Cycles Skin Render (With a Little Help From Blender Internal)
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 7:10 AM I said I've been playing around with Blender, and specifically Cycles a lot lately, as I said in my last post. I also said I'm lazy and should try to fix that. So, here's me, taking a break from coding soundbuildr (which I need to write about, because I've overcome some major problems) writing this post about something I've done.
What is that something? Well, something inspired me to try and do some realistic skin, I remembered the "Infinite" 3D head scan found here. What I ended up doing was rendering the diffuse and specular as best I could in cycles (which was very good with it's displacement), and then combining it later with some subsurface scattering provided by Blender internal.
This was the result:
Best skin I've ever rendered. I don't render skin much though.
I didn't really stress the lighting much in the image. It looked pretty good with high contrast lighting, but the SSS provided by Blender internal was too smooth looking in the dark areas provided by cycles. This is why we need some sort of SSS shader in cycles. Technically it's possible to get the effect with a volume shader, but it's way slower that way.