Just starting with Carrara,  can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial or technique or even just tips and tricks for getting realistic skin in Carrara? I either get something that's far too shiny and "oiled" looking or something really dry looking.

Thanks!

Hi SkyeWolf, Welcome to Carrara! Are you wanting to make your own skin or simply make the skin that comes with DAZ and Poser characters look good? Each one has different techniques. Mark

the skin textures that come with poser characters for now. I'll work my way up to my own skin eventually. :)

I don't have a tutorial for that specific thing yet but here is the method that I use: In Carrara the first thing I usually do is duplicate the Skin Bump Map into the Shiniess channel and reduce it's brightness to around 50%. (that's not always going to get the best results but it's a good place to start) Next, I also duplicate the Skin Color map into the Highlight channel and then reduce it's brightness as well. The adjustments required in the Skin Shader from this point are very dependent on how you light your scene plus the quality of the maps involved. There isn't one single sure-fire way to get the best skin because it is so dependent on the lights you have in your scene. It will simply involve some additional area renders (using the area render tool) and fine tuning in the shader room. I usually reduce the brightness of the imported Poser or DAZ Texture maps for the bump channel as well. In Carrara, they're simply too aggressive. Again, this is contingent on the lighting but I'll typically use something like a 3 - 20 percent brightness. Finally, as a last step, I'll engage Subsurface Scattering with a version of the skin tone but much darker. This is a last step because it increases render time. Please post back with more questions or an image to comment on. It'll go faster that way! :D Mark

Thanks Mark! :) I tried to catch your chat at ArtZone but missed most of it. I'm waiting for the archive. of course I'm still waiting for them to put up my Archive from october so.... :)

Thanks for the tips...when I get some free time I"ll play around and post some images :)

Skye

Skye and Mark, can I add to your discussion?

What I've been having trouble with lately is seeing what shader maps to what part of the imported figure. I'll be looking at a list of shaders (on the small round globes) but none are matched to a part of of the figure. So I cant be sure which texture is the correct one for say, "skin torso" And each of the listed shaders is identified with a tag titled "parametric mapping"

This hasnt always happened, I have imported figures and had all the shaders mapped to an identified part of the figure. Does it have to do with the mat files I'm applying to the figure in Poser or perhaps Native importer or Transponder importer is better at doing this?

its from importing the figure, forget which way of importing does it, as by now i just have a habit of using transposer and if i happen to see parametric mapping, i always by habit replace it with multi-channel shader, which is the usual color/spec/reflect/etc shader channels, and build the shader from there

if i import a scene rather than a single char, i seem to always get parametric mapping, which again i replace, because in my opinion, no converter in the world will make a material from 1 language into another language (poser shader into carrara shader) good enough, simply too many differences on the programming level to do it right

lighting and textures i will always create from scratch in the program i intend to render with, so much simpler and better results :)

Hi Metabog, For Poser figures, Carrara imports them in a long layer list. Select the top of the shader tree, you'll be presented with the locations of all the "mystery" shaders. If instead you chose one of the individual "globes", there will be a pull down menu at the right which then shows the body part that is matching. If you're not seeing the options shown in the screen captures I posted, then there is something else going on. Mark

Thanx Mark and Anxcom,
I think I've got from what you've said. It has to do with what Anxcom was saying about importing and entire scene instead of a single figure. I've been importing entire scenes and now I do remember when I imported a single figure I had no trouble seeing all the shader for the figure. When I import an entire scene it is another story.