Advanced Texturing and Lighting: Ugly Ray

 This ugly little fellow is Ugly Ray, another model that was provided for us.  Our assignment with this was to test out the subsurface scattering skin shaders, which I am glad to get more exposure to.  The advances in rendering software had made a huge difference in getting the skin of animated characters to feel more lifelike.  Before, the algorithms that were used just made skin look like plastic.

For this, I thought I'd try one of ZBrush's little known features called Pixolpaint.  With this technique, you are actually coloring vertexes on the model, rather than pixels.  You can then transfer that information into an actual color map for use in Maya or some other renderer.  ZBrush is becoming more attractive to me all the time.

One of the nice advantages of subsurface scattering shaders is the nice, realistic, light leak you get coming from this surfaces like the ear here.

We also had to do a "fake skin" shader that used a combination of older shaders to try and get the same effect as a subsurface scattering shader.  However, it left much to be desired: