Forum: Poser 13


Subject: Cycles based SSS skin shader

ghostship2 opened this issue on Apr 04, 2023 ยท 359 posts


oz_tangles posted Tue, 09 May 2023 at 7:16 AM

Thank you for your excellent tutorial on using the Cycles PBSDF shader!  I have been using SnarlyGribbly's EzSkin to convert "legacy" (i.e. ancient) textures to Superfly.  The results are OK but the PBSDF shader gives much better results.  
Something you haven't mentioned is vascular maps.  EzSkin ignores vascular maps when converting shader trees to Superfly, and trying to connect a vascular map to the displacement input of the Physical Surface Node doesn't produce very realistic results.  
Vascular or vein maps have been discussed elsewhere in the Renderosity Forums, but I want to show how they can be easily added to Ghostship2's Cycles shader tree.  
1. Open the vascular map in a standard image_map node, using a gamma of 1.0.  
2. Open a Cycles Mix shader (Cycles>Color>Mix) and connect the Color output of the image_map to Color1 on the Mix shader.  Set Color2 to BLACK.  
3. Blend Type should be set to Mix.
4. Connect the Color output of the Mix shader to Displacement on the root CyclesSurface node.  
5. The strength of the vascular effect is determined by the Fac parameter in the Mix node.  Fac = 0 corresponds to the maximum vascularity and Fac = 1 to no vascularity.  I have found that a value of 0.7 or 0.8 looks pretty good, but this is a matter of taste and the subject matter (eg pumped body builders).