These are some simple examples of the new Principled BSDF node using the Cycles Surface root node and Superfly. Before I start - this is not a tutorial. I’m not trying to say that the way I do things is the best way, or the only way. This is just a collection of things I have learnt which have been useful to me - I don't consider myself an expert and am more than capable of making mistakes. Therefore I'd suggest doing your own tests and research - good sources of information I've used include the Blender documentation, the excellent pdf’s covering PBR theory and practice at the Marmoset Toolbag website under Advanced Tutorials, and those on Allegorithmic’s Substance Academy website.

The renders are saved from Poser as jpg's with no post processing. With each example I’ve indicated where I’ve made any changes to lights or render settings. My units are set to meters. As there is no Preview when using Cycles nodes I tend to turn on Progressive Refinement in the render settings and use a small size e.g. 600 pixels square to get quick test renders. The props are mainly simple ones to try to focus on the node - no human figures in this thread ;)

For some examples I have used models from the Stanford scan repository (the Dragon has been cleaned up in Lightwave and Zbrush to fix a few topology errors). The Stanford scans are available from this link - http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/ - but please note their terms of use.

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The first thing I'd like to point out is that as the Principled BSDF is an individual node it is easy to blend between multiple materials using a mask. The setup below is very simple but the concept is the same no matter how many materials and masks (procedural or image-based) are used.

Two complete materials are defined; a mask is defined using a Poser Tile node; a Poser Blender node is used to tell the render engine which material to render according to the values taken from the mask (a Cycles Mix node with the mask plugged in to the Fac chip could also be used).

(This scene uses a black material on the Background material zone of the Poser Ground, and a mid-grey on the Ground zone as I want to keep bounced light way down. There are two area lights, one in front and to the side, and one behind the prop. The prop itself is a simple rounded cylinder I made with a couple of levels of render subD applied.)

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Next I want to talk about Specular as it was key for me when I was trying to understand the difference between Superfly and Firefly.

Specular in Firefly is a hack - it is used because raytraced reflections in FF, especially blurred reflections, are extremely slow to render, so specular is a means of faking them. Superfly however does raytraced reflections on everything all the time, which is why when compared like for like it is much faster than FF. Specular in SF is base reflectance (this can also be called direct reflectance or F0).

Base reflectance is the amount of light that bounces back to you from a material if you shine a light (imagine holding a torch) straight at it. With metals, this is high, with values around 60-100%. With non-metals the range is around 2-8%, with a few gemstones going as high as 16%, so the average for the vast majority of materials is 4%.

The Specular chip on the Principled BSDF appears to map 0-1 as 0-8% base reflectance, so at 0.5 it should be set to 4% for non-metals which will be good enough for a wide range of materials. This reflected light will be white.

When the Metallic is set to 1 it will override this Specular setting. The reflectance will be set to 100% and the reflections will be coloured by the Diffuse chip.

What all this means in practice is that most of the time Specular on the Principled BSDF can be left at the default 0.5 - and if the material is a metal, set that to 1 and forget about Specular. Simple!

So here’s a simple metal -

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And a simple non-metallic material -

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Base reflectance is not the same as fresnel reflections. These are reflections that occur when the light hits the material at grazing angles, and the beauty of this node is that it handles these automatically. No need to even think about them. In this scene setup the fresnel effect can be seen on the side of the cylinder as the light here is coming from behind the prop and hitting it at a sharp angle. The smaller highlight at the top centre of the cylinder is caused by the second area light in front of the prop, and therefore shows base reflectance.

This brings up another important property - Roughness. The physics are clear that as the angle of light hitting a surface approaches 90 degrees the reflectivity of that surface will approach 100%. This means that all surfaces behave like mirrors when the light hits them at grazing angles. But while the science might state this, it’s not what I see in the real world - a dead leaf never appears mirror-like no matter what angle I turn it to the light. Why not?

The answer is that the surface of the leaf is rough at a microscopic level. If you could see it in enough detail it would look like a mountain range, and the light gets caught, trapped and bounced around deep in the valleys. It cannot escape easily, or by the same route it arrived. Mirrors are smoother, and the smoother the surface the lower the chances of the light being trapped, and the easier it becomes for it to escape and bounce back in a straight line.

