ZBrushCentral

*SubSurface Scattering - Skin Mat & NEW Triple and Quad shaders from Pix on page 5*

ZBrush Artworks
#61

I finally sat down to see what you were talking about Mahlikus. I can see why you called it a discovery now!.

I started with a “fantasy” skin too get familiar with the method, so I modelled an orcish head and got started.

Im not sure if I got the “SSS”, Im still not 100% sure what that is so I just set out to make a nice texture =P.

Its a little too smooth and perhaps a little slimy…but hey he’s a monster so he can slime as much as he want. When I get some time, I’ll see if I can make a human skin too.

Its a shame we can’t do our own materials!, I’d like to have a material like the DoubleShade but instead be it a TrippleShade!.

Another thing that would be nice…if we could in some way be able to use multiple textures in the shaders, so instead of just using the colorize diffuse and colorize specular, you have a second texture that blends with the original and you control how it blends with a curve, just like the colorize diffuse works.

That way you could have a perhaps slightly more red version of the texture to have it shine through the skin, mostly in the shaded areas (or thats where I would want them, to kick some life into the shadows). Perhaps it would be easier to blend powerful colors this way, since I couldn’t get exactly the colors in shades and highlights I wanted with the colorize diffuse/specular…they seems to become very diluted for some reason…I wanted deep red but got pale magenta. Nonetheless im very happy with how the material turned out.

#62

Great skin! I like it! Model is kickin too.

As for showing everyone what I was talking about…I have found the ultimate solution…

SSS-Skin13.zip

This is a skin around the middle of my experimenting. Go and try where I failed.
Maybe I am not seeing it or maybe its just not possible. Anyway, here it is!

Good luck!

*Another thing, The image above did have a small treatment. The bright areas of the face have a couple hits if the highlighter brush (RBG only @2, big draw size). The terminator, which is the area of transition from light (dayside) to shadow (nightside), was hit with the saturation brush (also RBG only @2, big draw size). To read the logistics about SSS, here is a good idea of how this particular plugin samples normals…basicalhow its done! Thought the points to note are more thhe same pics at the bottom of the page

#63

Hi :slight_smile:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Karasuando wrote:

I’d like to have a material like the DoubleShade but instead be it a TrippleShade!.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Here it is… Click here to download the TriShaders material :slight_smile:

Mahlikus The Black: Your image (above) is significantly better than the one at the beginning of this thread! Care to experiment even further? Try the TriShaders material (above) or the following QuadShaders material :slight_smile:
Click here to download the QuadShaders material.

The TriShaders (three shaders) and QuadShaders (four shaders) are new materials and are not available in any other place, if you venture into this uncharted territory, please post your results :slight_smile:

Hope this helps,
-Pixolator

#64

Now that is awesome Pixolator! I can definitely put these to good use! Thank you so much!! :+1: :+1:

#65

MTB Faints at the sight of Pixolator and his compliments
…
…
…Comes to

OMG PIX!
Thank you sooo much for these materials!
ESPECIALLY the 4shader! Now I can segrigate the SSS properties better. There is one thing I did notice…but give me a few and I will post examples. It has to do with the diffusion curve in direct relation to light placement and how if the curve isnt symmetrical, the material displays a different diffusion when the light is place on the opposite side of the model…I will explain in a bit…meanwhile, I go to conquer SSS in ZB!

Now rubs hands together if I can only get a quad shader with 2 spherical blends and two basicshaders.

OH! or how about a shader that is s1-reflect, s2-spherical, s3-glow, s4-basic

MTB is now feeling faint at the monster mat

Lonnie, go get the bucket quick!!!
lol :wink:

Thanks a ton!

#66

Thanks ALOT Pix!.

I’ll begin playing with these ASAP ;).

:+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:… :+1:

#67

Welcome to the wonderful world of SSS-Skin Triple shader! lol…not really BUT!..This material was 5 minutes into the triple shader and already you can see the terminator is MUCH better. NO POSTWORK!!!

It made me think, tripleshader should work, but to have the same quadshader but have S4 shader a new type of shader…a texture wrap shader with proper mapping abilities (AUV, Spherical). this way I may use S1 trough S3 for the SSS effect and the S4 texture material to interlace a texture onto the shaders. See, the colorize spec and diffusion of the 3 shaders drowns out the texture…if there is a workaround and I am not seeing it…let me know. OH YEAH! Next to the two color preview windows for spec and dif colorize are two other color modifiers. What in the world are these for…how does one use them?

I’m going back in! this is way too much fun!

#68

Sweet material Mahlikus, I think the effects shows better on the last model :+1:.

Here is my go at the Quadshade material:

I will be trying to update the texture and add some more bump to it. Turns out adding bump is harder than it sounds tho…it seems it affects the shaders alot more than I previously thought.

Oh yea btw, you may recognise the model, this is Karsuando. I screwed up with my email info in the profile so I had to make a new user =P…well this is a better name anyways ;).

Well, back to tweaking!.

#69

Both efforts are very intriguing. Worth having a look into it; thanks guys, for showing the way into uncharted materials.

#70

Oh my Karsuando, I think that one is aLOT closer even still.
Mind posting the material?

