Subsurface Shaders... WOW!

Joe Cotter

The hair looks very nice, although she seems to have a bit of grey for someone so young ;)

That by the way is why I (and some others) often set specular to something other then white, against some people's recommendations.

Laticis Imagery

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

scorpio

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

Nice.

Fisty

HeraldOfFire said:

If anyone knows where I can pick up some a K4 texture set which includes normal maps, specular and displacement maps (or at least a combination of the aforementioned), I'd personally buy you a drink. Solid K4 textures are like looking for rough diamonds in a mountain of shattered glass.

Both of these have bump and specular maps, 4000x4000 too.

http://www.daz3d.com/jamika-for-k4
http://www.daz3d.com/josie

Kattey

Josi is on FastGrab currently. According to the promo blurb she has bump/specularity maps.
http://www.daz3d.com/fast-grab-3d-models/josi-for-kids-4

Pendraia

Gedd said:

The hair looks very nice, although she seems to have a bit of grey for someone so young ;)

That by the way is why I (and some others) often set specular to something other then white, against some people's recommendations.

I'm currently working with grade 1/2's and noticed yesterday that one of my grade 2's has white hairs(only 1/2) in black hair.

I was quite surprised to see it...

Love this thread... Thanks for all the info AoA!

TJohn

SS shaders on the Ogre and the Bone.

Jabba

Still can't get beyond the WIP phase with my Amara character (darn those texture joins), but she does look pretty good with SSS shader applied - I also used gummy & plastic on the 'clothing'...

Kevin Sanderson

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

Looking pretty good!

Slosh

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

I think Laticis made a deal with the devil. His renders are always amazing and seems to have a quick grasp on every shader and renderer that comes out. I want some of that.

Kyu2130

Slosh said:

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

I think Laticis made a deal with the devil. His renders are always amazing and seems to have a quick grasp on every shader and renderer that comes out. I want some of that.

I agree!!!

Herald of Fire

Fisty said:

HeraldOfFire said:

If anyone knows where I can pick up some a K4 texture set which includes normal maps, specular and displacement maps (or at least a combination of the aforementioned), I'd personally buy you a drink. Solid K4 textures are like looking for rough diamonds in a mountain of shattered glass.

Both of these have bump and specular maps, 4000x4000 too.

http://www.daz3d.com/jamika-for-k4
http://www.daz3d.com/josie

Sadly, no normals or displacement maps though. That being said, I've never even come across any V4 or V5 textures which use normals either, so I guess those will forever be a distant dream. I did try making my own with a combination of the bump map and the Nvidia plugin for Photoshop, but creating a normal map from a texture always goes south.

That said, I did pick up Jamika along with another one, which was Lilly. They're both pretty textures sets, and Lilly gets bonus points for coming with displacements! Yay! Though, not quite as high resolution as Jamika, the results are still very nice. It also helps that their morphs are as cute as a button. See... this is what happens when you direct me to K4 textures. I buy stuff. Happens every time. I swear I'll have every K4 character under the sun before long.

Anyway, adorables aside, and back on topic, I wanted to try out Jamika with the subsurface shaders. Results aren't bad, though I'm still a long ways from realism. I'll just keep tweaking and playing until I get it just so. On a side note, I think the Daydream dress has become the single most used outfit in my library.

cwichura

HeraldOfFire said:

Sadly, no normals or displacement maps though. That being said, I've never even come across any V4 or V5 textures which use normals either, so I guess those will forever be a distant dream. I did try making my own with a combination of the bump map and the Nvidia plugin for Photoshop, but creating a normal map from a texture always goes south.

