I'm continuously impressed by the intentionality of Blender's UI in recent updates. It used to be such a GNU nightmare. Ever since 2.8, you really feel how the developers consider not just how something should look, but why it should look and function a certain way.
The fact that there's a scale slider is enough for me. God how many times I had to scale up or down everything and adjust everything just because of the SSS.
Fyi, Christensen-Burley is the only SSS method that can "melt" an object with different shells together. Quite handy when you're building an say an organic object but you can't or won't model or boolean the whole object into one. If you with the same object is using any of the two Random Walk you will instead get double the SSS where the two shells overlap, so it will look quite dark and just generally wrong. Apparently this is something the devs are going to have a look at and maybe implement for all the different methods, but it might take a while before it happens.
I was always a little bit confused about anisotropic functions. This actually made me understand it better. Thanks. And thanks for the walkthrough on the new SSS settings. It just dawned on me because of this video that I can use an RGB node for the radius inputs. Kind of a “well duh, now that it’s pointed out” moment. :) Literally going to go play with a test character now.
Just one question left behind... what does the IOR value in this case? If Anisotropy changes the direction of light-scattering, how is relating to IOR?
It's just like transparent IOR, it causes light to change speed in the material and thus refract. It's also only exposed as a variable for Random Walk (Skin). For skin it's been measured at between 1.3 and 1.5, they default it to l.4. It honestly has the least effect of the parameters. You'll notice more of an effect on lighter tones than darker ones. For instance on the darker skin toned example I showed there was almost no difference between 1.3 and 1.5. There was a noticeable but minor difference on the lighter toned example. It's something you can experiment with though because you never know what specific model or material it could play a bigger role in.
Great explanation! However, for the SSS bit on skin, you should have used a 3D model of a hand or an entire arm to better illustrate the point. A shader ball doesn't do a good job of communicating what skin/flesh would look like.
Based on the depth of your knowledge of what each adjustment does within the shader nodes; I would love to see you do a series of videos where you focus on certain types of materials, detailing how to get ultra realistic results. Certain materials have always mystified me as to what exactly defines the true accuracy of them. One I have struggled with is Ceramic. Though it would be great to see an entire series that takes on certain similar types of materials at a time, such as metals, (Rough, satin, burnished & polished, along with other heat treated metals such as anodized, etc.) Also things like Brick, some rough, some glazed, etc. Different types of dirt, mud, sand; dry wet, etc. Glass, accurate to real world types of glass, (maybe plexiglass included), some with color tints, or etched, etc. Plastics, Wood, Leather, Cloth, Concrete, Stone, Etc. Water and other liquids like milk, wine, juice, oil, vinegar, etc. Based on all the comments and likes, I am certain I am not the only person who would be interested in such content.
Wondering about how maps would affect things like the Weight and hue/"Radius" maps, like would a color map work or would we plug in a grayscale map per coordinate?
Thanks for the update, I had been looking for how to set color and assumed radius was scatter limit in x/y/z planes. Terrible names. Should be "RGB Scale" and "Radius" rather than "Radius" and "Scale"
I am sorry but I can’t really see the utility of having rgb values still displayed numerically in the subsurface scattering. What I get is still a precise color and I don’t have intuitive control over it so I’ll still have to input an rgb node to make it have sense, I just don’t get why it’s default like that
You're not the first person to a strong reaction to this. The good thing is that if you tie an RGB node in the material node editor, the RGB fields disappear and are replaced by a proper RGB color wheel in the main Material Properties area.
I think this is because this isn't really about the color of the object in the normal sense, but instead just how far a color can penetrate an object, and those values can very much be above 1, so having a normal RGB color picker field doesn't really reflect that even though you of course can manually type values above 1, but the average user don't really realise that you can. This is at least how I understand how the devs think, but personally I have also made the same argument as you to them. But apparently they say that they'll at least add Red, Green and Blue labels to those three fields so it's clearer that it is about color depth and not just some vector value as it looks to be now (but really isn't).
Yes this is true, that you can enter values above 1. I prepared a version of the teapot where I used 1 2 1 for the values to emphasize the green, but decided not to use it to keep the time of the video down. @@gurratell7326
This is actually amazing, I was looking for a tut for how to make a mostly transparent silicone material and this opened up so much more for me. Thanks so much for making this!
