3D WORKSHOP:
Skin Shading using multi-layered SSS
3. Some Rendering Tips
15
Another piece of advice I would give is to use Ambient Occlusion! Indeed, skin tends to enlighten itself. The closer two areas are, the more saturated (orange, in the case of skin) they will look, because of the numerous bounces of light between those areas. And what is great with AO is that to some extent, it provides “distance values” of the rendered polygons. You simply need to adjust your AO pass so as to be orange, and then to multiply it to your render, just like on the image below. You will notice for instance, that the eyelids and the lips are better “drawn”, so to speak.
Conclusion
by Victor Malherbe
In the end, we have achieved a quite realistic shader which will, I hope, help you to get rid of the commonly seen plasticlooking skin. Firstly, I would like to thank the Blender community, which gave me a lot of helpful advice . and above all, thank you for reading. All I need to wish you now is "Happy Blending!" Below are some test renders, showing what can be done with this shader. No post-processing was used, except for the glow.
www.blenderart.org
In conclusion, some rendering/post-processing tricks may be in order to increase the realism of your skin renders. The first trick is quite simple: so as to enhance the contrast/lighting of your render, you can use the overlay node in post-processing, by overlaying the render with itself. Of course, the colors can be tweaked using RGB Curves, some contrast corrections, and so on.
Some weird lighting setups on Maqs' head model: Issue 16 | May 2008 - Wow Factor