Simplified Subsurface Scattering in Redshift! SSS...S?

[Music] hello everyone and thank you for joining us today we are talking about simplifying subsurface scattering and redshift subsurface scattering is far too complicated and technical for most of us in this lesson we will simplify it so you can focus on being more creative and less technical so let's jump in and see what it's all about okay so today we're talking about simplifying subsurface scattering and redshift so if you've ever tried to do subsurface scattering and redshift you'll probably find what I found which is it's very cryptic and it's very technical and a lot of times as designers you don't really care about that technical aspect you know if you just want to make something that looks cool you don't necessarily need to know like what the exact scientific values are and for me it was really frustrating because I would always just kind of go in there and drag sliders around and I really couldn't get the results that I wanted to because I didn't understand what was actually happening and truth matter is is I'm I only care so much about technical stuff and I have my limitations and I think that with inside redshift subsurface scattering I reach my limitations so I started thinking like well why not just make something a video that simplifies it for you guys and kind of makes it puts into terms that I think we'll all understand and hopefully we can yeah you know make cool stuff with it so again this is not gonna be dry and technical I'm hoping that I can make it simple for you and to all you 3d hardcore guys please don't be mad at me because this is not supposed to be real-world scenarios as far as the numbers that we're piping in this is more of layman's terms and how we can get something to look nice so let's go ahead and jump in and do it so first things first subsurface scattering without getting too technical what is it all it is simply is it's the way that light is transmitted through an object so I grabbed a couple examples here one we probably all know if you hold a flashlight up to your fingers you know you kind of get this glow that happens around and it's the way that the light kind of goes through and it comes out at a different angle and depending upon the material you know this this light will react if here we have like a glass material and you can obviously tell it's looking yeah thinner whereas like a plastic material is gonna be a little thicker and this is really important to understand because if depend upon your model itself is gonna affect the way that the light is gonna react so if you have a model that again like this guy has a big belly you'll see that it's it feels thicker here us on the sides it's feeling a lot thinner same with the fingers here you know in the fingers there's really it's pretty much solid right but on the edges where it's thinner and there's less muscle and stuff like that going on and more pure skin you're getting these lights that you can actually see kind of bouncing through so that's really all it is I mean we all kind of know what it is but without going too deep into it it's just basically the way that lights transmitted through an object so with lighting in general you know of course your objects are going to be affected by your lights right so if I have a light that is really far in the distance and my hands are right here most likely I'm not gonna get this effect here so for subsurface scattering it's pretty important that you that you take into account what your lights are doing and how they're reacting you know when I look at this bird here I can tell there's a light not too far away from this you know this isn't something where there's a light you know 50 meters away or whatever this lights pretty close and just as humans we just know that same with the bunny like we know that this window is creating this so it's something that is very very important is your lighting setups when you're doing your subsurface scattering so knowing that let's let's look at the lighting setup I have here so I did a pretty simple three-point lighting setup and all it is is I have just a little bigger I have a key light here okay so I have a key light that's coming from the top when it's this light right here and then I have a rim light that is I'm using for a lot of what will be our subsurface scattering which is right here you'll see it's a kind of position behind him and then I have a kicker light that is kind of just filling in everything over here so just do that it's kind of giving it some shape over here but what I'm doing is is I'm creating a hot spot right so the rim light is essentially my is gonna be doing most of the work for the subsurface scattering not all of it but it's gonna be a lot so again if you can imagine a flashlight to the back of your hand that's kind of what's happening here this is the flashlight to the back of the hand that's happening here all right so that's the lighting setup and again I can't stress enough how important the lighting setup is for this and I'll demonstrate after we build the material and everything about how if you just slap in hgri a lot of times you don't get as cool of results all right so what I want to do is I want to start with a clean material so let's go and create a material let's take that material and let's apply it on top of this be Krait here okay now let's go ahead and let's step inside the material and if you do we don't know subsurface scattering is all the way at the bottom here but before we do that I want to turn everything else off that way there's no variables affecting what we're looking at so let's turn off our diffuse color and our reflection weight all right and now under subsurface scattering what you're going to see is a single subsurface scattering there's also you're gonna see multi subsurface scattering which we'll talk about in another lesson but for today we're going to do single surface what you're gonna see is you're gonna see a lot of technical a lot of technical stuff here and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to break this down into the order of operations and kind of what they all mean all right so the first thing you need to do is you need to turn it on right by default it's off and to turn it on you need to go to scatter scale so scatter scale so most of us will probably come in here and put like 1 and right away we get kind of a cool result it's kind of a kind of a milky looking result but what is it doing so scatter scale is essentially think of it like a fern noun okay so or curvature map basically what it does is it pushes it pushes your your subsurface scattering effect from the inside to the outside