Simple "Pig" Skin

[chikega]

I've messed around with SSS for some time now with various and sundry plugins and apps and I have to say that LW's new nodal-based shader and Simple Skin Shader are quite impressive. :beerchug:

This is a default modo Rhino object that I'm doing my tests on. :)

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/LWgroup/RhinoSkinSSS1.jpg

[chikega]

Another viewpoint:

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/LWgroup/RhinoSkinSSS2.jpg

[Samus]

Hehehhe, Nice!

but a little grainy, how long were the rendertimes and what were your settings ?

thanks

[chikega]

Render times are about 18min with an old PIV 3.0Ghz. Testing with my iMac 2.16 Intel Duo 2 Core with a Beta UB version of LW reveals about 5min renders. This is pretty much default Simple Skin - changed the Epidermis and Dermis colors to make it look a little more pink.

I increased the sample rates with Simple Skin to 8 and 16 for the Epidermis and Dermis colors respectively (essentially doubling them to reduce the graininess). I also increased the Ray Per Evaluation to 128 in the Interpolated Radiosity to help reduce the grain too. And I increased the render size to 1280 X 1024 from the original 640 X 480. Render time was 1h 41m for this image (reduced by 50% in Photoshop):

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/LWgroup/RhinoSkinSSS3.jpg

[Samus]

Yeah!!! Looking really good, i'm sure render times could be brought down with
a character that has this shader only applied to arms and head.IMHO it's quite a heavy shader compared to G2.But i really like the look of things regarding what NT has been doing for this update.

Sam:thumbsup:

[Exception]

Instead of bumping up RPS levels for surfaces and radiosity, you might want to try choosing a low AA (2 or so) and turning on Adaptive sampling with something like 0.03. LW will then detect the grain and work until it's gone... so you're not wasting cpu cycles on too high a number of rais, but you still get a smooth image :)

[chikega]

Thanks Exception for the tip ... I'll have to incorporate it into what I've come up with so far. I've been doing a battery of test renders all afternoon. And I've found that most of the grain was coming from the Area light that I was using. I switched to the Distant light which produced the least amount of grain with much quicker renders.

Although there is also another source of grain inherent in the shader itself (when Epidermis and Subdermis samples are low). So, I increased it to 15 each. The renders seem faster with Advanced Camera, so I used it with Gaussian Reconstruction filter to help smooth out the grain with AA2 with Adaptive Sampling Threshold at .1. The render time is down to 30min on a PIV 3.0Ghz and less than 15min on an Intel Core 2 Duo. The Rays Per Eval was also knocked down to 96 (Final Gather), size 640 X 480:

http://www.3ddmd.com/images/LWgroup/RhinoSkinSSS5.jpg

Getting there.... :)