Subsurface Scattering Now Part of Internal Renderer

Published by brian on May 4th, 2007 in Development

Recently, we posted about a subsurface scattering node that was being developed. Well the good news is that its now integrated into the internal renderer and will be part of the 2.44 release.

Quoted from the blender website:

Subsurface scattering is a new material option to render materials like skin, marble or milk. For these materials light rays are not always reflected at the surface, but can also scatter under the surface and leave at another position. This leads to a softer appearance, as light is blurred out over the surface.

Blender uses a method to simulate this effect for diffuse illumination, in a two step process by rendering a lightmap in advance.

Some amazing results can be achieved with the effect like this tomato render by Enrico Cerica:

More info on the implementation can be found here. And some CVS builds of the integrated subsurface scattering can be found at graphicall.

Make sure to check out the Blenderartist thread where some of the first discussion started on this feature. As well as the numerous other threads that demonstrate the new rendering possibilities.

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24 Responses to “Subsurface Scattering Now Part of Internal Renderer”

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1 sijp May 4th, 2007 at 6:29 pm

This is great news. I've been experimenting with the patch for a few days, and really loved the results.

Thank you, and the developers so much!
2 Paul Holmes May 4th, 2007 at 6:37 pm

AweSSSome, looks like now I have no excuse not to switch back to blender.
3 Allan Brito May 4th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

SSS is a great adition to blender! That`s great
4 TKR101010 May 4th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

Any word on when 2.44 will be released?
5 Brian May 4th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

@TKR101010- The official Blender 2007 roadmap can be found here: http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-243/

And from what it looks like it should be released sometime in the next month or so.
6 LetterRip May 4th, 2007 at 7:36 pm

Hi,

the roadmap states 'Possible projects' not 'confirmed projects'

of the list for 2.44 only two on that list are in

- make blender 64 bits safe
- subsurface scattering

most of the rest looks like it will need to wait for the 2.5 release.

Also 2.44 should be out in a week or two (depends on how the testing of the 2.44rc1 goes).

LetterRip
7 Gwentiv May 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

Waw 2.5 will be some shock then !
I think i ll buy myself a new computer just for it !
8 TKR101010 May 4th, 2007 at 8:48 pm

Brian: Thanks for the link, but I've alrady seen that page. On there it states "with a timeframe of maximum 2 months of development time (march-april)" and it's obviously past Arpil, but no new info has been posted there. I was looking to see if anyone had any updated information.

LetterRip: Thanks for the info :) If the new version comes out in a week or so, then that'll be just in time for me to try it out on the new computer I'm waiting to arrive :)
9 Joeri May 4th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

Very cool. Makes it almost worth to start rendering with blender internal renderer.
10 Craigomatic May 4th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

Looks like it is in RC2, but no windows RC2 yet - OSX and Linux get to play at least :)
Very clean work by Brecht, and very interesting results from all the testing artists so far :)
11 Michael Crawford May 4th, 2007 at 10:04 pm

What's great is how fast it is. Pretty amazing.
12 Alden May 4th, 2007 at 10:33 pm

Wait, this isn't a composite node anymore? Excuse me for a moment…

*does the happy sss-moved-to-the-material-panel-dance*

Even if there's only two new projects listed for 2.44, it's going to be an amazing release anyway with this. Thank you very much, brecht!
13 ArabBlend May 4th, 2007 at 11:18 pm

Great news
14 Fire Angel May 4th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

Rendering of skin and other translucent objects looks as if it will improve dramatically with this. Well done the developer team for bringing it in so soon!
15 TXRXFX May 4th, 2007 at 11:42 pm

Just grabbed the latest build. Amazing.
16 Felix_Kütt May 5th, 2007 at 5:19 am

woo-hoo! yeah, now thats worth talking about! :D
17 Ronin May 5th, 2007 at 5:30 am

I do more celshading techniques but I was impressed by Brecht work on this.Before I could finished ask"What about not SSS all the objects in the scene with this node?"It gets moved to the shader panel:).

Once again great work.
18 Cinmay May 5th, 2007 at 6:28 am

It looks very good. My 1.5 year old girl was very impressed. The first thing she sayd when she saw the tomato's was Mmmmmmm…… :D
19 shul May 5th, 2007 at 7:33 am

Did you see this?
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/blender-244-release-candidate/

Now that is a render!! Giuseppe Canino, you made my day :)
20 Kram1032 May 5th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

Great :D
21 Logan May 5th, 2007 at 3:27 pm

Fantastic!!!
22 panzi May 5th, 2007 at 6:04 pm

Seg. Fault!

I made a .blend file which crashes blender every 2nd time I hit render. I compiled blender myself from CVS (version from today, 5.5.2007 7:00pm Central European Time) with:
scons WITH_BF_FFMPEG=1 WITH_BF_GAMEENGINE=1 WITH_BF_ODE=1 WITH_BF_BULLET=1 WITH_BF_PLAYER=1

Here is the .blend file: http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/pub/files/suzanne-sss
23 Kram1032 May 6th, 2007 at 8:24 pm

sounds like a game engine bug…
24 claas May 6th, 2007 at 8:59 pm

OMG, the tomato shot is terrific. It looks brilliant.

You can still see some errors in the illumination but for
advertising purpose this is just great!