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Description
Monique is one of the few main DAZ characters that I really like and use pretty often - even if you don't recognize her - as a basic morph to build custom characters. She does come with less flashy options than some, but with a few minor issues, she's a solid and good looking model.

I didn't post the comparisons here, because they can be quickly covered. The supplied shader is actually pretty good - you probably can get away with it as provided for most of the situations. Since she has a separate, brighter translucency map, she's actually a bit more on the brown side originally. But I wanted a really dark skin tone that still has nice nuances, as in "Black is beautiful". Altern8 on the other hand brings its very own Monique8 preset... but, at least for closeups, it's not even as good as the default shader, bluntly. More on that below.

So... dark skin behaves differently than light skin, because otherwise all the melanin would be doing a bad and inefficient job. In the case of the Altern8 shader, the nose ridge had a strong orange translucency - something that simply doesn't show with dark skinned people. But here SSS is more subdued and shortranged and prominent only in some areas with a very thin or less pigmented areay like the lips, maybe.

This also counters the softening effect SSS has on smoothing out bump and normals in high resolution pictures. So this was a bit of a challenge. In the end I actually gave the skin a small amount of refraction on top of the translucency, and I think it's fair enough.

While the model is very nice overall, the bump on the lips wasn't that good, maybe because of the volume of the lips in comparison with the average Gen8. Since I absolutely didn't want to mess with the textures, but create a generic shader setup, I added a bit of metal flakes to the lip area. Still a weak spot, but acceptable at this point.

You might wonder why I don't care much about gloss/specular... when it seems such a hot topic on the DAZ Iray forum. For one thing, realistic skin gloss (as an overall term for all kinds of reflection) is a matter of map quality - without these, it will always look unnatural - with these, it's relatively simple to control.

Second, gloss is an effect more important at a distance, where SSS and translucency is almost neglible in comparision. But in closeups, it's the other way around - SSS/Trans makes or breakes them and has an immense influence both on gloss/spec as well as bump/normal result.

So this is really a matter of application and taste.

Speaking of taste. I'm a kind of pragmatic dilletant when it comes to portraits and shaders - I build these to my specific needs and taste, and if I post this stuff at all, it's to encourage you to experiment and also to show the wide range of possibilities that DAZ offers. But...

Opinion to get angry about (free bonus - Why try to be all objective when you can troll and destroy with a two liner?)

Why is the DAZ Iray thread full of people bullying others with religious shader maths while posting tiny pictures as proof that look like Beavis took a bad photocopy of Buttheads bunghole? U SUCK!

Edit... I gave her Nulpi Eyes from iSourceTexture... because I like them.

Description
Monique is one of the few main DAZ characters that I really like and use pretty often - even if you don't recognize her - as a basic morph to build custom characters. She does come with less flashy options than some, but with a few minor issues, she's a solid and good looking model.

I didn't post the comparisons here, because they can be quickly covered. The supplied shader is actually pretty good - you probably can get away with it as provided for most of the situations. Since she has a separate, brighter translucency map, she's actually a bit more on the brown side originally. But I wanted a really dark skin tone that still has nice nuances, as in "Black is beautiful". Altern8 on the other hand brings its very own Monique8 preset... but, at least for closeups, it's not even as good as the default shader, bluntly. More on that below.

So... dark skin behaves differently than light skin, because otherwise all the melanin would be doing a bad and inefficient job. In the case of the Altern8 shader, the nose ridge had a strong orange translucency - something that simply doesn't show with dark skinned people. But here SSS is more subdued and shortranged and prominent only in some areas with a very thin or less pigmented areay like the lips, maybe.

This also counters the softening effect SSS has on smoothing out bump and normals in high resolution pictures. So this was a bit of a challenge. In the end I actually gave the skin a small amount of refraction on top of the translucency, and I think it's fair enough.

While the model is very nice overall, the bump on the lips wasn't that good, maybe because of the volume of the lips in comparison with the average Gen8. Since I absolutely didn't want to mess with the textures, but create a generic shader setup, I added a bit of metal flakes to the lip area. Still a weak spot, but acceptable at this point.

You might wonder why I don't care much about gloss/specular... when it seems such a hot topic on the DAZ Iray forum. For one thing, realistic skin gloss (as an overall term for all kinds of reflection) is a matter of map quality - without these, it will always look unnatural - with these, it's relatively simple to control.

Second, gloss is an effect more important at a distance, where SSS and translucency is almost neglible in comparision. But in closeups, it's the other way around - SSS/Trans makes or breakes them and has an immense influence both on gloss/spec as well as bump/normal result.

So this is really a matter of application and taste.

Speaking of taste. I'm a kind of pragmatic dilletant when it comes to portraits and shaders - I build these to my specific needs and taste, and if I post this stuff at all, it's to encourage you to experiment and also to show the wide range of possibilities that DAZ offers. But...

Opinion to get angry about (free bonus - Why try to be all objective when you can troll and destroy with a two liner?)

Why is the DAZ Iray thread full of people bullying others with religious shader maths while posting tiny pictures as proof that look like Beavis took a bad photocopy of Buttheads bunghole? U SUCK!

Edit... I gave her Nulpi Eyes from iSourceTexture... because I like them.