Therefore roughness is extremely important when defining a material. If the geometry defines the primary shape of an object, and the visible surface relief is defined by bump/normal/displacement, then the roughness defines the invisible surface relief, which has a huge effect on how the light is treated when it hits it.

The amount of light that falls on a surface does not change, so the amount of light reflected back from it does not change, but the greater the roughness, the more diffused and dull the appearance of that selected light.

Here the setup is the same but Roughness has been changed from 0.5 to 0.05 -

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Now the Roughness has been set to 1, and the highlights are far more diffused. The amount of reflection is still the same though.

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The Specular Tint setting is not physically correct, but is included for artistic control if needed. All it does is to colour the base reflectance by the Base Colour setting, but the fresnel reflections remain white.

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The Clearcoat setting provides another specular layer on top of the material, as if it were wrapped in clear plastic. This material blends two Principled BSDF nodes using Clearcoat and Tinted Specular using a Cycles Layer Weight node set to Facing as a mask.

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Now for a change of scene to look at SSS using this node. I've switched to the Stanford Dragon model, and this scene has a single area light placed behind and to one side of the mesh (as you can see from the shadow). The Ground material settings have stayed the same to keep bounced light contributions down.

First I've set up a basic non-metal material and rendered it -

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Now I've set the Subsurface Colour to red which will contrast with the base colour, and set Subsurface to 1. I've ignored the other settings for now. The SSS has swamped the base colour, so 1 may be a little high ...

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Before adjusting anything else though I decided to switch the method used from Burley to Random Walk. This is a new method which calculates SSS using the volume of the mesh, so should be more accurate. It does require that the mesh item be watertight i.e. does not have holes in it. The Dragon topology was checked and cleaned up before testing. The difference is subtle.

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Now I have changed the Subsurface Radius from 0.1,0.1,0.1 to 1,1,1. This setting controls the depth to which the light will penetrate inside the mesh. Higher values mean the light rays will penetrate deeper, and this means that the light will scatter and bounce around inside the mesh further and be more diffuse when it exits, which has the effect of making shadowed areas appear brighter and softer.

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The Subsurface setting is a multiplier for the Radius setting, so I turned it down by half. The result confused me for a while.

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The Radius setting has 3 values - x, x, x - which are for separating Red, Green, and Blue. Changing the values so that red light scattered deeper than green or blue changed the result.

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The effect was too strong so I toned it down by altering the Radius.

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Changing the Radius to scatter blue light deeper gave this result.

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It looked like the red Subsurface Colour was counteracting the Radius, so I changed it to white and got the result I had expected.

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Switching the Radius setting back to scatter red deeper but leaving the Subsurface colour at white gave this result. It appears that the Subsurface colour intensifies the result of the Subsurface Radius settings, and the whole effect is then multiplied by the Subsurface value. As SSS is a volumetric effect, I figure the settings will need to be varied according to the scale of the mesh item.

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I like this result.

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Now here is an attempt to wrap it up into a more caucasian skin. I've added a bit of bump via the 3D texture node Turbulence. This is run through a Cycles - Vector - Bump node. Any grayscale procedural or image based texture can be plugged into the Height chip of the Bump node, and the amount of surface relief controlled by both the Strength and Distance values.

So the material -

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These renders are not denoised and use higher samples; SSS like any volumetric effects I have found to be inherently very noisy but denoise can wipe out fine detail. The lighting has been changed as well - this is with a single area light in front of the Dragon.

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Now with a single point light set to Inverse Square behind the Dragon.

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Finally with both lights. I'll try to post some more examples of other uses for the Principled BSDF soon.

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Thanks for sharing all of that. Even though it's not a "do these things" tutorial, it was very helpful for getting my head around the principles. And I learned some tricks too.

Thank you. The admins should pin this post. Very useful.

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I agree, this should definitely be pinned, or all this useful information will get lost eventually.

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OK . . . Where's my chocolate?

Butterfly Dezignz

Thank you for sharing !

