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this is what I end up with. I only did the torso region. Maybe my absorbtion and scattering colors are wrong.
Looks like you've got the Specular aspect working pretty well. The Glossy seems to leave some room for improvement. The ears are already looking good. Finishing up work soon then heading home to make these image posts. Thanks for letting me see what you got so far.
OK, I have been playing with Rashad's formula, although I have tweaked it a bit (I can't help myself!). Looking pretty good, although it takes longer to clear of noise, and there is a pale edge which I am not sure is totally realistic, although it could mimic the effect of fine hairs. I am almost thinking that a mix of these two mixes might look good! Any and all feedback welcomed.
I think the glossy/specuar actually looks better. Now if only I could figure out why I only get brown skin lol.
PhilW,
This side by side looks good. Your observations are spot on. The pale halo you are seeing is the color of the room itself being reflected off the skin surface due to the introduction of true reflection. To my mind this is indeed realistic, and I've seen several skin approaches that purposefully apply grazing angle parameters and anisotropy attempting to produce results similar to the ones we're looking at now. I remember some years ago you were explaining how in Carrara that specular highlights only react to the light sources, whereas true reflection captures the entire environment. Assuming this same logic holds true in Octane, reflection should capture a more complete view of the environment than specular highlights alone, which should increase overall realism. The anisotropic effect of this approach arises naturally due to the non-uniform reflection pattern and specular pattern driven by the grayscale bump map. This particular Roughness setting of 0.150 also has a magical sort of impact. I dare not confess the number of hours I've spent rendering skin in Octane to discover this little gem, but so far so good.
I should be uploading soon but wanted to drop you a little feedback in the meantime.
I was cleaning some chicken drumsticks several months ago and started to really look closely at the SSS. I held that biots up to the light and decided that raw chicken would be my goal. I realized that if I could make human skin that looks "raw" in the way that darned drumstick appeared, it would most certainly appear realistic, or at least compelling. The bias toward the Specular Material really helps give the skin a raw appearance. Too much Diffuse influence tends to bake and "harden" the skin.
Sorel
It turns out the Gamma needs to be raised on one of the settings. In the Glossy Material, there is a Diffuse. I stated above that 2.2 might have been the correct value but indeed it is 1.4. Remember as well to raise the Power of that Diffuse to 1.6.
Back in a bit.
Ok this is what I get with the changes now. Also I realised that the color selecter has the hue/saturation/brightness values so I corrrected those for the sss settings in the specular. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I can't seem to get the actual skin to look like skin.
My testing involves solving for multiple skin tones under multiple lighting conditions. Below are tests.
1. Indoor Lighting Forefront
2. Indoor Lighting Backlight
3. Outdoor Lighting Forefront
4. Outdoor Light Backlight
5. Indoor Light Medium Shot 1
6. Indoor Light medium Shot 2
7. Close Up 1
8. Close Up 2
9. Close Up 3
10. Hands Close Up
Interesting shader Rashad. I am probably on my 30th iteration of "the skin shader" but I will have to check this out.
Hi Phil. Thank you.
Here are how my settings look. I believe everything is as it should be.
Sorel, are you rendering with the Path Tracing kernel? If you are using the Direct Lighting kernel, you will not get the correct effect from any of these shaders. I haven't checked all your settings.
Try changing your mix amount from 0.9 to 0.1 - I think the way mix is handled through DS is opposite to Carrara.
Great render!!
Sorel,
Here are the corrections I can see you need to make. Specular Material tweaks as follows:
* Reflection Power needs to be raised from 1 to about 3.
* Transmission Gamma needs to be raised from 1 to 2.2. Power needs to be 1 for pale skin, and as high as 5 or 6 for extremely dark skin. The darker skinned guy in my examples has a Transmission Power 4, while the caucasian lady has a Transmission Power of 1.
* As a general rule, all Gamma settings should be raised from 1 to 2.2 unless otherwise specified. 2.2 should be the default. So tehnically you should raise the gamma on the Reflection and all other places. There is one exception I will explain momentarily.
* Roughness needs to be raised from 0 to 0.150
* Your Absorption Color looks good. Your Scattering color in the right hue and saturation but needs to be much brighter, closer to white.
The Glossy Material setting seem to be correct from what I can tell. I suspect that correcting the gamma on the transmission will brighten things up as expected.
Best of luck!!
Really really cute character, Callie is definitely on my wish list, but you've made her even better .... and great renders too!
No suggestions for the renders. My only suggestion would be to move the heel back further on the boots (see attached image). Having worn cowboy boots for over 50 years, I noticed the imbalance right away (made me feet hurt
)
I really like the bluing on the metal!! The stock look great too. It might just be the angle of the render, does does it have a but plate on the stock?
Thank you for the kind words. I see what you mean about the boots and I can see by your avatar that you're an expert
Rashad if you wouldn't mind, can I get a screenshot of your settings for the pale girl. I put in the corrections but I'm back to getting a fleshy grey/brown skin.
Better.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4IpzCJ1fXped1JNSC14T0VsMVU
This is in the original Octane format. Hopefully you can upload this directly into the plug-in. Best of luck. Please report back.
Said I needed to request access to the file, so now just need your approval.
Sorel,
Try the link again. I had to re-upload it a couple of times. Here also is the screen shot of the settings as they appear in Octane.
hmmm still wants me to request access.
Still new to this sharing business. I'll keep trying to make it work. How about this link:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4IpzCJ1fXpeZ0dsTzhwMGJjQ0k&usp=sharing
So this is what I get with your file (this is also exactly what I had after I followed your corrections also). This is also how it shows up in octane standalone.
It looks like the specular to glossy mix ratio is still to high on the specular side. Attached is the image of the settings you posted earlier. I think changing the value circled in yellow (first setting for the mix material) from 0.9 to 0.1 or 0.2 should put you closer to the results you want. I'm not real sure this will work since I haven't used Octane for DS in a looooong time (and it's not installed right now) but I get results very similar to yours if I set the specular mix too high with Carrara.
If I put it at 0.1 or 0.2 everything is white and there is barely any sss visible.
Got it. Look more closely at the Medium Settings. Here I have uploaded swatches of the exact colors you need to input. The dark blue/green is for Absorption and the Light blue/green color is for Scattering. You can load these images as sources to ensure you get the exact colors.
Yep, these are the colors that are loaded in your file and the ones I used, which produced the last image I attached. I didn't change anything except load in the texture maps.
DustRider,
The Mix amount polarity isn't the issue. I suspect it was the Scattering color being the wrong value. Let's see if this tweak solves the problem.