I slung this question over on the Daz forum, but I figure best to cast a wide net.

I'm working on my self portrait for the interior of my artbook and I'm kind of stuck. I generally don't do close ups of faces in my DS renders (in fact, I usually try to keep faces out of shots) so there's something just... off to me. So far the only change I've decided is needed is maybe lightening up the eyes, but there's still something creepy about it. I'd say I'm firmly buried in the uncanny valley. Still, I figure it's best to ask. Besides, a lot of it could be over-thinking since I'm trying to copy someone I can see in a mirror. To other people it might not be as creepy.

I work in DAZ Studio 3.2 Free Edition, but I do have an old copy of Poser 8 laying around if I need it.

uncanny valley is an occupational hazard in the CG trade! :biggrin:

Lighting looks a little flat to me - have you thought about going for the traditional 3 light rig ? Key, Fill and maybe a rim light (no point in a hair light as it's covered) maybe try and get some sparkle in the eyes

What focal length are you using on the camera ? I'd use a mild telephoto personally.

it doesn't really look creepy to me, just a headshot

The uncanny valley shows up during animation.  So you are fine there.  The main problem with your render is that there is way too much ambient occlusion.

To me, the eyes look a little "dead", it looks like they might need some more specularity, glossiness or reflection. To my eye, it looks like maybe the reflection in the eye is painted on rather than actually reflecting the lights.

Bit of a long-winded way of saying, "I agree that the eyes need to be brighter."

I can see that. Makes sense. I think I'm going to use a diffrent set of eye maps, since I only now remember I have better ones. The lighting color will probably need a tweek since I think the eyes picked up a lot of that blu-ish grey from the rim light. As for the occulusion, I work in two layers and combine them in photoshop as an overlay (one for an UberEnvironment2 render and one with normal lighting). I guess I'll just lower the intensity on the UE2 render and see if that sorts it out a bit.

Thanks for the advice everyone, I'll let you know how it turns out when I get a chance to make renders.

If you're layering in Photoshop anyway then try this:

Start with a black background, then set each layer above to screen. Screen only lightens whereas overlay lightens and darkens. So whatever's black in 1 layer won't add any light. Then you can adjust the intensity of each light independantly with the opacity sliders.

For even more fun, you can work with white light only and then adjust the colour of the light in Photoshop (I like using the Photo filter adjustment layer to warm up or cool down lights but I have a photo background so I find this way very intuitive).

I've had good results with just rendering each light independantly at 100% intensity and white and then colouring them in Photoshop this way and using the opacity as an intensity slider. I converted each layer to a smart object so that I could apply whatever adjustment layers I wanted to each light without having to worry about masking the adjustment layers (since the screen blending mode is applied to the smart object).

The big advantage of this technique is that you get to adjust each light after the render without having to re-render and your renders should go much more quickly with only 1 light per render.