SSS won't work with single-sided geometry as it needs a volume, but single-sided meshes are useful for foliage, feathers and dynamic cloth among others. Here are a couple of ways to add more options to those kind of meshes using the Principled BSDF with other Cycles nodes.

First, the Geometry node can be used as a mask to put a different material on the back-facing geometry. I made a simple ring, had the same setup as above on the Ground, used a single area light in front of the mesh, and set up this -

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A Blender node could be used instead of the MixClosure - there is a lot of mix'n'match possible between Poser and Cycles nodes. An invalid connection will be indicated with a dotted line.

Now to add translucency to the same mesh. I've switched to an infinite light now. The translucency will only show up when the light is passing through the geometry so the direction of the light matters - to show this I've made the translucent colour red and the base colour blue.

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Lit from the front.

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Lit from behind.

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Now combining back-face masking with translucency added to the back-facing material only.

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Again, lit from the front.

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And lit from behind.

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Caisson, this has been most informative and reinforces much of what I have learned about PrincipleBDSF from Youtube. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your examples.

Thanks Caisson. I hope this info sinks in with folks.

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excellent explanation! Working with PBR makes transitions between render engines a lot easier as well.

Here’s a practical example of the Principled BSDF plus translucency on an older mesh of mine. First I’ll post the renders - the only difference between them is the position of the light. Scene details - single infinite light with 0.5 shadow blur radius, white, 100% intensity, default Ground with a grass texture tiled on the Ground zone and a panoramic sky in jpg format on the Background zone. Renders are jpg’s from Poser, no post processing.

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First the shader for the flowers. Pretty simple - one texture map for colour, one for roughness, both plugged into the node and the Specular set to 0.5 (which is the 4% average for base reflectance). The colour map is run through a Cycles BrightContrast node and that is used as the translucent colour, which is added to the output of the Principled node with an AddClosure node. (The only time I’ve ever used the AddClosure so far is when building translucent materials).

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The shader for the leaves is a bit more complicated. I always try to break stuff down into pieces. The first bit is the maps - colour and roughness are simple. The height map is plugged into the height chip of a Cycles - Vector - Bump node, and I generally leave the strength at 1 and adjust the distance value. This node outputs a normal, and I plug this into any other Cycles node that has a normal chip unless I can see any reason not too ;)

I knew that I wanted translucency, but I also wanted to try to distinguish between the upper (very green, shinier, not translucent) and lower (rougher, more yellow, translucent) leaf surface. Now the geometry here is from Zbrush Fibremesh, which is a bit scrappy and all the leaf UV’s are stacked in 0-1, so I was trying to maximise variety in the render. After importing the maps I added the first Principled node and tweaked and test rendered til I was happy with that material; then disconnected that, added the second Principled node and made the second material; and finally added the Backfacing mask to mix the two. Lot of test renders - the rule, as bagginsbill pointed out years ago, is to change 1 variable then render.

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Thank you

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Quick example of setting up a texture set exported from Substance Painter. When the maps are plugged in they override the settings on the chips, which disappear. Make sure normal maps are in 8 bit not 16 bit format. These should be run through a Cycles - Vector - NormalMap node, and the Space set to tangent in order to work correctly.

This is the first HDR render I’ve done in years, so I won’t go into details as my understanding is woeful. The map is one that ships with SP, and I used transparent background in the render settings, then composited the grey background in Photoshop - and as I was there, ran a Curves adjustment and unsharp mask too.

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Great examples. It will probably be my next endeavor to embrace Cycles. The sad thing, from what I know, is cycles won't render correctly or at all in Firefly, correct?

One of the biggest turn off's for me with DS is that many if not most published artists abandoned 3Delight and only create surfaces for iRAY now. I like the idea of having something for Firefly users going forward rather than abandoning that part of the user base!

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Bumping this up since it looks like the site hides old threads, even if stickied.

Thanks ChromeStar - I'll try and remember to add examples from time to time!

So here's a load of balls. Plugging a Blackbody node into the emission chip on the PBSDF allows the colour temperature to be set in kelvin (K) - the render goes from 1800K (candlelight); to 3000K (lightbulb); to 4000K (moonlight); to 5500K (midday); and finally to 10,000K (blue skies).

