My Corona SSS playground

[plopalou]

Hey everyone!

I'm a hobbyist 3D artist working in the mobile game industry. I haven't done any real 3D in almost 3 years I've been mostly involved with realtime mobile game graphics... but now it's time to get back in business. This thread will be mainly for Corona / Max SSS tests etc. Currently I'm using the trial version of Corona and I'm loving every minute of it ;)

Let's start with some test renders with the Eisko head. There is some wonky things happening in some areas because of the geometry and refraction. Also some of the textures are not gamma corrected properly so there might some strange values. The HDR is from sIBL archive. I hope u like it.

The render is straight up raw. No post processing etc. The render time is about 48h because I accidentally left the computer on. :)

edit. swapped thumbnail edit2. swapped thumbnail again. edit3. swapped thumb.

[plopalou]

Some eye shader tests. Definately not 100% physically accurate, but it gets the job done. Also I'm noticing that there is some weirdness going on how to Scattering handles bump maps, but I'm not 100% sure what's wrong with it. Hmm...

[plopalou]

Sorry for the spam. :) Some few days old test renders of my really really old character dug from the grave... The mesh is basically imported from Zbrush (no proper displacement maps) so it might look kinda blurry. The shader has few mix layers + layer masks.

I've never had the possibility to try out hair rendering because of my wooden computer back home. Corona seems fairly fast rendering hair and I don't need to use shadow maps anymore so I'm quite excited what I can do with it.

[plopalou]

I reworked the highpoly model and added a proper normal map (4k) from 21mil polys or so... It didn't add that much difference so probably I'm going to leave it there. It's an old model so... Also did some minor tweaks to the diffuse map. It's really hard to get that nice backs scatter bleeding with the current material.  One option is the lower the opacity, but it also creates weird shading glitches with the geometry. Also you could use a falloff map, but it feels like just a hack.

The helmet is done in substance painter.

[maru]

Spam like this is welcome. :)

[plopalou]

Thanks Maru for popping by. :) Here are some test renders from yesterday. I'm modeling the armor + fur today and doing some more render tests with the skin shader... not having that much luck with the the back scatter bleeding though.



I'm kinda feeling tired with this project... oh well I guess I gotta finish this.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Your SSS does not look very SSS-ey :) If you could post your material setup, maybe we could help you improve it ;)

[plopalou]

Sure. I accidentally messed up my hair material and the hair turned out white. I think it looks kinda funny. :)





The material has some additional layers such as an additional spec layer with high fresnel values to get secondary specularity + and one for the face paint etc. I've found out that turning off the refraction doesn't make that difference. I hope you can help! :)

edit. accidentally posted wrong shader

[plopalou]

I adjusted the skin shader a bit. It should have more strong SSS effect to it. It still looks kinda waxy. The weird stuff going around the eye is because of the "wetness" object. It's a piece of geometry that has a material close to water applied to it.





Also I made some armour today with Zbrush and nanomesh :) I'll post those soon!

[plopalou]

Spammity spam! Last post for today. I hope you enjoy :)

The errors on the beard are probably due to volume scattering + opacity.

The lower img has too little diffuse level and too much translucency. Also the scattering distance might be too high. I hope I can finish this before christmas... *sigh*

[Ludvik Koutny]

Okay, try following:

Set translucency fraction to 0.9

Set translucency color to 100% white

Turn off refraction (refraction level 0)

Instance your diffuse map inside of scattering color slot (the one which is currently red)

You may have to adjust absorption distance after all the steps to nail it. cause if your head is up to real scale, 0.43cm may be too much.

[plopalou]

Thanks Rawalanche!

I noticed that it is also better to plugin the diffuse map to absorption slot because it everything that penetrates the head geometry creates this strange halo yellowish (from absorption) around it example the eye wetness or the helmet. I'll post an example soonish. In the mean time here is a metal skull pendant made with substance painter... which you won't even notice under his beard. :P



I've tried quite a lot of experimentation with substance painter and Corona integration and currently it isn't just plug and play. You need quite a lot of manual curves to get it to work. Also the presets for the reflection color are wrong.

[plopalou]

I'll continue my monologue. :) Small update:

Did some changes to the bone material added few leather strips and some tweaks to the skin material.
Also added Corona sun to get some shadows.
The skin scatter radius is kinda low atm, 0,34cm but I'm aiming for a dry skin look.

Hmm I might also replace the checker pattern from the helmet since it looks kinda weird. After those I will probably call this finished.

It would be really nice to get more control for the hair. The fade tip doesn't work which means that all of the hairs have a strange dark error at the end if you are using opacity. Also I'm using volume scatter for the hair. I'm not sure that's the right way to go? :)

[plopalou]

Quick update!

Some new test renders. Kitbashed a body. :P

[plopalou]

Update:

Fixed hair Removed opacity, volumetrics
Textured body (90%) finished
Added an axe, unified material IORs etc




Rendering with Corona feels like cheating... everything is so effortless. ;) I'll might release the whole scene for free when this is finished for all Corona users. The scene cleanup might be too time consuming.