1110x589

skin.png

🧵 How to adjust mesh size with nodes in Bllender?

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 11:01:52 UTC No. 891067

So I spent a few years trying to create realistic skin. You can fake it by using photo derived textures, low lighting, post-processing etc etc. The SSS shaders in Blender are not able to create skin as they take the complete mesh in to account. This makes your show skin texture either meaningless or even an issue.

Skin absorbs light as it is a simply a slightly transparent rubbery layer. This is why some instinctively believe they can create better skin using higher roughness or lower specular levels.

I want to experiment with using the skin as a 1 maybe 2 mm layered mesh outside my character's main mesh.

So my question is, what node setup do I use to increase the scale of my main character a little? After I could simply combine the shaders in nodes with my main character controlling transparency and everything like that.

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 16:55:29 UTC No. 891137

Nobody with the needed knowledge? I tried Google and Youtube, but only get unrelated stuff. Seems like geometry nodes might be an option, but I can't find out if they can even be used with a "mix shaders" node.

Another option is to use actual displacement on the mesh, but that takes effect on the material output, so is a no-go for this experiment.

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 17:34:48 UTC No. 891151

>>891137
I have the needed knowledge but you'll have to suck it out of my penis

996x585

dogs.jpg

Anonymous at Tue, 12 Apr 2022 10:15:48 UTC No. 891532

Here is an example. Hot dogs are meat + a layer of intestine/thick skin. This layer of skin will vary in thickness and softness depending on if you're rendering a human/animal, it's age etc. But it is its own transparent outside layer/mesh.

People trying to create realistic eye's also run into similar issues because the reflections and SSS need to be outside the main geometry for the depth to look realistic.

1695x887

disp.png

Anonymous at Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:12:27 UTC No. 891536

I'm not sure I understand, what's wrong with just using SSS?
>they take the complete mesh in to account. This makes your show skin texture either meaningless
Whuh? Just crank it down, if you're working with 1 blender unit as 1 meter as it is default, the default SSS radius values are way too high, set it to like 0.04 for red and like 0.02 for blue and green.
Anyway you want to just make a copy of the mesh, assign a different material to it and displace it along normals? I never worked with geometry nodes before but 2 minutes of googling got me this. This is for 2.93, there's a dedicated normal node for 3.0, google it. Is this what you want? The two materials on top are transparent and the lowest is opaque.

Anonymous at Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:42:36 UTC No. 891538

Oh wait, I think I get it, you basically want to combine several "layers" of SSS in the shader and not as actual geometry? Like have skin layer with its own SSS and a meat layer with its own SSS?
Maybe try either making the lowest shader with its own SSS, connecting it to the "shader to rgb" node, and connecting that to the SSS color input of the topmost shader.
OR you could try faking it by making two shaders with SSS and mixing them using "mix shader" with a "fresnel" node as the mix factor, that way the glancing angles will show more of one shader and more direct angles will show more of the other shader.

Anonymous at Tue, 12 Apr 2022 13:47:40 UTC No. 891554

Why not just use solidify modifier? Then just have 1 material for skin and another for what is underneath?