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Description
DAZ3D characters rarely are used for high resolution (4k) face portraits, because the textures, being 4k themselves, are not up to it.
Maybe this will change with the new Genesis 8.1, but as far as Victoria 8.1 is concerned, at least for me, there's still some ground to cover.
Or, to put it bluntly, the toted new skin shader looks like horrible plastic in close up. I can only guess at the reasons - performance, taste, or just trying to pander to the average user skill - idk.

In advance - I'm not a portrait artist, I don't have the skill to compensate for the lack of model by lighting setup and post work. So I'm happy for input and tips.
But doing character illustrations, I want/need to do closeups of a character in 4k, and worse yet, with more or less conventional lighting, fitting the setting and scene.

In this case I've done a couple of renders of iSourceTextures new Loulia character with exactly the same lighting but different shader setups. I'll probably do another round.

Setup:
Studio Light Pro Iray HDRI - Soft Light
Gamma down to 1.45 (see below)

Character:
Loulia from Isourcetexture : www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs…
The vendor version is unchanged in all regards. The other two have the painted brows removed and fibermesh brows added.
Also there that ring around the iris. It's intentional, but it doesn't really work well with the brown eyes (the strange blur effect) so I used another eye texture on the Altern8 version.
It's not really relevant to the shader comparison, more of a character hack. SubD is set to 4.

Post work:
If you check the hair, you see that I did desaturate the first two pictures. That is because the first two shaders reacted so differently to the light (more below) that I had to compensate.
In case I do another run, I'll likely avoid the issue by working on the shader first. But again, this is not that much of an issue.

Shaders
The first is the supplied shader setup by the vendor.
The second is PSSSFID from dfggcxbbb . I actually use a modified version, but in this case, it's more or less out of the box (and free).
Finally Altern8 from DAZ. I used the Altern8 - Alexandra / No Maps preset, on the premise, that they're both women of a similar complexion and age. That didn't turn out too well, though.

Result:

Overall - These shaders aren't that much different, so they perform pretty similar, rendering time wise. Their one main difference is that PSSSFID works with extremely high translucency, using SSS to control the light flow.
If at all, they're in order of their rendering speed, with the vendor version being the fastest - but it's marginal. They're certainly slower than your default DAZ stuff.

Zones of interest: What I will look specifically after are the mouth corners, the eye sockets, the lips and the neck. The model has some distinct detail, wrinkles and blemishes and it's interesting to see how they work out.

Vendor version: The default setup is pretty much ok and the reference to check the other two against, since it's the intended look by the creator.
It suffers from the fact that I did set gamma to such a low value to compensate for the Altern8 result.
The wrinkles start to get that 'photo texture' feeling at this point - but with the resolution and lighting, that's still better than the plastic look of Victoria.
The lip blend is nice and the neck normal map artefacts (from the neck part of the Genesis 8 maps not being adequate for this size) are still acceptable.

Altern8: The skin turned out very! light and pale, even after I compensated using the included options.
Unfortunately I only realized HOW far it was off after rendering the other pictures with the light setup. I did adjust the gamma downwards, but that wasn't really the best of decisions.
So it would need a lot more compensation. Of course, if you WANT that kind of pale but still detailed skin - it's very nice. And of course it's just one preset.
Altern8 has a lot more. At a smaller scale, the Altern8 shader looks very good, the skin detail is nicely emphasized.
Unfortunately, in close up, it has the strongest 'flat photo texture on paper' feel. And the neck area becomes close to unacceptable.
Still - this may be due to my configuration of Altern8.

PSSSFID:
The surface has the most fleshy and soft look. There are almost no texture artefacts and the wrinkles look pretty good - I'd even try to raise the bump a bit, something that usually starts to look weird on the usual shaders in close up.
The PSSSFID becomes more and more useful the closer you go, since it does rely less on the texture and more on the actual volume form to create a flesh impression.
But it can quickly loose detail and become too smooth at a distance or with certain lighting. Here Altern8 certainly would yield the better results.

Conclusion. On average, the supplied shader does a pretty good job already, but the others might yield better results depending on the scene. Again I'd say Lighting>Shader, since none of them is really bad.

The next step would be to use an well set Altern8 against a custom PSSSFID and compare it to Anagenessis....

What do you think?

