SSS test

[jasonwestmas]

Originally Posted by judas_romanov

the one thing i have to say that we've all neglected...i tried working on it once but got frustrated with is...veins...if you look at your skin you have bigger blue/green veins...and also tiny purple/red veins....just a thought

The veins in my render are in the color bitmap texture, probably can't see them very well though. If that's what you are wondering about. Thanks for the nodes.

[lw3d23]

Originally Posted by Mercuryrex

Oops..sorry, I see what you mean. I think I meant to answer duke really, but ended up answering you by accident.

It's strange though because Newtek don't really normally make the mistake of making any false promises about the ability of anything that they program,...they usually keep their mouths shut and try to avoid the situation of creating hype about something that doesn't do what they said it would do....

But here on this occasion they went into specifics by saying that Kappa 2 would be good for human skin.

So it does make me wonder if they are not only combining both front and back scattering into one Kappa node, but also are possibly doing a bit more work on improvements to Kappa as well.

I think NT did always say something like "xxx is a powerful tool" in this forum and videos, but there' s a lot of ppl complained about those so-called powerful tools such as ikboost , motionmixer.,etc
if Kappa 2 could really do great sss effects for human skin, usually Chuck will correct our assumptions, Chuck are u there?

[judas_romanov]

i'd actually prefer if they worked on omega...if nothing else for the simple fact that you can specify surface as well as subsurface...although if they added that feature to kappa 2...well that'd be great too

[Werner]

Originally Posted by judas_romanov

i'd actually prefer if they worked on omega...if nothing else for the simple fact that you can specify surface as well as subsurface...although if they added that feature to kappa 2...well that'd be great too

I agree 100%.

[judas_romanov]

so i've been messing with my nodes...man that sounds perverse...ANYWAY

my original node setup had a gradient/incidence going from full black to a 0% alpha (top to bottom respectively)...then plugging the alpha into the amount on my omega shader....i unplugged it..and got this (horrible) outcome....i thought it was interesting...so i though i'd post it here

i've also added an anisotropic node and turn the spot light at a 90 degree angle to the model...but yeah that's not really important
original setup

unplugged gradient

[gerardstrada]

Seeing that accurate SSS models&shaders aren't very viable "per se" to accomplish skin shading for production, I developed several techniques based on multilayered SSS method; most of them was very complex setups, but this is my first simplified attempt for Donner-Jensen's multilayered SSS in Lightwave 3D:



Results are promising, I think (or at least respectable) considering lighting and texturing are quite basic, every layer takes only 25 seconds in my old P4 3Ghz and I haven't used any weightmap, or Omega, or Kappa, or LW 9, or LW 8.5, not even LW 8 (nor MR)
I know there is a lot of (more accurate) ways to do this with the new nodal shading system but I wanted to try this method only with LW 7.5 and Chanlum (by Mlon) to test how powerful this method can be, since this approach should be suitable for a skin shading beyond the SSS model we use (is enough if we can represent just a dipole diffusion approximation to extend it to multipole)
There is no GI, but I'm sure this technique may work fast with indirect lighting too. The good thing about this approach is that almost all parameters relapse in post production and subsequently feedback is interactive. I'm working on diminishing the layers quantity but without affecting the final result as much as I can. Hope to have some time to make more tests in that way.



Gerardo

[jasonwestmas]

Gerardo, definately in the ball park of what we were trying for and much closer than most of our results. Goes to show that the omega and kappa nodes need more of an explaination on how to achieve certain surfaces. I mean if kappa and omega can't even compete with this technique which doesn't even seem to use nodes then what's the point, lol. There are a lot of things up in the air concerning the correct lights and shadows to use and how to apply the air poly's etc. Personally I think there are some problems with the lightwave shadows and light diffusion in how it reacts to the Omega and Kappa surfaces. Shadow maps just don't work well with kappa, that I know, and raytracing is simply incompatable with kappa.

[EyelandArts.com]

Wow, not only is that really good but also a little scary

[erikals]

Impressive!
Gerardo, hope you make one or two texturing DVD's one day. **** cool.

[monovich]

nice research Gerardo. Wish I had the focus you do to explore this stuff, but it's just too heady for me. (no pun intended)

[Thomas M.]

If it can be done with chanlum, shouldn't it then be possible with nodes? For sure from my point of view. Could you explain the general idea?

[Emmanuel]

What do You guys think of Dennis' new FastSkin shader for LW 9 ?

http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins....html#FastSkin

[T-Light]

gerardstrada that's really great stuff, If I get the time soon I might just give chanlum another go (isn't there a new version for 9 out now?).

Emmanuel -

What do You guys think of Dennis' new FastSkin shader for LW 9 ?

I think it's great people are working on shaders for skin with LW's nodes. With this particular shader though I'm getting much more convincing skin with my current nodal setup. Haven't tried combining with other nodes yet though.

ps Thanks for mentioning it

[duke]

Originally Posted by T-Light

gerardstrada that's really great stuff, If I get the time soon I might just give chanlum another go (isn't there a new version for 9 out now?).

Emmanuel -

I think it's great people are working on shaders for skin with LW's nodes. With this particular shader though I'm getting much more convincing skin with my current nodal setup. Haven't tried combining with other nodes yet though.

ps Thanks for mentioning it

I'm not seeing a new version on the site http://members.home.nl/mlon/lw_chanlum/

[jameswillmott]

Rewriting ChanLum into a node, or even a fast skin shader shouldn't be too hard. The site explains basically how it works already. Anyone feel up to it?