#71

Wow guys! You all did a great job with these new materials, not only creating them, but implementing them as well! Awesome! :+1: :+1: :+1:

#72

Oh man, I am sooo excited about this one. It almost looks like a chanlum render!
Here is the low down. One light only. No ambient light anywhere save a setting of 30 for the GDI slider. Zmode shadow on light…of course. This concept is directly based on dynamic lighting and besides, everything can look much better with a good zmode shadow setting.
Also, no texture used either.

Two lights (a warm keylight and a cold backlight), a small touch of fog and harder shadows for faster renders =P
Also, I placed some standard ZBrush materials in front. Fastshader, BasicMaterial2, GelShader, and Noise2 just so you can get an Idea of how it compares.

#73

What you are doing here is pretty damn interesting M. Keep it up and let’s see where this takes you :slight_smile:

#74

Cool result Michael!!! Tnx for sharing your experience!!! Well done bro!! I see forward for others result!! :wink: :+1: :+1:

#75

Karasuando, Mike great shaders!

Pixolator thanks a lot for the Triple and Quad shaders. I would love to see what kind of skin material you could do with this shaders.

Well, I desided to give the quad shader a try. And this is what I came up with.

#76

Looking Good Guys :+1:. Im back after a good nights sleep =P.

I think that the thing im doing a little differently in the material is that I let the texture shine through and do alot of the work. This is how the shader looks on the flat skin colored model.


Pretty ugly huh?.

So I’ve used pretty low values on the night and day side diffuse, and to get the colors right I have painted the night/day side colors directly on to the texture of the model aswell. So thats one way of doing it, it may not be as fast and flexible tho.

Thats the idea behind the first version skin shader. I’ll be working on some other versions of shaders aswell, one of them that like yours works on a flat colored surface too.

#77

Hi :slight_smile:
Here is one more (new) material which is composed of one colorizer shader plus 3 standard shaders. This material will allow you to set base color and then define the surface properties.

Click here to download the ColorizerTriShaders material

Here are few recommendations…

  1. Concentrate on material and color: Since you are trying to achieve optimal material+color properties I would suggest that you use a ‘standard’ imported head (male or female) for your experimentations. By using a standard head model, you will be able to concentrate on the material+color properties and not be distracted by modeling.

  2. Using the ColorizerTriShader material: Draw the object in the canvas with a flat base color (such as white or gray without any texture) and use the colorizer shader (1st shader) to modify the base color to a skin color. Using the colorizer’s “Multiply Mode” will allow you to further tweak the base color of the head in order to get variation of the material without having to modify the material itself. (such as for lighter or darker skin variations).

  3. Color variations: In order to achieve ‘realistic’ skin you will need to combine the material properties with color variations of the head (such as applying reddish color to different sections of the face, or colorize the lips).

  4. Document Size: For the experimentation process you may want to use a standard size document (640x480) and activate the AA-Half mode (pressing CTRL+0) to view 320x240 antialiased image.

  5. Render settings: Use BestRender mode with ZMode GI shadows on. Use wide shadow aperture (such as 110) , set the blur radius to maximum and use higher rays count (120-240). While tweaking the material; use the CTRL+R in order to BestRender only the small area under the cursor, when ready, execute a full size BestRender.

If you are interested, I will be glad to also experiment with the above material and post some test renders :slight_smile:

hope this helps,
-Pixolator

Mahlikus The Black: That’s funny :smiley:

#78

Thanks for the info Pix!

Just my two cents worth:

What we are attempting here is to simulate sub-surface scattering since ZB does not truly support such a feature (possible future version feature? HINT HINT)…but we can “fake” it to a certain degree. I agree with Pixolator though about the human head thing…the further you get away from human norm the more difficult it will be to judge your success with this. In my experiences the best success for this is to incorporate not only material options but to integrate texture properties as well. Since skin is not flat…it is composed of thousands of intersecting and overlapping wrinkles and crevasses, bumps, and irregularities, these physical features will affect the the final outcome of a SSS render. So it is a good idea to incorporate a skin texture of some sort into the process. Stay away from strong saturated colors (unless that is what you are after). Do paint in the skin features outlined above and use the RGB bump slider in the material channels. The material will for the most part drive the color values of the skin. Perhaps in the future when Displacement Mapping has come to fruition we can use that to drive the skin characteristics instead of a texture map.

Below are my attempts at a Fake SSS…many things are going on here…I used the Tri-Shader, a skin texture, fog and three light settings, render Adjustments. The key is to understand what you are after so you can more intuitively tweak it to meet the needs of a particular model …not all models will take the settings in the same way. One could tweak these settings for days trying to find the “perfect” faux SSS.

And here’s one using the ColorizeTriShader:

#79

Karasuando/M.G. It would be interesting to see the texture map so we could have an idea of what is modifying the material.

Mentat lovely texturing on the alien head. The litle wrinkles make all the difference. I see that you could not control the urge of ripping it. Very nice shaders.

Pix thanks for the colorizer tri shader and for the suggestions. I would be very interested in seeing what you can do with this material.

One problem that I’m having is that for me creating this material is more art than science since I don’t know much about subsurface scattering and other factors that you need to apply to get believable skin. Do you guys have any links I could visit to learn more about the subject.

Here is my effort with the colorizer-trishader material.

#80

Oh yes of course Rafael, I missed that, sorry…

Since the UVTiles texture won’t make much sense I rendered it out in Flatcolor mode:

Note that this is FLAT Rendered, not Fast.
The levels are pretty even but with HDR they get good contrast.