Every character's skin tone: you have to guess

GLE

Hello everybody,

I'll point out here an issue I'm encountering when evaluating the purchase of a new charcter. Since every Vendor tries his/her best to make his/her characters stand out in the Shop section, everyone uses a different set of lights and HDRIs for the promo images. I find therefore very difficult to evaluate what colour will be output when you render a character in fairly simple conditions.

Before you blame me for my incompetence, I'd like to point out that it is pretty much useless implementing a PBR engine complete with skydome and phisically scaled sun if you then have to cheat it by adding all sorts of lights to recreate what you saw in the promos. Furthermore, this practice has serious drawbacks if you put the character in a 3D environment that renders as seen in the promo images.

What I would like to see is a mandatory "standard lighting and conditions" scene among the promos, or at least in the product KB (because I understand the Shop section is a showroom, not a technical place).

E.g. could be a render performed:

- in the standard pose

- without hair (because hair that are exclusively sold together with a character are very rare)

- wearing the Basic Wear (because the DAZ website has ToS)

- standing on a 10x10 meter plane coloured by the Leather Iray standard shader with some tiling, I guess 50x50 (because it's not too shiny, not too dark)

- default camera with headlight off, framing the subject from the front

- infinite dome, no enviromnment map, Latitude 45, 15/04/2016, time 15.30.00 (because the lighting would come some way from the side, allowing for a bit of depth and for shade to show, without compromising neutrality that much)

Thanks

GT

mjc1016

Eventually you may get some vendors to include one render like that...after all, some are now including 'clay' or 'wireframe' views too.  But while it would be nice, the vast majority of the promos are 'glam' shots and will remain that way.

GLE

Sure, that's why I insist that it should be mandatory, and being a technical information I think it'd be appropriate to show that in the product Knowledge Base.

The glam shots are OK to show what you could do with the character and I often find them quite inspiring, because you can tell serious effort was put in producing most of them. But the same way I order a light blue car you can't sell me one that's dark blue except under 20KW non-white lighting, you can't sell me a character that should be Caucasian pale and renders like a Mediterranean midtone.

It's not a matter of feeling ripped off or having to blame the PAs. I'm just saying I'd buy much more easily and happily knowing this information.

Thanks

GT

mjc1016

Changes like that take a lot of time in this community...unfortunately.