Skin shaders no longer rendering in Iray with sufficient sheen
I'm completely baffled about this. Loaded a figure today and did a render, and compared to previous renders with the same figure, the skin does not have the sheen it had previously. It looks flat and dry. I've reset all render settings back to factory default, and still have the same problem. Also, it seems the default light setup has changed. I previously had a fairly bright light on my figures, and now they're in half shadow. I know dome rotation would change the light issue, but the skin still has less/no sheen. Any ideas? I'm really not happy with how the figures look. :( Using GTX 1080 GPU, DAZ 4.15.
Added some test images. The first was done some weeks ago using the default setup. I made no changes to render settings before doing the render. The second is the same two figures using default settings. At this point, I had reset all settings to factory defaults. The third is done after rotating the dome to get more light on the figures. The figure on the left exhibits the greatest difference in the face. In the first image, the face has a light oily sheen, and does not in any successive render.
Comments
Images removed due to nudity
Please note this thread https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3279/acceptable-ways-of-handling-nudity#latest
*sigh* alright I guess the facial skin will have to suffice to try and illustrate what I'm talking about. Even though the problem is throughout the models and the question and images were purely technical in nature. But hey, I don't want anyone to faint from seeing too much DIGITAL SKIN.
Yes you can you just need to add clothes, a bra and panties would be enough, or if you just show from waist up it only needs the fra
Why would you need to show the complete anatomical elements & the breasts if the issue is with all of the skin surfaces? Its really not necessary to show the nipples & other naughty bits as they can be cropped off of the rendered image. Some of the layer settings I would check are Glossy Layer, Dual Lobe Specular, and/or Top Coat. Anyway, the lack of "sheen" you're referring to is most likely the Specular Lobe Roughness being set too high or Dual Lobe Specular Weight is 0.0 or set too low.
Hmm... thanks for the input. I checked Top Coat and Glossy, and they can alter the look. I'll look at Dual Lobe Specular Weight, but my question was more about why the appearance would have changed when I didn't touch any of those parameters previously. And why the change in lighting? Again, I didn't touch anything that would have resulted in a permanent change, and resetting to default should have corrected anything I did do.
As for the anatomical elements and breasts, it's not a question of why WOULD I show them, but why WOULDN'T I. They're just body parts; what's the big deal? I'm not illustrating a sexual act. My intent was purely technical: the more of the skin surface I could show the better it would illustrate how different parts of the body were now reacting differently to light hitting them. In fact, the nipples were one area that clearly showed a marked difference in skin sheen. Whatever; I sometimes forget how people are quick to sexualize an exposed human body, whether it's a real one or a cg one.
ok so are we supposed to just trust that all things are equal in both scenes? If so, maybe you had 'Auto Headlamp' set to 'When no scene lights' in the render settings.
edit: maybe save your scene next time so you remember what you did.
There are other more important reasons why they don't allow it, but one of them is that too many would abuse the privilege so the simple solution is to not allow nudity in any form.
If your lighting is changing, it could be a number of things. Check your camera settings(are you rendering in the default viewport or a camera?), particularly the Headlamp: it has AUTO, ON and OFF options along with x,y,z positioning & Intensity settings. I'm willing to bet that its the headlamp(or rather lack thereof). As for why settings would change, I couldn't tell you because there's no way for me to know what your default settings are, how you saved the scene, or if you clicked on something in smart content(or other content) that would change your Environment settings.