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You are here: Home / Daz Studio / How to Get Wet Skin in Iray

How to Get Wet Skin in Iray

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by shibashake 38 Comments

After seeing Dave’s wonderful wet skin image on the Daz Gallery, I was inspired to try creating a wet skin render in Daz Studio Iray.

Creating wet skin involves three key steps-
1. Making the composition fit. If our figure is to have wet skin, then we want our composition to support that.
2. Making the skin properly shiny. Wet skin is more shiny and reflective than dry skin because there is water on the skin’s surface.
3. Adding water drops on top of the skin. In addition to being more shiny, there will also be some drops of water clinging to the skin, and trailing down the skin.

Woman exercising with two weights and covered in sweat. Daz Studio Iray render.
How to Get Wet Skin in Daz Studio Iray

1. Making the composition fit

First, I create my scene in Daz Studio. Since I want to focus on the skin, I want my figure to be fairly large, and to have a good amount of skin visible. In addition, she should be doing something that will result in wet skin. In this image, I decided to create a dynamic scene, featuring Victoria 7 exercising with weights. Hair is NJA Ponytail Hair, which is one of my favorites. Outfit is Heat Up for G3F and G2F.

Below is the first pass of my composition with regular Victoria 7 skin. Lighting is just with an IBL. At this point, the skin does not look very wet.

Victoria7 in dynamic pose exercising with two barbells.  Iray render.
Woman exercising with weights with regular Victoria 7 skin.

2. Making the skin properly shiny

Next, I want to change certain settings on my Victoria 7 skin to make it more shiny. To do this, I select my Victoria 7 figure, and go into Surfaces > Editor. I select my V7 skins and make the following parameter changes –

  • Glossy Layered Weight set to 1.0.
  • Glossy Reflectivity set to 0.9.
  • Glossy Roughness set to 0.4. This can be set lower if we want to increase the wet effect on skin. Setting it too low though, will make the skin look unrealistically shiny. Therefore, tweak it according to personal taste.
  • Top Coat Layering Mode set to Fresnel. Top Coat IOR set to 1.49 and Top Coat Thin Film IOR set to 1.4. Again, Top Coat Roughness can be adjusted according to taste. A lower Roughness value will increase shininess and a higher Roughness value will decrease shininess.
Woman exercising with two barbells, with shiny wet looking skin. Iray render.
Victoria 7 skin after changing Glossy and Top Coat parameters.

3. Adding water drops on top of the skin

There are multiple ways to achieve this final step. I use a simple technique here, which utilizes the Daz Studio geometry shell.

  • First, I select my Victoria 7 figure.
  • Next, I go into Create > New Geometry Shell. This creates a shell over our Victoria 7 figure.
  • I then select the Geometry Shell and apply the Iray Water shader to it.
  • I go to Parameters > Mesh Offset and set the Offset Distance to 0.001.
Added a geometric shell onto Victoria7 with shaders set to Iray water.
Victoria7 after adding a geometric shell with surfaces set to the Iray water shader.

In the image above, she looks like she has cellophane wrapped all around her. This looks strange because water on our body does not form an even continuous shell. Instead, we only want certain small parts of the shell to be visible, simulating water droplets.

To do this, I do a search on “water condensation bump”. I download an appropriate black and white water condensation image, and apply that to the Cutout Opacity parameter of my geometry shell. I can then adjust the Horizontal and Vertical Tiles parameter to control how much water there is. I decided to go for the more subtle effect here with water drops that are not overly prominent.

Finally, I also add some mesh lights to further accentuate the shininess of my wet skin and shell.

Woman exercising with barbells with wet skin look, achieved by adding an appropriate geometric shell and mesh lights.
Added water condensation map to our water geometric shell, so that only small parts of shell are visible. Also added mesh lights to accentuate our wet skin.

Another way to achieve water droplets on skin is to use crafted specular maps. This is what is done in Genesis 8 Wet Body Iray by SimonWM. He also has a variety of shells for the other Genesis figures. More recently, Hellboy released Real Drops Male Edition, which looks superb. Finally, V3Digitimes also has some great wet skin products, including Wet And Tanned Skins For Genesis 8 Female(s).

In the image below, I used Wet Body Geometry Shells by SimonWM. This is what I did –

  • I apply the Wet Body geometry shell to a G2F figure (Victoria 6).
  • I select all surfaces on the geometry shell and apply the Iray Uber shader.
  • I set Glossy Weight to 1.0, Glossy Reflectivity to 1.0, and Glossy Roughness to 0.
  • Finally, I can further control the strength of the drops by changing Translucency Weight. A value of 0 has the strongest wet map.
Goddess of water with wet skin. She is standing with two water dragons, in front of a choppy ocean.
Water Goddess image with stronger Sweat Rolling specular wet body map.

