But is it ok, to mix spec with diffuse, then with sss like you did?
You’re right Jose, I’m aware of it. It just happened and was working. There was no need for more specularity.
On recent experiments I added a second different glossy in the end of the noodles.
What’s more weird (in my marble setup) is the use of transl node too, mixed (not add). This makes carving a little more visible.
A marbly SSS setup will eat sculpting details. This is correct, it happens to real marble sculpting all the time. Sculptors carve deeper on marble than on other materials.
I think my tweaking is getting me a bit closer than I was before, moving the diffuse component into one of the SSS groups for instance due to the idea that SSS is basically diffuse with an additional scattering component.
Ace, please don’t take this the wrong way but it needs improvements indeed.
Like better topology, resembling some manner of reptile creature and proper texturing and materials. This looks like a toy dragon carved badly out of stone with two glass eyes and ivory teeth stuck on it. If you really want to use SSS wouldn’t it be better to at least make the dragon material look like actual skin somehow? Of course the SSS effect wouldn’t convince if the shape was not interesting already.
Also the lighting…Red from the top is too much. If it is for dramatic effect, maybe lighting from the side would be better so the silhouette can be outlined better. That is, assuming there is a silhouette with shadows to outline.
I don’t know maybe it’s just me but this dragon begs for a furryball material in my eyes.
I did some edits to the model itself and reworked the bumpmap for the stone, the tricky part in the editing is that I have the face and head already rigged and I need to do some rejiggering in the setup to prevent the pose from completely going awry beyond repair when I go back into object mode. (I managed to solve the first problem which caused the tongue IK to completely mess up after constructive mesh edits but I still have one that gets triggered when faces are deleted).
EDIT: After doing test renders and poking around his head some more, I can say that the edits make the older variant of the model look like a sad puppy in comparison, really trying to get some clear bone structure and ridges, and the skin material now looks more like stone and less like ‘tortilla chips’. In other words, he looks more confident that he will be able to eat you.
I also found the cause of my ‘rigging gone crazy’ issue, turns out that if you have vertex parenting anywhere in the rigging setup, things will fail in a spectacular fashion when you edit the model (which makes me wonder whether the vertex parenting code depends on the index number of the vertexes when then change on edits and the rigging tools then fail to compensate for it). I still know little on how the animation system is supposed to work so I’m not sure if that would be an actual bug.
This is nuts, I spent about two weeks on the materials for this thing already where my basic goal is mixing two different scattering approaches as well as multiple SSS nodes to help neutralize the existing weaknesses in the current SSS shader (lack of bump support and the current simplistic falloff). Hopefully Brecht will be able to make use of the new SSS paper from the Arnold devs. and allow the overall setup to truly become a factor of a diffuse and glossy mix with an scattering component.
It’s things like this that leaves me burned out with Cycles (not so much what it can and can’t do nor the rendertimes, but I continually forget smaller details which can really lengthen the time it takes me to finish something. I figure I need to get the scene about perfect before devoting a few days of rendertime towards it, but my mind seems too flaky to find all of the things that should be done yet before I start the rendering which leads me to over an entire week chasing them).
@Ace dragon, I think you should remove the stone-texture, your dragon still looks like it’s made of tortilla chips, and would probably benefit from a difuse texture more than a bump map. As well, I suspect that’s whats making the SSS not very visible.
Actually, if you feel like this model is getting overwhelming, perhaps take a break from it, and try modeling a real-life lizard, like a Komodo Dragon. Because when you’re modeling that, you are constantly faced with the materials a real-life lizard is made of, making it easier for you to get to the materials you’d want.
@Nikko, nice job, is it me, or is the skin not the only thing using SSS
Shoddy attempt is shoddy.
I did this in the last three hours, and cut about every corner I could, but the logic is as follows:
Use a texture-map to control subsurf scattering, make the tips of the scales use more subsurf than the cavities. Randomise the colours to get a nice texture to it. Mix it with glossy shader. ( too glossy here)
I’m developing quite a collection of these tests, but I realized that there was probably still room for tweaking things and making some more changes, so here is the latest revision.
I think this might be the closest I have yet to convincing SSS materials as the actual scattering looks to be manifesting itself more than in all of the other images. Hopefully I’m getting somewhere here.
Well, I ended up tossing the fake scattering completely now that Brecht has committed major improvements (with the falloff not only physically accurate, but is able to support bumpmaps too), the original purpose of the fake ray-length based solution mixed into the SSS was to work around limitations such as no bumpmap support. Now that the SSS implementation is more or less complete, it was no longer needed.
So after I dumped the original materials setups for ones using the actual, physical SSS with the new builds, after I did tweaks to the lighting and the ground he’s standing on to get better highlights, contrast, and the like. This is the new result which surprised me on the large shading differences from the earlier tests.
Theoretically the old tests wouldn’t looked a little more similar if I did them with the tweaked lighting and new geometry, but it just shows what others meant of real SSS being nearly impossible to fake in Cycles (hence why the recently enhanced implementation is important).
EDIT: Updated the image, the advent of an actual, complete SSS implementation doesn’t mean the end of tweaking apparently.
EDIT2: Updated again, I think this may be the best result yet.
@Ace
It seems that you are really just changing the tongue and gum shaders. Is this correct?
If so, it might help to alter your lighting and camera angle to better represent your work.
I recommend asking the mods to move the progress you’ve made on your dragon to either
the focused critique or WIP sections.
This isn’t meant to become a finished image, the only purpose for this Dragon right now is to try out new scattering materials and techniques for later use in actual projects.
Plus anyone who is doing tests on a creature can post here, so it makes it even less of a WIP thread.
