OTOY Forums

Hello all

I'm trying to achieve subsurface scattering look using octane. I've watched inlifethrilll's tutorial about it but still a little confused.

There are 2 nodes, absorption and scattering but Is it the rgb value we put each node or is it float texture?

I tried this and that and achieved a similar look but I would like to know how it exactly works instead of having to go through trial and errors and happy mistake..

Can anyone explain please?

Go to the LiveDB and download some of the SSS materials there. DAZ skin is actually a good skin material to start, a balance of speed and quality. It is REAL easy to bring Octane to its knees with some of the skin nodes that I have seen, though with often gorgeous results. I learned quite a bit just by dissecting these shaders. Wish I could offer better advice, but the shaders will give you a great foundation to build on, once you understand how they are doing what they are doing...

Check out Roeland's tutorial on the medium node, it's really good.

At the moment you could provide a Greyscale Color, or a RGB color for scattering, emission and absorption in the medium node. Assuming you use greyscale colors, higher values for scattering primarily causes the haze/fog you see. Higher values for absorption causes a darkening, and with the right volume data (coming in Octane 3), you get thick black smoke. Emission is what you might use for fire.

If you use RGB colors, then you'll get wavelength dependent scattering/absorption/emission. Colors of that wavelength will be scattered. Absorption is less intuitive because the color you specify is what will be absorbed in the medium. Emission will just give off that color.

I hope that answers your question

Okay so I feel like I'm going out of my mind.

In principle I get how SSS is suposed to work .. but it doesn't do anything. I tried loading octane shaders of Skin for DAZ and it looks like crap. Looking at the node tree there's no specualr node .. well isn't that required for SSS to work?

Playing around with settings and all I get is the exact same skin look .. it's alright .. but it's hardly amazing. Can some PLEASE make a frickin tutorial on how this is supposed to work in DAZ (And not Maya, Cinema 4D and every other app I don't have). This is so frusttatng becuase it should work and do something .. but changing settings is doing nothing at all. And the octane shaders might as well be wood for all it's adding.