AoA SS Shader vs OmHumanSurface
404nicg
Posts: 270
Hello all,
what are you guy's take on these two shaders when applying to skin?
Do you use one or the other exclusively or does it depend on the character/scene etc.?
Also what are some of the differences between the two that you've observed? And how does your workflow differ between the two or is the process pretty much the same?
Since I really got into Genesis 2 and most of the G2 characters use the AoA shader I've been trying to get used to it's settings.
Is it me or does AoA shader take a tad bit longer to render? Which is ironic because AoA lights render so much faster than UberLights.
Any tips or hints you'd be gracious enough to share? :-)
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I have a thread where the AOA shaders turned out to be the culprit of a major exposure problem I was having in a large scene. I'm not sure exactly what the problem setting was and I can't blame just the shaders -- I may have had one slider just too high. But I had several characters in the scene and the one with AOA shaders was blowing out the render (way too hot) when everything else in the scene from props to the skin of every other character, looked fine. To get the AOA shaded character to look good forced the rest of the scene very dark. I tried playing with various settings and nothing really helped or at least did what I wanted (lowering diffuse to 75% worked but made a white character start to look black or Indian, for instance). However, switching to UberSurface immediately fixed the problem - the character now exposed correctly just like everything else in the scene.
This certainly is not to say I wouldn't use AOA in the future, but at least for this one character in bright daylight scenes... I had to switch away from it due to it blowing out the exposure.
For some reason I get the impression that AoA requires a bit more tweaking to get the desired results as opposed to Ubersurface. I think AoA may be more powerful because it seems to have more features. I could definitely be wrong though.
I would not disagree with AOA's power and the extra variety of options.
However, I think sometimes having lots more options can work against you. If there are only 5 settings and something is not exposing right, there are only a few possible culprits. But if there are 20 or 30 settings, you have a huge number of things to try before getting it right. Because it's not just "change the specular intensity" -- it may be "change the specular intensity while also changing the SSS depth" or something like that. If you do one or the other but not both sometimes you will see no change at all (at least to human eyesight at normal resolutions), and you might not even suspect that changing both at once will improve things. I am sure that some setting would have fixed my overexposure problem but after changing setting after setting and not seeing much improvement, compared with just double-clicking UberSurface and having it work immediately, the most practical choice was clear.
But then, I am not creating "works of art" in my work -- I am creating panels of a comic-book, hundreds of them, at a rate of about a panel a day (to try and produce 1 page per week). I cannot afford to spend hours upon hours tweaking and re-tweaking the skin settings to get them "just right" -- especially when all that tweaking, when you shrink the image down to the size of a comic panel on an 800x1200 or so webcomic page, will be hardly noticeable.
If you are doing a high-rez work of art you plan to sell on Deviant Art or something, then clearly, you would want the more versatile option with more sliders, and then go ahead and take the hours necessary to get the better quality shader "just right." It is just not practical to do this in my situation.
UberSurface is the move versatile shader but I've found its settings can be quite fiddly as a small change can make a major difference in appearance. It is also much slower when rendering for me.
I still prefer HSS because its just more... hm. I guess its easier to control the result across all surfaces. The AoA has some good results but i have to spend a VEEEEEEEEERY long time fiddling with it under every light. It's one of those plus-negative things. But I still prefer the HSS because it's easiest and fastest for me to use, and i've converted several of the genesis 2 skins that use AoA sss to using the regular HSS because its simpler to get the desired result.
And most of the time what I am doing is trying to match the look of a poser product, and i can do that with HSS. Most of the time.
You and me both! I have no interest in sitting up and fiddling with the shaders for each character in the scene for hours on end...I'm trying to bounce out a dozen or so renders at a time, so lighting is the only thing that I'll take some time with. AoA shader just has so much under the hood...I'm learning to just bypass it for HSS. And I'm pretty sure it renders slower...at least the default character settings with AoA's shader tend to render slower. I don't know exactly which settings to adjust to improve the speed.
