Help, Skin Shaders for next gen characters.

Robbiek1000

Hey everyone, so in my efforts to really learn everything I can about next gen. characters I think its about time to start diving into the work of skin shaders. I've looked around for some good tutorials and videos and have come up short. So I'm asking you guys for help. If you have any links to any type of tutorial or video that could help me learn shaders it would be greatly appreciated. BTW, I'm a 3Ds Max user.

Also does anyone know if their are any programs out there thats soul job is to render a model with bad ass lighting effects?

Thanks again everyone, you always come through for me!

Mark Dygert

[ QUOTE ]
Also does anyone know if their are any programs out there thats soul job is to render a model with bad ass lighting effects?

[/ QUOTE ] You're already using it, hahaha! 3Ds Max can pull off some really nice renders. I suggest reading up on 3 point light set ups (key light, rim light, and fill light). Also read up on Ambient Occlusion. This will help in lighting your models as well as making textures. It's not so much about finding the one program or button that says "make bad ass render" as it is knowing how light plays off materials and colors and knowing how achieve the results you want with what you have on hand.

For skin shaders, check out MentalRay and read up Sub Surface Scattering.

If you set your render to MentalRay you'll have a few new materials to choose from. The ones that say SSS are the ones that can be used as skin shaders. NONE of these shaders are actually usable in games right now. Most games do a decent job of faking this effect. You can however use the Render to texture feature (with mixed results) and save your skin shader as a defuse map, but it won't work dynamically and will have "baked" lighting.

Also forget the term 'next-gen' its soOooOoo last gen =P

silversteez

have you checked out shaderFX for max yet? i believe they introduced SSS in the latest version. i haven't used the new version yet, but we've made some pretty sweet shaders with that plugin here at work and its very well-designed and exports fx shaders, etc. it kicks ass.

Eric Chadwick

Also look for J.I.Styles' shader. Someone else has another viewport shader for SSS, can't remember though. MoP? Ben Cloward?

seforin

yea ive been trying to figure out how to do SSS shader stuff but even after reading the tutorials online and all I still cant get the damn thing to work right.

I need a Hooked on phonics retarded child version of this (a poopinmymouth tutorial)

fritz

JI styles is great. it's really simple to use too.

http://www.jistyles.com/main.php?id=doc&page=hlsl

grab it....read the "read me" file. load up the textures provided. then reload w/your own. should work.