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UPDATE: An outdoor lighting video tutorial is here.

Here is the render. There are better ones, definitely, but there are worse; and what I am about to explain will hopefully be of help to those who are still confused about skin and lights.

I loaded the Ultimo Paradiso product from DAZ3D via the "Build Island" and "Few Plants Only" scripts (I may be getting their names a little wrong). Most materials I did not convert, just the ocean (to the DAZ Water shader, with the aqua color added to the glossy color) and the Island itself (so that I could add metallic flakes to the sand). If anything, this ends up looking less realistic than the character even after I added SubD to all the meshes that are visible close up. It wasn't really made to be seen this close. I deleted the sky dome to use DAZ Studio's Sun-Sky.

The amount of geometry in the scene doesn't slow down the render much, but the large textures would, so I deleted some foliage that was off-screen.

Here are the skin settings I used for Kasper, before I start discussing them.

((The SSS direction was actually -.5 in the renders, the picture is wrong.)

First of all, of course, is to choose an appropriate skin. The DAZ store has many skins that are intended for mildly stylized renders, and that look more painterly than photoreal as a result. This is not bad - many are really beautiful - but it will not produce a photoreal result in Iray if that is the aim. I started with Kasper as one of the skins in my library that looks more photo-like to begin with but does not have a lot of specular contamination (highlights that are a permanent part of the skin).

Not shown: I selected the Cornea, EyeReflection and Tear materials and applied DAZ's Thin Water shader to them, then set the cornea refraction to 1.38 (there are arguments as to which part of the cornea this refraction should be set to, but it's between 1.36 and 1.4, anyway). I also dialed in the Corneal Bulge morph to produce better reflection. All of this is important partly because many 3Delight sets have transmapped reflections on the eyereflection or cornea or both that need to be gone for Iray use.

The only things I did to change the positions of maps was to add the bump maps to the Top Coat Color and Top Coat Bump channels for Templates 1, 2 and 3. The effect of this is subtle and perhaps not entirely necessary.

(Specific map icons do not show in the picture because multiple materials are selected.)

Most important is to turn up the glossy layered weight and the glossy roughness down from the default conversion. There's a tendency to translate lower specular values in 3Delight to a low value of the glossy layered weight, and that doesn't work well for Iray. Keep translucency at low values to avoid hurting your specular highlights. SSS needs to be at a direction of -0.5 and a lower distance, not the 10 with which it converts. You can see other changes in the image. With darker skins the only main difference is that they may need more gloss and less roughness; human skin tends to look "shinier" the darker it is because there's more contrast to the highlights.

Lighting is just as important as shaders to get the healthy glow of living skin. I see a lot of dull, dead-looking skins from first-time Iray renders, and it's usually because of lighting. Even if you want something more "real world" than the traditional three-point system , don't settle for an HDR or the Sun-Sky on its own. A second, dimmer mesh light from a second direction and in a slightly different tint helps bring out highlights.

In the Kasper render, the main light is from the default Sun-Sky settings (with Draw Dome on and the setting at Dome and Scene), but the secondary light is a pale blue plane primitive and is on the character's right. Mesh lights are better than photometrics for this use in my testing, but by all means do your own tests. The only photometric I've used is faint and is pointed at the character's eyes to give more highlights to the eye surfaces. Thus, the scene is lit with the Sun-Sky plus two added lights.

The Real Short Hair here does not look super-real, but it has been improved slightly by again tweaking the gloss from the default conversion and adding a little translucency to make the ends look less opaque. I also tweaked gloss on the shorts and added a level of SubD to them.

Moving on to other render settings, in the Advanced tab I have the minimum and maximum texture compression thresholds set to 2048 and 4096. This helps get rid of visible artifacts in the prop textures, which are usually larger than those of characters. Checking OptiX render acceleration makes things go faster.

Finally, always remember to turn off your camera headlamp in order to avoid interfering with your lighting. If the screen goes dark, press CTRL+L to turn off the OpenGL lighting preview (which is unable to perceive or simulate Sun-Sky, HDR or mesh lights).

---

Much of what I learned in this tutorial was gleaned from many other artists in the Show Us Your Iray Renders threads on the DAZ forum, except the lighting, which is seldom mentioned.

