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at the moment i can make very bad hair with the SBH editor.
it takes maybe an hour or two to make something bad from scratch.
i still have to master actually making it look good!
gimme a few more years.
Daz PBR Skin on Filament.
way better than my first attempts!
thankfully they're lost to the mists of time. since they're back from the garibaldi days they're also pre iray and the hairs probably what held up the best... and it hasn't held up well
True, you start by copying and go from there.
One HDRI and on flash light is a good start. It seems to be, that the more lights you are adding, especially when they are mesh lights, the less photo realism, you're getting.
I'd like to start testing, if HDRI images used as mesh light textures will help.
it lacks the structure of the best PA hair product - in real life, even messy hair isnt this messy. Also i meant bad compared to jcade.
Also i wasnt finished! i was just showing what can be done in a couple hours, which is the limits of my patience.
Yours looks a helluva lot better than my efforts and I have been trying since I bought Garibaldi. It must be the most frustrating tool in the box.
I didn't say you denided anything. I'm voicing my frustration at the lack of documentation and / or tutorials. Daz gave us SBH, then followed it up with...nothing. I honestly don't have hours and hours to mess around with a tool just to figure out how it works.
The result is that even SBH's made by PA in the store are crap compared to yours.
i played around some more and managed to get it to look a bit better from the front/back/sides, but the top of the head is still a cluster f---
I think one of the reasons my hair always looked bad was because i would always go overboard on random root angle, which is a problem because randomising the root angle ruins the effect of clumping, and clumping makes things look good.
the perfect solution!
LOL - That does actually look quite good, though!
Don't beat yourself up for the hair. It's not your fault. I just don't like SBHs (yet). It just never looks right to me. I bought so many and I dismissed everyone of them, for they just look bad. I do like the idea of having hair simulations, but I do think, it will take a lot of updates, until StrandBasedHairs are acually looking like nice hairs.
The rest of your renders look amazing. Your lights and your skin shaders are amazing. Good job.
well... not true! - It is my fault. I am definitely not getting the most out of SBH that is possible.I just need to get better at grooming. Alas, sometimes we cant just press the make-art button. There's no reason beyond skill of user that SBH shouldnt be able to come quite close to, like, Ornitrix hair - as j cade proved.
I am of the opinion that the simulation aspect of SBH is a bit irrelevant, especially for static renders. In SBH editor, we can use the comb or other tools to achieve the drape we want in some cases.
My renders look like garbage btw and were just tests!
I'll try to go point by point here, sorry for late response by the way, the forums made it seem like my post wasn't posting and honestly i just gave up and assumed it wasn't going to work, didn't realise the post actually went through xD
Spectral rendering;
I've tried to mess around with spectral rendering before but it's honestly just confusing for me xD It's meant to make the colors look more true to life, but whenever i try to use it, it makes the colors feel wrong, off, desaturated, i don't know, it just doesn't feel right, is this at all related to the point you mentioned after?
If so, could you possibly elaborate a little more on that? It's generally a good rule of thumb to treat me like a toddler and explain a little more than is neccessary xD
Okay so that's an interesting one, i found pretty good results upping the 'crush blacks' a little bit more and definitely agree with turning down the burn highlights, but i didn't really consider turning them both off (To 0 i presume?), do you keep your burn and crush at 0 and simply work with various elements of contrast in post? I'll have to give that a go :3 I think i get a bit caught up trying to minimize my post-work and perhaps do a little too much of the work in Daz itself xD
I've only just recently started really getting away from rendering in a void hey xD It really does make such a huge difference, completely agree :3 I love transparency, i am an absolute glutton for transparent background xD But including basic scene elements changes the game SOOOO dramatically yeah in terms of the lighting and just the overall DEPTH of the render which is huge xD
Ugh okay, yes, completely agree, it is REALLY... REALLY hard to get naturally feeling characters, i've tried so many times to use references to get everything just right, overlayed proportion diagrams and stuff to make sure everything is correct, i even tried to mess with Wrap3 and some other stuff to get perfectly natural characters, nothing ever works, EVERY SINGLE RENDER i can look at and be like "Ugh, something is still off with this character -_-" I wish there was a better way but honestly i think without sculpting the morph yourself, it's just a losing battle xD
Okay let me just take a moment to point out that i just LOVE strand based hair xD
It never quite agrees with me, and i've flirted with the idea of getting Zbrush, learning blender hair, trying to do haircards for laziness, blah blah blah, but i feel like strand based hair is like my white whale, like i *HAVE* to make it work xD It's a beast i cannot fathom taming but i always try xD And 120,000% agree, it makes an INSANE difference in making a character look more believably human, so yeah, don't worry, i will continue to try to tame strand based hair xD IT MUST SUBMIT ONE DAY xD
Just for some like.. Context?
