Today, let’s take a look at some amazing experiments with skin shading look development involving a combination of Pixar’s RenderMan and Houdini, showcased recently by LookDev/Lighting Artist at DNEG, Krithik Sudhakaran.
With the goal of matching a provided reference as closely as possible, Krithik tested Lama skin shaders and Texturing XYZ’s VFace model within the Houdini Solaris workflow, which also involved Nuke and Substance 3D Painter, and rendering the final results in RenderMan. Attached below are the fantastic results the artist achieved as part of his hands-on practice:
For those unfamiliar, Lama, a.k.a. MaterialX Lama, is RenderMan’s material layering system developed at ILM that introduces a modular approach to building material networks and includes recent shading R&D work on energy conservation and dispersion.
According to Pixar, the MaterialX Lama project represents ongoing R&D into materials at ILM and represents one facet of the larger MaterialX project. MaterialX Lama node composition also offers a simpler built-in mechanism for energy conservation and other properties, because of its fundamental focus on layering of physically based responses.
Speaking of RenderMan itself, the solution supports Houdini’s native USD Solaris workflows introduced in Houdini 18 and provides a USD Hydra Renderer Delegate that allows artists to render interactively directly to the Solaris viewport. You can learn more about the Solaris+RenderMan combination over here.
Click here to see more of Krithik’s projects and don’t forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
