Anyone have some advice for a porcelain shader? Not the really shiny porcelain used for toilets and bathtubs but the softer porcelain used for dolls and china. I suspect a scatter node is involved, but beyond that I'm not quite certain. :/

(On an unrelated note, I'm also looking for an M4 character with Baroque makeup. I have three or four for V4, but I can't seem to find any for M4.)  

Any one these have a porcelain shader in it. You can tweak it til you have something you like.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/?item_id=69141

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/?item_id=69176

But again that's glossy porcelain. I have Bagginsbill's glossy shader; I'm sure I could tweak it into glossy porcelain. What I'm looking for is the type of porcelain one would find in a porcelain doll.

you mean like clay node?  non-shiny

I'm just showing it to ask if this is what you mean.

If it isn't, then show one, please.

Yes, what Bagginsbill posted is exactly what I'm looking for.

Hmm. A few dozen attempts and I still don't have it.

It does seem to be a complicated material.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2857390

All images can be enlarged, from simple shader setup, to a bit more complicated.

BB will certainly come with a far better result.
happy Posering

There's no gloss on what Zaarin wants. None.

There may be some very soft, very spread out, blurry specularity, but it's not the main feature of the material.

The main feature is the way in which light scatters. I am able to get lots of translucence and scattering, but it doesn't have the right character. I can't put my finger on what's not right, but it isn't the same.

I have a suspicion that Poser's SSS approximation is not matched to the particular character of this real-world material. But I'm not saying that yet. I'm often irritated by other people saying Poser can't do something when it's more an issue that the user doesn't know how to do the effect.

I usually know, but in this case I don't. Which may mean it can't be done, or it may mean it's unusual enough that getting Poser to do this particular effect is something I've never run into before, and I have to try more things. 

I nearly got it with snarly's EZMat/EZskin.  drop scatter scale so it's more translucent than skin.  I tried scale= 0.1 on both scatter nodes, but it was so strong it was hard to see nose in render.  delete texmaps, use procedural bump (which is almost wiped out by increased scatter). add slight orange to hsv node to compensate for blue scatter.  decrease reflect node softness and incr. blinn refl.,  both of which you can hardly see due to scatter.

would also be good chance to post demo render using new VSS, or new porcelain plug-in for EZMat.

using above settings, it looks like this.  but it's too strong for facial features, hence will need to modify it.   dunno if it's o.k. with snarly to post screen shot of edited shader in mat room.

Quote - I nearly got it with snarly's EZMat/EZskin

I see we mean different things when you say "nearly" and I say "nearly".

Quote - but it's too strong for facial features

Yea well that is what I was looking at in my attempts and it is not even close to the photo I posted.

Quote - ...
would also be good chance to post demo render using new VSS, or new porcelain plug-in for EZMat.

If someone does come up with a convincing porcelain shader and is kind enough to post the shader for public use, then I shall start a thread giving a mini tutorial on how to convert it to a working EZMat plugin :-)

The tint color in the scatter was attempting to cancel the color map blue a bit - that's not going to be the same if you're not using a color map or you're using a different one.

Some of the numbers are overly precise - I didn't type those - they come from matmatic based on a formula.

Thanks, I'll fiddle around with it and see what I get. :)

Scatter Preset - Skimmilk

Texture Detail - 0.400000

Scale - 0.350000

MaxError - 0.200000

Scatter Color - Very light pink-orange

Also the lighting played a huge part in getting this look. I used a Fill Light (Infinite at 45% Intensity) and 2 Backlights or Rimlights (Infinite at 60% Intensity on both). The Backlights were placed directly behind her ears and casting slightly over her shoulders. Both Backlights have Shadows turned Off. The Fill Light is the only light with Shadows, and it uses Raytraced Shadows with Shadow Samples set to 40.

Indirect Lighting is on but only at 0.4% Intensity (using the D3D Render Firefly script), as well as Subsurface Scattering.

Attached Link: The Doll

looks good, icandy.  no bluenose nor blue ears!

ETA: The rest of the shaders are untouched except using EZMat for all the things one should use EZMat for. Also, the jingles use a metal shader by BB from one of Dreamland Models sets I think; I forget which. And I used BB's eye shader for the eyes but set the scatter mode to marble rather than skin. The lighting setup is an HDRI image and two spot lights.  

Oh I really like this :) Nice work !

As promised, I made a tutorial on how to convert this shader to an EZMat plugin:

Porcelain tutorial

I'm not in the position of testing at the moment, but as I read the posts, it crosses my mind that Custom_Scatter might be the alternative way to investigate, instead of Scatter.

The latter produces a blue/cyanic teint in all presets, the least for Marble (see table, the vales are a response to only a direct infinite light at 85%, producing 245/245/245 for regular 100% diffuse white under Gamma 2.2).

Note that the color in Custom Scatter is an absorbing one, using red makes a cyaning teint as red is taken out etcetera. White dims and makes a neutral translucency, black means no absorption in the skin layer at all.
Serous thickness settings are required, try 32, 64, 128, 256 to get a feel for it. 

Just thinking out loud...

Good idea but the custom scatter does the opposite-color tint as well. In fact, it's worse.

The lack of math description for custom scatter results in me guessing what it's doing and ending up wasting a ton of time.

The dipole scattering approximation it seems to be using is flawed, IMO. The numerous situations of white material with colored scatter (chromatically heterogeneous dispersion and absorption) producing opposite colors are bogus.

If blue is absorbed, causing scattered light to appear red, then there is no place where more blue should suddenly show up. It's not a zero sum game. Yet that is what it does. Bogus. A red scattering coefficient indicates an increased absorption of blue versus that of red. It does not, in any way shape or form, suggest that in some directions, scattering amplifies the blue.

yeah I know it''s hassling with the inverse scatter color too. But when that scatter color is a shade of white/grey it makes a neat uncolored translucency. Which might come in handy in the particular case from this thread, as Scatter requires your inverse-color-reversal and so on. I''ll look into it, soon.

Bill, if it helps, I think the picture of the doll you posted is made of french resin, not porcelain. (I don't know if you were looking up mathy-things for porcelain, and then not getting the desired results...But if so, it would be because that's not porcelain.)

After two weeks of testing in Muppets lab: Custom Scatter is great fun. The Scatter node is just a specialized subset of it, I can recreate every Scatter preset result (including artefacts), and do more. I understand its workings, its issues and its shortcomings, and I understand the effect of IDL and GC on its results as well. I just have to figure out one option/parameter...

... whoa, where are my asperines?

Settings for the pawn body (middle area). In the first image it's the setup for all pawn parts, but without the tiling node.

Wow, that's quite impressive; it looks good. :D

thanks.

In case someone wonders: this is the color/diffuse part only, I did not add specular/reflect in yet. That should be done the regular way, using Fresnel etc. Right now, this is the result of my investigations on Scatter as a Diffuse-replacement only.

Sorry for not including that.

Also for the sake of this test-render-result: render gamma set to 2.2 and IDL off. As said, I found out that GC and IDL do affect the scatter-mechanism / result as such, not only brightness and coloring.

And yes, node settings do depend on object geometry (same translucency on different object requires adjusted settings) and no, math/physics models are not applicable. Poser is serving a bag of graphics tricks again. So being good in graphics and bad in math might make one a decent manager of the Poser scatter nodes :-)