I've started messing with Michael 8.1 lately and so i've got a couple of terrible renders i've done to that end;
Try not to hate on some of the lighting, i was using references with harsh lighting and simply replicated it xD
DISCLAIMER: I make male renders, clothing is optional (EXCEPT FOR GENS, they will always be covered) and they are meant to feel more natural than studio, there are elements that intentionally lean more towards stupid insta pictures than photoshoots, this is, again, intentional, please don't hate xD
https://imgur.com/a/ASetfVH
So i mean, the hair is strand based, obvi xD But it doesn't really want to behave properly xD
I think some turned out better than others, again, pretty obvi xD
I've only JUST found the 8.1 face controls so there's some janky face stuff going on but yeah...
That's my 3 most current attempts minus one which has some inappropriate wording in it that i thought wasn't appropriate.
Oh, also, i welcome ALL opinions :3 Even if people have different ideas or opinions or advice, i wanna hear and try it all and find what works for me :3
I think that's the joy of a collaborative community, we can all have different opinions and ideas on what's right and wrong but in the end, two opposing opinions don't actually have to be mutually exclusive, they don't have to be right and wrong, they both just serve as different lessons on the path to the same goal ;3
Sorry for not replying to this one by the way, i did actually really appreciate the response, just wasn't sure how to respond xD I think the other post that i did respond to was a little easier to formulate a response to, there was a couple of points here that i responded to in that response aswell so please do consider the other response a semi-response to this aswell xD
Just don't want you to think i ignored your response, i didn't :3 Just wasn't sure how to respond... I don't know, i'm sorry :(
I will note though, there was one other point here that wasn't in the other response, the camera, i just CANNOT figure out the right settings xD What does a 50mm lens look like in terms of daz settings? Are we talking going into the actual 'lens' section of the camera? Or are we talking about the 'Frame width' and 'focal length'? I'm honestly just never sure how to translate camera logic into DAZ settings :/ Could you possibly elaborate a little more for me? :3
1st of your strand based hair looks very good
to answer some of your questions I like spectral rendering because I like the idea of accuracy, but mostly you can use slightly higher values for transmitted distance and scattering distance as I've found that as you use smaller values iray behaves in unexpected and funky ways. If (as I do) your using translucecy values from .95-.1 with spectral rendering off, If you want your skin not to look like jello, you need to use scattering distance values of .05 and DS really doesnt like that. With spectral on you can use higher values.
the downside is that spectral has a bit of a bug so if you use a color in transmitted color you get weird dark seam lines - thankfully a user named isadorekeegan discovered that if you use non- colored value the seams go away so the fix is you use a transmitted color of .99/.99/.99 and a transmitted in the range of distance of .01-.03 things look very nice.