This first image has a stronger wet body look, and uses the specular Sweat Rolling map. For contrast, we also use a more subtle wet body look, and the Water Beads specular map.

Water Goddess image with high contrast fantasy lighting, wet body specular maps, water dragons, and ocean.
Water Goddess image with more subtle Water Beads specular wet body map. Also using more fantasy lighting here.

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Comments

« Previous 1 2
  1. TsubasaShi says

    November 27, 2021 at 11:04 am

    Thank you very much for this. It took me a while of digging to find all the surface settings you mentioned in this tutorial, but I found them (using 4.15 after MANY MANY years of not touching DAZ.) It is very much appreciated that you did this.

    Reply
  2. Hobby says

    April 16, 2020 at 5:36 am

    Thank you for this tutorial! Much appriciated.

    But after working fine for a while, suddenly for no reason it’s not working.
    Character body only turns red.

    The solution I found is to increase Mesh Offset distance to 0.003 (or higher)
    Hope that helps others. I found no solution that worked for me on google.

    Reply
  3. Howard says

    May 22, 2017 at 11:54 am

    Hey – this is a completely fantastic, clearly written tutorial – in a domain where there is a lot of completely confusing info on Daz. I realize this about a year and a half after you posted this, and I apologize if my question seems incredibly amateur, but I’m not an advanced user) but my question is:

    In ‘2. Making the skin properly shiny’ you write:
    “Glossy Layered Weight set to 1.0.
    Glossy Reflectivity set to 0.9.
    Glossy Roughness set to 0.4. This can be set lower if we want to increase the wet effect on skin. Setting it too low though, will make the skin look unrealistically shiny. Therefore, tweak it according to personal taste.
    Top Coat Layering Mode set to Fresnel. Top Coat IOR set to 1.49 and Top Coat Thin Film IOR set to 1.4. Again, Top Coat Roughness can be adjusted according to taste. A lower Roughness value will increase shininess and a higher Roughness value will decrease shininess.”

    But nowhere can I find any of these parameters within Surfaces>Editor. I’m using Victoria 6 on Daz3D 4.9, with Iray. Clearly I’m looking in the wrong place? Do you have any guidance?

    thanks so much,
    Howard

    Reply
    • shibashake says

      May 22, 2017 at 5:02 pm

      Hmmm, do you have Victoria 6 selected? If so, there should be a Victoria 6 button in surfaces > editor? Open that up and click on skin.

      Oh I just thought of another thing, V6 comes with 3Delight shaders, so we also need to convert the shaders to Iray. I have more on that here –
      http://thinkdrawart.com/daz-studio-iray-tutorial-for-beginners#shader

      There are also more complex vendor solutions for converting old skin to Iray skin, but the tut above is a starting point.

    • Howard says

      May 23, 2017 at 3:34 pm

      Yup, I’ve done that, though I’m using V6 HD. Could that be an issue?

      I did a screen shot of all of the parameters available under V6>Surfaces>Skin but no way to include one here. There are approx 60 parameters. I did a search, and have scrolled carefully through the entire list, but Glossy Layered Weight, Glossy Reflectivity, Glossy Roughness and Top Coat Layering appear nowhere.

      Should I be looking at a different advanced palette?
      It starts with:
      Tags
      Ambient Color
      Ambient SSS Contribution
      Ambient Strength
      Bump Noise Strength
      …. and ends with …
      UV Set
      Angle
      SmoothOnline ID Color
      Online Depth.

      Thanks very much for your help.

    • Howard says

      May 23, 2017 at 3:45 pm

      Last point, in case this is helpful: on another tutorial, the Surfaces tab is titled “Surfaces (Color)” – mine is just Surfaces.

    • Howard says

      May 23, 2017 at 3:46 pm

      THANKS> Just figured it out. I had Skin selected but did not have “All”at the very top of the Editor menu. Thanks for being so considerate and responding, and providing the link.

    • shibashake says

      June 3, 2017 at 12:43 am

      You are very welcome. Feel free to post more questions here.

    • sreenivassan T says

      July 11, 2020 at 8:26 pm

      select skin under “character name” in the surface box.

  4. DrDrk says

    January 24, 2017 at 6:43 pm

    I cannot get this to work on scenes outside where there is a sky dome, the water shell reacts very strangely. any suggestions?

    Reply
    • shibashake says

      January 27, 2017 at 1:37 pm

      Probably a result of the reflection. First thing I would check is the skydome and skydome settings. Try setting it to Infinity and see what changes.

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