Realistic skin shader with Cycles
Sérgio Frias created this realistic skin shader using nothing but nodes.
Sérgio Frias writes:Hello ,here is my attempt at a realistic skin shader using Blender Cycles subsurface scattering :) ( ten24 head scan)
There is no code involved , only nodes were used. I just can say at the moment (maybe I’ll make a tutorial in the future) that I took some notes from real human skin, how the light would scatter the dermis and epidermis, from those numbers I applied some average measurements (in mm) to some blender subsurface scattering nodes. It’s still not perfect but I’m getting there, of course the 3d head scan,normal map,and specular map from ten24 was a big help on achieving that realism. Displacement map was not used,the light is only a sun lamp.
No Photoshop, it’s all Blender cycles :)
Wow! That is amazing! Please publish a tutorial! Please!
So what makes this news considering http://cgcookiemarkets.com/blender/all-products/cycles-skin-shader-double-pack/ ?
Matthew Heimlich’s shaders are nodes-only shaders as well and include a port of Arnold’s sum of gaussians shader.
likely the fact that it’s being shared, or I hope it will be.
Not to start a rant but monetizing Blender assets/setups etc is a negative turn of events in my opinion…. if the ratio of Blender dev contribution was much higher and was obligatory it would be a different story.
Monetization is a fairly touchy-feely subject.
On one hand – yes, it’s a negative turn in the context you’ve described.
On the other hand – without monetization, there will never ever be true quality because everything will forever be limited to advances made from hobbyist/DIY free time. As much as i like and support FOSS as a movement, i believe that every FOSS project/community has to grow up eventually and give away its noble causes in order to progress. It’s just the way the world works, unfortunately.
That said, and on a completely different note. Full disclosure… i’ve got no affiliation to Heimlich, beyond paying for the shaders (after playing with the free version he initially posted on blender artists). I do believe his shaders fully deserve the price – the supposedly realistic shader from this article looks painfully waxy, artificial and plasticky in comparison. SoG is the way to go (if you’ve got the CPU time)…
as you say every FOSS project has to grow up eventually, I believe this is true as well.
However all of the artists/scriptwriters owe their ability to make these sales only because of the tireless contributions of the developers of the Blender Core. These paid products should be used almost entirely to fund further Blender Development as a way of giving back for all this work. This is how Blender will grow up:)
just my two cents
Agreed, apart from “almost entirely”. There’s a fine balance between supporting the content creators / community and supporting Blender. Neither can be exclusive because both lead to a dead end :)
Hello ,my intention (with this video) is that i wanted to share how powerful blender is at the moment,and how it’s possible to create believable cgi with open source,i don’t have or have not heard of CGcookie’s skin shader,but from the images i have seen from the link you sended they look great ,but my skin shader looks more organic .But you can make your own conclusions just by using a simple light souce like i did and see if you can acheive the same realism using their skin shader ,i don’t have it to test it out.
You might want to check this thread out, there’s quite a bit of interesting info there:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?287516-Arnold-skin-shader-ported-to-Cycles
(also, you can get the free shader and test yourself – the paid ones are just for convenience, as they auto-generate the required derivative texture maps for the three SSS skin layers)
So is this just a picture/video of the shader? Is the shader actually available, or at least a picture of the node network?