Exporting for Cycles Render

[blindsaypatten]

I've seen a lot of references to using Cycles Render in Blender. When I change the render to Cycles everything renders white. Google tells me that you need a different set of materials for Cycles. Can MakeHuman export something that Cycles can render normally? Or do you have to create all your own Cycles materials? Thanks.

[jujube]

If you export as MHX2 and install the MHX2 importer blender addon, it generates cycles materials if imported while the renderer is set to cycles. (Before I discovered this It was a huge pain to manually add alphas every time. )

[blindsaypatten]

Thanks! I probably would never have thought of trying that.

The built-in hair I used looked really good in Blender Render, not so much in Cycles!

Oops, forgot to set up the lighting.

Anyone have any quick tips on how to make the Blender Render look less like he is a wax model?

As a person who knows nothing about lighting, it would be great if someone who did could set up a blender scene of a photography studio that one could just plop the character into and have good portrait lighting. I know, I'm endlessly demanding but I think it would be a great convenience for a lot of newbies like myself that are already overloaded with learning MakeHuman and Blender without having to learn good lighting technique at the same time.

[joepal]

There's a combination of circumstances that makes MHX2-imported materials have a bit too much glossy. This is particularly visible for hair. For almost all materials, you might want to enter the node editor and change the values on the glossy node so that roughness is higher (say .4 on hair) and the glossy color is less bright white (say 50% between black and white).

If you want an easy skin shader, you can look at https://www.blendernation.com/2016/12/2 ... s-addon-2/. This will give you PBR skin node with SSS. If you take the skin texture you got on the original import and plug it into the skin node's color socket, you can decent results with the proper lighting. But it will also require a lot more cycles render passes before the fireflies/artifacts evens out in the skin (SSS requires more computation).

[wolgade]

If you want an easy skin shader, you can look at https://www.blendernation.com/2016/12/2 ... s-addon-2/.

Cool! Thanks for the link.

[punkduck]

As a person who knows nothing about lighting, it would be great if someone who did could set up a blender scene of a photography studio that one could just plop the character into and have good portrait lighting. I know, I'm endlessly demanding but I think it would be a great convenience for a lot of newbies like myself that are already overloaded with learning MakeHuman and Blender without having to learn good lighting technique at the same time.

There is not "one lighting", there are lot of different ways to light scene. Last not least it depends on what you want to reach. We had a discussion in this thread:

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=13770

For portraits a three point lighting is one of the methods. Here is a short description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_lighting

For other lighting simply use google images search, "light setup" and you get a lot of proposals. At least that's the way I started with lighting. Compare your character with the real person on a photo when you set up lighting in the same way. Effects in Blender are very similar to the real effects

Glossiness / Skin like wax: the polygon hair (also clothes and sometimes the skin) look too glossy because the glossy input is white in most cases. The white is caused by the diffuse material settings, which is normally set to white or a light grey in MakeHuman. In Blender you can connect the color input of the glossy shader to the output of the image texture. You may also take out the fresnel node and simply put a low value for the glossy input in the mix-shader connecting glossy and diffuse shader.

When you connect the color output of the image texture with the displacement entry of the output node the skin will not be "flat". Put a math node between the color output and the displacement entry, set it to "multiply" and take a low value (e.g. 0.3). Otherwise the young guy will look like his own grandfather.

Sorry for not creating a picture but the setup is similar to the clothes setup I've done ... (without the "additional color" ...)

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/download/file.php?id=3690&mode=view

After doing the changes the skin should look like this ... (okay I've my own skins, but the shading is done exactly the way I wrote).

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/download/file.php?id=3633&mode=view

There are of course others methods, e.g. generate a normal map from the given skin. Or use generic skin like wolgade wrote. The only disadvantage of generic skin is, that the generated skin does not look different e.g. when you compare hand, neck or face.

Btw.: I also started with Blender Render ... (I guess most of us did), I managed to convert the Blender render characters to cycles render. It took me days, especially the eyes. And then I noticed, that the mhx2 export provides both methods