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Rough BPR SSS guide and shader download

Thanks a lot Julian for this superb thread :cool:

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sss_Explained_pt2.jpg

B&Wrender.jpg

if you cap the bottom geometry the result will be better :+1:

interesting study. Which one do you think looks best? I feel the sss effect based on real physics would be more subtle. I think third row, third from the right looks best.

you mean if you close any open geometry? yes, exactly, I forgot to mention that. open geometry naturally will show heavy sss around the edges because of otÄs lacking thickness which can throw it all out of balance. highly recommended to close your geo if you plan on sss rendering.
the set of teeth I have there for example is all open on the top and bottom which makes the teeth receive way to much subsurface scattering.

there is no best,right or wrong really. for one, it simply depends on what you want to achieve. the sss can be used for much more than skin actually.
for the other I used a rather heavy base setting here for demonstrative reasons. personally I prefer subtle settings.

Great model and thanks for explaining, bookmarked :+1:

thanks cherub, always welcome :wink:

thanks, great explanation sss settings

Great experimenting, thanks for sharing this stuff :sunglasses: :+1:

That’s really nice of you spending the time making a concise tutorial, really appreciate it.

Oh, thanks for the light setups & materials.

The color of AO could help here. AO seems like fighting SSS, its not the first time I’m in front of this problem.

Thank you for all the explanations, very helpful.

awesome model, btw.

yep any open geometry is problem when you render sss :wink:

yep any open geometry is problem when you render sss

Always :+1:

That’s good
thnx for tutorial ^^

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cheers and thanks everybody who posted :slight_smile:

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lights.jpg

Hey julian, keep the good work here. :+1:
Meanwhile, about multiple lights:

  1. Using the BPR we can’t have colored lights, right?
  2. We can’t use them on matcaps.
  3. We have SSS.

Now I just noticed that if best renderer is enabled, we can have multiple colored lights but no SSS. But now, we can render these colored lights using BPR but again no SSS. A funny UI :wink:

Conclusions so far: Multi-pass rendering is the way to go. Combining them in Ps. For SSS too.
Indeed a rim lighting should be in a different layer so to color it, to play with levels (hard) etc. We may also delete areas of wrong cast shadows geometry. (no raytracing, these are buffered shadows)
The best renderer can produce more accurate cast-shadows (uncheck z-mode on lights properties!).
Here using two colored lights multi-render.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpost.php?p=721683&postcount=112

HI Michalis,

you are correct, no colored lights in BPR. you wouldn’t even need Best Render for colored lights to comp in photoshop. you could render a bright white rim light-only pass in BPR and then color that in photoshop and set the layer to color dodge or linear dodge blend mode.
btw, if you use let’s say a Trishader material and one shader is dedictaed to specular only you can quickly and easily render that specular pass singled out, by turning off the other 2 shaders.

you can sort of use custom lights on matcaps, but it won’t look good in most cases because the static matcap light conflicts with your light.

that lion render looks terrific :slight_smile:

I agree Julian, the lion is rendered exactly this way.
But just for fun, have you checked the colored-lights option in BPR? (best render checked). No sss there. BPR renders wrong castshadows in some cases.