Description
DAZ3D characters rarely are used for high resolution (4k) face portraits, because the textures, being 4k themselves, are not up to it.
Maybe this will change with the new Genesis 8.1, but as far as Victoria 8.1 is concerned, at least for me, there's still some ground to cover.
Or, to put it bluntly, the toted new skin shader looks like horrible plastic in close up. I can only guess at the reasons - performance, taste, or just trying to pander to the average user skill - idk.

In advance - I'm not a portrait artist, I don't have the skill to compensate for the lack of model by lighting setup and post work. So I'm happy for input and tips.
But doing character illustrations, I want/need to do closeups of a character in 4k, and worse yet, with more or less conventional lighting, fitting the setting and scene.

In this case I've done a couple of renders of iSourceTextures new Loulia character with exactly the same lighting but different shader setups. I'll probably do another round.

Setup:
Studio Light Pro Iray HDRI - Soft Light
Gamma down to 1.45 (see below)

Character:
Loulia from Isourcetexture : www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs…
The vendor version is unchanged in all regards. The other two have the painted brows removed and fibermesh brows added.
Also there that ring around the iris. It's intentional, but it doesn't really work well with the brown eyes (the strange blur effect) so I used another eye texture on the Altern8 version.
It's not really relevant to the shader comparison, more of a character hack. SubD is set to 4.

Post work:
If you check the hair, you see that I did desaturate the first two pictures. That is because the first two shaders reacted so differently to the light (more below) that I had to compensate.
In case I do another run, I'll likely avoid the issue by working on the shader first. But again, this is not that much of an issue.

Shaders
The first is the supplied shader setup by the vendor.
The second is PSSSFID from dfggcxbbb . I actually use a modified version, but in this case, it's more or less out of the box (and free).
Finally Altern8 from DAZ. I used the Altern8 - Alexandra / No Maps preset, on the premise, that they're both women of a similar complexion and age. That didn't turn out too well, though.

Result:

Overall - These shaders aren't that much different, so they perform pretty similar, rendering time wise. Their one main difference is that PSSSFID works with extremely high translucency, using SSS to control the light flow.
If at all, they're in order of their rendering speed, with the vendor version being the fastest - but it's marginal. They're certainly slower than your default DAZ stuff.

Zones of interest: What I will look specifically after are the mouth corners, the eye sockets, the lips and the neck. The model has some distinct detail, wrinkles and blemishes and it's interesting to see how they work out.

Vendor version: The default setup is pretty much ok and the reference to check the other two against, since it's the intended look by the creator.
It suffers from the fact that I did set gamma to such a low value to compensate for the Altern8 result.
The wrinkles start to get that 'photo texture' feeling at this point - but with the resolution and lighting, that's still better than the plastic look of Victoria.
The lip blend is nice and the neck normal map artefacts (from the neck part of the Genesis 8 maps not being adequate for this size) are still acceptable.

Altern8: The skin turned out very! light and pale, even after I compensated using the included options.
Unfortunately I only realized HOW far it was off after rendering the other pictures with the light setup. I did adjust the gamma downwards, but that wasn't really the best of decisions.
So it would need a lot more compensation. Of course, if you WANT that kind of pale but still detailed skin - it's very nice. And of course it's just one preset.
Altern8 has a lot more. At a smaller scale, the Altern8 shader looks very good, the skin detail is nicely emphasized.
Unfortunately, in close up, it has the strongest 'flat photo texture on paper' feel. And the neck area becomes close to unacceptable.
Still - this may be due to my configuration of Altern8.

PSSSFID:
The surface has the most fleshy and soft look. There are almost no texture artefacts and the wrinkles look pretty good - I'd even try to raise the bump a bit, something that usually starts to look weird on the usual shaders in close up.
The PSSSFID becomes more and more useful the closer you go, since it does rely less on the texture and more on the actual volume form to create a flesh impression.
But it can quickly loose detail and become too smooth at a distance or with certain lighting. Here Altern8 certainly would yield the better results.

Conclusion. On average, the supplied shader does a pretty good job already, but the others might yield better results depending on the scene. Again I'd say Lighting>Shader, since none of them is really bad.

The next step would be to use an well set Altern8 against a custom PSSSFID and compare it to Anagenessis....

What do you think?