okay I also want to apply this to this object right here so you can kind of see the difference between two objects and how each object is affected differently alright so we have our scatter scale at 1 now let's go ahead and move this down down down down and as I move it down you're gonna see that everything kind of collapses in and it becomes a little bit more glassy looking almost and what that's doing if you think of it as like a curvature map or for now or what have you it's bringing everything to the center right so if I I think if I do it fast you'll be able to tell so if you see how it's if the more I pull it to the right it's creating less of effect in it's making it feel denser so you can kind of think of this yeah it's like it's like your initial density but it's also where the light is falling right like so do you want to fall in the center or do you want to fall in the edges you know if you look here right now it's just hidden on these edges but if I come in it's gonna pull it in and same with the beak and also you're noticing when I talked about earlier where the thicker the parts the thicker the part of the model the less of the translucency you're going to get and the thinner the parts the more of it so you can see we're getting more of that translucency happening here with the beak because the beak is thinner and this blue is actually the rim light is blue itself so don't be confused by that all right so very simple always start with scatter scale that essentially turns it on and then it's it's kind of like your power almost alright so next what do we do next so next what I would do is I would choose my color right so what color do I want this subsurface scattering to be all right so I'm gonna pick some kind of extreme here you can go to transmittance color transmittance color is power but it's mostly color I would just think of it as color it can be power so if I go pure black there's gonna be nothing so it's also power but in the efforts of simplifying think of as color and color alone it's pretty much color so let's go ahead and let's pick something like that or something that's fine all right so we've got our color and now if we kind of pull in this more and more more you'll see that we're starting to get kind of that like pink color but you might be saying like well why is it not this color right I want it to be this color and I want it I want to look like this and I want to be this color but it's very kind of muted and kind of pastel II and taken back well the reason why that is is because it's actually again you or your you're diffusing it so much through the scatter scale that that color itself is actually being reduced so how do we get this color how do we get this look to be this color this is where the absorption scale comes in to handy so you can think of as or some scale as like it's like your intensity it's your saturation values I promise I won't get too technical but it's technically multiplying this so it's gonna it's gonna make it more intense so if I go to 0.2 you're gonna see it's gonna get more intense if I go to 0.5 all of a sudden we're starting to get closer and closer to this color now eventually you will break it but you can see now we're getting kind of closer and closer to this color that we have here and then if we pull this out even more you'll see it's just gonna go to the edges and then we could try like point to yeah it's just it's it's it's it's your saturation think of it as your saturation but it will also make things look thicker the higher it goes because typically if something has more color that's richer it's typically thicker whereas if I go down to point zero five it feels thinner now so you really have to think of this as like your saturation so so far we have our fernell or our power I guess you could say here we have our color and now we have the the intensity of our color right and these kind of all work together and they it's a dance it's a total dance to get these to work together so that's good so now you know if I want to come in here kind of make like that and then like what if I went like point three yeah see now you're getting this like kind of rich color and again this is only subsurface you know we had no reflection on or anything all right so let's go back to point one and let's put it maybe summer in there so now we have some definition in here but we also have some nice translucency going okay so next we have the scatter Cove I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly but I find this one to be kind of the hardest to describe but the best way I can describe it is this kind of your detail it's it's it's a detail of your look so let's say that I have I'm gonna actually crank this up quite a bit so remember if we increase if we increase our scatter scale that's gonna make it just kind of go to the edges so let's say we like this look but man I want it to be kind of foggy inside I like this detail that's happening but I still want to be kind of foggy inside I want to feel that kind of glass like I wanted to feel like this right I want to feel nice like that so if you come in here general rule of thumb is leave it black and white if you want kind of more realistic results for now we're gonna leave it black and white we can talk about the color in a second so let's just go ahead and decrease the power so now what's happening is I've essentially made it to where it's I'm keeping this detail here but I'm also making it feel more yeah foggy and translucent inside so it's kind of like it's kind of like your transparency power I guess it's it's so hard to describe but I can come in here now and if I crank if I crank this up to like five and I keep bringing this down you see that I'm still able to maintain some of this detail that I like whereas before I wasn't able to I wasn't able to get this kind of detail without it feeling really thick like this you know what I mean so it's it's a way of yeah you got to think of it like it's almost a density inside it's like the transparency of the fogginess that's happening aside so the more the more you reduce it the more foggy it gets okay so again it's these are all a dance and you have to you really have to kind of mess with them to to get the exact look that you want to I find that this isn't the most useful for me I usually can get at a halfway decent look without messing with this you can also come in here and just color it if you want and you'll get some really kind of wacky results if you do that and it's probably too close to vocal let's do something else yeah you get some kind of like wacky results and it's kind of nice kind of a bubblegum vibe here that's happening so it's more