New Skin, radiosity, VPR and renderer nightmare

[Wayne Heim]

Anyone else having issues with the new skin shader node? I apply a skin surface to a model and vpr shows it looking very cool. I then go to render it I get all these black areas splotching around on the surface. Almost like when you have two copies of the same object stacked over each other but slightly mis-aligned. So I thought maybe it was something with my model so I loaded just a sphere and applied the surface preset. Same thing. Actually half the sphere was not rendering. VPR showed the entire sphere. I turned on double sided poly and it is now rendering. Shouldn't need double sided poly. Now the open gl preview makes it look like part of the object is missing (like when you have poly flipped but they are not) but it renders and vpr's fine. Is this just me?

Secondly adding radiosity, even the basics to s sss skin shader scene will make your hair fall out waiting for a render. After 6 hours it wasn't 1% done with the calculation. I'm on a i7 98x with 18 gigs of ram. It's insainely slow. Any way to make this combination usable. I'm using a high poly model but even on a lower poly model it is not possible to use in production. Yet the vpr preview is acceptably fast but it won't fully render it to a clean version. (if you uncheck draft mode, your back to a snooze fest and the think resets and starts over after about a half hour).

Very frustrated. I use fprime for most radiosity renders but sss doesn't work there.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm officially frustrated.

Wayne.

[Sensei]

What is your Render Globals > RayTrace Bounce Limit? Default is ridiculous high 16, IIRC. Change it to 2-3, and do test render to see how it speed up rendering. Same with GI Bounces..

[Cageman]

The artifacts sounds like a problem that greenlaw had... he found out about what was causing them... read his posts here:

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=121237

[Wayne Heim]

I'll give that a go. Thanks. Would you know what would cause the render now to look noisy (full of very fine grain).

W.

[evolross]

Radiosity settings. Try upping the amount of rays. This will slow the render down though. Generally the less grain you want, the longer the render. You can also increase anti-aliasing settings as well to try to work out some of the grain.

[Cageman]

For characters, my tip here is to generate an sIBL environment based on the environment they are going to be in, render the characters separately using sIBL and BG-GI without interpolation (5-10 rays will be enough if you tweak your AA/AS settings).