That and the tooth and eye materials, though I’m not sure if there’s all that much room for improvement on the shading side outside of textures (the materials already look quite a bit better than my old attempts to emulate SSS with ray-length, which shows that real SSS will always be the best solution).
Well, sorry for bumping the thread, but I made some extensive edits to my universal SSS material that gives results that I think are a bit better than before.
Basically, a bunch of edits to better balance energy and improve the effect of falloff, adding a ‘wet’ layer and a second specular layer, ect… I say the result speaks for itself when it comes to what I’m using as an avatar image
And some color-grading to give a more ‘film like’ effect.
And the .blend file for the first image (with the group node in question)
Cycles_SSSTest.blend (1.05 MB)
I will also note that my creature texturing skills aren’t really at the level of the forum experts (still have a ways to go), but the head of my Dragon was one of my first uses of using texture paint on an organic model (clearing seams in the texture after UV’ing it).
I know I keep bouncing this Dragon along in this thread, but I was starting to think the overall SSS shader was starting to get a little too complex and whether I could simplify it a little and get even better results without as much tweaking. I went ahead and removed a parameter or two and simplified the way energy was added (basically simulating a fac. for the add shader node on top of an initial mix).
A direct comparison seems to show more natural contrast within the mouth area now (the previous version seemed almost ‘glowy’ in comparison, I could practically imagine him wanting to eat me now).
Despite what it seems, this project isn’t really a high priority thing right now (other ideas to work on), but it’s a good base to try to perfect the overall shading of common fleshy materials if I am to start making more creatures in Cycles (and what has a larger variety than a Dragon?)
My first tests by now with my fake SSS are practically sad looking in comparison, sometimes you think you have it until you see a proper implementation that shows just how wrong looking it was. O.o
Ace you really should put a consumer protection warning on that Blend file. Without thinking I hit F12 and immediately the fans kicked to high. Now like all of us I’ve had overheating before when rendering but never instantaneously. Jesus I thought I even heard the bathroom vent fan kick in for a couple of seconds. And, yes by hitting F12 I was in the CPU. For openers are you aware you have a subsurf level of six going on here.