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That's pretty cool. Is there any possibility of controlling light falloff through the PrincipledBSDF node or does that become a separate process? I know how to do it entirely with cycles but I see no other alternative with your posted setup.

I think that would either be separate or involve plugging more nodes in, which then kind of defeats the point of the PBSDF. I'm using it as a higher-quality-more-versatile alternative to the Physical Root, so am trying to avoid complicated setups.

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It looks like Blender 2.92 and higher has an Emission Strength input on PrincipledBSDF where you could plug in that LightFalloff node pretty easily. Not sure how Cycles upgrades are going to work in Poser. But see https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/164075/how-do-i-change-strength-of-emission-at-principled-bsdf

That page also suggests that for us the solution would be Cycles --> AddClosure --> PrincipledBSDF with the other AddClosure --> an Emission node, so you can plug the LightFalloff node into the Emission Strength input on the Emission node.

It's not as clean as Cycles --> PrincipledBSDF but it's really not that bad.

caisson, I love you.

You have no idea how much this has helped me learn the new nodes.

There are no glass PBR shaders, or am I mistaken ?

Eternal Hobbyist

 

There's a GlassBSDF: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/shader/glass.html

You can also use it for other transparent shiny materials like water.

Thanks

Eternal Hobbyist

 

caisson, thanks so much for this information.

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This is really helpfull - thank you!

Wow, I had missed this thread ... so glad I checked back in!!

Boni

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Here is a shader set up using PBDSF for a prop with a single material zone textured in Substance Painter (which I’ll abbreviate to SP from now on) using the Metal/Rough PBR workflow. The exported maps are: colour, metallic, roughness and normal. Render is made using a single infinite light at 100% intensity.

I was originally going to write up some quick info on the various maps, but it … expanded a bit. Apologies for the wall of text that follows ;)

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The PBR Metal/Rough workflow deliberately simplifies some parts of the material creation process to make it easier, faster and more consistent. It’s worth keeping in mind that it was designed for realtime engines with all their constraints, and Superfly, being an offline render engine, has the huge advantage of time. This means that it is possible to build more complex shaders without this workflow, but I think that PBR Metal/Rough is a very useful tool and the underlying principles are worth getting to grips with.

I’ll discuss the maps in order of importance. First, the metallic map tells Poser which areas are metal and which are not - white pixels are metal and black pixels are not-metal. The importance of this distinction is that all metal areas will be set to 100% reflectance, and the reflections will be coloured by the colour map. Not-metal areas will have reflectance set to the specular value and the reflected light will have no colour i.e. be white. The specular value should be set to 0.5, which is 4% reflectance.

Specular in Superfly does not mean the same thing as Firefly. In Superfly it means base reflectance (sometimes called direct reflection or F0). In Firefly specular is a hack used to simulate/fake reflected highlights as real raytraced reflections, especially blurred reflections, are extremely slow to render. As Superfly is much faster it uses raytraced reflections on everything all the time. Specular maps should only be used in Superfly if the effect they will have on reflectance values are properly understood. Simple values are all that are needed here - the detail and definition in the appearance of reflected light i.e. highlights is carried in the roughness map.

On the PBSDF node the specular value can be set from 0-2, which maps to 0-16%. Setting it to 0.5 equals 4% base reflectance, and in the Metal/Rough workflow all not-metal surfaces are set to this value as it is a good average (most surfaces range between 2-8%, with gemstones an outlier at up to 16%).

(In SP, and any other application that understands the Metal/Rough workflow, when a metal map is created this is what the shader is set to automatically - to get direct control of reflectance values a different workflow, Spec/Gloss, which creates a different set of maps, would be used.)

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Next up is the normal map.

A normal map will do the same thing as a bump map - give the appearance of more detail by affecting the lighting but without altering the geometry of the mesh - but is created in a very different way. This is the most important thing about normal maps: they are not texture maps, they are surface normal data that has been encoded into pixels. This matters and can make them harder to create, unlike bump maps that can be painted by hand (unless you’re using an app like SP to create normal maps). It also makes them less flexible after they have been created, in that it would be difficult alter their values by using math nodes as can be done relatively easily with bump maps.

