I have talked a bit about applying an SSS shaders to CC3+ head based Humanoids
hereHere's a couple of tips for fixing a mouth opening for any humanoid character with SSS.
Lots of humanoids with PBR for inner mouth, tongue and teeth would suffer from this issue while rendered in iClone.
They might look fine without the need for micro-normal and other highlights from DHS, but once they open their mouth and start talking,
it feels like they are in dental chair getting ready for a procedure
:ermm: :crazy:. Depending on your light scheme, it might look from bad to terrible.
Specially if the inner mouth has fairly bright texture and is specular.
So here's how to quickly get from this (I have a DHS Kevin to show the difference):
to this:
I will still use CC3+ Head for this example, but tips could be easily applied to any Humanoid with texture for inner mouth, tongue and teeth.
Basically you will need to switch from PBR to SSS, tweak AO maps and apply an important AO control in SSS.
Head/Inner MouthOnce switched to SSS I will retain the head PBR look and work only on the inner mouth.
If you do not need subsurface scattering, apply a pure black map to SSS Map slot (or play with SSS Falloff color), delete the rest and play with roughness controls and slide SSS Radius to 1.
Otherwise, tweak the shader until you like skin appearance (see the article I mentioned at the beginning).
It's even better if you have a separate material for the inner mouth mesh of your Humanoid.
What I will essentially do, is simulate a DHS AO.
I have applied a gradient for the inner mouth mesh for the AO map.
I picked a relatively soft gradient. You may go stronger on a dark side (back end of the inner mouth):
And then checked "AO Map Occlude All Lighting". And that would start making a real difference. You may further play with Blend Map Brightness and Saturation here:
TongueSwitch to SSS, play with controls to your liking and similarly apply AO gradient to the Tongue material. I made a very simple gradient map in this case :
Same as with Head/Inner Mouth, check "AO Map Occlude All Lighting".
TeethSwitch to SSS, play with control. You may want to spend a bit more time making fine looking teeth here.
Regarding AO, I just darken a bit the existing maps for the upper and lower teeth.
And then of course checked the "AO Map Occlude All Lighting" in Blend section.