I'm working on a fish, and I need the tips of his tail and fins to be more transparent/translucent. I'm already using subsurface scattering, which I know is a different form of translucency. The problem is that I don't need light to just scatter in the surface, I need it to pass through, and there's no attributes for transparency or translucency. Is there a way to combine these in somehow?
translucency is a simplified form of sss. Its just very tightly focused sss. All normal maya shaders have translucency controll.
SSS is waht it is the effect.
However truuth to be tld you probbly want to ditch sss alltogeteher
I thought about ditching sss all together. I'd rather not though. The fish is the main character, and I need to be able to render up close and personal, and without the soft sss shading, it just won't look right. There's a layer over the scales, under the scales, etc. Lighting is very important here too.
One thing I've considered is rendering a separate transparency pass as an alpha and compositing later on. I'd rather not do that though.
A possibility is mib_transparency. It works fine if I plug a dgs into it, then mib_trans into the sg. However, when I try plugging sss into it, it won't work at all.
I'm starting to wish I could write code, and I hope it doesn't come down to that. There HAS to be a way.
QUOTE(Joojaa @ 02/01/07, 08:35 AM) [snapback]258628[/snapback]
translucency is a simplified form of sss. Its just very tightly focused sss. All normal maya shaders have translucency controll.
SSS is waht it is the effect.
However truuth to be tld you probbly want to ditch sss alltogeteher
Ok, I figured it out:
Using mix20layer, I plugged sss into the colour channel of layer1. It was also important to plug the lightmap into the lightmap slot of the mix20layer shade group node. Othewise it wouldn't work.
The other problem was the base colour. There is no transparency/alpha control for the base layer. So I plugged mib_transparency into the base colour slot.
Et viola!
Now there's still something in the sss layer that won't make it 100% dissapear when I crank the alpha all the way down. Part of me thinks its the lightmap. Its not really a problem at this point, because I am totally satisfied with the effect, but I'm just curious why there is still a slight remnant of sss with no alpha.
you might want to read shading fish guts by pixar the main characters in finding nemo look bery good sss but has no such thing in it. Even the corals don't have sss at all. In fact the movie has only a few minutes of any raytrace at all.
The fuxxyness can b easily faked and youll happily render at seconds opposed to minutes.
Writing shader code is ususally way easier then it at first seems.
I've thought about Nemo and Pixar. I'm using Chen Qingfeng http://www.chen3d.com as a benchmark, so a Nemo style fish wouldn't look right. I know Chen doesn't use mental ray, but thats not a big deal. I'm definitely planning on raytracing. I've actually toyed with the idea of baking a lot of photon maps, fg passes, and ambient occlusion/bent normal passes into texture maps to speed up animation (or using these plugged into hardware shaders for realtime photoreal:) Or depending on what comes out of the animatics, camera mapping pre-rendered scenes. I'm not using the real physical_sss, so the character doesn't even need fg or photons.
We'll see what happens.
They don't need to look like nemo things its just that you can get really good looking translucen (forward scattering type sss) With a rig where you have dedicated damp translucency, with or without mentalray. i mean ive actually dished out frames at 6 seconds with these things and they look exactly as good as physical sss. Off course tweaking them right took me 3 hours but thats nothing compared to the speed increase. soo i gain the 3 hours in just a 30 second shot. Even better for statics stuff its actually even faster.