I have been trying to figure out how to do subsurface scattering for skin in Blender, using the internal renderer, on a Poser figure. Here is the result of today's experiments, using Antonia. The skin has come a long way, this is much better than my initial efforts.  The eyelashes look too clumpy, I don't know how to get rid of that. I also don't know how to deal with nostril glow in Blender, short of making another material for the inside of the nostrils (which is much easier in Blender than it would be in Poser). I struggled for ages not knowing what I was doing because the effect was really over the top. Finally I realised that this was due to the tiny size of Poser figures in relation to Blender units. I had to adjust the scale in the SSS settings to 0.00044. That's the magic number.

I think it is coming along rather well, with the exception that, to me anyway, it appears quite dark. You're right about the eyelashes. Otherwise, I am impressed with your results thus far...

 

C~

Yes Charlie, It looks dark to me also. I am struggling with the balance between one extreme, which is waxy translucency with no shadows, and on the other hand having the skin darker, and the features being visible!. Lighting also makes a big difference to how the skin looks. Here I just used one hemi lamp at low energy, facing the figure head-on. Finally I added in some environment lighting as well using the sky colour and also at a very low intensity. Ambient occlusion also improves things, but it is easy to do too much. Indirect lighting in Blender seems quite difficult (and rather slow), I am not sure how to set it up and it also tends to overpower the skin detail. Still learning.

Blender is very powerful, therefore a real bitch to learn. I committed to learning Blender last year, and I am still learning. Your work is highly advanced as to where I am at. You should be proud of this effort - it is really very good...

 

C~

I adjusted the balance between colour and texture (reducing the value for colour). My scatter colour is a very light pinky flesh tone. This seems to have lightened up the skin somewhat.

Wow. I have so much to understand about Blender, and materials is one of those grey areas. Think 'charcoal'.

Interestingly, in a thread on sss for Poser, Bagginsbill identified a problem which he said is exactly the same in Blender... if there are structures close to the surface with sss, there are going to be artifacts. Blender or poser... doesn't matter. He indicated there are strong similarities between Blender scatter and poser scatter: same algorythm.

I'd have to have a look at the lighting and shader without scatter to sort-of get a starting point on all this... still have to export Antonia myself or get that rigged version from - I believe - shvrDavid.

Robyn, as I understand it, the mathematics for subsurface scattering was in a published academic paper, and Blender and Poser both implemented it, probably with some variation. The logical components and even the presets are very similar indeed. Blender had SSS before Poser did, but it took Poser 9 to even make me aware that there was such a thing. And I now have a new machine that lets me do test renders quite quickly. The render above took 1 minute 43 seconds.

The interface for creating material shaders is different, but the principles are the same. I am figuring out the nodes in Blender, but slowly.

I so seriously wish I could clone myself so I could spend some serious time with Blender - you're so whetting my appetite for it, Nanette!

did you scale your "doll" up ?? I have taken v4 into blender and rigged with rigify but the tiny size makes it hard in the cloth sim (ps I'm playing with cloth sims at the mo') even on the tightest collision settings its blows the cloth out from the body too much

 

nice render hope you'll share the secrets lol , but the skin round the nose and chin is more what I would expect from some one in there late 50's after a life of "having a good time" then a young girl like Antonia

Heddheld, I didn't scale the figure up, it didn't occur to me! I'll remember that next time. Yes, you are right about the skin texture but then, I didn't realise Antonia was a young girl.

ok ok so I'm a dirty old man but the boobs dont match that face ;-)

Um, or a young lady in her 20s with sort-of normal attributes in the over-grown sweat-glands region (boobs)? Dunno - I don't see a young girl - just a young woman. But, that's just me.

lol Robyn at my age any female under 40 is a girl, 20 or under is a child ;-)

funny how age changes ones perception of the world  rofl

very good point, Hedd...

I have noticed a tendency lately for texture artists to emphasise skin details like pores and blemishes lately. When I look at some of my older V3 textures and compare with newer ones the difference is quite noticeable. Personally I don't mind imperfections, even young girls seldom have snmooth dewey skin here under the southern sun anyway. In England perhaps...And I am not even mentioning spots and pimples.

