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Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 4:53 pm
by bpzen
Hi all,

I have been playing around with Octane pretty much non stop for a week or so since I got it.

I am having a little difficulty getting skin to look like, well skin. I seem to have this plastic(ey) shine to the skin almost too smooth. I like a slight shine but also like others the bubmpyness of the skin is what really makes it look great.

I have played around with a bunch of texture maps in poser and adjusted the bump power in octane but i cant seem to rid myself of this look.

Is there a link or tutorial on how to get a more realistic skin? Im assuming and have been told to up the power on the Spec=Bump, and tried that moving to 20-.35

thanks

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 7:19 pm
by Witpapier
Have you tried to increase the roughness on the specular or glossy side... Id say, increase the bump to something between .1 and .15 and increase the roughness on the specular... that way that shine effect will get dampened and you will have some texture on the skin.

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 7:43 pm
by KleanZlate
Have you also checked out Witpapiers SSS skin materials?

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=30867

They are a great starting point.

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 8:14 pm
by face_off
The standard skin material conversion should get you a very good result IF you are using quality texturemaps. The quality of the texturemaps (in the Poser material) is more important than the actual Octane skin node setup IMO. There is an advanced skin shader tutorial at http://poserphysics.blogspot.com/2012/1 ... hader.html.

Paul

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:28 pm
by bpzen
Thanks all

I'm using what I believe are quality texture maps, all are fairly new from DAZ or DNA or Rederosity, they all have SSS options (I haven't tried but plan to see how the Oxygen skin shaders look this weekend)

but here comes the dumb question: how or what = a quality skin shader?

I will try those settings for bump and what not

Yes, I have all of the Witpapiers :) downloaded from the forums and love em but still get a little too much plastic look, I am sure its the texture or a few tweeks, im jsut not very good with these shaders yet. I will look at the tutorial tonight.

thanks

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:33 pm
by bpzen
Witpapier I actually changed the bump power value under specular to .3 (is that way too high?) in your opinion?

Roughness is also at .3, suggestions on value, .5 ?

thanks

Re: Skin question

Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:40 pm
by KleanZlate
bpzen wrote:Thanks all

I'm using what I believe are quality texture maps, all are fairly new from DAZ or DNA or Rederosity, they all have SSS options (I haven't tried but plan to see how the Oxygen skin shaders look this weekend)

but here comes the dumb question: how or what = a quality skin shader?

I will try those settings for bump and what not

Yes, I have all of the Witpapiers :) downloaded from the forums and love em but still get a little too much plastic look, I am sure its the texture or a few tweeks, im jsut not very good with these shaders yet. I will look at the tutorial tonight.

thanks
Set film width to 1. It should dampen the plastic look.

Re: Skin question

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 8:11 pm
by Witpapier
Hi There BPZEN, the bump mapping strength is very dependent on the texture you are using, some skin textures require the value to be a bit higher to create the desired effect and some a little less... as far as the plastic kind of look, I recon the REDSPEC material presets could seem a bit on the specular side, as I do like shiney things :) anyways, I am busy rendering a pic with the settings you stated, I also decreased the specular to 0.616. I have studdied the whole sss thing by looking at my very lovely wife's face in different lightning situations also the shiny effect never looks the same from person to person, (since I started rendering I have never looked at people the same way :) ) with my sss the main settings you need to play with is Bump strength, the specular strength and the roughness.mainly tweaking these tend to generate all kinds of results without effecting the actual sss of the skin. I am playing around with other ways of going about the whole thing.. but I tend to get much the same results if not worse.. Im also hoping to update all my REDSPEC materials once the new version of the plugin is out where the bump map strength is also transfered as I intended from the start when importing while maintaing existing imagemaps...

Re: Skin question

Posted: Fri May 10, 2013 8:18 pm
by Witpapier
i recon with KleanSlate's recomendation you can get it as close to non plastic as possible... :)

Re: Skin question

Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 3:15 pm
by bpzen
Thanks again

im playing around with your suggestions and don't get me wrong the shaders you pride are great much better than anything i could have done solo :)

im gona open up the manual too , i don't remember if all these setting and what they do (explanation) are in there? Like what does filmwidth actually do ?

thanks