There are different kinds of normal map, and the ones that I am concerned with here are tangent space maps as exported by SP (as opposed to object or world space maps). Within SP the default setting is to use DirectX normal maps – I always change this to OpenGL. (Poser can use either but up and down are reversed depending on which is used, and I’m used to using OpenGL).

It is also worth being aware of tangent basis. This is only relevant when a normal map is decoded (i.e. rendered) by an engine that uses a different tangent basis to the engine that encoded the data. Most applications use MikkT (also called mikkspace), but not all. SP and Superfly do, but the Poser Preview and Firefly use their own tangent basis. This means that normal maps could give unexpected or wrong results in those engines.

It’s also worth noting that Poser will not read 16 bit normal maps, so I always set the SP exporter to 8 bit PNG. It is possible to use JPG, but it is a lossy format so compression artefacts could potentially result in shading errors, so PNG is safer (though the file sizes are larger). Depends on the end use – a hard surface model would look bad with shader errors, so I’d go with PNG, but with a detailed terrain the difference might not be noticeable.

Lastly, when using a normal map with Cycles nodes like the Principled BSDF it’s essential to use a NormalMap node (found in the Cycles – Vector submenu) to tell the shader exactly what kind of map is being used, otherwise Superfly will not understand how to render the map. This is not the case with the Physical Surface root, which expects a tangent space normal, so this step isn’t needed.

TL;DR – A normal map is computer code that only happens to look like a texture map. Use normal maps in Superfly if you understand them and have a tool that can make them correctly. For maximum compatibility and flexibility consider using bump maps instead.

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So now to roughness. The roughness map describes how smooth or not the surface is in extreme close up, and this has a huge effect on the appearance of the reflected light. Using PBR Metal/Rough, a puddle of water and a dry leaf will have the exact same reflectance – the specular will be set to 0.5, or 4%. The reason they will look completely different is down to the roughness. Water is very smooth, so the grayscale roughness map will be be almost black, and the surface will render with sharp clear reflections while the dry leaf will be very rough, the values will be approaching white and the surface will render with reflected light so soft and blurred it may not seem to affect it at all.

While the values for base reflection are kept simple, the roughness map can be full of detail – scratches, fingerprints, smudges, pores, chips and blemishes of all kinds can sell the illusion of reality here. Any detail that is too small for the bump or normal map should be here.

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Lastly, the colour map. Not a lot to say. Extremes of light and dark should be avoided. Lighting detail should be avoided, so it’s worth noting that the shader in SP makes use of AO (ambient occlusion), and that this can be baked into the exported maps - it may be advisable to disable the AO in SP before exporting maps.

However.

There is a way of adding AO and other maps for micro-occlusion in a controllable way with Cycles nodes, which could help bring out more detail and sharpness in a colour map. The Mix node in the Colour section of the Cycles nodes will allow mixing two colour inputs (the amount of mixing controlled by the Fac parameter) with blend types that anyone who has used layer blend modes in an image editor will recognise – like darken, screen, soft light, multiply, add etc. In the screen below I’ve added an AO map and am blending that with the colour map using overlay. Using a curvature map would probably be more appropriate for overlay; AO should really be blended with multiply.

Just another tool that is nice to have inside Poser to allow more control over a material - the Mix node has a lot of potential.

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And something completely different - glass. Same prop, no maps, same lighting and render settings. I've deleted all the maps and set Transmission to 1, IOR to 1.5 and the colour to white.

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Now changing the IOR to 2 and giving it a blue-ish colour tint.

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What I want is to get a more crystal look, something with density to it. Roughness will only affect the surface highlights, so I want to activate Transmission Roughness. This setting will only work when the Distribution method is changed from the default Multiscatter to GGX. If I activate it and set it to 0.5 I now get this.

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Wow! Thank you this is so helpful!

Boni

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Keep the lessons coming sensei caisson, and of course, arigato gosaimasu!