I do tend to like the look of characters "out the box" when they have AoA's shader applied. But when you add lighting to the equation it kind of changes things.
That's interesting because my experience has been the opposite! I find Uber human surface to be faster than AoA by far. If I'm watching the render and it gets to where a character is that has AoA's shader applied, it'll spend an extra 2-3 minutes 'processing"(or whatever the correct term is) before it will finally start to render that characters skin. I don't have the same experience with Uber human surface or even the DAZ default shader.
Agreed whole heartedly. The bolded is what I'm going to be in the process of doing sooner or later, because HSS agrees more with my workflow and it's what I'm used to having been working with Genesis characters for so long and being so late to G2 figures.
there's some presets included with M6 to set sss down 75%, 50%, etc.
Yeah that helps, a little, but it it's still not easy to affect the colors... the tiniest bit and woops, you have a blue or purple skin.... try to make things glow, but have th wrong group number, woops... so on. It's just... complicated. And different things have effects on other variables, so its a lot to wrap your head around. The HSS is more straight forward. yeah, ambient and translucency both affect the SSs outcome but its still less fiddly. and you get more consistent results under variable light sets.
Isn't OmHumanSurface a bit deprecated? It was a shader for DS3..x. Usersurface replaced the OHS as standard shader in DS4 then (if I remember correctly) and has a few more options.
I never use AOA as it doesn't work as I think it should (many bugs in my POV, not logical result especially reflections and I don't like unpredictable result) and is slower than Ubersurface
i use them both, interchangably, to be honest. It may be a bit old but it still holds a lot of weight. for a while i was saving my shaders in HSS and USS both but it didn't have much visible difference and people didn't seem to care either way
One of the 'advantages' of having an old and slow laptop for rendering is that it gives a clear account of which shader is slower. AoA's SSS may have that pre-calculation delay before rendering but over all it is faster than UberSurface.
That depends ENTIRELY on the shader's settings. The toon shaders by AoA take my computer 3x as long to render as regular SSS. And the render time for new skin with AoA sss vs the render time with HSS is still longer overall. the effects are different. AoA can do more things, and has more realistic settings, but it DOES take longer to render under most general settings. I almost gave up on the AoA in the beginning because I couldn't take the drastically increased render times. :(
You know what, I just bought the Amazing Skins bundle this morning...now that's a phenomenal shader/material/utility. From a few tests I've been running it renders in a fraction of the time while maintaining quality. It has some really great and useful presets to work from too. I wasn't even aware of it when I made this thread.I'm thinking that it's going to be my go to for skins.
I guess Amazing Skins is quick because there is no SSS in that shader. Eventually a pseudo fake one but not more and it's principally based on 2D photoshop like effect using hue/saturation/contrast etc...for what I have seen from the thread. At least that's my supposition as I've seen no Amazing Skin render with SSS. effect like below (strong backlight should give some translucence)
AOA is slow because of the SSS calculation and I guess it is slower than regular RSL shader like OMHS or Ubersurface because it was made with shader mixer
There is nothing that can make the SSS calculation quick. If you need SSS you'll have to pay the price in render time. If you don't, then it's good
I often have an issue with the SSS Shaders, randomly everything with the SSS Shaders applied render pure white. I don't know why.
The basic, underlying reason it happens, is that the connection between the temp folder and scene is broken. This means that instead of rendering the textures it (3Delight) is supposed to be rendering, all that's being rendered are 'blank' models. The usual fix...save the scene, close Studio, restart and reload the scene. This will repopulate the temp folder. It's not really any one part (shader, 3Delight, etc) that is 'broken', it's just a combination of events (and the OS has some influence/say in it...I've never had that problem running Studio in WINE on Linux, for example) that leave the renderer firing blanks. And what that exact combination is, seems to be very individualized, and, often, not repeatable.
