Been playing around with Mental ray’s sss_fastSimple in maya 2012 and came across something that everyone should know about when making sss shaders.

The option “SCREEN COMPOSITE” is very important option to try turning off if you are finding your SSS shader is coming out grey instead of full color. This option effectively CLAMPS the color values during the render, and is ON by default. I really dont understand why this is on by default, but as you can see from the image above, the left side represents the OFF function, with full red saturation. While the right side you can clearly see a lot of grey clips…

So remember, if your render is turning out weird, try switching this off. Also another option to keep an eye out on is the SALE CONVERSION. You can read more about it from this great collection of Maya tips

Update 3 – Here I have created a better skin shader using maya fast simple SSS. Which was then rendered with MR using phyiscal sun and sky, and the still render is with IBL.

Update: Finished the diffuse textures for serpent, had to re UV the mesh as the sculpt had pull some of the polys, causing texture to stretch badly.

Got motivated to continue the remodelling of the wizard’s serpent for Cerebus 3D the movie. The ball was dropped on my part a few months ago when I had to focus my attention on Anomaly. So the wizard’s serpent has been an ongoing project of mine to convert the low poly / texture model to something that will hold up in close ups and rendered in HD. My previous work on the hi-res tentacle can be seen here.

To match the great animation done by the guys, we needed the model to hold up, so it was decided to remodel the entire head.

I spent a good deal of time on the topology, making sure it flowed nicely when deform then moved onto deailing in mudboxbox. The next step is to texture and develop an appropriate SSS shader for the serpent. Here are my dailies on the progress.

Not my model, just render and comp for fun.

A mutated male homosapien host after been attacked by the deadly endo-parasite codename MKU.

The host’s original form is almost indistinguishable at this late stage of the parasite’s life cycle, except the eyes, arms and a small part of the sculpt remain.

Features of interest / avoidance

The two large sacks under the armpit which contains the spors from MKU.

The pus-filled glands on the back contain deadly and highly corrosive acid, avoid at all costs.

The enlarged orifice where the belly button is located contains MKU’s reproductive organs, this is the creatures main weakpoint.

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Original concept used with permission by AudreyB2D

Just spent the afternoon setting up a simple gallery website for my mother’s artworks. She is a great pastel and watercolor artist, http://artcathy.com

http://artcathy.com

Memory Dump

• Track, Shift C Cleanup
• Calculate lens distortion
• lens workflow, undistort
• save seq
• export to ma
• open in maya
• check scale
• set film gate to “horizontal“
• set nulls and parent
• bake nulls
• dup camera
• move camera out of grp
• parent to camera
• BAKE ALL
• export