I also thinks spectral handles light a bit nicer which is the other main reason and leads into my reasons for tuning down burn highlights/crush blacks (typically I don't turn them all the way off, but down to .05)
Burn highlights/crush blacks are post render effects that up the contrast of your image (burn highlights also does it in a particularly ugly way that tends to turn highlights yellow) the thing with esentially just upping the contrast is you're then not creating that contrast with the lighting itself. so you end up using lights of lower strangth than you might otherwise. lets say you want some nice ear glow you need some rim lighting for that. If your highlights burn out the second it gets slightly bright, you use less bright rim lighting which means less ear glow. With burn highlight/crush blacks loweres you're more likely to use much brighter lighting so more light passing through the ears - more ear glow even though the scene is no "brighter"
I posted some images a few pages back but I think interiors is where this can really be demonstrated
heres a room it purely by the sun and sky - despite being lit by what is clearly sun streaming throught the window it looks like a dark cave. I could turn the light up, but the highlight on the floor is already comepletely burned out. Now I happen to live in a house with small windows much smaller than the room in the renders, and even on cloudy days they are perfectly capable of lighting rooms. I could fix this all by adding helper lights in the room, but obviously real rooms don't have those and still can be lit by windows, is Iray just broken? (spoiler: no)
well here's the same room but with the lighting set up with burn highlights/crush blacks tuned down. Notably I was able to turn the strength of the sun waaaaay up without blowing out the lighlights. Also the effect of the bounce light is suddenly much more evident - Peronally I think this setup makes not only makes the room look less like a cavern, but also makes the effects of light bouncing much clearer. look at the floor infront of the cabinet and how much clearer it looks tinted brown as its lit by the light bouncing off the cabinet.
and for fun the same scene with a character - I'm definitely still tweaking things
also it makes what I'm referencing even more obvious
Yay thank you :3 It's very basic which upsets me a little because there's so much power in strand based hair and i'm still sitting here being lazy with it xD But i guess it's just the hair i wanted for that character xD I'm glad it atleast comes across alright :3
I've literally only recently started deep diving into translucency after some experimentation, if i recall correctly i was doing some tests with Yuji, it was probably related to strand based hair xD And i noticed he was, to use your words, like jello xD So i delved into some scarier settings that never seemed to bother me before, namely yes, the burning and crushing and the translucency, and as i was experimenting i realized that i needed to be delving into these settings a lot sooner xD But i'm still quite new at it :(
I'll delve into some additional youtube content, try to get a better understanding of the additional values you're talking about here, i haven't quite gone deep enough to mess with scattering or transmitted distance, they're always settings that i never actually saw change anything before, but now i have a little context for them, i'll experiment a little bit more with those :3
Oh oh oh, i will point out i have seen the weird seam lines! I thought it was just me xD I found these weird lines on my characters neck and shoulders (Where the texture between the arm and torso meet) and i was like "Well, i borked something up" xD So thank you so much for that bit of advice, i will have to make a note of that somewhere because now i know what those weird lines were and how to fix 'em xD
When you explain that, it actually makes so much flippin' sense xD Thank you :3
This is another thing i've actually noticed! I've tried interior and windows and all that jazz a bunch of times and every time the lighting feels wrong and i have to use, as you say, helper lights to make everything feel right, but all the time when i'm watching a tv show or a movie, see a picture, or even just notice it in my own home i look at the way the smallest of window with the sun coming in just beautifully lights the whole room and i always wonder why daz won't do that for me xD Why do i have to CREATE the light that the sun should be?
So there's another problem you've just solved for me xD I hope, i mean, now i've got a whole bunch of experimenting to do xD But i appreciate it immensely! :)
Well, with some experimentation i have managed to completely bork it xD
I'm off to deep dive some SSS videos so i can understand what i've done wrong xD
I can manage to make him blue, white as the driven snow, or jelly, but i can't quite get him to look human at the moment xD
Any advice while i'm researching would be greatly appreciated xD I'm sure it's something simple and stupid and i'm just not connecting dots but doing a whole bunch of stupid things, borking everything and then eventually unborking it is essentially how i learn xD
EDIT:
Well, i've changed the SSS to mono and given the translucency a bit of color, i don't think that's entirely correct but he does look human again, the only issue is now i feel like he just looks the same as he did when i started...
Can confirm, exactly the same scene but with completely default Yuji with no spectral rendering, i don't feel like my adjustments really added anything positive which leaves me with the impression i did it wrong xD
Now the big question; What did i do wrong and how do i improve on it?
