Skin difference between Blender and Daz

[PurpleTourmaple]

‌

Hello! I’ve tried to get things to look as close as much as Daz in Blender but with no success… I don’t know if that was already talked about but I noticed that the skin seems a little off compared to Daz. I tried to recreate the exact same lighting but still, I can’t put my finger on what’s the problem with the skin even tho every value is the same. I also made sure to tweak the tone of the render obviously but it’s still way off. Anything I’m doing wrong here?

[Alessandro Padovani]

That’s probably the fresnel effect. This has been improved with #576 but can’t be exactly the same as daz. If the figure gets a high fresnel skin there will be some difference. This has nothing to do with sss that’s converted correctly with the volumetric skin.

To fix it you can lower the fresnel intensity. This way the skin tone will be better at the cost of dimmed reflections.

[Thomas Larsson]

The greyish skin tone sometimes comes from the volume node. You could try to turn off Volume in the global settings and then tweak the material afterwards, as described in http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2021/06/voluminosity-and-material-editor.html. It may be necessary to turn on Fake Translucency Textures to avoid white skin.

[PurpleTourmaple]

I managed to have some decent result after tweaking a few things such as light paths, even tho it’s still not really similar, it’s already way better!
The fresnel effet didn’t change much unfortunately, but it was a lot better and closer to what I wanted after I turned off the volume!

I still don’t understand why there is such a big difference between the Daz render and the Blender render though…

[Alessandro Padovani]

Basically there are two ways to get your skin in blender.

One is the volumetric skin that will convert both the diffuse and volume sections of iray. This way the skin is always similar to daz studio. Here the cycles light paths do matter especially for volume and transmission. This way is accurate but it’s slow and doesn’t work in eevee.

The second way is the sss skin that takes into account only the diffuse section of the daz uber shader. Thus the skin may be similar to daz studio or not, depending if the volume section does make a difference in iray. This way is approximated but it’s fast and works both with cycles and eevee.

See #24 #179 for details.

[Former user]

BSDF Method:

Principled Method:

Iray:

I am new to the plugin, have about a year of blender experience and little experience with shading in Blender. I “disassembled” both of the generated node-setups “BSDF/Principled” to see how they are constructed.

First question: Is it normal that my imported vanilla G8.1F looks different like this straight after import?
Second question: What parameters would you guys recommend me to tweak to get as close as possible to the DAZ skin. I like the DAZ quality a lot.
- It seems that the Blender skin is too red. I reduce the “Volume Absorption Density to 10”:
- But still, I feel like I lose skin detail in Blender compared to DAZ. It doesn’t look as detailed. Any ideas?

‌

‌

[Alessandro Padovani]

For the record she’s not G8.1F but Victoria 8.1. Then the support for the pbrskin shader is currently limited, that is, you don’t get the occlusion and detail sections, so some details are lost compared to daz studio.

As for the red skin for the bsdf version, it’s probably the volume factors that can be improved. I’ll look at it.

[Former user]

Thank you for your fast answer Alessandro and for clearing up

The support for pbr skin is limited you say. Can you explain where exactly the problem is? I mean all the character textures get imported into Blender, so it should be possible in theory to get all the necessary information to create a good-looking node setup, like in DAZ? What kind of information gets lost, so we don’t get occlusion and the details? Thanks a lot 🤝

[Alessandro Padovani]

The occlusion and detail sections of the pbrskin shader are not imported, nor the relative textures. While I’m at it I’ll see if we can include the details section for better support. It’s just that I have a very limited free time to do things.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Peter It appears this is a recently introduced bug. See #697. Thank you for reporting this, unfortunately lately I don’t have much time to play with daz so can’t check the new commits.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Now details are implemented with #700. If @Peter has nothing to add we may mark as resolved.