Max, your Terminator-concept is really cool. Hope to see a complete T-800 in the future
3DTrialpractice, an albedo-texture is a specular-free texture containing only the color-informations. The albedo-layer contains only this texture and has nothing else activated (no specs, no SSS, no translucense etc.)
Here is another setup, played again with the settings and maps:
It is real volume SSS, has ca. 10 hrs at SL 13.39 now, ah, and was gone through Neat-Image to remove the rest of the noise.
But I have to say, compared with what is currently possible with Mental Ray (look at the makings of the Benjamin-Button film
), this is only like toy-playing.
I am afraid that also in V2, it is still
not possible to create a
real life-looking human skin. Human skin behaves different compared to all other materials that can more or less easily simulated with apps like maxwell, Vray etc., that are primarily used to architectural purposes. Because skin has a non-uniform tissue-structure and has furthermore solid structures (Bones) underneath in reality, it is in my oppinion necessary to have a special programmed shader to calculate these special light-behaviors correctly within an even multilayered material applied on a simple polygon-figure-bubble (meaning that usually you don't really model all the structures, thicknesses, bones, well, except Max with the T-800
).
So I would really like to beg the NL-Team
for a special human-skin-shader to really use the enormous potential of Maxwell also for organical projects.
Please,
Please.......
Just to explain what I mean with a special programmed skin shader:
Currently, I have 3 possibilitys to combine material-components in Maxwell V2:
1. I do all with weight-maps inside one layer,
2. I use the new V2-layer-concept and can
a) weighten 'normally' and b), weighten by 'add' - calculations.
None of these provides the right algorythms to calculate the different components for
real looking skin (albedo, deep tissue SSS (red), epidermal-surface (desaturated, yellowish-green), gloss and specs) correctly together that the result look
life-alike.
Also if you look at the rare background-infos of the former creator ('Zap') of the MR-Skin-shader, there is a lot more to calculate than simply blend or screen layers.
Simply try to combine the above listed maps (albedo, SSS-result, epidermal, Glow and specs) within the layer-system of photoshop, try every combination that photoshop can calculate, you will fail. None of these calculations leeds to the right result.
So, whatever we try currently, it's frustrating to know that Maxwell (and Vray) could do
it principally, but we always fail because we don't have the right calculation-options.
So, an easy to use skin-shader-material would be urgently needed, where I can simply put in my maps in an albedo-layer, a deep SSS-layer, a surface-epidermal-layer, an overall-glow and finally a specular-layer, set simply the desired thickness of each tissue-layer and the shader does the
correct calculations of each layer to produce a real looking skin.
but i'll pack that up and send to you next week or if i manage to sneak back in... (don't tell my wife i said that)
- By Andreas Hopf