EDIT2:
I get the impression that chromatic is the way to go, i just need to figure out the nuts and bolts of it.
Out of curiosity, my brain tells me that the skin should look good/appropriate in live view iray (Not perfect obviously but it shouldn't look alien), and good/great/perfect in render, as opposed to looking alien in live view iray and fantastic in render, or do you find your skin looks wild in live view and perfect in render?
Just makes sense to me on the level of like, for posing, that old idea that you should view your pose from all standard angles, no matter what parts of the pose/character are visible in the final frame, the pose should look perfect from every standard angle because even the parts that aren't visible somehow find a way to influence the overall pose in the final frame, to me that's how my brain is looking at this situation, i want the skin to look appropriate in each view because it will translate to a... More perfect(?) final render xD
Let me know your thoughts there :) Is the final render the only thing that matters or should we be trying to make something that is universally coherant?
EDIT3:
Interesting note, probably not interesting, probably incredibly obvious xD But i thought i'll get a more realistic look at what my changes are going to do in a legitimate render, so i opened up my latest character (Michael8.1 base), literally NONE of the problems i had with Yuji are present for this character, i'm not having weird blue issues, i'm not turning them white as a ghost... I'm really not entirely sure WHY this is, but there we go xD
Even with a better understanding of each setting and what it's actually doing (I have been rewatching videos and re-reading all sorts of stuff as i go to make sure i'm getting it right xD), adjusting the settings willy nilly, thinking "I want this to happen, i know this setting will do that, i'll just increase this a little, decrease this a little" etc. etc., it's not creating the BEST result, BUT! With the rim light behind, changing the lighting to scene only, reviewing the SSS in live iray and adjusting it to a point i'm happy with, switching it back to dome and scene, it looks great in live and just about perfect in render, i really do think this is something that'll make a huge difference on my renders :3
Thank you again, again ;3
Exact same scene, same lighting, same everything, only difference is the one on the right has had some additional SSS adjustments and is using spectral rendering, if you ignore the ears (Which, is hard xD), i feel like the difference is quite minor but i am feeling it, i am feeling like there's an improvement, which is good, but i feel like i need more xD Need to figure out how to improve it even further without overdoing it (Which, i don't know if you've ever mucked with retouching, i assume you will have but assumptions aren't always intelligent xD, but the moral of the story is, overdoing it is easier than doing nothing at all xD)
Postscript:
I am also already seeing quite an improvement in various aspects of lighting by lowering those burn and crush settings, i don't know why i didn't discover this while experimenting with it earlier, thank you again :3
Little bit of an update if anyone is interested;
Because learning is an iterative process, i'm attempting today to recreate what i did yesterday, again, it wasn't much, possibly wasn't even good, but it was a step in the right direction towards achieving more realistic renders.
As of today, doing exactly what i did yesterday, i am borking it something fierce, i'm rewatching videos, i'm rereading responses and other various things, i am doing everything i did yesterday but the results are completely different, more akin to my Yuji tests than my main character tests, we're getting the white as a sheet and the blue as a smurf, but there's a disconnect in every case between the live view and the render, when i achieved quote unquote success yesterday, there was very little disconnect between the result in live versus the result in render, nothing outside the ordinary, so there's something i'm missing, there's something that still isn't connecting that i managed to subconciously do yesterday that i wasn't registering that allowed the result i achieved.
As per usual, any thoughts or advice or anything would be greatly appreciated :)
Or i mean, if you just wanna run through how you set up your skin with translusency and SSS settings and why, it could help me find my missing link ;3
Or you could just tell me how much you hate my posts and would like me to stop so you can get back to looking at people who already know what they're doing posting :3 (If mods are going to get upset at you for that, you may private message me if that's something that works around here and let me know, i will try to post elsewhere or just learn on my own if it's a bother :))
EDIT:
Don't know if it's all relevant, but so far, darker translucency colours have little to no disconnect between live and render, lighter translusency colours seem to undersaturate in live and oversaturate in render, a lighter red for instance looks human in live, tomato in render, am yet to recognise the connection, not sure if i should just be using darker colours or if that's the wrong solution to the right problem, just wish i could connect the dots on why this is the case.
