Problem with Subsurface Shader Base
Riggswolfe
Posts: 906
It only started earlier this week. One of my figures is getting bands on her arms and legs. Usually I can fix this by tweaking the shader rate or shader scale but neither of those has any effect. The scene in question has AoAs Ambient Light and a couple of linear point lights. The only fix I found is to turn the SSS strength to 0% which basically just turns it off.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Is it related to the new build of DS?
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Can you post some screenshots of your settings? Everything is working fine for me. I found that a shader rate of 6 and shading scale of 0.50 works really well for most figures.
I'll try those settings. I tried lots of low and high numbers and it didn't help. It's only started recently which is why I wondered if there was a change in the latest build of DS. I'll also just noticed the bump settings are low so that may be causing some kind of distortion. I'll change those and rerender and see what happens.
Those settings didn't help either. The only thing that works is turning Subsurface Strength to 0%.
hmmm are you using the default AoA light settings or are there some tweaks? I dont know how this would be messing up. I feel like something in the surfaces could possibly be off still. Can you post a screen shot of what it looks like?
What I don't get is why they worked fine in one series of renders and are messing up in the new ones with no changes to the surfaces....I'll try to do a render here in a second to put up. I'll put her in underwear or something so as much skin as possible is visible.
Well. I narrowed it down. I loaded the figure in a blank scene without lights and rendered and there are no artifacts from any distance. That means it is something in the scene I am rendering, whether lighting or perhaps the figure got messed up when she was loaded in. Thanks for trying to help, I now know AoA Subsurface isn't messed up and that gives me new things to check!
np I try to help if I can ^_^
It's not the lighting. I deleted all lights in the scene and it still happens. I also removed the figure entirely and reloaded her, same result. I'm stumped. For this particular render I just have to turn SSS off.
Riggswolfe, what kind of bands are you seeing?
If they're shiny bands, could it be that you're using SSS (or specular) maps set to one UV and diffuse maps set to another? I found a similar problem over and over again when I tried to be clever and swap out the diffuse maps on M6 to some of my M4 maps. Because spec and SSS maps were using M6 maps still, I had odd shiny strips at the shoulders and under the chin.
Alternatively, if it's that you're getting weird displaced bands across the elbows, I'm going to sit in and see what people come up with - because I've had that issue too. I managed to overcome it in the end but by total chance - and now of course I can't remember what I did... That may have been something to do with non-matching UV maps too...
From memory, AoA's lights also have a setting for SSS shading rate... could that be overwriting the one in the surfaces tab? Have you tried changing it there?
One likely cause is having surfaces with the same SubSurface group value but different settings for the SSS properties. if it happens only when more than one item is loaded its likely that you need to select all of the SSS surfaces on one item and change the group number, then repeat for the next item if there are three in all and so on.
I have two figures in the scene, both with subsurface. On the figure that is having problems her arms have alternating light and dark stripes. It looks very similar to the picture in the manual of having to high of a shading rate when the figure is far away. Her torso and legs have little bumps, like giant goosebumps. I just saw something which might or might not be related.
The skin is for v6 but the vendor who made it made it with the v4 uvs. (It is Chloe by Dariofish). I put on a tatoo from the v6 tatoo parlor by one of the vendors here from Daz. Could that mismatch have any effect?
What I don't get is why the same figure, with the tatoo, has rendered fine in other scenes but in this one specific scene looks terrible unless I turn SSS off. I'll try changing the group ID thing though.
If the two figures use the same group ID then they will be treated as being the same object, and also if other settings differ across the surfaces with the same ID even within an item you will get strange results of the kind you are seeing
I have Chloe by Dariofish. I fiddle around a bit with her. The image below is with the 80% SSS, which is the default skin preset. This is cut out of a much larger image. I had to get very far back to get any banding with the default settings. When I changed the SSS shading rate to 1.0 (this character is set to 4.0), then I was able to get ride of the banding at this scale.
What I did is select one of the characters in the scene, then select the skin surfaces. I changed the group ID to 98 on one and 99 on the other. Then I reduced the shading rate to 1.0 on both. This character is using AoA SSS for other surfaces than the skin and some of them are in group 1 too, so you need to change the group id on the skin before you start fiddling with other settings.
The Shading Rate on the Render tab was set to 0.2. The lighting is a distant light, ray traced shadows, shadow softness 50% and the advanced ambient light set at 20% intensity and range zero, which means global. Gamma Correction was on and Gamma set to 2.2.
I notice an issue when I use AoA SSS, Reinterject, and V6 Displacment Materials products on a G2F figure.
