I've been experimenting with the tips found in various posts here and over at RDNA dealing with realistic skin texturing, basically using the skin shader in the material roon, (been all day at it...). And just when i thought I had the best values, I saved the materials, built a scene, clothed my character,and... Da Da!! She glows in the dark!! Obviously it's my fault for doing things the other way round... first setting the skin material,and then setting up the lighting... But, why does this happen?? I thought "skin" didn't mean "lightprobe"! I thought the skin shader would control how the surface REACTED to light, and not how it would cast light!! Pleeeaseee holy gods of realism Face_off, stewer, ynsaen, and the rest (y'know who you are...!) shed some light on my path....! :D

I have been trying to get it to glow (a tiny bit) for four days now without much luck .. I can get it to glow a lot, or the wrong color or a lot of other things but not the way I want it to.

Wanna give a try to my settings? My glow effect was totally unintended, looks natural only if the scene is brightly lit, and that is not my case, so i need to get rid of it, any idea how? what did i do wrong? Here goes a screenshot of the settings at the begining of the scene, looks quite real now, but if you set the lights low, and use dark clothing & hair... no way!! That glow ruins it all!!

I am pretty new to this but I would try to reduce the ambient in the skin node. I have been yelling at P5 for days now since I could do it in a few minutes in P4 but I am having a pain doing it in P5. Thanks for the settings .. I will see if I can use anything. Good luck with reducing the glow.

Does it improve things if you plug your texture in the "SheenColor" node as well ?

Set the Ka parameter of the skin node to 0, that should get rid of the glow. To compensate for that, you may want to increase Kd and/or Ks.

So, in theory, this could be used to make other things glow, not just skin? I must try this out. mac

To make things glow, simply use the ambient_color and ambient_value channels.

That's what I do already, stewer, and it works just fine. But I'm always up for alternatives. Who knows? It might just be something interesting. It's always worth trying anyway. mac

yup the Ka varible is the source of the glow. for some reason CL thought we all have skins that glow in the dark...

Ok, finally got to terms with the dials... Took me a while to understand what each one does. At first I came up with those values, and liked it that way so I left them like that (and that's a terrible mistake). The effect has to be checked under different lighting schemes!! Thanks everyone for your advice... Ghostofmacbeth did you get good results? I don't think this shader is intended to make things glow but... maybe you got something out of it? And stewer, thanks for making things so easy. You are of great help. BTW, my settings at the moment are Ka:0 Kd:1 Ks:1.2 Thickness:0,5 Eta:1.5 But I'm still working on it... Thanks again!! Ike.

I think I finally got it to be the way it should be after over thirty hours of work. Thanks

However, if you have aliens, angels, or elves, this sort of glowiness can be very useful. :) I suppose you could color it to get the sort of phosporesence that dead things have?

Yes sure, haven't checked it but for sure the character can be tinted for that effect.