OTOY Forums

A bit better lighting.

Looks good Theta! Also thank you for the update Paul.

Loving the shader so far, Sorel!

However I am noticing a few artifacts that I can't seem to get rid of. In the image below, you can see some "scaling" on her cheek and chin that appear to be interpolygon shadows. Lowering the ray epsilon helped a bit, but this was as low as I could go.

Also, the shader seems to react oddly to transparent objects (whether by transparency map or even a material or object set to "Hidden") The shadow on her forehead and temples is caused by the transparent skull cap of the hair.

Any ideas?

How much of a presence in the light calculation of the render do transparent objects have, Paul?

For the scales, check that smoothing is on. I had an issue where it was suddenly turned off for a material.

However I am noticing a few artifacts that I can't seem to get rid of. In the image below, you can see some "scaling" on her cheek and chin that appear to be interpolygon shadows. Lowering the ray epsilon helped a bit, but this was as low as I could go.

Also, the shader seems to react oddly to transparent objects (whether by transparency map or even a material or object set to "Hidden") The shadow on her forehead and temples is caused by the transparent skull cap of the hair.

Any ideas?

How much of a presence in the light calculation of the render do transparent objects have, Paul?

Looks like the skull cap is inside the models head, so is effecting the SSS calculation.

And for her cheek, it looks like smoothing is off.

Paul

Yeah, I checked for smoothing and it was on. (on both materials in the mix)

As for the shadow, I did some testing by expanding the hair to make sure the cap was outside the mesh:
As you can see it seems mere proximity is enough to cause the shadow:
Checking the infochannels seems to imply that AO is the main culprit...

Is there a fake shadows option somewhere like in the Poser Plugin?

ThetaGraphics wrote:Yeah, I checked for smoothing and it was on. (on both materials in the mix)

As for the shadow, I did some testing by expanding the hair to make sure the cap was outside the mesh:

ShaderShadowsCap.png

As you can see it seems mere proximity is enough to cause the shadow:

ShaderShadows2.png

Checking the infochannels seems to imply that AO is the main culprit...

ShaderShadowsAO.png

Some info I can provide. Turning up the subd makes the "facets" go away. I usually render at subd 3+ for the hd morphs. As for the shadows of the skullcap, this is an octane issue, and how transparencies are handled with specular materials. Since it is a double spec material with each material having a different SSS scaling you get the results with skull caps as you can see. Because of this I'm trying to perfect a new setup to work with daz hair. I only ever use this original shader if I am using fiber mesh hair, which is sad, I really like the material setup.

Yep, increasing subd seems to have fixed the facets. Thanks.

Any good recommendations for fiber mesh hair?