Can we turn off the glow on SSS skin textures in the viewport?
XoechZ
Posts: 1,102
Hello!
All those new SubSurface based skin textures really look very good when rendered. But working with them is a real pain. In the viewport they all are such bright and glowing that my eyes start bleeding when I work for a while on a scene. But not just that. It also makes it very hard to create a balanced scene. You can hardly guess how light affects a character because of all that brightness and glow. And it looks all very unnatural.
Anyone else has this problem? Can we turn off that glow in the viewport so that those skins look like all the others? Like the standard G2F texture (Bree) for example?
Any help is very welcome. Thank you!
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Comments
I don't get a glow from that skin at all. Go to Edit > Preferences > Interface, is Per Pixel Shading on/off? Try flipping the switch on it and hit apply and see if that changes things.
Left is on, right is off.
Thank you! I will try that setting. But I did not mean this texture, if it is Bree. This texture looks ok and I would like to have all the other textures look the same in the viewport. What I mean are the default textures from V6, Gia, Olympia and so on. They all look too bright and glowing. Even hard to see a make-up on them.
Ah, yea, that's standard G2F using the base Bree mat. Let me load V6 and see. I don't have the others.
/edit
Oh holy :gulp:
Take 1 dose of Per Pixel Shading and it'll clear that right up.
My eyeballs...
If PPS makes things too dark for you, lowering the Subsurface Strength on the skin in the surface parameters will lower that glow. Just don't forget to crank it back up before you render.
Keep in mind, PPS has no bearing on the render, just the viewport.
Yeah, thats what I am talking about :-)
Ok, thanks for the suggestions. I will try it!
Ok, now I have tried the Per Pixel Shader setting. The glow is gone, but the result is also not good. Left is with PPS OFF (ugly glow), right is with PPS ON (looking like an alien). I still wonder why those textures can´t look like normal skin in the viewport. This is definitely a big downside when working with such textures.
Go with the second method then. Leave Per Pixel Shading off and just turn the Subsurface Strength down on the skin by using the Skin label in the surfaces tab to quickly highlight them all (the dial is actually named Subsurface Strength). Belle by default is at I think 75% strength.
It still won't look the greatest in the viewport, but at least she won't be glowing. Just don't forget to turn SSS back up before you render (or turn the lips down to match if you prefer a less intense SSS in the render).
Your characters with "glow" most likely have AoA (Age of Armor) SSS (subsurface scattering) on it. The other kind is HSS (Human Skin Shader) and does not do the glow, as I recall. Depending on the skin you are using, some vendors have put presets in for using SSS and removing it. If they didn't provide a way to remove the SSS, you could replace the textures for another texture without AoA SSS and then put that AoA texture back on after you have things set up and are ready to render. I would check your presets, first, to see if an add/remove was provided.
Edit: Disregard
While those suggestions to temporarily fix the problem are nice and well meant, this still leaves this annoying issue on the table. I hope the developers will remove the glow in future releases. It adds nothing to the viewing experience inside of the 3D viewport, so why even display it this way in the first place?