What's the Best Way to Make VICTORIA 3 Skin Look Great in IRAY?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
in The Commons
I have so many Victoria 3 skin textures that looked sensational in Poser, 10 years ago. What's the best way to restore the glory of their appearance usine IRAY?
Thanks!
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I think it might be memory versus actual result. I know stuff that I look at from V3 days would not hold up well at all to the current standard.
It's not my memory idealizing the look of those old renders. I still have the renders, and I still have the V3 textures. They looked magical in Poser - and they look hideous in IRAY. I just want to know what product to buy, or what proceedure I use to get them back to looking sensational. A lot of those old textures were hand painted by actual humans. It's like the difference between the look of a 1939 3-strip Technicolor film like Gone With the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, and a contemporary film, or Kodachrome film and a cell phone photo.
There is this converter for Victoria4 and Michael4 textures to convert and render in iray https://www.daz3d.com/iray-converter-for-generation-4
but nothing comes to mind for Victoria3
My suggestion would be to post the magical render and then to list which skin it was and see if anyone can help. Something like this might also help https://www.daz3d.com/advanced-material-converter
I save the PBR shader off of a genesis 8 surface and apply it to earlier generations and swap out the maps
but I am hardly the talented render of realistic skins
find a character you like and save their shader off a skin surface ( not materials) or use a shader you like from the DAZ store
I also apply the materials but that means a mix of UUW3D repaint and texture converter
I've used this on Gen3 and Gen4 to improve their skin. You can adjust the color by changing the base color under surfaces.
https://sharecg.com/v/87083/gallery/7/Material-and-Shader/VRX-iRay-Skin-Shader
Iray is very unforgiving and a load less painterly and forgiving... It is a complex mix of technological advancement and aesthetic choices. Fortunately, if you don;t mind tinkering, you coudld render using 3delight. If you want to render in Iray, I would suggest that you get the NGS 2 Freebie script and N.G.S. Anagenessis II - Revolution when it is on sale, thoroughly read its manual, and use the manual script to convert the surfaces.
I too used VRX's shader as a basis for using on V3 skin textures. Below is Dreampaint's yarishan character before the shader is applied. (No bump, no specularity maps were used)
After the shader is applied
I have attached a copy of the shader file and the thumb image. It would be a start. needs work on specularity. You don't have to convert the surfaces to iray first and this shader has no textures assigned to it. So load in V3, put the texture you want on her and then double click the shader. It will convert the surfaces to iray and add the scatter info to the right regions.
Environment and lighting used was valzheimer on gumroad. I got it free. it is now 5 bucks.
fabiana's Theory of Light - Zen Moods - Free HDRIs over at Rendo Freestuff is a good one to start with as well. Used that for alot of the images on the PoserDAZ freebie wiki.
"Before" looks way better IMO.
Sevn in what ways? Deeper color, loss of detail, truer to human skin color. I am no expert and I really want to improve and the only way to be better is to find out what people are seeing. Can you tell me what you like about the before image, pertty please?
What I see is the shader does not maintain depth of color but does bring out some of the specularity in the forehead, lips, chin. what it lacks is the presense of moisture. The pin points of reflection in the eyes and on the mouth, but the shader is a start I think. I remember back when Poser made some amazing renders. You have to have the right touch with the lighting to get that kind of result.
I'm no expert either, and not 100% familiar with the IRay terminology (and this particular shader). What caught my eyes were the darkish outlines that don't look like proper Freznel effect (skin gets more reflective at grazing angles, so outline should be brighter with that kind of bright background). To me it looks like there is an additive specular lobe/coat layer that may not be set up correctly, with the proper index of refraction, glossy Freznel etc, and the high specular roughness kinda smoothens out the skind detail...well something like that;) Sorry for not being able to be more specific! Granted, the added specular gives a nice sheen..
I uploaded an Iray preset freebie here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8010791/#Comment_8010791 that you could use with the settings I use. Don't think they look too bad, but are very different from the sort of skin settings I see in G8 figures. Before it's applied, apply the DAZ Uber Shader to the whole character then apply the material settings file I pointed to.
It has no textures, just the Iray settings and references to the default position for the high res V3 texture. If you want different textures, manually change all the texture file references (and there are a LOT). The 256x512px tip image below is the setting applied to Jim Burton's Glamorous Vickie V3 varient and is included in the freebie. The image was rendered using the default DS Iray environment settings.
Hope that it's useful and saves you money. And, if nothing else, it's a starting point to experiment from.
