SSS ruins 3Delight

ColemanRugh

Somewhere along the way, I don't know when, someone with influence said that everything in 3Delight has to involve SSS... and this is complete bullshank. And it's also why vendors are intimidated by 3Delight.

You can see through a human ear... SSS looks great with it. You cannot see through a metal bar... but every single shader for 3delight for metal uses SSS... why? You can't see through it and it does not require all that complicated math to figure out how to make metal shine with displacement. What folks are wanting is ambient occlusion... not SSS.

SSS kills DAZ Studiowith renders... and it's totally uneccessary. It's why you get the glowing white skin of death when Daz Studio runs out of memory... the SSS shaders are way too damned complicated. If I take a render of a character from 15 feet away... I don't need to see the light going through their ear. I don't need complicated light set ups that fake atmosphere either like the Uber stuff that kills render times. I don't need ultra UBER complicated skin shaders at work except for extreme close-ups.

And trying to clean out the SSS stuff in a skin set up is a pain in the derriere as well.

90% of the time SSS is overkill

Richard Haseltine

Are you sure SSS is active? I can't say I've seen it used on things which don't need it to any great extent.

The pure white skin is not usually down to SSS per se, it is down to a Shader Mixer shader (in that case the AoA SSS Shader) not compiling properly and it can happen with any custom shader.

Sven Dullah

ColemanRugh said:

Somewhere along the way, I don't know when, someone with influence said that everything in 3Delight has to involve SSS... and this is complete bullshank. And it's also why vendors are intimidated by 3Delight.

I haven't come across this claim, and I think there are other reasons for vendors not supporting 3DL.

ColemanRugh said:

You can see through a human ear... SSS looks great with it. You cannot see through a metal bar... but every single shader for 3delight for metal uses SSS... why? You can't see through it and it does not require all that complicated math to figure out how to make metal shine with displacement. What folks are wanting is ambient occlusion... not SSS.

I have metal shaderpresets that use both DS default and UberSurface. And I cannot see how you can compare SSS to ambient occlusion, do you mind explaining that?

ColemanRugh said:

SSS kills DAZ Studiowith renders... and it's totally uneccessary. It's why you get the glowing white skin of death when Daz Studio runs out of memory... the SSS shaders are way too damned complicated.

Yes, it renders slow because it's a shadowmixer network (if you are talking about the AoA SSS shader), correct me if I'm wrong, but the white skin thing can be solved by emptying your temp folder or restarting DS, I don't think it's related to memory.

ColemanRugh said:

If I take a render of a character from 15 feet away... I don't need to see the light going through their ear. I don't need complicated light set ups that fake atmosphere either like the Uber stuff that kills render times. I don't need ultra UBER complicated skin shaders at work except for extreme close-ups.

Well don't use that stuff then, there are other options available. Other people might want to do those closeups and feel those things are needed.

ColemanRugh said:

And trying to clean out the SSS stuff in a skin set up is a pain in the derriere as well.

I think it's pretty easy to convert to the default shader or UberSurface or simply turn off SSS. ( Which means you will use diffuse scattering instead and have to set diff strength to 100% and go from there.)

ColemanRugh said:

90% of the time SSS is overkill

That one I personally agree with, to be honest I rarely use SSS myself, not usually needed for the stuff I do, but I like to be able to make choices.