Rhia474 posted at 8:16 AM Tue, 1 August 2023 - #4471616

@shvrdavid: very well done sweat. Are you able to share the way you created it? One of the things I really miss from current iterations of Poser is any sort of wet overlay on skin, used to be products you can get for it.

It is all done on a single layer, using a very simple physical surface shader. There are a few tricks to getting it to look like that. I don't use material layers....

First off, I used "Ok, it's a lot of lights", from one of Ghostships light sets. You need a lot of light to reflect off the skin.

This will sometimes work with just hdri lighting, but is usually much better with lots of lights in the scene.

Turn the roughness down on the skin way down, but not to zero, specular to white, then turn the bump up on the skin up more than you normally would.

I am also using rather high fixed random walk SSS settings. That dulls out the bump on the skin, and makes it more translucent.

Turn filter glossy in the render settings to 1 or lower. This is one of the more important steps, or it gets removed by the render engine.

The bump map settings may have to be messed with until you get it to look right, you will need more than you think most of the time.

The angle of the lights to the skin is crucial, and you may have to tweak that.

Basically all I am doing to get this effect is overdriving the bump, and hiding that fact with the specular reflection and the translucency of the skin.

This is what it should like with the roughness about half way up. And you can see how strong the bump is and how translucent the skin is.

It is so translucent, that even the eye socket and eye materials have to be in a different sss groups. Or it bleeds thru all over the place....

This is what it looks like with the roughness very low, at .1. Now you don't notice how high the bump is, because it is hidden by the sweat that is really just a reflection.

I did the lacrimals basically the same way.

You can't do this very well with all normals and or bump maps. Some of these maps are from LF2, the diffuse is not thou.

One thing to always remember with shaders, is that they only have do what you want them to. 

The don't have to be "correct". They only have to give the illusion you want them too.

This is what it looks like with the SSS and Specular on the skin turned off....

And is basically what you need it to look like to get sweat to show on the final render...

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