Aha, found it.

Attempting gemstones using the Principled BSDF ...

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The coloured stones above use this setup:

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Gemstones have a base reflectance of 16%, so Specular is set to 2 and I set Transmission to 1. I've played around with varying the colour, roughness and IOR (there are many examples online, here is one). I also tried adding a little Transmission Roughness to a couple of stones - to enable that the Distribution must be changed to GGX instead of the default Multiscatter GGX.

The mesh is a primitive from Lightwave, there is a single infinite light and I've used a jpg panoramic sky plus simple reflective surface for the Ground.

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The clear stones in the render use the shader below, which I attempted to duplicate by following this example.

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An extremely good and important contribution to the understanding of Cycles materials and in particular the Principled BSDF node.
Thank you for this contribution.

Bumping this thread back into visibility....

Presently, we don't have any way of adjusting emission control on the PrincipleBsdf node but I came across a Blender trick that works very well in P12.  By connecting a Color mix node to the emission input on the PrincipleBsdf node, setting it to multiply, and connecting a Value node to its Color2 input you create an effective way of controlling emission intensity.  Plug a color or a map to the Color1 input.

                                                   

You can also use these nodes in Bastep's Background Controller to control HDRI illumination intensity rather than adjusting the Gamma value.  I have found that using Gamma to intensify the HDR results in fireflies in the render; this arrangement eliminates that.

                  

Interesting thread. Thanks forsharing.

Eternal Hobbyist

 

Fantastic! Thank you @hborre

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I've been curious about this side of rendering in Poser but it seems quite daunting until I see the designated Principled BSDF node then it makes more sense but my main question for now is this compatible with Firefly or just Superfly?  

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Ah, OK.  Thanks so much Ghosty!  

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I have an old set "The Study" from DAZ.  It was in my Poser 4 runtime.  I had to rescale all the elements to 60% (In case anyone else wants to use it in newer Posers) Now I'm retexturing it.  I'm working on the cabinet first since most of the textures are wooden cabinetry and walls.  The original setup has only a texture map plugged into the difuse and specular plug-ins in the PoserSurface root node ... I have the Cycles root node with the PrincipledBsdf  I've plugged the texture map into color and subsurface color.  Nice ... but what I would like to know is what is the optimal settings for the polish/shine for a wooden surface.  There are so many options that so far I have it too shiny and don't want "shine" it with the wrong setting.  Suggestions?

Boni

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This is the set up I have, as you can see too high of a gloss.  Plus I don't know which gloss to use. 

Boni

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"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork

What the ideal shine would be for wood can vary depending on what real-life wood finish you're looking for. There are numerous types of shine and finishes for wood. Some of the basics are varnishes, waxes, and oils. (there's a lot more than that but that gets technical.) There are glossy (think those fancy grand pianos), semi-glossy (fancier furniture and wood trim might have this) satin (probably most common things) You'll want to adjust the roughness and specular to get the right settings, but without knowing the look you're going for it's hard to say what numbers to use.

Also, many finishes have a yellow tint to them which give the wood a rich warm look to it. That doesn't seem to be an issue in the image you posted, but if it starts to look desaturated then you might need to make some adjustments.

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Ah, ok.  I thought maybe Sheen or clearcoat would be my more realistic choices.  But this does let me know it's more complicated than that and my best judgement is my best choice.  Thank you. 

Boni

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Do not use Subsurface color as part of your setup, that channel is associated with subsurface scattering, and if you drive the subsurface scale too high your floor will glow.  It is wood paneling, you do not anticipate any translucency through it.  It is best to omit it entirely.  The Clearcoat/Clearcoat Roughness channels would be the most practical for wood; although Metallic gives you some tremendous reflective shine, I disagree with using it at high values.  If you want to add a yellowish tint finish to the wood, I suggest using the Poser native HSV2 node that has the color chip accessible for tinting.  Show us a render.

Oddly enough ... I used the Substance color because when I didn't the texture was washed out.  Not sure why,.

