Decent skin shader not using SSS

[gringer]

Hi,

I'm not sure about this, but from memory, in MAX 8 there is an 'SSS fast skin' shader for mental ray. I don't know what you've used or tried but I thought I'd just throw it out there in case you hadn't heard of it or seen it before.

I remember my lecturer demostrating it and it rendered pretty quickly and looked decent.

Hope that helps.

Cheers :D

[bitBrain]

I'm working in Maya and I'd like the shader to work under Mental Ray in Maya.

Can't find an SSS shader in the Hypershade and a quick search in the help reveals no goodies.

[Brumugun]

try misss_fast_skin

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=163360&highlight=misss+test

http://accad.osu.edu/~lconnors/AC753/misss_fast_info/misss_fast.htm

cheers. :thumbsup:

[meanlebh]

As far as I know, all versions of mental ray, including mayay, have the sss_fast_skin shader, I use XSI, but I am 99.9% sure that maya has the same shader, anyways, it isn't blazingly fast (certainly slower than your average blinn or phong, but also obviously faster than true sss). It's definitely worth a look, otherwise you would probably be better off just faking it in your image maps and such. Good luck.

-Brian

[gerardo]

Read the threads on sss.

I have this cartoonish character, and he needs a skin shader. Tried the skin shaders on highend3d, but I'm hoping there's a better one out there. Those were all very dull.

This is for a client animation, so I can't afford 5 mins per frame with sss. I was hoping that you guys would know of a decent one that works with Maya/MentalRay. :)


You can avoid a skin shader, you can even avoid a sss shader, but you can't avoid the overall effect.

You can get some kind of cartoon skin shading with gradients based on reference object distance on ambient channel (or luminosity and color / or a diffuse shading node); I use often this technique to fake the radiance effect too (you can see an approach here (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=176195&p=1853072)). It's with Lightwave but must have a way to do it with Maya, I guess. Other way is to use a volumetric light as alpha (isolated per surface through ID Materials), although a volumetric light may be too slow for your project.

You may want to try in post too. Is doable basically with a depth map (which render faster in any app), but is very tricky since you need to mix it with some passes/ buffers. You need also to have very clear how works a basic skin shader and solve the 50% of the effect with lighting to get faster results.

I don't know if this result convince you but render time was only two minutes on my old 3 Ghz P4 (original res was 480x480)

http://www.geocities.com/spinquadlinks/postcartoonskin.txt

No shaders above, just post-processing work. Btw, if Maya has a SSS shader like Chanlum (which is very simple compared with a skin shader and is a lot faster) you can get a cartoon skin shading more easily than these tricks (you could get even realistic skin shading with the proper post work).



Gerardo

[DJSmackMackey]

You could use my hack trick.

http://seanskube.com/TS_SSSFake.htm

For cartoonish stuff it can go a long way. Just fiddle with the ambient and negative incandecense a bit. There are many ways of faking it, especially for non photoreal work, like if you just want to warm the skin color as the light rolls off. Some people also use a ramp shader or surface luminance nodes too.

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