In this post, I will talk about applying indirect illumination to the skin shader using ambient light
and AO
Mental ray's
misss_fast_maya_skin shader is a
one of the better skin solutions.
Like its name implies, it's fast and quite easy to
accomplish a quick skin look.
But if you look for more realistic results, you need to
provide with indirect illumination to the skin.
First of all, you need to approach the skin shader from two different
directions. direct and indirect illumination.
Most of the skin tutorials generally deal with direct
illumination part only.
Sometimes direct illumination only can create a
satisfactory result, especially for cartoonish look characters.
But a realistic human skin cannot go without considering the
indirect illumination.
So, I'd like to show a method of doing this, not using
expensive final gathering but ambient light and AO combo.
Here's a scene with a head model. A skin shader is alreay
assigned to it.
I have set up two light sources. One from the front for epidermal and subdermal scatering and the other from the back for back scattering.
Area 1: This is where the direct illumination
hits the sufrace.
Area 2: This
is where you can see scattering.
Area 3: This
is where no illumination or scattering is found.