Boni

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That's an unusual behavior if the texture was properly made.   Try placing an HSV Node between the texture node and the PrincipledBdsf node and modulate the settings.  The value channel controls the brightness of the map.  Reduce the Secular value of the PrincipleBdsf node just in case it is affecting the brightness.  Unfortunately, I don't have that particular model to play with on my end.

@Boni: I actually do have the model in my archive, never installed.  Doing a quick overview of the Raytrace Preview, I found that the Specular value must be set to zero so that you don't get that washed-out effect in the render.  

With some modifications, this is what I rendered with Superfly P12.

If you like the results, copy the shader and build on it.  In this render, I replaced all the lights with one Area Light, scaled to 1000% and intensity to 500%.  I usually use Blackbody lighting for all my Superfly renders, in this particular case, the light temperature was set to 5500 degrees Kelvin.

I don't really like the way clear coat works/looks so if I want a top-coat on something I use a second layer. I think sheen is more for cloth. I'd set sheen at 0, clear coat at 0 and roughness at .3.

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the table, lamp and walls are using my free shader (rendered in P11) but it's basically the same as the PBSDF node. 

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Not being as technical as you all, here's my 2 cents: I prefer to add a sheen effect using a second layer as I have the *feeling* that the sheen given by the PrincipledBSDF node is given at the cost of the resulting diffuse color, whereas a second layer, for the sheen, adds the sheen while keeping the color intact.

This may not be a technically correct response, that's the result of my experiments with human skin.

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This is great! I lost all my settings yesterday due to a power outage .... Will adjust on Monday.

Boni

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I'm assuming that the PrincipledBsdf node is only in Poser 12 unless I've overlooked where it is in the add node fly out menus in Poser 11.  

Also one of the very off putting issues with Cycles, for me, is there is no instant preview so you have do allot of test renders to correct settings.  Again, unless I'm missing something and I very well could be.   I do have Poser 12 but the no instant preview confounds me and annoys me.  

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RAMWorks posted at 9:06 AM Sat, 9 July 2022 - #4440952

I'm assuming that the PrincipledBsdf node is only in Poser 12 unless I've overlooked where it is in the add node fly out menus in Poser 11.  

Also one of the very off putting issues with Cycles, for me, is there is no instant preview so you have do allot of test renders to correct settings.  Again, unless I'm missing something and I very well could be.   I do have Poser 12 but the no instant preview confounds me and annoys me.  

An Eevee-like Instant preview is on its way for Poser

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ATM, the best you can use is the Raytrace Viewer that can be set for auto if you wish.  I find that annoying when used in the Material Room so I would suggest leaving that feature off.  It does have a refresh button and, as I mentioned, is very convenient in the Material Room.  Just have your render settings at default and don't attempt to preview with a final render setting.  It will completely bog down your app.

As for the PrincipledBsdf node, that is only found in P12.  I have been using it exclusively for Superfly Cycles materials and renders, it's much more robust than the PhysicalSurface node and you can connect more than one to Mix Closure nodes for more elaborate materials.

Yea, I agree.  Allot more robust but I'll have to wait for this Eevee Preview option before diving back in!  

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Just use the Raytrace Preview in the meantime, it's fairly close to accurate.  I have been creating elaborate skin shaders with a textured base and that preview feature has been indispensable.  Unfortunately, you can't resize the panel.

I've done the set for "The Study" I used  your suggestions ... but, it looks like painted wood rather than rich wooden elements.  Any suggestions?

Boni

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@boni can you post your mat settup for the wood. Also has a lot to do with your lighting. A room like this would not have a single ugly white light bulb near the ceiling. that is more like a gym or warehouse light set up.

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Good point on the lighting.  This is my main shader.  

Boni

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Unfortunately, this set lacks other major texture maps to give it depth and detail.  Everything needs to be faked to make it presentable.  I agree with Ghostship2, the lighting is too stark for this type of room.  I don't remember if lights were included, they would have defined the atmosphere in the surrounding space.  My inclination would be to generate new specular and bump/normal maps.  Maybe use an area light as the primary source of illumination.

glossy or semi-gloss wood doesnt really need a clear coat. Clear coat has it's own normals and roughness. It will create a second specular/reflection on your object and bork the surface. So: turn off clear coat, set main roughness to .4 and adjust the strength of you normal map node till it looks right.