of like it could be really nice for like designee type work which is what we're talking about so yeah think of scatter scatter Cove as basically it's it's like the power of your it's not the scale of your subsurface it's like the power of your subsurface all right so for now let's put the power back to one and let's go back to somewhere in there so where we have here so again because I noticed it's confusing we have the scale the scale is our four nail or curvature we have our color we have our saturation values how saturated is this color gonna be that's what the absorption scale is and then we have this which is kind of how powerful is it gonna be this guy scatter Cove how powerful is this entire effect gonna be how foggy are not foggy and you know when you're creating your materials of course you know our I knows different things and this is where it's it's up to you as an artist to figure out okay I want to make glass or I want to make a marble or whatever what is what are those values what is this combination so next let's talk about phase and this is the last part that we're going to talk about with inside subsurface scattering so phase it's basically the direction that the light bounces out once it's entered through the object so it's pretty simple to understand so values of 0 to 1 are going to bounce the light is going to bounce away the light that's traveling through the object is going to bounce away from the light that is hitting it so come over here you'll see that it's it's gonna exit out this way and they get really dark whereas if I come here it's gonna actually try to go back to the light it's gonna try to reverse itself and go back to where it came from okay so it's gonna try to go back the lights coming in this way and it's kind of try to go back out that way so again this is one of those situations where if I just kind of drag the slider a little bit you can kind of tell what's happening so again when I go to the right it's going away from the light and when I go to the left is trying to go back towards that light so you can just think of this as the angle that the light bounces that's really all it is and it defaults at zero and this is one of those situations where if you do want more definition potentially you can get that by yeah moving this around a little bit so that's cool so that brings us through all of the subsurface besides the samples I think we all know what samples are through all the options with the exception of this one so transmittance is the best my knowledge transmittance is basically less scientific which is what this is what this is about and extinction is more scientific so I don't even mess with extinction extinction I just keep at it transmittance and for me it works fine because most of the time the stuff I'm working on is not real-world scenarios so feel free to read up on this if you want but I stick to this one so lastly let's talk about if you don't want pure subsurface scattering on so if you remember at the beginning we turned off our reflection and our diffuse color now reflection is easy if you just turn that back on you'll see you're gonna get your highlights back on here and you can start making kind of a glassy look if you want and actually you know what for this purpose of demonstration let's just go to a simple kind of yellow color here because I want you to actually be able to see so so now we just have like this yellow color we have a reflection on here and we'll just rough on that up actually you know what let's just put there something like that and then when we start reintroducing our diffuse let's go ahead and make this like just a crazy color let's make this like a green color and then start reintroducing it as I reintroduce it you're gonna see it kind of coming in here and this is where again it becomes a dance you know all of a sudden how my Lighting's too hot because we were going again for that pure that pure subsurface look that requires that kind of hot light to it but as you introduce your diffuse you see it starts to get blown out so again it's it becomes a dance and it becomes like alright well how much of this do I want I mean this looks pretty I mean it's getting really hot here but the colors that are mixing here are pretty nice so what you can do is you can yeah you can reintroduce your diffuse and you can get some either realistic looks or not realistic look so like obviously it's a super extreme but if you wanted to do like a skin color or like a bone color like a walk come here and then you could just like put this back to here and then maybe bring it down a bit yeah so now you're getting kind of that like nice I don't know that nice kind of like could be like a cool plastic color if we want to make it a little more waxy come in here now you're getting more like a waxy look I don't know if we did that it's even more waxy so this is where yeah you just kind of have to mess with these to kind of get the look that you want and it does all come down to your lighting and you know the settings that you have and this the diffuse is also going to make it feel thicker of course because now less lights traveling through it so at the beginning I mentioned about how the light will affect how your object looks in the end so real quickly I just want to show you if we turn off all these lights and we just put on an HDR I'm you'll see we're still getting this like effect here but it just doesn't have that pop to it anymore you know it doesn't have it's just not as nice so I feel like most of the time when I'm doing this stuff you have to actually put you know real lights in there HDR eyes usually don't cut it because this looks like so one thing yeah so one thing just to keep in mind that ACR is can be good for a fill light but a lot of times I find that you just can't get away with it so cool that brings us to the end I hope this is simplified subsurface scattering for you and if you have any questions or comments please let me know I'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: You And Me Academy

Views: 24,395

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, redshift, render, nodes, otoy, tutorial, 3d, cg, cgi, vfx, visual effect, visual fx, learn, education, free tutorial, free, how to, motion design, motion graphics, material, materials, shader, shaders, create, c4d to redshift, beginner, beginners, tips, tricks, quick, quick tip, quick tips, redshift tutorials, redshift tutorial, c4d tutorial, c4d tutorials, cinema 4d tutorials, cinema 4d tutorial, maya, octane, arnold, autodesk, sss, subsurface scattering, simple, simplified, light, houdini

Id: anTVQW0vPL0

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020