Well, I´ve read the 40 pages already and still can´t solve the alpha thingy, (already check that option in the render globlas “custom entity”). It´s the last thing I need to solve and I´m done, sss working great.
By the way, very thankfull to all the feedback and the great tuts around. You guys are the best. cheers!
If really nothing helps you can pass the misss through a standard maya Surface Shader by plugging the misss shader into ‘Out Color’. Of course you will have to replug the lightmap shader into the Surface Shader’s shading group.
I got it. I found out that if you uncheck the “Export with Shading Engine” from the “Custom Shader” section in the “miss_fast_skin” shader group, you get the alpha back. So I´ll stick to that work around unless I need that option cheked (which it´s meant to improve the interact with the bump maps - if I got it right - even if the bump doesnt seem to change at all checking or unchecking that option in my test renders).
If I need to check this in the future I´ll try to connect the fast_skin to a standard shading group as you said floze. thanx for the tip.
likuidSnake: cool, glad you figured that out! another workaround would be to make the alpha or mask in a different render pass.
did some subtle tweaks to da monkey – got a little less stingy with the sss - tweaked the eyes. did that trick i talked about with mid sss – used mixColors to mix in another color map into that layer. cheers
Hi All,
Thanks to everybody that has added to this thread. It has been a great help.
i am just struggling with one thing. I have a human (looks great with the sss shader applied)
and I want a light to shine a hole into his chest. Like an x-ray light. So that his organs are shown. The thing is I don’t know how to implement transparency with this shader. Now that it occupies the material shader in the shading group, it overrides my maya shading network. Can anybody help?
Thanks
I was wondering if anybody has had a problem rendering a scene with a a lense less than 20mm? The past couple of days I wasn’t able to render a shot out and I just recently found out that my shot wouldn’t render with a 17mm lense so i increased it to 20 and now it renders fine. So, just in case, here’s another workaround to add to the books.
Los
I figured it out. (With the help of Floze’s helpful comments above) Hooked the sss shader up to surface shader sg (and the light map to the sg too) and the hooked the light intensity to the ‘overall color’ value in the sss shader and finally had to apply the inverse of that to the surface shaders out transparency value. Works a treat. take a look:
First off, thanks to everyone who’s contributed in this thread! This has been a great starting point for learning the basics of SSS and MR shaders.
I saw some people discuss adding reflectivity in their skin, which is what I would also like to add. Is my best option using the miss_fast_skin material rather than the miss_fast_simple? Or I’m assuming there must be a way to plug a miss_skin_specular in somehow? Thanks for any help guys.
-Jared
Very cool Fathom!
I like it…I may bother you a little later if I have any questions after I give that a try. Are the rib cage, and organ shaders the xray shader with falloff produced by a sampler/ramp combo?
Thanks
DD
I’ve been following this thread and only recently downloaded the script just to see if its as good as everyone reckons. I applied it to my character as I wanted a bit more ‘richness’ to the skin. Heres the results:
normal phong - rampler info plugged into the ambient paramter and a tiny bit of spec - quite happy with this to begin with
this is her with the MISSS shader. Mapped my texture into the diffuse colour param, crunked up the diffuse value from a default 0.3 to 0.8 and tweaked the colour value to a more skin tone. Epidermal, Subdermal n wotnot left as are or tweaked slightly. bumps a bit high in places I know but I’m really chuffed with the difference 
Hi guys,
Has anyone figured out a way to remove the specular aspect of the shader when using MISSS yet?
I’ve been following up on the threads but I couldn’t find a workaround or solution. I’ve tried turning down the spec color to black, pumping up the shininess to 999 like Stahlberg said, but i’m still getting the same specular look. There’s not even a change in specular shinniness when i change the values…There must be something I’m doing wrong.
Any suggestions are so totally appreciated 
Regards,
Marlboro
Marlboro-Man: What shader are you using? What’s always worked for me is making sure I zero out the Primary, Secondary and Reflect Weights as well as their Edge Weights. Although, this is with the fast_skin shader, not the fast_simple.
I think I remeber Stahlberg suggesting to someone to switch from the the fast_simple to the fast_skin, when they were having the same specularity problem. Can’t remember who, but they said it worked. fast_skin just has an extra subsurface layer and more specularity control, but you could zero out any ones you don’t want.
nix21 - Ah, that’s the same problem I was trying to figure out (regarding getting the spec to work). I was going to end up changing the simple’s over to skin’s and just get the extra spec and reflective attributes because I couldn’t see anything else that looked different.
edit: Ok I switched everything over to the misss_fast_skin. Initially it acts almost the same, but I noticed to get the equivelent to where I was with the fast_simple, I had to have a much lower diffuse weight. After just an hour of tweaking my reflectivity it looks so much better. I don’t even have any spec values currently. It’s crazy how much this adds to the skin.
Hi everyone,
Could anyone tell me why I’m getting back scatter through the mouth of my model? Obviously it because I have the back of the lips and gums modeled in…but why would that cause it to illuminate and is there any fix?? I’m using misss_fast_skin.
Any other general crits on my shader are also welcome…thanks!!
maybe u have to turn on shadows or something so the light doesn’t shoot across to unwanted sides of the model, or maybe u can paint an alpha map to cause the mouth to have almost zero ( or very low SSS effects ).
Btw, what did you do to get his whole head black and just have the SSS effect coming through the thinner parts of the model? Did you just put the diffuse color to black or something?
Marlboro
thanks Marlboro-Man,
Turning on shadows for all my lights fixed it right up… as for making the head black, I simply turned all weights to 0.0, expect for back scatter and specular.
Oh cool… thanks man.
By the way, has anyone successfully used MR render passes with the MISSS shader in the scene?
I’ve been trying to render my creature’s passes out with the SSS on. Mainly, what I’m trying to do is get a PASS with just the color and diffuse channels showing. Preferably I do not want to have any sorta shading happening here.
But everytime i batch render passes, it comes out all the same, with spec and color, diffuse all in one image. I’m at the verge of going bald here, pulling my hair out…
Marlboro:argh:
Marlboro-Man - The SSS seems to definately affect the different passes and channels. My alpha, for instance, seems to be based off diffusion rather than transparancy. Maybe you can use the “use background” shader in particular attributes you don’t want rendered somehow :shrug: I’ll fool around with it a bit in lab
Anyone else have a high scale? My character is roughly 35 units tall and I noticed that I’ve had to go from a default scale of 1 to 16. It seems rather extreme compared to the default, but it’s giving me better results.
Thanks for confirming that with me FrizzleFry.
I just want to check one more thing.
I’ve just switched my shader to the Fast-Skin shader from the Fast-Simple shader.
SUddenly, my object doesn’t pick up on shadows anymore. Self shadows seem to have just disappeared from my Ray Traced shadow directional light. Hmmm so strange indeed. I seem to be getting better SSS effects with the Fast-Simple, but the problem is I have no way of getting rid of the specular aspect within the render.
THe fast-skin on the other hand…lets me take away the spec by turning the spec color to black… but the SSS results are not as nice ( using the same settings as the Fast-simple ).
Can somone point me in the right direction?
Regards,
Marlboro.