Hi there !
I’m new on this forum, though I often read some threads here… First, I want to apologize for the countless mistakes I’ll do when writing in english…:o My english needs to be improved (that’s one of the reasons which led me to post on this forum^^)Appart this, I’m 16 years-old, and still in the highschool. I’ve been interested in CG for a while, and Blending - Blendering ? - for about 3 years. I also use Gimp of course, Inkscape sometimes, Indigo, etc, and I love programming, even though I’m not yet able to code a whole programm in C (still learning^^).
I did some experiments this week, trying to get a realistic skin shader. I was looking for a better way than pure sss, because IM(h)O, the sss renders make the objects look like wax rather than organic tissues - sss blurs the bumps on the meshes when applied too strongly :(. I was wondering how I could achieve a shader which wouldn’t look like rock or even worse, plastic, and neither like wax. The answer is, as you now, to use a kind of multilayered shader, which simulates both epidermis and dermis. Epidermis with a subtle sss effect in order to see the fine shapes on your model, and dermis with a quite strong sss effect which allows to have a soft orange shading which doesn’t look like plastic.
So I built my shader with nodes, combining 3 shaders for the diffusion : 1 : epidermis, 2 : dermis, 3 : back sss - veins/muscles etc for the back lighting, which makes appear red tints on the ears for example. For the specularity, I decided to use 2 layers of speculars : the speculars of the skin look soft and large (I applied them on the epidermis shader), and on another shader, I put quite bright and blueish speculars in order to simulate the reflections on the sweat (maybe it could be more realistic with the new feature of soft reflections in the 2.46 release… To be explored :))
Finally, I came up with quite satisfying results, to my sense. I believe that with some well done textures, it could achieve a great realism, which was what I was looking for
The textures are only procedurals I took from the shader of Carsten on the material repository. Here are some test renders on a simple sphere, Suzanne, and the legendary Stanford dragon, which offers to my sense more interesting and detailed shapes than the default Monkey (sorry Suzanne… :p) :
I also rendered 2 videos, one with a rotating Suzanne with the same textures as above, and one with a hand I did in MakeHuman quickly, without any textures :
- Suzanne
- Hand
I do not deserve any congratulations, since the whole shading model was “inspired” by the fast skin shader of mental ray. In fact, if you take a look at how it is built, you’ll see that I almost copied it entirely But I was judging that someone HAD to do it one time with Blender, since I hadn’t seen that kind of material with blender (except in a Blender magazine issue, if I well remember).
That’s all folks ! Any comments ? I would be pleased if you could help me to improve this shader. If you want to download the Blend file of the material, just check it on the Blender material repository HERE
Have a good day guys