What is subsurface scattering? For those who arent familiar with the term, it is the simulation of light once it has penetrated a surface and been dispersed, or scattered from within. This translucent effect is what gives candle wax the characteristic softness The effect is different to that of transparency, a different phenomenon, where light passes through a surface and leaves on the far side, often with its angle changed due to refraction (think glass of water), or even with some of color filtering (think glass of cordial). for this effect you need: [specular: white- lighting shader-phong] [diffuse color: white] [translucence _color- yellow -image shader map -grey scale] 2 lights, one behind without shadow 100%, one front with shadow 60% and the effect as in image above. as you see this shader create a beautiful wax effect, if you move with your light it will alife so not just a candle textures but a real wax in 3D. Have fun as I have Cath

here are the settings for the grey maps

Great. Now to try it on skin....

here I used color translucene maps

and the final effect with 2 colors

your very own egg :P look good the settings

Excellent! Thank you so much for sharing this. That red candle really shows the effect superbly.

egg with the light behind + one front. I used just the ball prop

Thanks moochie, I think the color maps show the translucence on the best in the wax.

Not perfect but close. I didn't use enough blue in my translucency color map. Also, my painting as a whole could've been more accurate to better simulate the translucent effect. Slight level adjustment in 'shop to help with the letters vs. image quality. This has been a very interesting series of threads.

.

.

Thanks, Mec4D. Experimenting with translucence with human skin after reading your stuff I noticed you can 'improve' some renders simply by adding a little (so far I like between about 0.1 and 0.3) translucence and fiddling with the color a bit depending on the texture used. Very handy stuff. Thanks for the tip.

.

Hey...kewl stuff. Nice thread. Marking.. :-)

Still fiddling around myself...gotta fix my colormap or it's never gonna look quite right though.

(bookmarkythingy)

...

...probably an obvious thing, but I just noticed that if you decrease the diffuse value by about the same amount that you make the translucence it helps knock out what can be a kinda harsh 'glow' otherwise (for human skin) depending on your lighting, e.g. with translucence of 0.2 and diffuse value lowered to 0.8 (so that the two added together is equal or fairly close to 1.0).

Teyon try to remove the diffuse, you use already a image color map maybe it will works better for you. Tunesy : translucence effect is great for the body part and for special effects, to avoid the glowing effect I will use the Alternative Diffuse here for human character, if you work with Aliens it is great to get the waxy effects as well :)

...cool. I be watchin. This is fun stuff. Thanks again for the info, Mec )

An image map! Of course. Why the hell didn't I think of that. Here all this time, I've been trying to find a pure node combination to achieve the effect. Thank you, Cath!Now, I'm off to see if I can up with the image I had in mind.

Hi chinchbug, sometimes the simple things are the best! you need image map for this effect in poser, we don't have SSS in our material room but Poser users don't stay behind other in any way! there wait for us more solutions around! Wish you much success with your experiments

Mec4d - These candles look awesome! Again (as per the other msg thread), I suspect you will get the effect regardless of the light positions...so it's kind of "fake translucency". Tunesy....definitely adding a small amount of translucent (or ambient) red to skin tones will improve human skin a heap. You just need to tune the amount of red depending on the amount of light in the scene. You you add lots of translunce, back the diffuse off a point or two. Mec4d - yes, the sss map is the key. The HyperReal kit uses both a V3 head and body sss maps to control where the ambient (translucent) and diffuse incidence effect gets applied. Makes a big difference. As for getting REAL sss....that is the quest. I think there are two possibilities.....1) Some tricks with specular. So far, experiments has been a total failure, but haven't given up yet, or 2) A phython script which analyses the lights in the scene and creates a lightball map (like a sphere) jpg (using the sss algorythms), which could then be plugged in to the ambient node.

I saved the screen shots in this thread! But I'd like to know how the flame was done on the candle?

face_off Thanks!, but sss have to do with translucence and not with ambient, as you read already it works fine regarding to the light. We don't have in poser5 material room SSS but thanks to the translucence map we can create the illusion of it as well, without the maps we don't get the effect and that is the trick here about. Ambient glow always in dark or not, translucence glow now in the dark if the scene don't include any light behind the object and as you saw already i proved it :) more value of the front light on the surface get past the translucence effect as in reality what we can't say about ambient.. it is very big difference about. :) Cath

[I saved the screen shots in this thread! But I'd like to know how the flame was done on the candle? ] It is animated avi diffuse color map with alpha channel. I plug into the Alternate diffuse color to let it ''glow '' also in the dark :)

that are preview of the avi movie maps for the flame you plug the movie into the suare and as transparent the alpha channel this way you get real animated flame into your 3D scene. If you point at the spot light it will give you a nice romantic effect, cast shadows---check OFF.. :)

If it's not too much, maybe a mini tutorial on that candle flame, because you lost me. I'm still learning how P5's Mats works.

I will put the tutorial on my website under Tutorials tomorrow, i will show there some more tricks as well, to use in the P5 Material Room. Check out later at www.mec4d.com :) Cath

Mec4d.... "Ambient glow always in dark or not, translucence glow now in the dark if the scene don't include any light behind the object and as you saw already i proved it :)" I'm not sure I fully understand.....Can you pls try this... 1) open a new scene in Poser 2) load a box prop 3) set cube material to translucence = white, power 1 4) then delete ALL lights 5) render The cube will render white! I think this conflicts with what you are saying (which is that if there is no backlight, translucence will render black). Then....change the translucence to 0, and ambient to white, 1.....then rerender - you will get the same render. So translucence = ambient in these circumstances. Again....I hope I am wrong. I so want to believe you, because this opens up so many possibilities...

Attached Link: AVI Animation Translucence effect CLICK HERE

I understand but it works well good did you saw the animation? it don't glow without light, it can't glow becuase you saw it on the other topic with the clothplane I think you do something wrong I go now to see the cube and I will let you know check out the animation

Catharina! First, thanks for the tip! I checked out your site and see the store is back up. Looks good! When are those new textures coming online? I can hardly wait. No one does textures better than you!

.

Attached Link: Mec4D's Poser5 Tutorials

Thanks Jim :)) I made tutorial only for the translucene material setting check on my website, I will post tomorrow more tutorials there for Poser5 Shader nodes so check out if you wish Cath

bookmark this too ;) Mazak

hahah I have to update the tutorial after I changed my Poser5 interface and now I can record longer and smaller tutorials :) Will post link with updates.

AKmaterialroombookmark