Wet Body Iray help needed (edit: with Product: Wet Body Iray for Genesis 2 Males)

Knittingmommy

@SimonWM or others who have successfully used this in Iray,

I have this and I've been trying to get my character to look just a little sweaty, but so far nothing I've tried has looked like any of the promo pics.  I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.  I have the manual and I've tried following the directions, but so far it always looks flat and nothing even close to sweat.  Any ideas?  The attached render clip is with default settings for dark skin just overall mild sweaty look.  I've tried adjusting translueceny and a few other sliders, but I have no idea how to get the desired effect.

jestmart

You need to play with the Thin Film settings so appears to be on top on the skin.  Or you could add a Geoshell with a close offset and apply the sweat to it.

Johanna

Creating a good wet look is an art in itself. 

Especially when it comes to skins for black ppl.

Creating skins and skin effects for black ppl follow totally differnt rules than working on white skins.

Pale skins need shadows to look good, dark skins need highlights.

This means in RL photography studio work, for white palish ppl we need matte powder, for blacks we use oil

 

Imagine you add 10% dens white to a light pink area. You hardly will see any difference.

If you add the same 10% dens white to a dark brown it looks totally different.

 

For black skin you have to lower the mid grey influence of the water reflections a lot.

I recommend to add a bit overall reflection / glossyness in DS to the entire skin and alter the wet effect reflection map layer to higher contrast in Photoshop.

 

Plus, a bit harder, kind of pointed spot light is recommended for the use of wet effect layers.

Soft light areas add flat grey to dark skins and tends to let them look washed out.

Knittingmommy

Okay, first, I think my subject heading may have been a bit misleading although I hadn't thought so when I wrote it.  I've edited the subject to, hopefully, be more specific.

I'm requesting help for use of the product by SimonWM called Wet Body Iray for Genesis 2 Males.  This product puts a geoshell with the texture already on it for sweat and wet effects.  I would have assumed that it would work as it does in 3Delight where I actually don't have to tweak it much.  However, I haven't used the Iray version bfore as I just got it and no matter what I do, I get this flat look to the skin that in no way resembles sweat. So, I'm asking for help from someone who actually has this product and might be able to help me figure out where I've gone wrong with using it on my model shown above.

I will try adding a spotlight as all of the lighting in the clip of the render shown is all mesh and hdri lighting, no spotlights on the figure.  I'll try adjusting the lighting and see if that helps.  I'm hoping in the mean time that someone who has used this product successfully can give me some advice on using the actual product.

Thanks.

mjc1016

Check the cutout opacity...it's one of the pickier settings, the maps need to be perfect.  They can't have embedded color profiles or anything...they need to be strict greyscale not sRGB/RGB or anything like that.  In other words, the black must be BLACK.  If not, you end up with a translucent geoshell not a transparent one. 

For one of the maps, click on the cutout opacity image in the surface tab.  Then select image editor...if it is not 1.0 for gamma, then Studio is 'guessing' and guessing wrong.  Or open it in an image editor and if it wants to import a color profile, you know it isn't greyscale, but rather a color image, pretending to be greyscale.  Set it to greyscale and resave.

vwrangler

Huh. I have the product and have used it, but I've never tried using it for that sort of closeup, only for distant shots. My guess is that something needs to happen with bump maps, normal maps and displacement and SubD to get it to look like actual beads of water, rather than something flatter.

One of the issues between 3Delight and Iray is that 3Delight is much much MUCH better at dealing with displacement than Iray is, at least when it comes to using displacement maps. It's more work to get that same sort of look out of Iray than from 3Delight, unfortunately.

Is that the issue that you're looking to fix?

EDIT: OK, I have the G3F version of the product, and tried increasing the value of the normal maps from 0.28 to 1.0. Not sure this is the effect you're after, somehow.

For some reason, the Genesis 2 version of the product doesn't seem to have normal maps, which is weird for an Iray product. It also doesn't have bump or displacement maps. Since it doesn't have any of them, increasing the strength/appearance of height on the droplets and trails is difficult.

Knittingmommy

Just got back on the computer.  I'll try the things you guys suggest.  I do have the Iray version for the females, too, but haven't tried them yet to see if I have the same problem.  I'll look into it.

@mjc1016 I'll look at the settings and opacity maps and see what they are and see if changing them makes a difference.  I'll look into the gamma setting as well.

@vwrangler That is close to the look I'm trying to achieve, but haven't gotten there, yet, on the G2M version for Iray.  Yes, the 3Delight version seems to work straight out of the box, but this is my first attempt at using the Iray version.

I'll play with the suggestions you guys gave tonight and see what happens.  Thanks.

vwrangler

Knittingmommy said:

Just got back on the computer.  I'll try the things you guys suggest.  I do have the Iray version for the females, too, but haven't tried them yet to see if I have the same problem.  I'll look into it.

@mjc1016 I'll look at the settings and opacity maps and see what they are and see if changing them makes a difference.  I'll look into the gamma setting as well.

@vwrangler That is close to the look I'm trying to achieve, but haven't gotten there, yet, on the G2M version for Iray.  Yes, the 3Delight version seems to work straight out of the box, but this is my first attempt at using the Iray version.

I'll play with the suggestions you guys gave tonight and see what happens.  Thanks.

I checked the opacity maps in both Studio's image editor and an outside image editor. While the Gamma was 1.0 for them in the Studio image editor, the outside editor also reported that they were full-color and not grayscale. Not sure what difference that makes ... although it might explain why I had such a miserable time with the 3DL version on darker skins, since it always seemed to make characters look dusty rather than wet. If the maps weren't handling transparency/translucency correctly, that might explain it.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure why the 3Delight version works, given that it also doesn't have bump/normal/displacement maps. You'd think that 3Delight would need that information as well, but apparently it doesn't; specularity seems to be enough.

That said, because the G2M version lacks bumps or normals or displacement maps, you're not going to be able to get where I got with the G3F version. Iray hasn't got anything to work with to give it that sort of "appearance of height" information.