Hello,

I've imported DAZ 3D characters with the Elite Series textures, and after some tweaking of the
bump and highlight settings of the materials I got okay results.
But, the results are not as good as when I render the model from with DAZ 3D.

I'm a bit new to Vue, so maybe someone who actually KNOWS what he's doing,
could chime in a give a hint on what to do best.

Thank you all in advance,
Tom

Adjusting material settings is only half of the work to make skin look good. The other half (as important or maybe even more important) is the light settings. In fact, the two groups of settings (material and light) should be worked together, interactively.
This is hardly something that can be summarized in a few statements, a book could be written about it. :-)

Some few pointers from the top of my mind, from my own experience (which is small anyway).
Light:

• The best light for skin seems to be environment mapping, not with 0% light balance but with 5% or 10% or so (so that some highlights can appear)
• Mind you that each map will have completely different results. Experiment with different maps to see the one you like the best.
• One subtle point light in addittion to the environment map seems to yield good results. For example, to provide rim light.
• GR seems the best. GI is also not bad.
• In case you don't want environment mapping, I personally prefer the results from spectral atmosphere, but volumetric will probably give more skin detail.

Skin:

• Use specularity map (connected to the highlights channel) if your skin came with one. There's a big difference from using the default plain highlights.
• likewise, use bump map if your skin came with one. Please note that sometimes this can get lost in the conversion to Vue. You may have to manually hook it up.
• Use a bit of fresnel in the skin. Subtle, don't overdo it.
• You can use a bit of luminosity (very subtle), this will fake SSS convincingly if done right.
• experiment various bump strengths. Each skin will have its own best setting.

If I remember some more stuff, I'll write it down here.
Hope that helps anyway.

Quote - [...lots of good information...]

I have a bit of a photographic background, so I already found some good
configurations for main and fill lights.

What 's completely new to me is the connections from one function to the next one,
so I guess I'll spend this weekend with the function editor playing around.
I'll report back my findings.

Thanks a lot for your time

Tom