Intro to subsurface scattering in Cinema 4D (C4D) - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Welcome to another C4D weekly. This week, we're going to be covering a 3D concept called subsurface scattering and what it does. Basically what subsurface scattering, or SSS, does is allows light to penetrate and scatter through a surface that is slightly transparent. A great example of this effect is if you turn on your phone's flashlight and place your finger over the flash bulb, you're going to see that your finger turns orange and is illuminated by that light. So, that phenomenon, in 3D, is subsurface scattering. What it does is adds a whole nother level of realism to the objects you apply subsurface scattering to. So let's go ahead and check out how you can add it to your materials. So here's my piece of cheese made with the volume builder and volume mesher. And basically what we're going to do is just check out the current material I have applied. So it's just your basic color channel and a little bit of reflectance, blurred reflection in the reflectance channel. So nothing fancy. Let's just go ahead, I got a basic lighting set up. Got overhead light, background light, and side light here. You can see going on right there. So, lighting is very important as far as how your object looks with subsurface scattering because it plays off the lights in your scene. But, let's go ahead and just render this view right here. So you can see that the cheese does not look very realistic. It looks okay, but this does not look like actual cheese. This is where subsurface scattering is really going to help push the realism of how this cheese looks. So what we're going to do to add subsurface scattering is just go in to our material. And what I'm going to do is just turn off the color channel here. But what I can do is, maybe grab this color, just in case I want to use it in my subsurface scattering. So I'll just right click on color and hit copy. And let's just turn that off. Now, where we're going to load in our subsurface scattering is in the illuminance channel. So I'm going to check that on and let's just go into texture and go down to effects and check out subsurface scattering. Now let's go into the subsurface scattering options and here we have all of our subsurface scattering options. So you're going to see, if you go to this preset menu, you're going to see all of the different types of presets we have here. All these different types of objects that are really enhanced by using subsurface scattering. So what we're going to do is, instead of using a preset, we're going to build our own custom setup here. So what we're going to do is, first, adjust the color. And this is basically the color of your object in the light that's going to be passing through. So what I can do is maybe just right click on the color and hit paste so that'll load up the color that we had from our color channel. This would be a good starting point. We got this really nice handy, kind of preview image of what our object should look like. So it's kind of lookin kind of cheesy at this point. Not that kind of cheesy, but actually look like cheese. But what we're going to do is, maybe brighten this up just a tad. Maybe something like that, okay. Now what we can do is maybe increase the strength. So this is the overall strength of the subsurface scattering illumination. So, if we really want to make this pronounced, maybe we can crank this up to 250. You can see that we're kind of blowing out and overexposing parts of our image. So maybe we want to make the cheese color a little darker, maybe something like that. The next option that's super important is this path length. So, basically, what the path length is, is how deep the subsurface scattering light will penetrate your object. Now, lower values look way nicer, but it also increases the render time. So, the smaller the path length, the longer the render time. So if I twirl down this path length, you're going to see that we have this red, green, and blue options. Basically, what we can do here is, define the color that is going to penetrate deeper through the object. So, if we want more yellow to penetrate, we can just go ahead and up the red and green values, kind of like this. So maybe around 300 in red and 300 in green. You can see that we're getting a little bit more yellow penetrating there. Now what we can do is, let's just see what we have at this point. So, you're not going to see a good visual representation in the viewport. So let's go ahead and just render our view. So we can definitely tweak the settings of the subsurface scattering and adjust the lights. Again, a big component of how subsurface scattering works is just the positioning and the placement of your lights. As well as some of these subsurface scattering options. But you can see that, already, just by adding a subsurface scattering with tweaking a few of the options, we already have a much more realistic looking piece of cheese here. So, if we see the before and after, you can see just how stark a contrast there is between subsurface scattering and no subsurface scattering. So, hopefully this helps illustrate how important subsurface scattering is, in adding realism to your renders. They have objects with semi-transparent surfaces, albeit with higher render times. So come back next week and I'm going to show you how to use subsurface scattering using Octane for Cinema 4D. And let's see how much faster an effect like subsurface scattering can render using a third party renderer. So, you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are some other ways to feed your creative brain, to keep you busy. 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