Floze Light & Shade

Floze has produced some incredible tutorials covering the Mia material and lighting with the new daylight system for mental ray.

Light and Shade Part I

I did not have time to make textures, but i was mainly interested in the lighting aspect. A lot can be taken away from these tutorials so take a look if your interested in mental ray. Here are some of my results

MIA_SSS_Material

I've been thinking about a shader for a long time now and finally sat down to flesh it out. The idea goes like this. The SSS (subsurface scattering) shader in mental ray is very powerful and provides fantastic scattering effects. Mental ray also has a very powerful all encompassing material has well called the Mia_Material. This is great for real world application because it can mimic practically any surface and has a lot of control. The thing is that is isn't good at SSS. So i wanted to combined the two so i could have even more control with the SSS shader for things like Fresnel reflections and a overall more accurate surface.

Here is a default SSS material with the back scatter turned up to make it a little more noticeable.

And here is the default mia_material.

And the two combined together has a shader with a simple bump.

I'll be testing it out to see if it has any practical application (things like Skin, Eyes, Teeth since it can be easily tweaked) It can be combined with a bunch of stuff to give it even more detail, Mia_roundcorners, Built in AO, and Displacement to name a few.