FWIW, I've used ShaderMap 2 to convert skin bumps to normals for use in LuxRender. I switch to the advanced editor, load the skin diffuse as a colour map, the specular as a colour map, and the bump as a displacement map. Then add a normal from displacement node. Set up the material editor in SM2 to point at the diffuse, specular and normal maps. Then adjust the intensity value on the normal map node to get the desired effect. (Intensity defaults to 100, and for skin bumps, I find you usually want to turn it down to somewhere in the range of 5-10 depending on the skin's provided bump map. Basically start at 5, and increment it by 1 until the preview window 'snaps'. That's usually the value you want, or the value before it snapped. You'll have to do a couple test renders to confirm.)

Granted, it does depend in part on the quality of the bump map, too. But you can get decent results. I wish more vendors supplied normal maps with their products (be it skin, clothing, or environment prop), but as some have pointed out, even the bump maps many vendors supply are junk. Hence why it's useful to have ShaderMap 2 to try and create your own replacement maps. Especially for someone like me that is no texture expert...

Herald of Fire

My pet peeve is bump maps which are just desaturated diffuse textures. It's especially odd when the texture in question has freckles and every little freckle now appears as an indentation in the face, as if someone had fired rock salt at their head. This is actually the case with a recent purchase I got from Rendo...

Still, I'm diverting the conversation away from its intended purpose which is to showcase the awesome shaders. I'll post some more works once I've figured out where I'm going wrong.

cwichura

I did say it depends on the quality of the bump maps... :) And yes, many vendor-provided bump maps are junk, if they are even included at all. Not just for skins, but for clothing and environment props, too...

TJohn

HeraldOfFire said:

My pet peeve is bump maps which are just desaturated diffuse textures. It's especially odd when the texture in question has freckles and every little freckle now appears as an indentation in the face, as if someone had fired rock salt at their head. This is actually the case with a recent purchase I got from Rendo...

Still, I'm diverting the conversation away from its intended purpose which is to showcase the awesome shaders. I'll post some more works once I've figured out where I'm going wrong.

Sorry but the "rock salt" comment got me ROTFL.

JOdel

Well, I certainly can't say they don't work. They definitely do something. I guess there was no way to build presets that "just work". Which is a bummer.

I found that changing the ambient to a darker version of the shader color got rid of the black core, but some colors just rendered as a flat white silhouette. I finally just did them all in red (which seemed to work the best overall) and then postworked the hell out of it.

Laticis Imagery

kyu2130 said:

Slosh said:

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

I think Laticis made a deal with the devil. His renders are always amazing and seems to have a quick grasp on every shader and renderer that comes out. I want some of that.

I agree!!!

Has anyone seen my soul ;)

Thanks for the comments guys :)

Laticis Imagery

scorpio64dragon said:

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

Nice.

Thanks Scorpio

Laticis Imagery

Kevin Sanderson said:

Laticis said:

WIP - Texture is Bree using AoA SSS shader applied with Skin 1 as a starting point.

Looking pretty good!

Thank you

Laticis Imagery

The revision.

Major Points for improvement: Lips need more work / Bump needs some work / artifacts at the nostrils and tear ducks.

Still not sure whats going on with those artifacts.

Saturation on skin colour is questionable.

Joe Cotter

Are the lips separate ID from the face? If I recall correctly I think I had to do separate ID's to keep from getting a glow around the lips. I my case I ended up wanting to do a separate set of settings for them anyways.

Almost forgot, very nice :)

Laticis Imagery

Gedd said:

Are the lips separate ID from the face? If I recall correctly I think I had to do separate ID's to keep from getting a glow around the lips. I my case I ended up wanting to do a separate set of settings for them anyways.

Almost forgot, very nice :)

Thanks Gedd

No, lips are on the same ID but I did mess with there bump and specs settings individually...will need to fix that.

Zilvergrafix

Laticis said:

The revision.

Major Points for improvement: Lips need more work / Bump needs some work / artifacts at the nostrils and tear ducks.

Still not sure whats going on with those artifacts.

Saturation on skin colour is questionable.

looks perfect for me, your works inspire me for doing better renderings, my respects.

