[bograt]

Hello All,

Maxwell render is by far my favourite rendering engine and I have always loved how versatile and accurate it is, especially considering the stacked layer system. I have always found it is capable of achieving the results I am looking for, until now.. maybe...
Basically I want to make a good skin material, Making a soap like sss material is simple but skin is obviously far more complicated than that, The 3 main layers of sss the skin is made up of seems very difficult to achieve using the material editior (version 2.6)
I have tried many ways to recreate the 3 layers (bloody dermal, sub dermal and epidermal) of skin such as:
3 bdsfs weighted to achieve the 3 varying layers,
3 semi transparent layers each with a bsdf,
1 layer with standard sss and 2 with single side
the list goes on....
The real problem is that epidermal and sub dermal layers are very thin so their effect is very limited and only have an effect for less than half a mm, Unless I want to make a wax model I am going to have to come up with a way around this problem.
mental ray has a 3 layer sss system in it which works very nicely but mental ray sucks.
Maxwell has a very nice hair system so unless it was intended for wig product design, there must be a way to produce hyper real skin?
any suggestions are greatly appreciated, or if anyone knows more about how the stacked layer system works with sss materials than is mentioned in the users manual?
Cheers,

btw, I wasn't sure if I posted in the correct section so I posted here also

Jules

[eric nixon]

At the moment there isn't a practical way around the lack of a skin shader, or 'non-homogenous depth sss shader', Perhaps it will be ready for MW3.

The closest thing for now, is a textured-trans sss bsdf + diffuse bsdf, ususally kept in 1 layer, can be 2 layers, but dont make them additive above 100%, that rarely helps with transparent things because of the xtra energy multiplied by internal reflections.

Heres a quick test, just the first render so the material needs tweaking as do the maps, model inc maps is available online.



wire showing emdedded skull geo,

[bograt]

Thanks for the Reply,
Sadly I now know you are right, it is not possible, but what you have presented is a kind of work around,
but it doesn't quite compare to a real multi layer sss system. A more complex and detailed version of the internal skull idea does work in tests I have made, but it is tedious and basically rules out posing.
I look forward to a real option for this!

[eric nixon]

progress not my model or maps of-course. self portrait by lee perry - infinite scan