Message edited on: 08/12/2005 10:24

IMO, no. The skin looks too perfect and the focal length looks wrong for portraits. I honestly have seen better results from Poser.

I concur with SamTherapy regarding the skin: it's too smooth and "plasticky". Real skin has irregularities that should be visible in your image. And unfortunately yes: the Poser render engine can create better results.

I'm with SamTherapy. The focal length looks wrong. It gives her an unnatural frog-faced look. The skin texture is too smooth in tone, but too rough in texture. The pores are too sharp and prominent, particularly on her forehead and the tip of her nose. It doesn't look like skin. Dunno how you fix it in Max, but in Poser, I'd lower the bump strength.

Most portrait studios use a 100mm lens for head shots; it compresses perspective and avoids making the nose and lips too prominent. Don't know what F/L Studiomax uses, but Poser's 35mm is WAY too short for close-ups. BTW, the hair looks terrific! Fetter

The specular highlights need some tweaking. Skin highlights often look good with a slight hint of blue, and the highlights of the eyes need to be much sharper to look wet. And the hair, well...I never liked painted highlights, they don't follow the lights in your scene.

To a casual viewer? Yes To an experienced group of poserites? no Doesn't max have the much coveted sss? This looks VERY good though 2 days in mattweaks is not much for skin fanatics... lol That hair has never looked better. Alas, the great shadows that are working wonders on the hair are making the telltale 3D skin shadow on her neck where sss glow skould happen. Eye reflects are like fingerprints. All different. Here you can make your software scream with bounced light and an object to reflect on her outer surfaces. Not sure if this one is painted on the texture or not. I would play with light. See if you can illuminate the dark lacrimal. In Poser, one is almost always wrong and that's where people make the nanosecond decisions on reality. Eyes are it. Then we scan outwards. Well, some of us... And I've worked my butt numb getting renders not as good as this. It is not easy.

Great render. I agree with the others. The neck shadow is too sharp, go to 100 mm., use GI lighting, add detailed background, etc.

Its close. Hold it next to a photo of real person to see what needs improvement. I agree with earlier comments-- these are just additional observations. 1) Sclera (whites of the eyes) are too perfectly white, and too dry. Look at specularity in real photos as a reference-- very different. 2) Skin is "clay-y" 3) Geometry and pose are too perfectly symettrical. A little unilateral curl to the lip, a slightly raised eyebrow. . .anything to break up that deadly "mirror face". Skin pigmentation is a great way of doing this. . .some freckles, a little mole, even . . 4) Hair looks good, but shadow cast by the hair does not. . .too hard. 5) overall exposure has that lower contrast "clipped" look characteristic of CG. Compare with real world photos; highlights are brighter, shadows are darker, except in very low key indoor ambient light situations. What kind of a lighting rig are you using? I think you could get vast improvement with more lights, or HDR environment lighting

Thanks for the feedback, I am just using a single point light with GI enabled, I have been playing around a lot with the SSS controls, but they always turn out either too pronounced or not at all. The eye's highlights are calculated in-scene. I will turn up the gloss on them. I think the reason the eye-whites look so bright is the background, which I need to change, the eyes are reflective and it looks like they are reflecting just the walls in the room. Also, thanks for the focal length settings, I don't know a whole lot about photography, just 3D modeling (check out my gallery to see my from-scratch models!). Again, thanks for the help, for some reason I have had this obsession lately with making "realistic" renders and all you're comments with help me on my path!

"I have been playing around a lot with the SSS controls, but they always turn out either too pronounced or not at all."

Unlike Poser, 3dsMax uses SSS that is controled by maps AND scene scale. Use real-world units and import to the correct scale to get good results. Yes, you can fake it like Poser does using depth maps to control the SSS, but you would need to make those maps. You can get a decent fake forward SSS by putting a falloff map in the translucency slot, and setting it to "light/shadow".

I disagree about the skin. I don't think it looks "too" perfect. However, I think the shadows are too sharp. Skin diffuses shadows because of the SSS. If you use MentalRay fastskin shader, you will see this effect for real.

I think the eyes can use a bit more life to them with some specularity or reflections. The hair looks OK, but as Stewer pointed out, the texture's highlights are not matching up with the scene lighting... take a look at the shadowed areas of her hair, you can see a highlight on the hair where it is in shadow, which is physically incorrect. Not your fault, but all KOZ hair textures have "painted on" specularity, which is not good for all lighting situations.

Message edited on: 08/12/2005 17:57

You could add a little extra bit of realism in a very lo-tech way by : - turning (and maybe inclining) her head slightly - turning her eyes back to look at the viewer - add an expression (smile, whatever) to add life to the face One of the reasons that these "realism demos" often look doll-like DESPITE superb tex and rendering like yours is that they are POSED doll-like. Don't get completely lost in technical fixes - even real human beings look doll-like when holding their head perfectly straight up, and staring perfectly straight ahead, with a completely blank expression on their face ;o)

totally what thip said is the first thing I saw :)

In addition to what Thip said: Create a camera, and adjust it's settings; it gives you better results than zooming in close in the perspective of front or user views: Make sure it's centerred on her face - that's easiest to do in by generating it in the top view, and then tweaking it in the camera1 view. (which, incidentally, has a ton of "lens" options in the camera quad. You may want to consider using a mix-map for the face. I don't think it looks too bad, in general a lot of Poser pores are way, way to big in relation to the facial mesh anyway, but tweak it, just set the bump to about 10-15 %or less. The eyes could use a little more texture in the iris, and maybe you could use a falloff map on the light for dramatic effect, and don't set it to pure white, soften it up a bit with yellow or pink/red. However, I think you made a really good effort - I really like the way you made the hair look, and I have seen many, many worse portraits than this one. ~s

No even to a casual viewer it doesn't look realistic at all. She looks like a plastic doll with fake eyes to the casual viewer (and more experienced 3D viewer too).

When looking at a portrait, the eye tends to go 1st to the eyes, then searches around from there (it's a "human" thing..). Try aligning the cam so that the eyes are central. For setting up the lighting, try using a totally black environment 1st. That should get the colours right. If, after that you change the background the colours will probably need tweaking. As mentioned above, for close-ups, most professional photographers use a focal length (on 35 mil cameras) of between 90-120 (and of course, backing off the camera so that you can see more than just the tip of the nose)..:-)) Also agree with the "slight change in pose" bits mentioned above.. Excellent try - far better than my attempts at such things..:-)) Cheers, Diolma

The eyes look very plasticky to me, and not at all like real eyes. That was the first thing I noticed. Also, the skin doesn't look very natural. It's too smooth, too perfect, and doesn't have much translucence. Granted, this is difficult to do (even the biggest animation studios have a hard time with this one!), but this skin looks like wax. The shadows from the hair (particularly along the front of the neck) are very... uhm... wrong. Too dark, for one thing. And too solid for another (hair generally casts much softer shadows than a solid object would). I don't know enough about D|S to suggest what to change to get closer to your goal (although I could make suggestions if you wanted to fix it in Photoshop ;-). bonni