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...I've had similar results with losing all texture maps when applying the HSS (unless the map itself is built with the HSS).
Also have been experiencing 4.5 freezing up in some kind of loop when working in the surfaces tab with HSS/US shaders. When I looked at the setup on my system, for some reason all the Omnifreaker stuff for both 3 Advanced and 4.5 installed to the Programme Files folder. I have been told this is what may be causing the issues I am experiencing however short of uninstalling/reinstalling not sure how to fix this as simply moving it might break paths that have been set up by the installer.
OK folks my two tests have proved to me that either my machine is really borked or US2 is, either way SSS is not working as it should on those two images and in my many tests it works one minute and not the next. Yes I am getting error messgae when it doesn't work and no messgae when it does. But as soon as I change one channel's setting I get the error and SSS isn't working. So I am abandoning it until I get a new PC.
It wouldn't be the first time Omnifreakers shaders have been "broken" by an update to 3Delight, it happened a couple of times with DS3.
I am thinking of going on to PWsurface2 next and see if that is any better.
Which error message do you get?
quotes from http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19526/P120/#324910
Which version of DS are you using - I've not noticed any error messages or signs that Ubersurface 2 isn't working.
DS4.5.1.56 public release
I've upgraded to the beta, but only recently. I don't recall seeing any problems with Uber2 and I use it all the time.
LOL I did say it could be one of two things, thansk for the input. I will put it down to the computer, which doesn't surprise me.
And if you do trust my knowledge, then you don't need any. Honest.
Translucence only works for really thin (preferably one-sided) meshes, either way.
After some more tweaking, I do understand better the relationship between diffuse strength and SSS. If you want really strong SSS but keep most of the diffuse texture details, you need to have lower strength and compensate the reduction in strength with diffuse color values.
For example, rather than doing RGB192 x 0.75 for diffuse, it will work better with RGB255 x 0.55. It does somewhat limit diffuse color adjustments, but I can live with that. You can see the difference between the shots below. Except for the SSS strength, lit and darker areas are about the same. And I finally have transluscent ears (not shown here).
This looks interesting: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/16324/start
It's included with the latest release of DS4.6, out today: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/22156/
You beat me to it Scott....very interesting indeed.
Age of Armour is KING. The Ambient Bleed alone is a super sweet feature to have, and the procedural noise in the specular channel is a great addition (I usually keep a set of pre-generated noise bitmaps at various resolutions around for sticking in spec channels when the bump does not give enough variation, but the procedural implementation is sooooooo much more flexible). The ability to limit ray depth for reflected SSS is also super cool.
The only thing this seems to be missing, judging by the manual, is the Fresnel attenuation for specular, but you can't blame him for that since Fresnel is one weeeeeird brick in the ShaderMixer. And maybe there is a way to load the shader back into the SM and stick the Fresnel in manually... gotta try it out when the heatwave here subsides somewhat.
Are you folks using AoA's other shaders? The free ones, at least?
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/skin-textures.html - you can actually load any texture set you want into this shader, it's pretty sweet (it uses fake scatter, but hey there's nothing wrong with fake scatter if it looks good! I have an old test render with the shader and one of the free V4 texture sets on my computer, I'll show it ASAP)
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/daz-studio-cloth-shaders.html
I also wish he'd be doing more models because they are awesome, but that's offtopic =D
Good news. I haven't had a chance to even install it yet as I am having dl [roblem like many others. :( Thanks for reporting Mustakettu85. I did a have a quick peek at the SSS settings in the pdf and got excited. :)
I like your results but please forgive me, I am having some trouble understanding what you did?
"you need to have lower (?) strength and compensate the reduction in (?) strength with diffuse color values."
"RGB192 x 0.75 for diffuse, it will work better with RGB255 x 0.55."
screen grab please?
Type 0 Negative, here are my "crazy" settings for UE2:
Environment mode: Occlusion with soft shadows
Occlusion colour: (16,17,19)
Occlusion samples: 192 (if your version of UE2 won't go as high, double-click the parameter name and change its limits in the window that pops up)
Shading rate: 6
Max error: 0.4
Maximum trace distance: 20
Used here: http://mustakettu85.deviantart.com/art/Rogue-a-la-Mode-257293590
And here's that old render with AoA's free skin shader (link, again: http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/skin-textures.html ) and Deadly Beauty textures (that was a Halloween freebie on some site, IIRC).
So we now have a bunch of different shaders that support SSS. UberSurface(HumanSurface), UberSurface 2, pwSurface 2 and DAZ/Age of Armor Subsurface shader.
How do these shaders compare? What are the differences?
I made a mistake there, should be 0.56. In practice, I chose 0.55 to add some margin for energy conservation. Basically, those two values (diffuse color 192,192,192 at 75% strength and 255,255,255 at 57% strength) will give the same diffuse (color 144, 144,144 at 100% strength). However, since SSS is tied to diffuse strength, you will end up with more visible SSS. The lower your diffuse strength, the more visible SSS will be. I believe this applies to both HSS and US (and US2).
