Skin Shaders

Antaus

What is a skin shader and how do you use them? I'm still kinda new at learning all this technical stuff. I'd like for some of my renders to come out better but I'm a little clueless here.

maatauset

Hi Black Adam

There are several informative threads in the forum for beginners.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19756/
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/10835/
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/327/
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/318/

mark128

Black Adam said:

What is a skin shader and how do you use them? I'm still kinda new at learning all this technical stuff. I'd like for some of my renders to come out better but I'm a little clueless here.

A shader is a bit of software that models how light interacts with a surface.

DAZ supports a lot of different shaders, and most of them can be used with skin. The most common ones you will find:

The DAZ Standard shader - This shader is used with a lot sufaces, including skin. This is a simple shader. It is used on a lot of the older DAZ characters and is still used by a lot of the characters available from 3rd party sources.

The Human Surface Shader - Sometimes called the Elite Human Surface Shader, but it is not Elite anymore. When this shader was first introduced it was sold separately or as part of some products. Now it comes for free with DAZ Studio. This shader supports subsurface scattering, which attempts to model how light penetrates skin and scatters off of subsurface layers. A lot of the V4/M4 Elite skin textures use this shader, but newer products usually use UberSurface.

The UberSurface shader - This is a upgraded version of the Human Surface Shader. It also is part of the standard content that comes with DAZ Studio. Many of the recent DAZ characters use this shader, like for example the default V5 Bree skin.

The SubSurface Shader Base - This is a very new shader. It is not currently part of the standard content that comes with DAZ Studio, but it is currently free. I don't know of any characters that use this shader, but there may be some coming in the future.

There also are other shaders which are not free you will hear people talking about:

UberSurface 2 - This is an enhanced version of UberSurface that has a more complex model of subsurface scattering, specular lighting and other effects. Since it is not free, no characters come with skin textures that using this shader.

pwSurface2 - This is another shader that is not free that can model subsurface scattering, which you hear less discussion about.

If you want to improve your render quality, the place to start is improving your lighting. Only after you have a pretty good handle on lighting, would I start looking into skin shaders. You can vastly improve your renders with better lighting.