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Hey guys,

Anyone using the DAZ plugin together with one of tonysculptors skins from the livedb? If so, where do you plug in the different maps? Can´t seem to figure that one out...thanks and best!

I'm a huge fan of the tonysculptor series, and use a variation based off of the "20" version on my DAZ figures. It gives very realistic SSS effects, the best of any skin material I've tried.

The first thing I'd advise before plugging any of your DAZ texture maps in is getting the Tonysculptor material to work approximately well in your typical lighting situation with the colors it already comes set up with. Make sure you're using the Path Tracing kernel (Direct kernel won't give proper SSS effects). For my use, I mainly had to adjust the scale settings of the scattering up much higher from the defaults - somewhere upwards of 3000, up to 8000 or maybe beyond. The skin should look opaque and skin colored, with a nice red SSS glow around thin areas like ears. You'll probably want to spend a bit of time experimenting with the various scattering settings to get what you like.

Once that is in the ballpark, plug your DAZ skin's main color maps into the specular material's Transmission (replacing the skin-like RGB color currently there), and into the color of any diffuse or glossy materials. (I'm not on my work machine until Monday, but from memory I believe you might want to adjust the gamma of your color maps from 2.2 to 1. Experiment with it!) Plug your bump maps into Bump, with a strength of around .05. I personally don't use DAZ specular maps in Octane, as they were designed for DAZ's renderer. You can paint your own spec and roughness maps if you want to for example make the nose and lips shinier than the rest of the face. But just adjusting the specular values already in Tonysculptor skin until you get something to your liking will get you 90% of the way there.

Damn Squirte, thanks so much for that detailed answer. I´ll try it right away =)

edit:

So I´ve tried getting the material to look decent without the textures, but with no luck....this is my result.

I´ve done nothing but turn up the scale as you suggested, but I can´t figure out how to get rid of this brownish-dirty look. This stays that way when I plug in the texture maps by the way.

If you´ve got more pointers to help me out here I´d be really grateful!

cheers!

Good luck! I have another tip or two - I've had good results making skin by using only the "Epidermis" layer of Tonysculptor's skin, removing the other nodes. It definitely helped me understand what I was doing when experimenting, to have fewer variables to worry about. And once you've figured out what's going on in that Epidermis layer by messing around with it a bunch, you can introduce more layers to the skin if you want them.

If you haven't gotten very familiar with using the Node Graph Editor (NGE) yet... this is the time! I found MTimtam's extensive series of Octane Render tutorial videos on youtube to be really helpful in understanding how to work with nodes. Also, after I'd used the Octane DS and Poser plugins for a while, some things became much clearer to me only after learning my way around the Standalone Octane app too. The plugins give you a nice streamlined way to access Octane from within your favorite app, but it's hard to get the whole picture of what Octane is doing without getting familiar with the Standalone Octane app too.

edit - I just saw your edit, so I'm responding to that here. I had similar issues when beginning to play with Tonysculptor's textures, of the skin looking too dark. I'm going to have to wait til Monday to get on my work computer to get back to you with specifics, but here are a couple of things that come to mind - is your kernel set to Path Tracing (or PMC)? In the Direct kernel, specular materials such as in tonysculptor's skin don't work right, so make sure it's not on Direct. And also, try playing with the gamma setting on your skin color map. Lowering it from 2.2 to 1 might help correct the problem. Make sure that "Fake Shadows" is checked on in the specular material. And like I mentioned earlier, it will make your experimenting easier if you first manage to get Tonysculptor skin looking good with its default RGB color before importing your own textures. Once you know that it works with a simple color for the skin, you're ready to introduce the variable of a texture image and troubleshooting that. I'll check in on ya tomorrow.

Thanks Squirtle, I really appreciate your putting so much effort into helping me out.

It looks like you gave me plenty to work with. I´ll try your suggestions later today and see if it solves the issue. If you find the time and it´s no bother, a screenshot of your settings would help me a great deal since the vast number of options with that material kind of have me confused right now...but I´ll try.

And thanks for recommending the video tutorial series on the NGE, it looks like there´s a lot of work to be done =).

best

If not, I can make a screenshot of my settings on the 1.2 compatible version. Basically I just plugged the texture into everything until it worked
Actually I've started playing around with a much simpler skin (Diordales), and I find that to be almost as good. Being simpler it eats a lot less VRAM than the more complex shaders. I'll try to post a comparison later.

DrHemulen wrote:If not, I can make a screenshot of my settings on the 1.2 compatible version. Basically I just plugged the texture into everything until it worked
Actually I've started playing around with a much simpler skin (Diordales), and I find that to be almost as good. Being simpler it eats a lot less VRAM than the more complex shaders. I'll try to post a comparison later.

That would be really nice, thanks for your offer!

I´ve got 3GB VRAM which isn´t an awful lot, so if Diordales´ skin can give similar results I might try it as well...

Here's an example I put together of tonysculptor Skin R20 being used on a head model. The two different pictures of the nodes are to illustrate where the texture map is added. It is just replacing the one RGB color that is feeding into the color corrections which are feeding into the transmission pins. I also upped the scale on both scattering nodes to 3000. And I adjusted the final mix material node to .25. And one last change I made was lowering the specularity from its rather high default to an RGB value of 154-154-154. I mentioned in an earlier post that you might need to adjust the gamma of your image, but I left it at 2.2 here and I think that's working fine.

I have pictures here of the tonysculptor skin R20 with the values set as described above, but with its default color instead of my skin texture. And then with the skin texture added in. This was just to demonstrate how to get good results quickly without changing too much around in Tonysculptor Skin R20. From this point, I'd want to start tweaking for improvements, making adjustments to bring out the darkness in the eyebrows, making a custom spec and roughness map, adding a bump map etc.

Also note, I'm using the DAZ Octane plugin version 2.1

I was inspired by DrHemulen to try out D.Ordiales Skin V6.

It works great, very much like my own personal simplified 1-layer version of tonysculptor. I plugged my skin color texture map into the transmission pin (this time you do have to set the image map's gamma to 1). I used a bump map this time too (plugged into bump, set at .05 power) Very important, I set the Mix Material amount to 0, since there is nothing I'm mixing it with here. Turn "fake shadows" on. (I don't know why they're off by default here, but the render comes out much faster and cleaner for me with "fake shadows" turned on.) Adjusted specular amounts and scattering scale to my taste, and in the end I ended up with a very similar result to tonysculptor's skin. Since I added a bump map here, and didn't in my tonysculptor example, these renders look even better and more detailed. I like the approach of adjusting the skin texture map's gamma from 2.2 to 1, rather than the color correction used in tonysculptor's skin. In the end, what I got with D.Ordiales Skin and these tweaks is almost exactly the setup I've been using for skin, which I had derived from tonysculptor R20. I'd been contemplating submitting my skin to the live DB, but it looks like it's so similar to D.Ordiales that there's no reason to. Thanks for pointing it out, DrHemulen

Wow, that did the trick! Thanks again for taking me throug it, I feel like I would never have managed to figure it out on my own...I´ve started looking into the NGE and it looks like I can learn a lot there.

Additionally I found what caused the brownish look: I accidentally changed the specular and diffuse depth of the pathtracing kernel, made the whole thing look like a mess.

So time to get to work, again I´m grateful for your awesome assistance!

best wishes