For scale, I believe it's the typical DS scale (centimeters). I've gotten very good results with 0.75, which is what I used for the last shot.
I'll give it a try after I've finished downloading it.
I love the idea of procedural bump - it's nice to have another way of adding bumps, since artist and apps have different ideas of how bumpy skin is.
From the readme, PreSSS quite possibly works the same way as HSS and US. PostSSS is different and I believe work more nicely with darker skin characters. You generally have to adjust SSS strength(s) manually with the preSSS method. So you technically can apply the same postSSS preset to light/dark skin characters.
Not to crazy about the opacity settings. I also saw no mention how fresnel and specular relate to each other. HSS don't respect fresnel values, while US do (when calculating specular). I wonder what's the usefulness of using max ray depth with SSS? If an object have SSS, the reflections should also show SSS. The readme hinted this as an optimization for indirect lighting.
Some concerns though - from the readme.
Procedural specular noise and bump may not properly move along with rigged or morphing objects throughout animations.
In rare cases, where an object is only partially visible to the camera, the areas not directly visible to the camera may not show the subsurface scattering effects in reflections or refractions. This is simply due to the way many renderers optimize geometry for better memory use, only calculating geometry that is visible to the camera during any given render pass.
Dimension Theory also has his "Interjection - Surface Injections" shader pack. The presets give pretty good results out of the box when the lighting is right.
UberSurface/HSS and pwSurface2 are similar in that their SSS controls are sort of basic: you can only specify a single colour for your scatter, and only control the overall strength of the effect.
Docs: http://www.poseworks.com/shaders/pwsurface2/pages/sss.html
Moreover, UberSurface can theoretically take maps in the colour control, but in practice this feature is broken (try this and see for yourself!)
I have pwSurface2, but I haven't researched it indepth yet (mainly got it for the surface-based IDL). If it takes colour maps well, then it's better =)
As you definitely need Fresnel attenuation for specular when you're aiming for realistic non-metals, these shaders aren't also that nice because they only attenuate _Reflection_ through Fresnel and NOT specular.
UberSurface2 does good SSS with finer control: you can specify separate colours and strengths (not sure if the strengths are in millimeters as they should be, but there are several good presets for various cases) for scatter and absorption. It is also the ONLY prebuilt shader on the market right now that does Fresnel attenuation of specular. It also has a second layer which can be helpful if you want to overlay makeup (otherwise the SSS will change its colours, crispness etc)
Docs: http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberSurface2#Subsurface_Scattering
AoA Subsurface Shader uses the Shader Mixer subsurface brick which is my favourite implementation actually and the most flexible currently available for DS, comes with the most presets too. Likely to be the fastest as well, since the brick apparently draws on the 3Delight internal algorithms (impossible to say for sure, but it looks to be the case). Basically, you could harness the same SSS algorithm for your own Smixer shaders (and I'm soon going to tell everyone how LOL), but there is much, much more to AoA's shader than just the SSS brick. The downside is that out of the box, there appears to be no Fresnel attenuation for specular either. I'm going to test it right now...
Summing up: if you're limited to the free choices, definitely go with AoA's shader. If you want to buy something solely for the SSS schtick, go with US2 which also has a bonus Fresnel for specular (indispensable IMO, but YMMV...) - and even then, you might still find AoA's shader quite useful...
Alright folks, tested the shader with the Jeremy Sample maps... Cool =)
How-to: load your MAT pose, then hold Ctrl and apply the Subsurface Shader base... then start adjusting =) It picks up the exact parameter values for compatible nodes, but does not do the conversion of glossiness between omnifreaker's shaders and the default "DAZ Material" (neither this is expected, actually, but worth noting that AoA's shader uses a glossiness distribution much closer to the default one than to omnifreaker's - so, if you apply the AoA SSS over an US/HSS based material, up the glossiness!)
It also loads for me with Reflection Strength at 100%... be aware of that.
If you want the lightset I've used, it's here: http://www.sharecg.com/v/69281/view/21/DAZ-Studio/Mk85-Basic-Lightset-for-DS4.6+ - nothing fancy, uses the Park map for the UE.
Here are my test renders and a long screenshot of parameters used for the skin surfaces (the same for all the surfaces marked with the shakey purple line =D). Some of the parameters are the same as default or picked up from the Jeremy MAT pose, like the spec colour, some are changed. I also ditched the spec maps that came with the MAT pose - procedural specular noise rocks! =)
The sclera also uses AoA SSS shader, here are the parameters that differ from the skin setup:
- PreSSS mode
- Glossiness 80%
- Specular colour pure white (255,255,255)
- Specular Noise strength 5%
- Specular Strength 75%
- Group ID 3
- SSS Material: Skim milk (it will set all the scatter parameters once you click it)
And yeah, AoA's shader is fully importable back into Shader Mixer, so putting Fresnel attenuation in for specular is possible.