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

UPDATE: An outdoor lighting video tutorial is here.

Here is the render. There are better ones, definitely, but there are worse; and what I am about to explain will hopefully be of help to those who are still confused about skin and lights.

I loaded the Ultimo Paradiso product from DAZ3D via the "Build Island" and "Few Plants Only" scripts (I may be getting their names a little wrong). Most materials I did not convert, just the ocean (to the DAZ Water shader, with the aqua color added to the glossy color) and the Island itself (so that I could add metallic flakes to the sand). If anything, this ends up looking less realistic than the character even after I added SubD to all the meshes that are visible close up. It wasn't really made to be seen this close. I deleted the sky dome to use DAZ Studio's Sun-Sky.

The amount of geometry in the scene doesn't slow down the render much, but the large textures would, so I deleted some foliage that was off-screen.

Here are the skin settings I used for Kasper, before I start discussing them.

((The SSS direction was actually -.5 in the renders, the picture is wrong.)

First of all, of course, is to choose an appropriate skin. The DAZ store has many skins that are intended for mildly stylized renders, and that look more painterly than photoreal as a result. This is not bad - many are really beautiful - but it will not produce a photoreal result in Iray if that is the aim. I started with Kasper as one of the skins in my library that looks more photo-like to begin with but does not have a lot of specular contamination (highlights that are a permanent part of the skin).

Not shown: I selected the Cornea, EyeReflection and Tear materials and applied DAZ's Thin Water shader to them, then set the cornea refraction to 1.38 (there are arguments as to which part of the cornea this refraction should be set to, but it's between 1.36 and 1.4, anyway). I also dialed in the Corneal Bulge morph to produce better reflection. All of this is important partly because many 3Delight sets have transmapped reflections on the eyereflection or cornea or both that need to be gone for Iray use.

The only things I did to change the positions of maps was to add the bump maps to the Top Coat Color and Top Coat Bump channels for Templates 1, 2 and 3. The effect of this is subtle and perhaps not entirely necessary.

(Specific map icons do not show in the picture because multiple materials are selected.)

Most important is to turn up the glossy layered weight and the glossy roughness down from the default conversion. There's a tendency to translate lower specular values in 3Delight to a low value of the glossy layered weight, and that doesn't work well for Iray. Keep translucency at low values to avoid hurting your specular highlights. SSS needs to be at a direction of -0.5 and a lower distance, not the 10 with which it converts. You can see other changes in the image. With darker skins the only main difference is that they may need more gloss and less roughness; human skin tends to look "shinier" the darker it is because there's more contrast to the highlights.

Lighting is just as important as shaders to get the healthy glow of living skin. I see a lot of dull, dead-looking skins from first-time Iray renders, and it's usually because of lighting. Even if you want something more "real world" than the traditional three-point system , don't settle for an HDR or the Sun-Sky on its own. A second, dimmer mesh light from a second direction and in a slightly different tint helps bring out highlights.

In the Kasper render, the main light is from the default Sun-Sky settings (with Draw Dome on and the setting at Dome and Scene), but the secondary light is a pale blue plane primitive and is on the character's right. Mesh lights are better than photometrics for this use in my testing, but by all means do your own tests. The only photometric I've used is faint and is pointed at the character's eyes to give more highlights to the eye surfaces. Thus, the scene is lit with the Sun-Sky plus two added lights.

The Real Short Hair here does not look super-real, but it has been improved slightly by again tweaking the gloss from the default conversion and adding a little translucency to make the ends look less opaque. I also tweaked gloss on the shorts and added a level of SubD to them.

Moving on to other render settings, in the Advanced tab I have the minimum and maximum texture compression thresholds set to 2048 and 4096. This helps get rid of visible artifacts in the prop textures, which are usually larger than those of characters. Checking OptiX render acceleration makes things go faster.

Finally, always remember to turn off your camera headlamp in order to avoid interfering with your lighting. If the screen goes dark, press CTRL+L to turn off the OpenGL lighting preview (which is unable to perceive or simulate Sun-Sky, HDR or mesh lights).

---

Much of what I learned in this tutorial was gleaned from many other artists in the Show Us Your Iray Renders threads on the DAZ forum, except the lighting, which is seldom mentioned.