OctaneRender SSS Skin Shader

Poser Skin materials are converted to an OctaneRender glossy material by the OctaneRender for Poser plugin.  This will get you 90% of the way to a realistic human skin render.  If you want to push the envelope, the you can build your own OctaneRender SSS shader, and save it (rightclick the material in the Material tab of the plugin and select Export) using the plugin for use on all your human figures.

This is the SSS shader I have been using for the Victoria 4 figures.  It should work fine on other figures.  The shader is made up of a diffuse and a glossy material, mixed together with more (0.7) diffuse than glossy.  The diffuse will provide the SSS, whilst the glossy will provide the highlights.

NOTE: The only need to do the following ONCE!  Create the shader once, then save it as a material (rightclick -> "Export Material"), then copy and paste the material it to all the skin materials of your figure and rightclick the mesh -> "Export all Materials for this Figure/Prop".  Then you can reload all the skin materials with the SSS shader at any point, and keep or replace the texturemaps that are currently assigned to the figure.

To create this shader, pick a skin material on you figure.  Then change the material type from "glossy" to a "material mix" (change the node type in the bottom box of the plugin window).  Set the "amount" to 0.7, leave "material1" as a "diffuse" material and set "material2" to "glossy".

Expanding "material1" (the diffuse material) above shows...

The important parts are:

• diffuse is a multiply node. So copy the existing texturemap (rightclick-> copy image node), change the diffuse node from image to multiple.  Then rightclick texture1 and "paste image node"
• texture2 - this removes some red from the image map (to compensate for the red being added by the scattering medium.  Start with red=150, green=200, blue=255, and adjust to get the right skin tones.
• transmission - set to red=255, green=0, blue=0.  So change it from the default "floattexture" to "RGBspectrum". IMPORTANT: You can also copy and paste the image node from above into this node, which nicely stops SSS appears on dark areas of the map (like hair).  If you do this, lower (halve) the "scale" below.
• medium - change from "absorption" to "scattering".  
• absorption/scattering.  The ratio of these two multiplied by the scale seem to control the amount of SSS (and how far it travels).  The settings above seems to give a good starting point for human figures.  NOTE: The plugin rescales to figures to OctaneRender units, so these settings will be too high if you setting this shader up in OctaneRender Standalone.
• scale - IMPORTANT - this number effects the amount of the SSS effort.  Small number like 2-5 will give lots of SSS, large numbers like 20-50 will give a very subtle SSS effect.  Adjust the scale to get the effect you want for the lighting in the scene.

Expanding "material2" (the glossy material) shows...

The important parts are:

• texture1 - this is the image map for the material, and can be copies (rigthclick -> copy image node) from the diffuse material above.
• texture2 - this is currently set to 255/255/255, but can be used to fine tune the skin tone.
• specular - change from the default "floattexture" to "RGBspectrum".  Set the color to red=10, green=20, blue=30
• roughness - Increasing from 0.3 will result in drier looking skin.  Reducing results in very oily skin.
• Remember to set filmwidth to 1.0

Render Settings

IMPORTANT - you need to use the "pathtracing" kernel in order for the "scattering" node to work.  Also, I recommend reducing the scene "gamma" in the imager settings (try around 0.8).

 
Good luck!