Iray viscous clear liquid shader parameters or preset?

Aethyr

Hi there,

I'm working on a horror piece where I want to have a monster's mouth dripping with saliva (think the famous scene from Alien), and I've set it up using some of SickleYield's products (mostly the Rigged Water series), but I can't seem to find a shader that looks right - none of the water or liquid shaders I have seem to have the right look, and I don't understand the parameters well enough to set up something myself.

I'd appreciate any help with this - whether it's a preset I can use or a way to set up the shader manually. It'd be useful if the shader could be tinted as well, to give different effects e.g. bloody saliva.

Thanks!

-A

Cris Palomino

Maybe:

https://www.daz3d.com/subsurface-workshop-sss-shaders-for-iray

https://www.daz3d.com/iray-liquid-shaders

https://www.daz3d.com/liquid-2-iray-shaders

 

JonnyRay

I have all the ones Chris mentioned ("Hello, I'm Jon, and I'm a shaderholic"), but the one I go back to often for liquids is SF-Design's Easy Liquid Shader. I like it because it is a custom shader rather than just presets for the Daz Uber shader. The water presets in particular are very nice. It isn't made for completely opaque liquids like milk though.

Aethyr

Thanks for the suggestions, I tried the JG liquid shaders and SF-Design's Easy Liquid Shader but still couldn't get it to look quite right. I have the subsurface shaders and totally forgot about them so I'll give those a shot.

It's possible that it's a lighting issue but I spent so long on the lighting already that I don't really want to mess around with it too much.

JonnyRay

I thought of another product example. Sickleyield's SY Splats Drips, and Splatters for dForce. Taking a look at how she built her objects, there could be some tricks even with the creation of the liquid volume that might be useful. And her shader settings are designed to mimic slime, blood, etc.

I was also reminded during another conversation about Iray settings for water about another potential issue with the Thin Walled setting, especially when the liquid object is a single sided plane, not a true volume. This may or may not apply to your case.

With Thin Walled turned OFF, Iray treats treats everything behind the plane (from the camers's point of view) as if it were in the volume of the material. So refraction, etc. works because it thinks the light has bounced off your objects and passed through the liquid/air boundary.

With it ON, it treats a single sided pane as if it were the entire "volume" of liquid, but with infinitesimal thinkness. So, technically it thinks you have a thin film of liquid, but anything you think is "in" the liquid, Iray thinks is actually in the air on the other side of the film. This will cause issues with refraction and other volumetric effects since there isn't enough "depth" to the liquid to affect the light very much.

Finally, even with it turned OFF so that you have access to the volume settings like transmission and scattering, be wary about some of the parameters. For instance, if you're making a puddle of blood that is only about 0.2 cm thick, but you have a transmission depth that is greater than that, you could get some really odd results as you're affecting light which technically isn't inside the boundary of your object.