Thank you Sincerely for all your work!
Why do you call them "crazy"?
I'm using them now, but I did a few tests and turned the Occlusion Strength down to 10.0% with Occlusion Samples at 24
may just be a personal taste thing?
Mustakettu85, do you have pwSurface2 installed?
If so and your interested in what I'm doing here, I'll get this skin material setting to you.
You might be able to tweak it up better.
I'm using some strength images I painted, and I've reapplied the diffuse textures to other areas of the surfaces, added them to Translucense Color and to Subsurface Color. I have not figured out how to remove the strength images I painted to get similar results.
If the strength images I painted can be removed it would make appling these settings easer, one would be able to apply them to any figure with one click and with out having to manually insert images.
These are rendering in five minutes with a quad core, the image at top is as natural human looking as I can get, the image at bottom I increased the saturation color on the Translucense and the Subsurface to better show the effect.
I returned to (edit) this post. Image at the very bottom is as best as I can do with removing all the strength images I painted and the reapplied the diffuse textures.
If anyone at all wants to have a look at this stuff I could put it up on shareCG
two more images,
image at top, I changed the Translucense color to blue just to show what it is doing
image at bottom, I changes the Subsurface color to blue just to show what it is doing
Translucense is working for me, understanding the relation between Translucense and SSS is going over my head.
I think there's very little visible transluency in the skin. The easiest to spot is the ears - I generally expect the shadowy areas to be more 'light' rather than the pure dark it is right now. Other areas I generally look at are the nose and the lips.
You might want to tweak the shadow for the lights. Just look at the shadows from the eyebrows on the eyes. There's a noticeable gap which shouldn't be there.
I'd say these darker shadows are expected since there is no strong backlighting and no indirect light, both of which contribute a lot to the "in-lighting" of the fleshy folds of the ear. Dark shadows happen inside real human ears all the time IRL as well, when the lighting does not scatter and interreflect well - I'm sitting in one of those rooms now, it's very similar to this one: http://intermark-ltd.com/pics/office.jpg - big and lit exclusively from the ceiling down with these gas lamps. The people around me don't want to have their ears photographed, though =D
In media-type situations, "shadowed" ears usually happen on the side which is not "directly" lit - look at the man on the left. The man on the right has more light behind his head (check out the collar), so his ear is more translucent.
http://s.cdn.acunn.com/upload/haber/muhtesem-400-293_61673369750ee6dd97efed.jpg (these are guys from that Turkish Muhteşem Yüzyıl show)
Besides, those test renders were using the postSSS diffuse multiplication which kinda muffles the scatter down - I'd say it looks more natural for male skin, 30s onwards (the Jeremy maps seem to be based on photographs of a male of that age), which tends to be less translucent generally than that of females and kids.
Let's compare the postSSS diffuse option with the preSSS mode (Image 1): I literally changed just that one setting and the eyelash transparency map (to the one that comes with ARTCollab's Jess character), and I'd say it affects the perceived gender and age very noticeably.
Then, let's move on to the effects of the IDL...
To make them more pronounced, I added a distorted sphere primitive to the scene to enclose the figure and the camera (shadow casting turned off for the sphere) and upped the raytrace distance to 100. We can see how the IDL looks on the AoA shader with SSS turned off (and diffuse strength upped to 100%) - Image 2
Then let's add SSS back (I only added it on the head to minimise memory requirements, and changed the diffuse colour on the other surfaces) and dial diffuse strength back down to 80%. You can see how the ear looks more soft now. (Image 3)
Either way, US2 with its Backscatter Boost handles the ears better in backlit situations, but I like AoA's shader just fine.
And thanks for noticing the eyelash shadow problem! I don't generally render closeups, so prefer to keep shadow bias at 0.2 so as to avoid self-shadowing. Setting it to 0.1 fixes the gap.
Human skin when viewed under low light shouldn't be that dark.
Below you'll see my setup under similar conditions as your third render. They are not using area lights and I've turned down UE2 strength to 25%. For the second one (the top one), I dialled UE2 strength down to 5% and upped the spotlight to compensate. I think this one is closer to yours.
Although the ears do have shadows, it's nowhere near as dark as yours. You can also see the shadows on the left side of the face are not as dark as well.
wowie your getting some neat things to happen,
Mustakettu85 thanks for your interest give me a few more days, I get busy durning the week, but on the weekend, hopefully sometime Sat. I can get something on sharecg. Since my work is piliminary, I think after youve downloaded it, I'll remove it from sharecg
wowie if you use pwsurface your welcome to have a look too, I think were the only ones left in the thread?