Gotcha.

Although the skin and eyes really are procedural textures I'm playing with.

This is the best render of jessi I have seen yet! ;)

lmao xantor

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2220376

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2220376 Link to my try. I would love to see the node set up for what you are doing. It is much better that anything I ever came up with. I was using Nea so the eyes were funny but I tried some marble veining, clouds, and noise on my irises. Please do tell if you are willing. Looks great though I'm glad of everyday that goes by when I don't have to see those terrible PoserPro toons!

Here ya go. This is the skin. I wasn't really serious about the eyes - was just goofing around there.

I have been playing with this basic setup for a week, doing test renders of Vicky and Jessi. I wondered how much of the realism was geometry and texture file versus my shader nodes so I gave Barney a shot. I think it looks pretty good, lol.

Lighting is key. Until I started using an IBL, everything looked like crap. If you see blooms or red fringes, the lights are too strong. I see this all the time in other peoples stuff. Once the lighting is right, then subtle things like the spots and the ColorRamp/Edge_Blend start to make a huge difference.

I posted a later version of this image in my gallery. The shader nodes shown here are for that image.

Enjoy.

Thanks for the capture. And Thanks for the lighting advise. It was smart to test on Barney but geez that's a scary image.

I still think that we may be approaching this the wrong way with the shaders - I posted this example in another thread but I will post again here and see if we get more discussion on the subject.

As you can see I have avoided the diffuse channel altogether and gone for the alternate diffuse and specular, as well as adding a skin node and using bump maps on the lips and nipples and trans on the eyebrows and lashes. Procedural eyes would be nice as well.

It would be really great if one could get to the stage of dynamic eyebgrows and lashes - but I think thats a fair way off.

My biggest problem at the moment is making a universal lip and nipple bump that will suit any character - as you can see from the above the lip bump just isn't happening.

No IBL used in this test either, if I can get it reasonable without IBL then it can only be improved by the useof lighting techniques.

Tastiger -

Do you know the following about the root material inputs?

The Diffuse_Color/Value internally includes a Diffuse node.
The Specular_Color/Value internally includes a Specular node.
The Reflection_Color/Value internally includes a Diffuse node.
The Alternate_Diffuse is just a passthrough. (Nothing internal)
The Alternate_Specular is just a passthrough. (Nothing internal)

I point this out because moving a node from Diffuse_Color to Alternate_Diffuse will lose any shading of the figure unless you hook a Diffuse node in series. This may not be what you intended.

I will post some pictures to demonstrate.

Here is a pretty simple setup. I made a ball with some red and yellow swirlies. The ball has some specular and some reflection. I put some blue steps in to see something reflected in the ball.

In the next post I will make the same picture but will hook the material nodes to all the wrong inputs. Yet, the render will be the same!

So now I plugged my spots into the REFLECTION. I plugged a Specular into the ALTERNATE_DIFFUSE. I plugged a Diffuse+Reflection into the ALTERNATE_SPECULAR.

The render is the same!

Now I'm really being perverse. I've achieved the diffuse, reflection, and specular *** using only the REFRACTION input ***.

In other words, the names of the inputs mean nothing. A few are wired to internal nodes. The rest should just be called AUX1, AUX2, AUX3, etc.

no... you've discovered something else. just as in a modeling program there are multiple ways to make the same model, there are multiple ways to get the same effect in the mat room...

actually hes right, this is why plugging the skin node into diffuse doesnt do the same thing as plugging it into alternate diffuse. its another sort of diffuse I gues you could say, if you plug the skin node into a diffuse node, then into the alternate diffuse node, you get the same effect as just plugging it straight into diffuse. that makes no sense LOL

Thank you templargfx - you got it. I just learned something even worse. I'm going put a new post in the forum about it. The Reflection_Color input is being multipied by the value of the internal diffuse node of the Diffuse_Color input. This means that reflections are TOTALLY INCORRECT. Look for the post at top level.

"The rest should just be called AUX1, AUX2, AUX3, etc." Then everyone would be asking "what are these inputs for?". The names are for convenience: Alternate_Diffuse is a place where you can plug the diffuse nodes into, Alternate_Specular is where you can plug the specular nodes into. You don't [b]have[/b] to - but following this convention will make it easier for other people to understand your shaders.

I guess that's true, stewer. Also forget what I said in #14 - I didn't know what the two checkboxes for Reflection_Lite_Mult and Reflection_Kd_Mult were doing. If you turn them off, the reflections are realistic. I have to say, thought, that I can't imagine why those are defaulting to an unrealistic setting, nor why they aren't on the Reflect node itself instead of the root node.

Ah - seee you learn something new every day - my experiment has been based on throwing together a lot of ideas from various tutorials. I will move my nodes around and see what happens. Now the next problem I have with this idea is the sharp edges that one gets on areas such as nipples. What's the trick to this? From my experience aureole are never perfectly symmetrical, surely there is some way to reproduce this effect.