skin shader a la Alsurface pleaseeee

[Bigguns]

ho thanks ill try it. the thing is , lots of girl tint their hairs with desired color . thats the case here. its a project for a friend and im doing his girlfriend.. so he want the hairs a specific color etc . cant wait to try the alhair meanwhile ill try your melanin but not sure if will fix the backscatter issue. thanks again.

[Joezeta]

In the original tutorial at http://www.anderslanglands.com/alshaders/tut_skin1.html the displacement map is considered by the author to be the most important map in the skin shader. What is the workflow to implement it correctly in Max? Do we just need to put the map in the disp slot? And most importantly, how do we find the correct amount of the displacement(say we've extracted our map in Zbrush)?

[Bigguns]

your better to use vray displacement modifier.. much more control and for the strenght of the displacement if you output a exr black and white (to do that , in zbrush put the valu to o for the mid value ) map from zbrush the value in vray displacement is always 1

[Bigguns]

My experience with the VrayHair is that it does not do well, especially in the transmission with colors that have high saturation. That looks like what is happening on your render. So a quick fix is to simply lower the saturation in the transmission color.

The AlHair bases the color on melanin amount, which means the color is based on slider that produces a range of colors that are possible for human hair, rather than being whatever RGB values we artists put in, so it may fix that.

If you want to try out the melanin color thing with the VrayHair, I wrote an OSLtex for it that you can use:
http://docs.sharktacos.com/vray/osl.html#melanin

BTW I'm using max, does that OSL work in max also ? thank's

[sharktacos]

ho thanks ill try it. the thing is , lots of girl tint their hairs with desired color . thats the case here.

For dyed hair there is a "Dye color" parameter which mixes with the natural hair color (melanin).

[sharktacos]

BTW I'm using max, does that OSL work in max also ? thank's

It may need to be tweaked a bit to work in Max. Since I don't have Max I have no way to test that, so I can't say for sure.

[sharktacos]

IAnd most importantly, how do we find the correct amount of the displacement(say we've extracted our map in Zbrush)?

This is nice tutorial on displacement maps:
http://www.cggallery.com/tutorials/displacement/

[Bigguns]

It may need to be tweaked a bit to work in Max. Since I don't have Max I have no way to test that, so I can't say for sure.

It work's it's really cool to get quickly a fast and natural hair color, for sure, but we can't plug a map in the OSL , so I would need to blend it with a vrayhairtxt to get hair variations

[sharktacos]

The reason you can't put a texture into the Melanin Amount is because its a "color" input rather than a "string" like the Dye Color is. So you just need to change that in the code.

Like this:
string Melanin_amount = "color.png"

and then also this:
color MelaninAmount = getTextureDif(Melanin_amount, color(1,1,1));
float Melanin = luminance (MelaninAmount);

[Rens]

That getTextureDif is a pretty nifty setup to check for missing textures / have a default colour, mind if I borrow that piece of code (with link)?

[sharktacos]

That getTextureDif is a pretty nifty setup to check for missing textures / have a default colour, mind if I borrow that piece of code (with link)?

Hey Rens, I think I got that from one of the Chaos guys, so no need to credit me

[Rens]

Hehe ok, thanks! : )

[sharktacos]

Vlado,
The alSurface is now in the nightlies for Maya. As discussed previously, in contrast to other SSS materials, the SSS and GI appear together in the render elements (i.e. there is an option to disable this in SSS2, but not in the alSurface). You had said you were therefore planning on introducing a new render element in order to separate these. I do not see that RE in the nightlies. Did I perhaps miss it? or are you still working on that?

[vlado]

Still working on that.

Best regards,
Vlado

[jstrob]

see in my render what it does... [ATTACH=CONFIG]35612[/ATTACH]

Hey nice to see some new stuff from you Bigguns!

In the mean time maybe you can output a vraylightselect pass for the back lighting and correct it in post but yes it would be great to have it react more naturally.