Darker - The render is suspiciously close to the live view
Only slightly lighter - The render is very red
Normally i'd be asking if it really matters but my concern is that yesterday i was able to achieve continuity between the live view and render, both looked good, so i feel as though there shouldn't be a high level of disconnect between the colors in live vs render.
(Also quite obviously that's not the color i'm looking for, i was just experimenting at the time, so i thought i should use some visual aids to help explain what's happening at the moment :) Oh, and for the record, things only get more out of sync when i start trying to adjust the SSS colour, but in all honesty, i can't figure out weather it's the SSS or the translucency or both causing the disconnect)
EDIT2:
I've managed to bring the discrepency between live view and render to a margin i feel is within the expected range, i feel like live view never feels that close to render (Quite obviously xD), it still feels, to me, a little washed out, but at this point if i'm honest i feel i've been adjusting so much that i've lost any idea of what skin actually looks like anymore, i'm going to look at some references and adjust a bit more if needed.
(Also, strange note, for reference i turned spectral rendering off and on and rendered both, the difference was, well basically they were identical, i'm a little confused and concerned about that, will asses my spectral rendering settings, perhaps i've just forgotten how subtle the difference is xD)
EDIT3:
Finally managed to get everything right, it was quite a delicate balance between translucency and SSS, adjusting everything just a fraction of a fraction at a time, pulling the translucency up a little to add a little more color, pulling the SSS around to adjust the hue ever so slightly, blah blah blah, there was no one thing that improved the situation, it was a delicate balancing act between each setting, too much on any given setting threw out the colours, the saturation, everything, but i thought before i save it out (Because i'm an idiot and forgot how often i need to be saving -_-) i'd just adjust the eyebrows a little, but ofcourse, as i decided to even look at strand based hair, Daz crashed on me, so i guess i will pick it back up tomorrow for a new iteration ;3 Hopefully someone will have some additional input for me in the meantime :)
So this idea intrigued me, but I didn't have any real similar comparisons. But then I looked at my latest render and went "hey I've definitely rendered someone with nice cheekbones and strongly toplit with emphasis on bounce light before" (actually I have a lot of those)
true the 1st render is from before this thread, but I think its still valid so before:
some notes: this is pre sbh built in that hair was made in garibaldi and then converted to mesh, I really don't miss having to export out giant 100mb objects and then having them just sitting in my scene. those eyes just make me sad.still like the bouce light on the neck and emphasizing the curve of the jaw.
and after:
notes: character blends more with the scene thanks to adding just a bit of dof and making sure theres a backdrop reflecting light. sbh that you don't have to export as an object is much more effective - I was actually lazy here this is togatta hair by redz with some tweaking. mesh eyebrows are superior to painted on ones. I can't take credit for the eyes vanilla Torment - genesis 8.1's new eye set up is so much better y'all
Jcade, wow you have a big progress on your workflow,
btw here is one tip, use violet color on Translucency Channel
she is Keicy with some Brielle with V8.1 PBR Skin shader and some magic on Render Settings, that skin was used with the SSS color above, that will get rid of that orange skin tone very famous on all victorias textures.
She is not very realistic because is a half toon (Brielle)
I did notice some pretty good results heading towards the purples, just had a bit of a rough time balancing it all out, i'll have to remember tomorrow to try those values specifically and see what i can do with it :)
I'm not 100% sure that tip was aimed at me, either way, i appreciate some publically posted tips :3
Oh and the render was lovely, even with half toon she did feel pretty realistic, probably has a lot to do with that cheeky DoF ;3 Lovely render :)
I try to incorporate DoF in the most natural ways i can, i think my biggest contradiction is that i have an obsession with sharpness (Probably because i love photography xD (Not a photographer, i just mean i'm a fan :3)) but when everything is so in focus and everything is so sharp and beautiful, it just looks artificial, another tough balancing act in the world of Daz xD
I'd add use Canvases (In the Render tab, in the Advanced section). Ideally, render out each light as a separate pass, along with an Environmental pass if you're using an HDRI or physical sun, and an Emission pass if you have emissive surfaces. There's so much detail in Daz skins that gets lost in the 8-bit output. Plus, you don't have to care about toning settings. I often overexpose my lights (e.g., get blowouts) in order to throw more light into shadow regions. In post, you can pull everything back and use HDRI toning to get more balanced light.
