FROM THE COMMUNITY COLLECTION
Ramon
Another in your face render, sorry. I just feel the need to master this skin thing and it cannot be done from a distance. I am trying to get a look that defies Bryce expectations. Hopefully this looks more like a Studio or Carrara render than a Bryce render. You be the judge. This time I am using Jepe's Pierre skin material for sale at Daz 3d. It is high resolution but the nose is till too pixelated for me so I provided my own bump map and use the Pierre as color information only. The dof blurs the nose a bit so the pixelation would not have been to obvious in thes case anyhow, but for good measure I always provide my own seamlessly tiling bump and specualrity mapping. Please zoom in on the skin and tell me what you think. Rendered with premium AA 144 rays per pixel, soft shadows, and depth of field. The dof and high ray count help to further smooth the impression of the skin. The only difference between Cassandra and Ramon really is the render quality settings. I could never render the scene at these settings if I was rendering hair so Male characters are more ideal for the skin testing. Also with females the issue of make-up comes in and I have not yet decided how I should handle make-up. Grown man playing with dolls, somehow isn't as bad as it sounds. I feel this is a marked improvement over Carlos series. I did not use SSS this time because the more I experiment with it the more I find that Bryce is not really up tp the task of SSS in a situation like this. The SSS scatters not only light but also shadow so the inner mouth meshes caused wierd shadows on the skin surface when SS is engaged. I will likely solve the issue at some point but for now no SSS. I also remembered finally to label the image as my own, a detail I always somehow forget. Anyhow I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks all for your time.
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Sweat skin texture!
Yes Horo, I agree. True reflection is the best bet. I will test it out.
-Eyes and specularity Specularity or the use of a specular map is what makes eyes look wrong and certainly is what makes Ramon's eyes look wrong. The answer is reflection! Rashad, stand in front of a mirror and look at the reflections in your eyes and you see what I mean. Eyes are mirror balls that reflect the environment sharp and clear - but very small. Those reflections get blurred only if the eyes start to water, e.g when you cry or prepare an onion.
I am not a expert on this topic but like what I see in this render. It would help if I could see a before and after picture to make a comparison as I do not own Jepe's Pierre texture. I find what you are doing very interesting and will be looking forward to seeing some of your texture maps
Full marks?! Yeah!!!! I will be in a good mood all day after the positive feedback, thanks alot to all of you. Thanks to Horo on the Gamma Correction issue. After disabling that feature my colors have been much more accurate. The results with no gamma correction are vastly better in every single way! Thanks Horo! Yeah, the dof was set to the centered position of the eyes. This had a unique effect of blurring the nose. As I narrowed the blurring it brought the ears and the shoulders very much into focus, too much to make the dof worthwhile. I should have selected the entire face instead of just the eyes as the centering for the dof and I'm guessing the nose would have retained its focus. The darned eyes! Naturally there is no ambient glow in a scene of mine with room temperature objects, but there is alot of very bright light in the scene providing strong ambient secondary light. The dark skin version you see above is at a diffusion of just 7. Raise it to 10 and he becomes very much caucasian. The lights are so bright that diffusion is everything. I tried to lower the diffusion of the whites so that his eyes would look a touch sympathetic, slightly bloodshot, imperfect. The issue came in with providing the sense of wetness. Specularity is a good thing. I tried to do a subtle reflection mapping on the corneas. I preferred the eyes without the reflection mapping but most artists do find it necessary to provide some reflection for the eyes so I too did it for good measure. In this case the reflection turned the eyes into glass. I could easily remedy the problem by removing the reflection and allow the specularity which is a reflection shortcut to do most of the work. The lips are the show stealer here. Hard to imagine a better result. I am really impressed with Jepe's Pierre and not to sound like a salesman but if you were to purchase any male character texture ever I think Pierre would be the one. It is even better than the High res maps sold for Michael 3. The next step is to create my very own texture maps from scratch. I found a tutorial on mapping Daz Characters. I am working on one now that is about double the resolution of the already high res Pierre. The difference will be noteworthy especially in the sharpness of the eyebrows and other facial hairs I might add. I also think I can get a better more natural coloring to the skin to prevent the model from appearing made up. It's weird because the skin textures often look like corpses without enough saturation, yet too much and it begins to look like a clown. The threshold for saturation is very thin. Blue colored lights help to lower the sense of saturation in the skin where warm colored lights seems to boost it. In the case above I used colorless lights, and I did not make any saturation adjustments to the pierre texture before or after the render so this is pretty much the way the texture was intended to look, though not for charcters this dark skinned perhaps. I am trying to figure out a way to use premium effects and render hair. One of the reasons hair has not looked good for me is that the strands need high level AA to smooth out the strands to look realisitic. The female characters will be much more challenging than these mostly hairless males. Thanks again. I am glad the hard work I'm putting into this is noticable.
The texture and appearance of the skin is excallent, the DOF a little overpowering I feel, as observed by others. The only outstading issue I would say is the eyes, which somehow seem to be a too hard edged - like glass - and as pointed out by others, perhaps a tad too bright. That being said, I have no reservations about giving top marks.
The texture of the skin and lips are amazing, as are the lashes and eyebrows. The skin tone is very even, suggesting the use of makeup maybe? The only thing I would change is the brightness and specularity of the eyes. The see unnaturally bright, IMHO. Overall this is a very well done image and I give it top marks.
Full 5 marks for Rashad Carter!! I'm speachless for your skin-testing result! Yes, work on SSS if the case requires it. Right here, if I didn't know that you're rendering with Bryce I'd be asking what renderer did you used. Excellent result. If I had to be picky I'd recommend less amount of blur - adjust your lens. The only thing you should work on now I guess would be the eyes. You suggest to people quite often to be careful with ambient in the materials, here the white places of the eyes look as if ambient is present. The left eye has this secondary refractive specular spot in it - too glassy effect. But since you've worked only on the skin, you shouln't take these last word as pure criticism, at least not for now :) Anyway, impressive job, a deserved marks.
The colour of skin and lips is excellent. Very natural looking specularity. I like the use of DOF but I'm not sure it was a good idea to set it so that the nose got a bit blurred. The pores might be large as you say, but this is often the case. Nevertheless, this face looks very natural even without SSS (the effect is subtle anyway).