Laticis Imagery

zilvergrafix said:

looks perfect for me, your works inspire me for doing better renderings, my respects.

It is nice to know your work can inspire, thank you for the comment :)

Laticis Imagery

Revision 2

Well it looks like couple of artifacts where associated with the Shading Rate...( I think )

Digital Lite Design

Haven't played yet with a "real" character, but I have been having fun with the toon and gummy shaders. :) Shaders on Hair (yes I was going for the glow look on that one), skin and candles. There is a bit of a learning curve, but reading the tips here really helped. :) And AoA has been very helpful with the images and examples.

Age of Armour

Laticis - Looking Great!

JOdel said:

Well, I certainly can't say they don't work. They definitely do something. I guess there was no way to build presets that "just work". Which is a bummer.

I found that changing the ambient to a darker version of the shader color got rid of the black core, but some colors just rendered as a flat white silhouette. I finally just did them all in red (which seemed to work the best overall) and then postworked the hell out of it.

Your end result looks great!

What was the issue with the "black core"? Do you mean they were simply rendering dark gray or something else? If just rendering much darker than expected try setting the scale to small with the preset or manually making it even smaller like 0.2 or 0.1. You might need to increase the SSS shading rate if you do that though.

Another thing for the aliens, if you were rendering all 7 at once. maybe assign a different group ID to each one. That is not required but may make the brightness and saturation a bit stronger in cases when there are multiple objects separated by some distance.

You say some rendered as white silhouettes. Dimension Theory and I were just discussing the other day how Shader Mixer made shaders will sometimes render as very overblown white silhouettes. This happens in some cases after a scene has been saved and reopened or when undo is used right after applying a preset. The cause of this was reported to DAZ and I was under the impression it was fixed in DS 4.6 but I haven't specifically tested for it yet.

If DS4.6 didn't correct this, the fix is easy on the user side though. Simply select the blown out white surfaces and reapply the SSS base shader again. If you use that preset it shouldn't change any of your settings but will just refresh DS's memory as to where the base shader code is located.

Sadly, no normals or displacement maps though. That being said, I’ve never even come across any V4 or V5 textures which use normals either, so I guess those will forever be a distant dream. I did try making my own with a combination of the bump map and the Nvidia plugin for Photoshop, but creating a normal map from a texture always goes south.

What I will sometimes do is load the displacement and bump textures into Photoshop, do a Gaussian or surface blur to the bump to smooth out things like freckles then set the bump to Screen or Overlay and adjust the opacity of the layer till what you see is mostly displacement.

I'll sometimes add another layer and paint any large wrinkles with a soft white brush. That layer I will also make screen or overlay and adjust for intensity. If I need the wrinkles to blend and taper more I will use the smudge tool and go over the beginning and end of each wrinkle. This is what I did for the normal maps in the Callum.

Once everything looks good you can Shift-Ctl-Alt-N then Shift-Ctl-Alt-E to create a new layer and merge visible onto it. I usually run the Photoshop/xNormal-Height to normals filter using AvgRGB, Smooth 0.6, PRE_5x5, Swizzle X+,Y+,Z+ to create the normal map. If that yields a noisy or stair stepped map, I just give it a slight Gaussian blur.

With that said, I'm not sure normal or displacement maps are really needed on young people. Actually simple bump maps may be fine along with some specular noise just to break up the surface a little bit.

Another thing that sometimes works for bump maps that are simply desaturated diffuse maps is to load the bump into photoshop and apply the High Pass filter. This can be useful for creating bump recesses around areas of contrast without actually making freckles and such stand out from the surface.

I hope that helps.

Herald of Fire

Thanks for the tips. I'll definitely try some of those out and see if I can't get some reasonably good normal maps.

vex3d_22560

Laticis said:

Revision 2

Well it looks like couple of artifacts where associated with the Shading Rate...( I think )

What settings are you using for the eyes? The refs are gorgeous... can't tell if its RT or mapped...