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Description
Doing some light & shadow play on my Violet character, now with the new and spiffy "Kinley" dynamic hair.

A teeeeensy bit of speckling left over around her lips, but I'm okay with it.

***

After converting Violet over to Genesis3 geometry (thanks to the Mallorie character product and a few modifications here and there), I noticed that for whatever reason, her iRay skin textures kept coming out remarkably dark, no matter how I twiddled the light settings. This shouldn't have happened, because iRay textures under iRay lighting are supposed to be optimal - what I see should be what I get. Instead, the old 3Delight skins came out perfect, while iRay skins continued to be muted - like they were in shadow all the time, no matter the lighting.

So, time for a ton of playing with lights, fiddling with luminosity, and messing around with all-over lighting such as you might find in an HDRI (which is what I'm using here), and it turns out that a lot of the problem is that light defaults (even those you find in iRay) default to FAR LESS than what the skins need to render properly.

Like, by a whopping ten times too little. A tenth of the necessary luminosity. It looks great in preview. Terrible in render.

AND NOW YOU KNOW!

Description
Doing some light & shadow play on my Violet character, now with the new and spiffy "Kinley" dynamic hair.

A teeeeensy bit of speckling left over around her lips, but I'm okay with it.

***

After converting Violet over to Genesis3 geometry (thanks to the Mallorie character product and a few modifications here and there), I noticed that for whatever reason, her iRay skin textures kept coming out remarkably dark, no matter how I twiddled the light settings. This shouldn't have happened, because iRay textures under iRay lighting are supposed to be optimal - what I see should be what I get. Instead, the old 3Delight skins came out perfect, while iRay skins continued to be muted - like they were in shadow all the time, no matter the lighting.

So, time for a ton of playing with lights, fiddling with luminosity, and messing around with all-over lighting such as you might find in an HDRI (which is what I'm using here), and it turns out that a lot of the problem is that light defaults (even those you find in iRay) default to FAR LESS than what the skins need to render properly.

Like, by a whopping ten times too little. A tenth of the necessary luminosity. It looks great in preview. Terrible in render.

AND NOW YOU KNOW!