Theoretically, it can happen to any shader, that uses image maps,...but why certain ones are more prone to it, I haven't got the faintest idea. My guess is that shaders that do a lot of calculating, before actually starting to render, like the SSS one, are more likely to lose track of the images, if something happens.
You don't need to close DS, and I don't think it's quite a lost connection, as usually going to \DSTEMPFOLDER\Shaders\Brickyard\ and deleting the contents will cause DS to recompile the shaders and render correctly.
That should work, too...but, I've had it happen several times on Windows machines and once or twice, just clearing it out didn't work. But the restart always did.
But anything that disturbs the connection can cause it. One thing I did notice, on a Windows machine, interrupting/stopping the render...like cutting a spot render off before it's finished, can cause it. (That's how I got it to happen 3 times in a row, one night...but once I let the spot render finish...after reloading the scene for the 4th time, it didn't repeat.)
Deleting the temp brickyard works most of the time but occasionally I have to delete the temp images tdlmaker creates. I suspect one of the images was actually corrupted and that causes the recompiled shader to just go belly up again.
...I've been using AoA SSS for awhile now and find it workd well for my purposes. One item that helped me learn a lot about how SSS works is DimensionTheory's Subsurface Tool Box. I also had previous experience with SSS using pwSurface. Yes it takes some extra adjusting compared to the HSS, but I feel I have developed a pretty good workflow for it now.
I even use SSS with Iray, applying the Iray G2 skin shader but not overwriting the original skin map.
The one other advantage with AoAs SSS (same as the Advanced Lights) is also more detailed documentation.
Thank you SO MUCH for this feedback! (I'm the creator of Amazing Skins)
I guess Amazing Skins is quick because there is no SSS in that shader. Eventually a pseudo fake one but not more and it's principally based on 2D photoshop like effect using hue/saturation/contrast etc...for what I have seen from the thread. At least that's my supposition as I've seen no Amazing Skin render with SSS. effect like below (strong backlight should give some translucence)
AOA is slow because of the SSS calculation and I guess it is slower than regular RSL shader like OMHS or Ubersurface because it was made with shader mixer
There is nothing that can make the SSS calculation quick. If you need SSS you'll have to pay the price in render time. If you don't, then it's good
Actually there is not the "classical DS SSS", the more rigorous and long to calculate one, but there is a SSS made by another - simplified - approximation. So, yes it is fake (why pseudo?), and less exact, but faster. The simplification included in the approximation allows you to reach and dial sheen and scatter, but I cannot deny the counterpart of the approximation is that you loose the translucency part due SSS. I hesitated really a long long time before using this one rather than the classical one at early stages of development, fearing that people might complain about the loss of translucency. But for now feedback showed me people are OK with the SSS approximation and accept loosing translucency regarding globally the other benefits. This material was meant to be fast, flexible, and realistic. I did not want to remove the "fast". But yes, you are right, in no way, with no settings you will be able to obtain the translucency result of a non approximated SSS.
Actually there is not the "classical DS SSS", the more rigorous and long to calculate one, but there is a SSS made by another - simplified - approximation. So, yes it is fake (why pseudo?), and less exact, but faster. The simplification included in the approximation allows you to reach and dial sheen and scatter, but I cannot deny the counterpart of the approximation is that you loose the translucency part due SSS. I hesitated really a long long time before using this one rather than the classical one at early stages of development, fearing that people might complain about the loss of translucency. But for now feedback showed me people are OK with the SSS approximation and accept loosing translucency regarding globally the other benefits. This material was meant to be fast, flexible, and realistic. I did not want to remove the "fast". But yes, you are right, in no way, with no settings you will be able to obtain the translucency result of a non approximated SSS.
I said pseudo because I read somewhere on your thread that your shader has some kind of SSS calculation. So I thought there is some kind of "pseudo code" to do that. Just my way of saying things. Not a big deal
In understand! You're right, not a big deal. I was just wondering.