bryce skin shader for M4?

Mistara

bryce has the loveliest skies and seas.

i haven't tried importing a pre-posed poser figure to bryce since poser4

would like to give it another try, but bryce shaders baffle me.

is there a (free) skin shader preset for M4?

-would like most to try it with Albane's texture map. or M4's hi-res that comes with Cararra.

Thanks :)

Rashad Carter

Misty Whisky said:

bryce has the loveliest skies and seas.

i haven't tried importing a pre-posed poser figure to bryce since poser4

would like to give it another try, but bryce shaders baffle me.

is there a (free) skin shader preset for M4?

-would like most to try it with Albane's texture map. or M4's hi-res that comes with Cararra.

Thanks :)

Believe it or not, myself and a few others have been working at a Skin Settings tutorial of sorts. I will explain it in more detail soon. I've got a couple things cooking right now for a lighting discussion but as soon as that's done I'll pop in here with some settings you can try.

Horo

@Misty Whisky - great you've re-discovered Bryce. The shaders in Bryce are called materials, and the materials are made up of textures. It is indeed a bit baffling (I have a 84 pages PDF on my web site I compiled from 17 videos by David Brinnen, but I do not recommend it at this stage - it might overwhelm you). Bryce works with procedural materials - though it can use UV-maps as well - and these are very memory conscious. Skin is the most challenging to render properly. Bryce lacks SSS (sub-surface scattering) at the moment but Rashad and David came up with quite convincing work-rounds. We should not forget that skin also "lives" with the light shining on it. Though Studio has the better prerequisites to render skin than Bryce, I haven't seen a lot of convincing close-up skin renders; most look like dolls. Skin is always tricky, no matter how advanced the render engine used is.

Mistara

do i have to do something in Bryce to tell it to use uv map?

thanks.

Mistara

an old,old bryce render - :) back when i was rendering to bmp

hmm forum won't let me attach a bmp, converting to png

Horo

Needs to be jpg or gif, bmp won't be accepted. Never render to jpg, it's a lossy format. Save your renders as bmp or tiff - or export as HDRI. Convert to jpg if you want to publish it. Max picture size here is 400,000 bytes if I remember correctly.

UV-maps can be loaded in the Mat lab as pictures.

Chohole

forum accepts jpg gif or png

Horo

Thanks Pam, I wasn't certain.

@Misty Whisky - Perhaps this helps.

1: Access the parts by clicking on the down arrow.

2: Click on Select Mesh.

3: Find the mesh, here Hitomi's skin for the hands.

4: Hand skin is selected, click on M.

5. The material Lab opens.

6: Selects Picture material, the button has a P in it.

7: Opens the Picture loading dialog.

8: Pictures dialog. Left is colour, centre is alpha, right is sum.

Though I'm not sure whether this answer your question.

Rashad Carter

The diffuse color aspect of skin is not the hard part. The difficult part is with the Specular. My opinion is that for the best results start with a Specular Halo color of around RGB 200 or so and play around with it. This will spread the specular over an area avoiding overly sharp reflections. The Specular color itself should be white in color. Overall you probably wont need very much specular. The wetter the skin should appear the darker the Specular Halo color needs to be for tighter reflections.

Mistara

wet skin would be kewl. or wet dragon wings!

Dave Savage

Or a dragon with a slight sheen on it's skin :-)