robcat2075

Here's a Steve Shelton model with SSS set at 4 3 2

making red largest lets more red scatter to the shadow side. Tricky to set the green and blue so the bright side doesn't look weird.

I have done that. I thought 1.0 might be "default"

Here is a test with more conservative values. The left has no SSS, the right does. This head is about 25 cm wide. Although they are slightly different angles to the camera, they are both identical angle to the light.

Mark, I'll also note that I shrunk the objects down quite a bit from your sample PRJ. the extinction distances seem to be real distances, centimeters I presume, so the visible effect of "2" will appear to be much less on a giant object seen from a distance than "2" will make ona small object seen up close. the cubes in my example above are about human head width. small distances, less than 1.0, may be scientifically accurate for skin, but also are very long to render, and produce such a slight effect that they may seem not worth the time. Larger values, greater than 1, render faster and produce a more visible scattering effect. It may be the "exaggeration" you need to get the effect you need across on the screen.

I haven't done much with SSS so this is my uninformed attempt. I hope others will chime in. My first gambit is to set some absurdly large settings to see if anything happens. Yes, it does! This scene has two identical objects facing a single Sun light at identical angles. Both have identical materials on them except the right one has SSS ON with the settings shown. They do indeed appear different. The light seems to flow through the second cube instead of getting cut at the corner. Notice how the shadow the first cube casts on the second one is blurry even though the Sun light is just a simple sharp-shadow light. These settings are more like what you'd use for a waxy candle than human skin. The high values for "extinction" seem to require large values for density of SSS Samples in order to shade smoothly. Here is the PRJ... Marcajun_test sss_03.prj

As I see it, making the matching groups is so easy that it's probably easier than whatever interventions you'd have to do to make some other automatic discriminatory power to work.

If you can make that work, I'm all for it! But note how in the picture you've posted, for example, the two thighs are the same color but you would definitely not want them to be communicating weights. Also note that those bone colors fade from one to the next. Where would one group end and the next start? Here's a result with no leg Groups... the thighs get stuck together.

I thought so too, but it seems that mere proximity in space is enough for influence to happen. For example, the right big toe and left big toe are very close to each other in space even though they are far away from each other in the spline mesh. You don't want either to be partially attached to the other.

One other tip... After Transfer_AW is done, force a save. This causes all the new CP weights to be in effect.

You will get a result. Part of success with Transfer_AW is to use "exclusion groups" When there are body parts that lie near each other but should not share any CP weighting, like a right and left leg, then you make an exclusion group for each body part in each model. For the right leg you would make a "lo-res rightleg" Group in the lo-res mesh, and an analogous "hi-res rightleg" Group in the hi-res mesh. Likewise for other body parts. For this demo I just did the absolute bare minimum of Exclusion Grouping to get a functional result. Here is Steffan's page for Transfer_AW http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin24/index.html Here is the demo PRJ in the video, before Transfer_AW has been run lo-hi015a demo.prj

Great lookin' head! Wild guess... This may be something as simple as needing to explicitly set a color property where, before, the default "not set" would work. I'm sure it is still possible to set a color for hair so I'm sure there is a solution somewhere.

Is it magic? Is it a trick? I will note that Transfer AW is not a one-button solution and sometimes makes mistaken assignments that are rather odd. But if you had to get a body moving quickly... it's there.

Hooray for complication!

I'll note that you can always load these files directly as files from the CD or folder they are in without needing to use the Library process.

The squares? Can you show me a couple frames with those? I'm sure I'm not the inventor of this technique. I'm thinking I tried it after either hearing someone talk about something in another program that sounded a lot like our sprites or maybe even seeing some CG clouds in a movie and thinking they looked suspiciously like sprites we could make in A:M. It's not very different from how we've been doing sprite smoke except it's not getting blown away. I also recall a shot someone did a long time ago showing the white contrail smoke trailing a rocket and that was pretty much the same technique except their sprite was more toony with harder edge. Yes, you may use this technique and re-use my sprite. The biggest limitation of this technique is that you have to craft the sprite to match direction of the sunlight in your scene as seen by the camera. If your camera swings around to see clouds from another angle those clouds will need a different sprite made to match their surrounding illumination.

It is indeed a slow technique. The more typical technique of using an image backdrop will always be faster but this is an option for when you need to fly among the clouds or build a particular shape which the other techniques can never do no matter how fast they are..

Six minutes? Why, when I was a boy, we had to wait...

Whoops! I'll have to take a look at it and see what behaves differently in v19.

Well... I haven't actually looked at that project in a long time... maybe I did try hair? Maybe hair can work as well? But I'm pretty sure the version in my video clip is sprites.

I'll note that in my PRJ the particles are sprites rather than hair. Each sprite is one tiny, single cloud puff image, but if you emit many of them in different sizes in a clump you start to get something that looks like a cloud!

Is this not good? https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41565&p=367998

Set the Ground's "Toon Shading" Method to "Standard" if you want it to show shadows that fall on it. Additionally, you can set its "diffuse" falloff to 0% for a flatter look.

Hooray! that worked well! You can reduce/eliminate the jitter after it settles by setting "sub steps" higher and/or making "precision" smaller. Those are settings in Chor props.

And if you have a specific shot you want to create clouds for we can pursue that here on the forum.