pick if you want to keep the original textures. So you can just load his skin settings onto any figure and use the original texture maps. But even his skin materials won't look good unless you have good lighting.

Other things to do are:

• If the figure has normal maps then enable them. Normal maps will activate little skin details that catch light and look more real.
• Turn up the HD morphs if a character's got them. You need to turn up the SubD to see them though. Your figures will take up more memory the higher the SubD is.
• Increase the skin translucnecy to strong/90%/whatever. Low translucency will make your characters pale but high translucency will let light into their SSS layer and make the skin nice and tan.

For "Crap hands.png" it's basically the same solution. Instead of having very dim lighting it's better to mimic nighttime with a single spotlight (using the same techniques I talked about above) that has a deep blue tint to pretend moonlight is coming through a window or something.

 

[BlitzMcGee]

Thanks for the suggestions. I know my lighting needs work. I've still not fully figured out how to control the light intensities.

As for the skin and shaders, I'll try your recommendations and see where it gets me.

Do new materials overwrite previous materials? For instance, if I tried material "x" for a skin, do I need to remove it before applying material "y"?

Thanks again!

 

[MidnightArrow]

Thanks for the suggestions. I know my lighting needs work. I've still not fully figured out how to control the light intensities.

As for the skin and shaders, I'll try your recommendations and see where it gets me.

Do new materials overwrite previous materials? For instance, if I tried material "x" for a skin, do I need to remove it before applying material "y"?

Thanks again!

You control the intensity with the luminoux flux/lumens property. Sometimes you need to jack it up into the millions so don't be afraid to jam some zeroes in there. But the amount of lumens you need also depends on how big the light's geometry is. Bigger the surface of the light then the more spread out the lumens are. Increasing the size means you need to increase the lumens to get the same light brightness. But the light will also be softer so the shadows aren't as distracting.

Materials are a big clusterfuck since Daz doesn't do any kind of standards for their own content runtime. PAs create materials however they want and just submit them. They're supposed to overwrite but there's some that don't so you get stuck with bump maps or cutout opacity from the last material you applied. Though that mainly happens in shader packs and not with actual figures. You're usually safe to just select a figure and hit that "All MATs" preset and it should overwrite everything.

But some Genesis 8.1 figures use a completely new skin shader that Daz made so they might not be totally compatable with others. Other 8.1 figures just use the Uber shader. You can tell the difference by whether you see a bunch of "Enable" booleans in the skin surfaces. "Makeup Enable", "Metallic Enable", etc.