Will we ever have sub-dermal texture input for the Skin shaders?

[Invertex]

This is one major issue I have with Keyshot that is holding back how good the skin materials can look. Right now it only accepts a base color texture input, while color swatches are used for the other skin layers... Skin is not a uniform color on any layer in real life. And unfortunately it seems the MTL material system does not give users much control for creating custom shaders for the software, as far as I can tell. Diffuse, Epidermal, Subdermal and Back Scatter would be optimal. But even just a texture input for the current "Subsurface Color" would be amazing. And perhaps some weight & radius values for them.

Does the dev team have an update to the Skin shaders planned at all?

[DriesV]

As far as pure skin rendering goes, I think KeyShot is currently plenty capable.
Not an expert on the matter, but are these KS skin results not satisfying your needs?




Dries

[DriesV]

Try to push the current skin shader as far as you can.
I'm sure you'll get great (not just good) results.
I think you should be grateful that the translucent shader is super easy to control.

Just saying...

Dries

[Invertex]

No, that result is not good enough.

1. Most of the color information is coming from the base texture in that image, it's baked in subsurface lighting, hand-painted rendering. It's like if you did a 3D scan of someone's face and just used the texture generated, sure, it will look good, but it's not going to change properly according to lighting you use, due to all that baked in color information.
2. Since there's no texture-based control of the the Subsurface swatch, it creates this rubber-like uniform skin lighting across the whole model. It's especially noticeable on the ears and eyelids.

That red in the ears shouldn't be a painted base texture, it should be simulated with light by using a higher value on a subsurface texture in that area. And things like veins and other differences in matter inside the skin, should be on the subsurface texture where their visibility is adjusted properly according to lighting, versus what we have now where the veins would always have the same relative level of visibility, no matter the lighting.

I don't need to be grateful that it's easy to control, if that ease of use limits its capabilities. Simply allowing a texture-input for the Subsurface color swatch wouldn't make the material anymore complex for less technical users, and would push skin-renders to an even higher level in Keyshot. Though it wouldn't be as ideal for simulation as the MR skin system, it would still be much better.

It's a fairly reasonable request, the skin shader is one of their weakest compared to their other shaders.

[Frederic]

DriesV, hi!

I am amazed by your skin shader! 

Would you care to share a few lines about your materials and shader setup for such beautiful skin in KS?

[Niko Planke]

Hey,

Try to have a look at the material graph in KeyShot 6 Pro.
The material graph allows you to use a texture for the "Subsurface color"(Subdermal),"Surface color"(Epidermal), and the Roughness slider(or roughness-map)  and Secular color(or texture) should give you control over the Diffuse and Back scatter. By utilizing "Color adjust" nodes for  the textures you can gain even more control.

I would like to see how it turns out with these new possibilities.
New limits to push it to :-)

Niko