Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Skin tones and SSS

cedarwolf opened this issue on Jun 01, 2013 · 48 posts


kobaltkween posted Wed, 19 June 2013 at 11:29 AM

Quote - I actually got the scatter + blinn plugged into blender plugged into color_math idea from a thread by bagginsbill, not from EZskin... I tried EZskin but I found it easier to read up on it and figure things out myself... I like to learn, lol. I'm far from perfect but concidering everytime I browse the forum I learn a new skill I think I'm getting there, lol...

Oh, you're doing great.  And Bagginsbill made EZSkin, so I wasn't thinking you were any less of a do-it-yourself person by deconstructing his material on your own.  He's written about the single channel problem, but that's going back a ways.  Years by now.  I know because I forgot he wrote that, started getting heavy into materials, had the problem, then remembered his comment about Blender having a single channel.   It hadn't made sense to me at the time because I was thinking of the swatches, not the Blending parameter.  And, like most people, when I thought of specular, I thought of white.  Duh on me.

The more correct method would to use Color Math on Subtract instead of Blender, with a Color Math on Clamp after that and before the Color Math add.   But more correct at that level probably isn't important.

If you want to test for the issue (which is far from necessary), color your lights.  You might try the typical pure orange and pure cyan.  If it renders fine, then don't worry.  If it doesn't, well, your lights always need to be white to use that shader.

Quote - Speaking of not knowing how to do things, I usually use edge_blend because I'm not sure how to properly use fresnel to control my blinn, could you possibly explain that process?

You can't control Blinn with a Fresnel node accurately.  Blinn already has Fresnel built into it.  In your shader, you're actually going against Fresnel with that EdgeBlend that has a dark outside and light inside. A more slightly accurate Blinn would use an Eccentricty of whatever matches the IOR (index of refraction) you want.  I know higher IOR (shinier) means lower Eccentricity, but honestly, I have no clue after that.  Same goes for the SpecularRollOff.  I've created relationships that bring down rolloff as IOR goes up, but I can't say they're accurate.

Working with the intensity and rolloff of blur are essentially coming up with what the built in lights would look like if they were actually real and were blurrily reflected in your surface.   How big is that imaginary light mesh?  How far away is it?  I find it really hard to judge.

Now I work with emitting meshes in addition to lights, and depend more on reflection than specular.

You don't really have a use for Fresnel in your shader as it is, but if you added a Reflect node with high blur, you could control the Reflection value with a Fresnel_Blend node.  You just set the Outer_Color to white, Inner_Color to black, and give it the IOR you want.