So I’d intended I’d already have a full review of M6/G2M and the most useful extra products. I got off to a good start doing a detailed comparison between the various base figure mesh dating back to M4/V4. Next was to get a quick render to go with the rest of the review when it was written. This part of the session degraded into endless play. First of all I wanted to get some lighting that brought out the quality of the skin materials, this led to playing around with said materials, which led back to playing with lights and then lots more material edits AND ON!
Maybe I’m out of practice when it comes to rendering flesh and blood figures, but I also think that the supplied materials with various M6 characters just aren’t doing what I want them to do, which is render something more-or-less realistic out of the box. What I found was lobsters and Jaundice. Could be a problem with my lighting, could be a problem with the mats, or it could be just down to my own preferences. Anyway, this is beginning to sound like a review, so I’ll stop right here. I’m not ready to do one just yet. I’ve yet to test many things. I will say that I like the new M4 and G2M morphs – they both have character and are, in my opinion, a huge improvement over M6 and the base male morph for Genesis – see I just can’t help myself being all reviewy and stuff.
I’ll get back to you all when I’ve got all those tests done.
Well, you know where I work, but I’d argue for lighting. Your results look flat and washed out, as if the base light (distantlight from the characters’ left?) is too bright and there’s no separate spec or rim. If that’s a 3Delight render, anyway. 😉
Hey there, thanks for dropping by 😉 The flatness of the lighting doesn’t really the issue I’ve been having with SSS response, though badly balanced spec (on my part might). The overblown light is partly done in quick and dirty post so I could accentuate the skin tones more to my liking.
You inspired me to go back and take a look. I’ve got better results by adding a specular only light (good tip), but I also went and looked at the skin surfaces and noticed that G2M (haven’t re-checked the Logan mat configs yet) has grey scales to control spec colour as well as having a very dark spec colour to begin with. In DS that results in a net spec response of almost nill, which is what some people like. So I took that out (and put them in the strength channel) and was a lot happier.
Another thing I don’t like about many of the new releases is that they don’t come with SSS strength maps, so again we tend to see the base texture plugged into the colour field and nothing moderating strength. In many situations this is fine, but I like to have some diversity in SSS response. This is why it is hard to adopt G2 M or F based textures and UV sets when there are few or no good SSS strength maps for G2 based UVs.