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this one uses PBSDF on just about everything, also my shaders which use it too. Only mesh lights on this one.

@boni you have to think of where the lights would be in your scene. If the scene obj does not include lamps/wall lights/ceiling lights then you have to either add those into the scene and make them glow appropriately OR you have to have lights or meshes out of camera that cast light that would be believable for the room.

 

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Love the pool room.  I've taken your advice.  and aside from a little graininess here and there ... here is where I am. 

Boni

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Definitely looks much better, more natural.

Boni posted at 10:22 PM Tue, 12 July 2022 - #4441201

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Success.  Thank you everyone!!

Boni

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Can the Principle Bsdf shader be used to create master character staders?  Looking for new techniques. 

Boni

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What do you mean?  An example, please.

hborre posted at 11:26 AM Tue, 10 May 2022 - #4438405

Presently, we don't have any way of adjusting emission control on the PrincipleBsdf node but I came across a Blender trick that works very well in P12.  By connecting a Color mix node to the emission input on the PrincipleBsdf node, setting it to multiply, and connecting a Value node to its Color2 input you create an effective way of controlling emission intensity.  Plug a color or a map to the Color1 input.

                                                   

You can also use these nodes in Bastep's Background Controller to control HDRI illumination intensity rather than adjusting the Gamma value.  I have found that using Gamma to intensify the HDR results in fireflies in the render; this arrangement eliminates that.

                  

@hborre:
Thanks for the mix node idea. Works great!

Sorry, been AFK for a while.  Here is the core setup I'm starting with.

Boni

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I have seen a thread that points out that there is a problem with the Normal Map plugged directly into the PrincipledBsdf.  Add a NormalMap node between those two and see if it makes a difference.

As suggested.  The Head is the only map I've worked with so far.  Note that I improved the Subsurface settings at a .03.  Otherwise it looks very dark and flat.  

Boni

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The Subsurface scaling value of 0.03 is good enough, a higher one will cause a glowing effect.  I usually use a value of 0.015 - 0.02.  The Subsurface Color can vary depending on what type of color you want as a scatter.  On the NormalMap node, change the space to Tangent.  What is your Subsurface radius?

Question: Why is your roughness so low?

On white skin I use a roughness of .71 and dark skin looks better with a little more shine so I set roughness to about .6 Just guidlines

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I agree with those values.  I never try to go below 0.4, the skin becomes too unnaturally specular.

Using settings you all suggested.  My question here is for Ghostship2  (I used your eye shader)... The sclera seems way too bright and doesn't seem to allow a natural shadow from the lids and lashes ... how might I fix that? There is some ... but it seems too light. 

Boni

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What does the Material Room shader look like?

Added grey tint to eye surface and beige to sclera.  

Boni

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"Be Hero to Yourself" -- Peter Tork

This is my suggestion

Eye Surface:

                           

Sclera:

                

This is what I render for Superfly.                   

Here you go ... a minimum of nodes ... and the SSS radius is: .1, .01, .01

Boni

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OH, oh! I will do that eye setting.  Thank you!!

Boni

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Ignore the Glossy node for the Eye Surface, I replaced that with the GlassBsdf node.  The LayerWeight node blend value can be modulated between Fresnel and Facing; you can experiment with either combination.  I use this with the cornea if it is available but I use the Fresnel connector.

For the Sclera, I added the HVS node between the Diffuse map and the PrincipledBsdf node.  Also note, that the same map is plugged into the transmission channel to give it a glassy appearance, use the transmission roughness to modulate the transparency.  On the HVS node, experiment with the value channel, that will brighten/darken the map.  As you can see from the quick render, you preserve the eyelash shadows on the eyes.

Better eyes.  Thank you!!

Boni

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I normally don't add SSS to the Sclera because you would require very low-value settings to prevent self-illumination but this render shows off what it would look like if adjusted correctly.  The lacrimal in this image was also SSS adjusted for Superfly using the PrincipledBsdf and other tweaked settings.