My second tip would be don't get caught up on where you do the work: what matters is the image, not the software you did it in. Don't waste time trying to perfect your Iray output if you can more easily fix the issue in an image editor like Photoshop. Literally no professionals in Holywood, archviz, or product rendering treat the render output as the final product.
Re: SBH, alas, that requires more computational power than my no-Nvidia-card laptop has to effectively play with it. I'll have to wait on vendor-produced hair that works for me.
That's an interesting idea, although I'm not sure kind of HDRI you'd use for a mesh light—say you use one of HDRIHaven's studio HDRIs, you'd have all of the studio in there as well as the "light." In archviz, they always use IES (name?) light profiles for their lights to ensure acurate lighting. I don't know if there are any IES profiles for the kinds of lights I use (very larg soft boxes), since they have big difusers on them, but if you're using room lights, IES profiles would be another step towards accuracy. I know they're available for free from most light manufacturers if you search for them.
I mostly do studio stuff. For that, I use an HDRI set to something like 0.25 to get some additional shape to the light, while relying on (usually) a large soft box set pointing just in front of the figure. I picked that up from a youtube video by a portrait photographer. It's a nice way to get super soft shadows. Combined with a white plane to fill in the backside, it produces nice results.
I liked this result a lot, although the line on the lips looks really off to me. And—oy!—fixing the hand in the hair in post was a pain. Definitely not something SBH would help with.
I agree with canvases. for quick renders I'm usually to lazy but for renders in which I'm putting effort I try to use them
I will say with strand based hair there are some settings you can use to make them more resource friendly: by setting the tesselation to 2 rather than 3 and interpolation length as high as you can go without making the hair look completely crunchy, you can get the memory lower than many traditional mesh hairs - that said I've also messed up settings and completely frozen my computer. but I can frequently get sbh down to 300k total memory which is less than, say oot's hairs, though more of sbh's memory is geometry based which seems to take longer to load than images for whatever reason. I also help myself by following your postwork advice If the hair has some janky crinkliness because of the interpolation settings I use, I can always do some smudging in post to get rid of the crinks. I also find sbh tends to clear up faster once it starts rendering than hair with bunches of layers of mesh with transparency
For instance in my last render if I render just the hair my memory consumption is:
if I set the tessalation down to 2 it goes down to:
for comparison just the figure without hair:
much less geometry memory - but more total memory due to textures
and for comparisons to other hairs
Matthew hair
less geometry memory consumption but more memory for textures for a slightly higher over all memory impact
Morley hair by Aprilysh
completely blows strand hair out of the water. so memory friendly. I use Aprilysh hair a lot especially if I'm not going for ultra ultra realism
OOT Ryan hair
lower geometry memory again but woaaaah so much more memory for textures that it uses almost triple the memory. obviously you can also optimize this for memory by shrinking all the textures, but even with all the textures halved it ends up about the same as my sbh example.
But I will say if occasional computer crashes when you forget to optimise aren't your thing I can totally understand your wariness. (although the last time i kept freezing my computer I couldn't figure out how I had messed up the hair, but it turned out I had set the figure subdivision to 5- whoops)
On the Mac, memory usually isn't the issue, at least with rendering (I think it is with simulating, but I'm not 100% certain about that). MacOS does a fantastic job of managing memory, so I can render 8-12 GB scenes on my 16 GB MBP without issues. But Nvidea-free CPU rendering is slow, so seeing what things will look like is annoying when it doesn't show up in the Iray preview. Plus, the fur tools (I haven't done anything with hair) are sluggish. So it's just not been worth the effort for me. Perhaps when DS gets updated for Big Sur compatibility, these things will use Metal and work better on the Mac.
