Top Coat Weight, Color, Roughness use on skin surfaces

magog_a4eb71ab

I was wondering in what situations these settings are used on skin surfaces. There's a skin I'm using on a character that lacks the SSS Reflectance Tint setting and I have applied

Top Coat Weight 0.5, Top Coat Color 1.00 0.98 0.93, Top Coat Color Effect "Scatter & Transmit", Top Coat Roughness 0.8(with Glossy Roughness 0.45), Top Coat Layering Mode "Reflectivity", Reflectivity 0.5. Does this make sense? When I spot render the comparisons, it seems to look good.

However, this particular skin does have Transmitted Color 0.95 0.25 0.055, SSS Mode "Chromatic", and SSS Color 0.95 0.45 0.55, which I'm not very familiar with when it comes to making adjustments.

3Diva

If it looks good in the render that's what matters. :) I'm of the camp that whatever you want to do with your art and if it gets the look you're desiring, there's no "wrong way". As long as the render looks good and it doesn't hurt anything, use whatever settings you like. :)

One of the fun things about working with Iray settings is that you can just fiddle with it and do experiments with different settings until you get a look that you like. 

AllenArt

If it looks good to you you're all the way there. "Fake it till ya make it" - that's what I do. LOL

Laurie

JonnyRay

If your goal is to make your current render look the way you want, Diva and Allen are 100% correct. Who cares what the "right" settings are as long as you're getting the results you wanted!

If, however, you're trying to setup surface settings that you will use again and again, top coat should rarely apply to a skin under normal circumstances. Because of how it fits into Iray material processing, Top Coat has a way of affecting everything else and can be very hard to balance with the other settings in the Iray Uber shader.

I highly recommend @V3Digitime's Skin Shading Essentials tutorial if you want to learn about the various settings that are most useful for human skin. Or better yet the Skin Shading Bundle which includes her Ultimate Iray Skin Manager. The Skin Manager is a great timesaver and ensures consistent settings across all the skin surfaces.

magog_a4eb71ab

JonnyRay said:

If your goal is to make your current render look the way you want, Diva and Allen are 100% correct. Who cares what the "right" settings are as long as you're getting the results you wanted!

If, however, you're trying to setup surface settings that you will use again and again, top coat should rarely apply to a skin under normal circumstances. Because of how it fits into Iray material processing, Top Coat has a way of affecting everything else and can be very hard to balance with the other settings in the Iray Uber shader.

I highly recommend @V3Digitime's Skin Shading Essentials tutorial if you want to learn about the various settings that are most useful for human skin. Or better yet the Skin Shading Bundle which includes her Ultimate Iray Skin Manager. The Skin Manager is a great timesaver and ensures consistent settings across all the skin surfaces.

Yeah, I found that out when I switched over from Reflectivity to Weighted, despite setting the Top Coat Weight down to 0.07. I did a "fast" 45-min spot render to 100% of the character, so I removed most of the stuff out of the scene and re-posed the character to cover up the naughty bits.

I'm using Aiko 8's base skin set at 0.55 translucency weight and Translucency Color at 1.00 0.70 0.74 with the Top Coat Weight 0.07, Top Coat Color 1.00 0.98 0.93, " Color Effect "Scatter & Transmit", " Roughness 0.80, " Layering Mode "Weighted". I also found that when I tried to match the Top Coat Roughness with the Glossy Roughness of 0.45, it was comparable to increasing the Base Bump and lowering the Glossy Roughness. If you have good eyes, you might be able to make out the sparse hair on the character's left forearm that is covering the breasts. The only lighting I used was Environment set at 1.5 and the camera headlamp at 1.0 with DoF "ON". If I get time tomorrow I'll do a full render at a higher res.

Top Coat is something I wanted to start playing around with more after using it to make wet skin(which didn't turn out so well) a while back. The Fresnel setting seemed to make the skin either way too dark or throws the color off.

Mod edit   :- Image removed due to nudity