What I found is that if I change the Deep Shadow Maps on the Lights all to Raytraced (Software Only) on the Lights that the issue is removed. I was guessing it had something to do with a setting I saw from one of the shader changes. I remember seeing the word Raytraced somewhere in there and that's what gave me the idea to try changing the light shadow setting.
I think it probably had to do with the group ID. When I removed the other figure from the scene it cleared up. They both had the group ID. Oddly enough I had done a render with 4 figures, all with the same group ID and nothing bad happened. Lesson learned though!
Greetings,
I've been having the crappiest luck with SSS lately. I can't render anything using Julie's skin, for example (which is SSS only, AFAICT), and most other SSS skins look like crap also. Zombie-like gray, mottles, banding... I've given up on SSS for a while.
It's probably the lighting I'm using; I often use the Andrea AOIBL lights, as for non-SSS at least they do a great job. Or they used to.
Anyway, at a certain point it's just too much to figure out, so I've gone to non-SSS skins for now.
-- Morgan
That's quite odd. I haven't used UE2 since AoA's lights came out. Are the lights you're using set to ray traced? Also if a skin is too pale looking for you you can always adjust the diffuse and SSS color to your liking.
Do you have multiple items using the SSS shader in the scene?
Greetings,
Do you have multiple items using the SSS shader in the scene?Do instanced nodes count as 'multiple items'? And if so, how do you change the SSS group for the instanced node? (That's a trick question, I'm fairly sure you can't.)
This is from a test render I was doing recently with converting some 3DAge outfits to Gen2F, sorry about the semi-prurient nature inherent in 3DAge's clothes... :) I've reduced the resolution (the original is 2048x1536), so hopefully nothing untoward is visible.
MRTD: 2 or 4, I forget, but it doesn't matter, it definitely happens with 4 as well.
Pixel Samples (X): 16
Pixel Samples (Y): 16
Shadow Samples: 32
Shading Rate: 0.10
Gamma correction is off, gain is 1.0, and pixel filter width x/y are 6 each, but I'm fairly sure they're not involved.
Lighting is a UE2 (Occlusion w/Soft Shadows, shading rate: 4.0, samples: 96), two specular lights (one spot, one infinite), and an infinite light (shadow type: raytraced, 5%, 0.25). (All stock from Andrea AOIBL, to be precise.) No shadow maps, as they're just broken in 3Delight/DS, so any shadows are raytraced.
The characters are a G2F and a Node Instance of the same G2F, rotated. I thought I was clever with the fingers interlacing. ;)
[Edit: Added a second render (different outfit), with Max Ray-Trace Depth of 4. Also added more lighting details.]
-- Morgan
Instances may confuse the issue as any surface with the same group ID is treated as part of the same item, so you can get scattering from one item to another. however my main concern was that you might have surfaces with the same group ID but different SSS settings, which can by a cause of problems
Greetings,
I decided to kick off a render w/o the instance, just to make sure, and it still look zombie-like.I wish I knew what was wrong. :(
-- Morgan
Greetings,
While the above image (singleton) appears to show it acting alone, I had merely 'hidden' (by clicking the 'eye' button) the clone. If I eliminate the clone entirely, the problem actually goes away.
I've seen other issues, mostly banding on medium-far characters, but this ashen skin problem was killing me the worst. Now I know that it's due to the clone being in the [strike]image[/strike] scene.
-- Morgan
What is the subsurface colour you're using on her? Sometimes, dark skin can look a little dead under certain lighting. The late make-up artist Stan Winston was finding this problem when he was doing the make-ups for the black characters in Roots. What he did was to use a bright orange base and put the other skin tones over it. When filmed, the skin tones looked natural. When I rendered the Elite Rob and Marie textures, I used a bright orange subsurface colour and it really brought their skin to life. The renders below both use the subsurface shader.
CHEERS!
Greetings,
It's Teen Josie, out of the box, honestly. It's pretty trivial to duplicate. Load Teen Josie, render. (Even the headlamp works for this.) Looks fine.
Make sure Josie's selected (Genesis 2 Female). Click Create | New Node Instance, select Copy Selected Character.
Move the clone off a little bit, so it's not touching. (Doesn't matter, but reduces the variables.)
Now render again. (The headlamp is fine, the lighting doesn't matter.) The resultant render has Josie being all...zombie-like, with the ashen grey skin and all.
Dunno why, but instancing just plain breaks the SSS skins... It may be different for skins implemented differently, I'm not sure, but I know that Josie's blows up that trivially.
-- Morgan
Oh, right, sorry, I thought it was a dark skin texture, now I see there really is a problem. It's an odd one too, I'm sure someone can shed light on it.
CHEERS!