Are you using AO? that would help for the nosetrils

Yes I was using AO, and it helped.

dont know if you have seen this

http://www.4colorgrafix.net/2011/06/dazstudio-blender2-5/

can get the dolls into blender quite easy with daz studio and its collada export

Quote - dont know if you have seen this

http://www.4colorgrafix.net/2011/06/dazstudio-blender2-5/

can get the dolls into blender quite easy with daz studio and its collada export

You can use this plugin with Poser:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2829354&page=1

Previously convert the figure to prop using this Python Plugin for poser 

Convert Figure to Prop by D3D

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=50705

Works great converting all transparencies and textures!! :-)

yeah but if you do it from DS with collada it retains the rigging, stops me biting my nails waiting for poser tools to be finished lol

Have you looked into any of the free .blend files out there that have skin examples?  I ask because the standard in skin in Poser misses several nuances that most skin by Blender users seem to use.  IIRC, there's 3 parts to the standard Blender skin shading solutions I've found, which don't include bump, displacement, etc.    I have a .blend files for skin in both Luxrender (found in the Lux forums, I think) and the current Blender native (not Cycles, found in the BlenderArtists forum) that gives pretty photoreal results.

Not that it's not great to do your own experiments.  That's always enjoyable and fun. And your work looks awesome so far.

On scale: Going by Blender's  internal scale that seems to make 1 unit = 1 meter and Poser's scale according to Poser (how it interprets inches and feet), I scale up by 2.5 to go into Blender nowadays.  That said, lots of Blender people make up their own scale, so I'm not sure it's tied very tightly to Blender's settings.

Yes, I took 1 Blender unit to be 1 meter, based on what I had read around the web, and it seemed to work out all right. I watched a very inspiring tutorial on SSS skin that requires three different texture maps for  different SSS layers - I think that was at Blendercookie. I didn't have the time or patience to paint SSS maps for Antonia though.

I expect that I'll probably still render most of my figures in Poser going forward, but I needed to experiment a bit to find out how materials work in Blender. Medium to long term, I expect I'll either stay with Poser if it continues developing at the rate it has recently, or I'll move over to Blender entirely. Studio or Carrara are not part of my landscape.

Hmmmm.  The ones I've seen don't need that many maps, I don't think, even though they have 3 parts.  That said, if you mean that they have one map for diffuse, one map for SSS color, and one map for SSS distribution, you can use the technique without all that, the same way you would with one SSS component.  Just use flat color for SSS and let the distribution be uniform. 

Skin shading is basically diffuse, reflective and specular (basically the same thing, since specular highlights are meant to fake reflections of lights), dermal SSS (which is yellowish and wide, but not deep), and subdermal SSS (which is red and smaller, but deep).  Even if you don't have maps, dealing with the two completely different types of SSS separately can generally give you better results than just using one type of SSS.

edited to add: And I'm definitely with you on looking at Blender and Poser for the future.  I still covet Vue, but the more I look at the Nature Academy images, the more I wonder if I couldn't learn to use Blender instead.  Especially since they added the Ivy Generator and Sapling, and now the Ocean simulator is in the works.  I'm sure Vue is a much more optimal tool for environment building, but since I do most of my other types of work in Blender anyway... 

The Nature Academy course is just over halfway, and by now I no longer covet Vue. I enjoy modelling so much anyway, that doing things in Blender is more fun. We still have to do mountains, forests and deserts, and a few other things. The best thing is that I can now figure out how to do lots of things for myself. I wouldn't have attempted skin before doing the course, now I'll try anything.

The SSS skin tutorial that impressed me used layers of epidermal, dermal and subdermal texture maps - specifically for skin. Excellent results though. I'll try it some time.

Quote - The Nature Academy course is just over halfway, and by now I no longer covet Vue. I enjoy modelling so much anyway, that doing things in Blender is more fun. We still have to do mountains, forests and deserts, and a few other things. The best thing is that I can now figure out how to do lots of things for myself. I wouldn't have attempted skin before doing the course, now I'll try anything.

I can believe it.  I'm still incredibly impressed by Vue and what it can do (much respect for Vue and those who master it), but I want to learn how to do most of the things you need to do nature scenes in Blender anyway.  Your reaction to what you've learned in the Nature Academy has really inspired me to think more about what I could do with the tool I'm already familiar with, already planning to render in, and already planning to learn more of. 

My biggest obstacle, I think, will be my total lack of talent concerning plants in general.  Your rose really impressed me.  I can imagine learning to make those daisies, because so much of that was intense particle work, but I can't imagine being able to make that rose.  Heck, I've been wanting to make a cherry blossom branch for a vase in a scene for ages, and haven't even started because I can't even get what it should be like right in my head.  I can't imagine being able to envision the proper shape of a rose. 

That all said, I have tons of plants I bought never use because I suck at setting up outdoor scenes with props.  So I have resources to cannibalize, and even look at for ideas.

Once I got one petal made on the rose, the rest fell into place. The tutorial that explained the principle is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48s3t_cZQA

Same tutorial here:

http://www.metalix.co.nz/tutorials/blender/modelling/rose_lp/index.php

Excellent website that.