Wikihuman Emily specular

[corestudio]

Doing some R&D into how various renderers handle skin with Emily (Wikihuman) as starting place. One thing that's causing trouble is is translating the specular layers, where there doesn't seem to be a direct analog to what's happening in the Maya setup. What is that shader that is labeled a VRayPluginNodeMtl and how to figure out the same setup in VRay Houdini?

[Gosho.Genchev]

If possible, you can export a VRScene from Maya, import it in Houdini using a VRScene SOP node and use the Import tab -> Import Material option.

Based on the parameter names on the screenshot above, this seems to be one of the basic low-level BRDFs shipped with V-Ray. We have them hidden in the Houdini UI but if you need to, you can always create one with python. E.g. by typing the following in the Python Shell window to create a new BRDFGGX node in /mat:

hou.node('/mat').createNode('VRayNodeBRDFGGX')

Hope that helps!

[corestudio]

Cool, interesting. Haven't worked much with VRScenes much, but that might work. A quick look seems to indicate that the subsurface is rendering differently but we might be able to piece it together. Might be a scene scale thing. Will dig in further, thanks.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Yup, could be. Default for Maya is centimeters while in Houdini, the default scale is meters.

Feel free to throw the Maya file my way if you hit a wall. You can always mail me at the address in my signature if it can't be shared publicly.

All the best!

[corestudio]

Yeah I'm going to do send you a link. 'm very close, but between the displacement mix and specular I've hit a wall. Thanks!