Hey all!
VLADO : I was just wondering if there are any plans to make a fastsss skin shader ( similar to the one for mentalray ). The fastsss vray mat doesn’t seem to giving me as good results.
Does anyone have any good skin material tuts for vray? or any suggestions.
Right now I have my my painted diffuse color map in the first layer of the shader. and I have left the back scatter color pretty much default. but it still looks kinda lifeless and waxy.
Well, there is more to skin than SSS itself; the VRayFastSSS material simply blurs the lighting across the object surface, but this is not enough to make a believable skin shader (in fact, the SSS effects themselves play only a small part in the appearance of skin).
There was a scene with a V-Ray skin shader posted over at CGTalk:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=4174297&highlight=vray+"v-ray"+VRay+"V-Ray"+"skin"#post4174297
There are also a number of skin materials at www.vray-materials.de:
http://www.vray-materials.de/all\_materials.php?q=skin&Submit=Search
Best regards,
Vlado
Sorry, forgot the most important question: there are plans for a user-friendly skin shader, yes. I don’t know when it will be coming though.
Best regards,
Vlado
vlado what do you think of that max skin shader? With all the different dermis slots and such? I haven’t used it at all, but it looks cool on the surface (no pun intended)
Here is a modified version of the CGTalk scene, the model is by Marc Mordelet (aka visionmaster2 on CGTalk) from this thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=4174297&highlight=vray+"v-ray"+VRay+"V-Ray"+"skin"#post4174297
I just played with the skin material a bit:
vlado what do you think of that max skin shader? With all the different dermis slots and such? I haven’t used it at all, but it looks cool on the surface (no pun intended)It’s looks too complicated to me as UI and it cheats a lot as far as physical correctness is concerned, but it does indeed look nice. Hopefully V-Ray will get an easier to set up skin material some time soon as well.
Best regards,
Vlado
Any news on this front?
V-Ray already has everything needed for making good skin, one just has to set it up properly. I’m writing a small tutorial for this, but the model that I have is not particularly good…
Best regards,
Vlado
I think the problem though vlado, is that it’s not very user friendly, hence my earlier comment about the max material. It at least seems to make sense in a way. The vray method seems awfully esoteric. A tutorial will be most helpful.
One thing that CAN be done, either from Chaos’ side or from a user’s side (with some scripting knowledge) is to create a material encapsulation.
Basically it is a scripted material (similar to what egz did) with a set of parameters which will intelligently (or not, it’s all down to the creator and the user) set whatever else is needed to make it work.
I had a custom material half prepared for 1.47.xx, but it was broken in 1.5.
If there’s enough interest, I may try and look into this, it shouldn’t be overly complex a task.
Please mark me down as “extremely interested”.
OOH skin
Out me down as a “extremely interested with bells on”
Thanks Lele, for this and all your fantastic scripts. I don’t think I would attempt to use Vray sun without it.
Raj
Ok, a first attempt at a simpler SSS material is done.
It has more limits than features at the moment, but it does work straight away.
Put the .mse file into your maxroot\stdplugs folder.
Run max, switch to vray, and open the material editor.
You’ll find a new material type called VRayQuickSSS (quick only in setup, of course. name is temporary as everything else).
It’s setup with the hybrid method (new to 1.5), so if you get errors with versions previous to the RCs, upgrade.
It’s NOT the fastSSS, rather the standard vray material setup so it exhibits SSS characteristics. You can texture both the SSS color and the SSS “softness” (which is the refraction glossiness, in any case).
As i said, it’s a first attempt: please comment on it.
you can find it here: http://www.scriptspot.com/Lele/VrayQuickSSS\_1.0.mse
Wow Lele! Thanks! Can’t wait to check it out.
ive got a problem with your steps. you said “Run max, switch to vray, and open the material editor.” what do you mean by switch to… im confused, is there something max is supposed to be set to other than vray? you mean to tell me there are other renderers out there? hehe cool material
lol only the scanline, only the scanline…
i vaguely remember such a thing. thats still bundled with max? wow
Ok, i tried the material. If I am correct , the dials, manipulate the settings in the shader. At the moment I use the VRAYFASTSSS blended with an ordinary Vray material to obtain highlights (skin also reflects light), and in most circumstances human skin doesnt exhibit refractive properties that SSS is used to simulate. Only unusual lighting situations engender this glow through effect. So after experimenting with the script, lele, I found it unsuable. It makes the skin 100% transparent but yields a bright orange colour. I usually use a dark red colour for the FASTSSS but if I try this in the skin shader I get a very dark red humanoid. I would post some pics. But they were so awful I coudln’t bear to look at them. I turned the muliplier down to a fractional value and the skin was very dark.
I am using a poser mesh with a painted texture map to test things with. The texture map has the skin elements, but no highlights that the misguided poser people include in their texture maps. Its a pretty neutral skin texmap.
I found that the speed of the quicksss material is very very slow compared to the blended fast SSS and Vray material.
I think some realistic presets are what is needed for the skin material in the script suggested to be usable. I don’t know what results you have obtained using the script.
Raj
It’s as usable as the standard vray SSS material, really.
You’ll notice the diffuse component is entirely absent in this one, whereas for skin you’d have quite a lot of it.
I started it off as a purely SSS component to be embedded into a vrayblend, just to find out later that there are limitations with that material and scripted materials like this one (it renders black).
I’m no artist, and have little to no patience for the waits a proper skin SSS material requires (on my pc, that is).
So if Vlado comes up with a decent skin sss tutorial, or preset, i’d be more than happy to incorporate it.
Just to strengthen the proposition, this was never meant to be a one button solution to skin, it’s just an aid to get the VRayMaterial to exhibit SSS, and the user to find himself in the right ballpark.
That much it does 
thats looking prety damn nice imo!