You seem to know a ton about blender + real materials so I think you’re the perfect person to bring this up with- whenever people in general try to make a spandex/silk material in blender they make it a metal- but that’s not technically correct because silk is actually a protein in real life… what is the physically correct way to make silk type materials? I feel like it has something to do with subsurface scattering but I have no idea. Under a microscope silk threads are actually like tiny glass threads that are shaped like a triangle so they scatter the light in a special way, and I don’t think blender is really built to create that kind of a material. Anyways- the specific fabric I’ve been trying to recreate is the red anisotropic looking fabric from the amazing spider-man 2… it’s not technically silk but it’s definitely anisotropicy and velvety yet it’s not velvet.
@@christopher3d475coming back to this so long later, I’ve actually created a really really good physically accurate silk shader since then. It can’t be used on any models basically because it’s so complicated. The problem with silk making it so complicated is actually that the entire appearance of silk is based on caustic refraction. The way I did it was creating a really high poly mesh, adding 6 levels of subdivision, creating a displacement map which mimicked silk (wave texture for the grain of the silk, noise texture, Color ramps) you have to have the wave texture in one direction for the anisotropy instead of doing a grid style weave. Then you add subsurface and transmission and render- looks exactly like real silk. It’s actually insanely accurate. All it needed was real displacement and transmission basically, instead of using the metallic anisotropic shader everyone’s been using for silk until now
Im really excited to see blender moving to more of an industry standard in how the shaders are handled. Coming from Arnold to Blender was pretty confusing. thank you for the informative video.
It's an impressively odd decision to give zero indication that the Radius values are R/G/B. That said, thanks to your explanations, this is an impressively powerful tool.
Great video, very useful ♡ One thing id really like to ask though, what is that display with a chain icon you have next to the pause render button? Im eager to know 😂
Hey there, About radus. The default values are no longer R 1.0 G 1.0 B 1.0 But 1/0.2/0.1. And it seems that they behave differently. Can you comment on this?
@@exploringrvdude7817@exploringrvdude7817 Thanks for the timely response, I did not find better lessons on BSDF and materials in general than yours. I was litery taking notes and replaying them to learn everything.
Hi Christopher, since I really love your channel, I want to show you a really useful trick that I developed after studying the behavior of materials in Corona, Octane and Fstorm. Unfortunately Cycles has a very bad glass shader for architecture, but I think I have found the way in which these popular rendering engines work and I have adjusted it to Cycles through a very simple node setup, I have sent it to you by email (as images ) to see if you are interested in sharing it.
My my.. Thankyou so so much for such a brilliant and easy to understand quick video discussing subsurface. A very crucial element in food and organic modelling in blender. Thanks a ton !
thank u so much Christopher... please can u do an explanation for light path node? i watched 5 light path node and getting hard to understand them to the fullest.. i know this time ill get it because i understand ur way of explanation
5:41 the way you explain the difference between isotropic and anisotropic now I really comprehend why anisotropic is called as anisotropic thank you very much teacher😊 lots of love from India❤
The best video I've ever seen on sub-surface scattering! Most videos I've watched, people just fiddle with the values and either don't explain or don't know what is going on. Now I'm prepared for when Blender 4.0 officially releases! I'm going to turn all my materials into skin! Muahahaha!
Thank you for the very informative video, I really appreciate the time you took to edit and make comparative slides so we can pause and see the differences. Blender is such an amazingly powerful program, and there is so much to learn.
No idea how blender principle shader keeps getting worse. This was supposed to plug in and play type of shader, now its a nightmare that dosnt replicate a simple pipeline anymore.
@@christopher3d475 What you mean by "industry" standard? Lets say im making a game model for unreal, i want to slap in my normal, rougness, diffuse, sss and emmision maps. Oh noo, there is no sss color, let me plug in the normal ... oh no, it dosnt work. Its pathethic.
@@christopher3d475 I did, but thats not my point, my point is that its impossible to figure out or preview those information, i had to google what it means and this video showed up The shader whose only goal was to accommodate modern PBR pipeline is now back to being shit and not compatible with what people expect.
I explain on skin with real PBR materials because the blender fails to work in reality skin so you are explaining on solid materials and do not know how to make a realistic human skin on a blender 4 They always make bad updates without explanations😅😅😅😅😅😅😅