Regards,
Richard
Agreed. I tried early on to make my very large library of V4 and V3 skins look good in Iray and finally just realised it wasn't going to happen
The High res V3 tex is 4k high (by 3k) so is not entirely hopeless and if you're not wanting G9 style close up portraits, it can be quite acceptable on HD screens.
Regards,
Richard
Load your prefered V3 character. Apply DAZ Iray uber to it by holding the control Button. A roll down menue appears "select, ignore.
Choose ignore. Now the texture maps are left alone, but only values are changed and you have basic IRAy shader with your texture maps. If you prefer one vendor's specific skin shader style, repeat the same procedure with his skin material.
You might still have to do adjustments, depending of the brightness and skin color of your V3 texture maps.
That's how I would try it.
Sounds like a tip I need to try. Thanks.
Regards,
Richard
For 3Delight, what product or method works the best - to render Victoria 3 textures?
It is built in to Daz Studio!
That's true and also a gross oversimplification. The renderer is built in and there are a plethora of shaders that affect the renderers's output. I'm sure you know this and probably Sven Dullah is a lot more qualified to talk about it than I am. But even just making a list off the top of my head, we have standard lighting and default shader, we have uber lighting and uber shaders, we have AoA subsurface shader, and we have Wowie's lighting and shader system. All of those will give different parameters, capabilities, and rendered outputs. Also, there are gotchas about what to put in which channels with a lot of these shaders. I've worked with 3DL enough to have opinions about some of that, but I need to organize my thoughts and have comparative examples rendered before I say anything authorative about any of it. Also, I have not ever bothered to actually render a V3 figure. I might have loaded one a few times and did not see the point of going further. Sorry. YMMV.
I also want to note, I've indulged my bad habit of using a response to one post to make a broader statement to the whole thread.
Keep in mind those textures probably have a lot of baked in details that a modern Iray texture will not have. Shadows will be painted right on the diffuse texture, especially the eyes. While you can make these work in Iray, the fact remains the original textures are built for Poser.
You will also run into issues with texture quality. Many of those old textures are small or highly compressed, or worse, both. We STILL have problems with Daz textures that are excessively compressed today. Iray can show every single artifact of compression in your textures. Unless you only render the subject far from the camera and at super low resolution. You may have to do some editing to improve the quality. That is not an easy task.
As for Iray material setups, take a look at your favorite skin setups and try to drop the V3 textures that are similar to them into the boxes. You might be able to use a generic b&w noise map for detail maps you do not have with V3. This is part of how NGS Anagenessis works. NGS includes just one texture, a 4k size noise map.
Actually, I think we all agree.... All of this will be terribly hard work no matter what path one chooses since V3 and M3 were designed for totally different rendering engines, with all the materials very specfically designed for these rendering engines. Most of the textures will have to be disgarded and reconstituted by hand and what remains will have to be lovingly upscaled and tidied up. I lean toward 3delight for this because it is a bit closer to the original Poser rendering since Daz was still mailing selling Poser models as Daz Studio was going to be designed. There probably still tutorials on how to optimize Poser models. Iray is a whole other beast since it was born at the point when monitors got larger and higher resolution. So, yes, it is a big oversimplification, but all of those variables provide options so that if uber lighting doesn't work, then something else can be tried.
+! and cheers @nemesis10
Looks like most of the Victoria 3 characters have been removed from the stores - but here are Victoria 4 and Michael 4 skins that will give you the effect I'm looking to duplicate in DAZ Studio - go to that OTHER store and type in BAYLEE , or type in METROPOLITAN COLLECTION . I realize, looking at these characters that it is likely the Poser SSS setting that is creating the soft skin.
There is a setting in iray that can it closer to the super smooth waxy look but I am not sure what it off the top of my head. It is there though
Yep, that will be hard to do for a V3... The jump from V3 to V4 is closer to the jump from 8.1 to 9 than V4 to Genesis. Resolutions changed, new surface settings were added.... Once you find the settings you like, that product would definitely help automate it.
Maybe the soft skin effect can be achieved by loading a 2nd skin texture of some kind, over the IRAY skin texture on a geometry shell, then blending the two by making one or both, more or less, transparent.
You just reminded me of something! A while ago, I was commenting in a thread about an old M3 character (Bastile from Atlantistyle) and decided to see if I could do an Iray conversion. I used some G3 iray conversion shaders and methodically applied skin textures to skin textures, iris textures to iris textures, etc.. until all the textures were converted. I used some coverters to convert the clothes and hair to iray versions of themselves, found a pose, and added aneye light and HDRI. As you can see in the result, it was a bit underwhelming. I find the textures and baked in shadows make him look fuzzy. As always, click the picture to enlarge.