Re: canvases, I have a default scene saved (and locked so I don't overwrite it) with Canvases (beauty, depth and the worthless alpha) already set up. Every now and then I'll use a lighting preset that overwrites my defaults—very annoying!—but mostly I get them without any extra effort. Of course, I like toning, so that's part of the fun for me.
i made this in SBH editor today on a G8M haircap - so i can actually use it on G8.1, if i ever feel so inclined.
Took maybe 2-3 hours to make. I feel certain patches of it look realistic, but others not so much.
Okay, so! Spent a good chunk of this morning researching canvases, then the rest of the morning testing out the canvases on an old render (Which i needed to redo anyway, i got carried away with the background, i wanted to make it fancy and interesting and as a result, it just ended up feeling 'off', so i needed to simplify), it wasn't the BEST scene for it because the primary lighting is literally just the sun xD It didn't turn out GREAT, it's usable but the moral of the story was about learning the canvases and what they can do for me xD
Completely agree with using them, even with the limited lighting, i feel like canvases gave me the control to really fine tune while keeping as much detail as physically possible, the difference between the various versions of the render are pretty minimal but they're things that i think you subconciously notice, i got a lot of detail into the background that otherwise was being lost and getting for lack of a better term 'flattened', i was able to control the DoF blur with much more precision, i was able to bring in and take out shadows that otherwise i had no control over, i mean, there were just so many things that i could fine tune and adjust that generally i just have to accept as they are for the purposes of postwork, and speaking of postwork, i literally made a SINGLE adjustment ontop with literally 5% opacity, everything else was done with balancing the opacity of the various different canvases, utilizing the depth map to allow greater control over foreground and background independantly, i mean, let me say canvases are my new best friend xD
For the sake of.... Transparency? Context? Or perhaps even just for the sake of recieving additional notes, i'll just slap this here.
DISCLAIMER: I still make male renders, pretty exclusively, these renders are clothing optional (Minus the gens, they are always covered, this image in particular is cropped at the waist, so you don't see any front or behind anatomy), incase this is offensive to anyone, i am providing a LINK instead of the image itself, you shouldn't have to look at it if you don't want to.
Additionally, i'm currently in a 'phase', very slowly and poorly working towards 'photorealism' (I'm very far from that goal at the moment, please be aware and mindful of my INTENT, but also my skill level, or lack there of) but also, thematically, silly instragram pictures, as opposed to STUDIO images, as such there may be adjustments, elements, posing, etc, that is more reflective of that as opposed to a studio environment, please take these things into consideration before judging or commenting, just so we're all on the same page :3
https://i.imgur.com/B4az3fw.png
Worth noting 2 things; One, i didn't experiment with spectral rendering or SSS changes or anything in this image, i'd rather experiment with one thing at a time xD
And two, for this image i incorporated the use of a couple of tips provided here, the canvases, the burn/crush suggestions, i think there were a couple of other things, i honestly cannot remember, i've started auto-pilot experimenting, as if my brain know what i'm testing out but i'm not actually registering what it is xD
In regards to your second point;
Thank you, i realise it's all probably pretty common sense, honestly i just needed to hear someone say out lout that it's okay to leave a bunch of stuff for post xD
There's a lot of really interesting wavyness going on there, i'm curious how you achieved that?
I think i saw another image of SBH you made that had some nice wavyness aswell, i've struggled a lot at achieving believable waves, i wonder if you could give me a little glimpse into your process? :3
Other than that, fantastic hair, exactly like you said though, there are patches of it that look realistic, others not so much, but honestly i feel like that describes a lot of peoples attempts at strand based hair xD Unless it's commercial grade, it's usually a little off here and there xD (Low key in a lot of renders i've just cleaned up the hair a little in post xD In the bathroom image i posted the other day, there were some massive gaps in the hair that just looked odd that i literally just filled in photoshop xD) SBH is such a devious monster to tame xD