Character shininess

[bodonnell]

We generated several characters and they all show up overly shiny/reflective. I've tried changing multiple settings, deleting lights, etc., but they still look like little plastic people with high reflection.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

[bodonnell · Accepted solution]

Never mind... got it figured out.

[Judith.Hageman]

Hi bondonnell,

You have fixed this "plastic" reflection. Can you tell me how you did that? I have the same problem, but not yet solved, would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Judith

[bodonnell]

We selected the character and then in the materials editor changed the Specular Highlights, Specular Level to "0". That took the high shine off the character. Seemed to work fine.

[Judith.Hageman]

Hi,

Thank you very much for your quick reply. It does indeed do the trick!

Thanks a lot!!!

Regards,

Judith

[j.walczak1]

Just a couple of quick comments/additions here...

First and foremost, you may wish to reconsider setting the Specular level to absolute 0, as that can look rather unnatural depending on the render results you're going for.  Human skin does tend to have at least a little "shine" to it.

Second, always remember to judge by your renders and NOT what you see in the viewport!  I'm assuming you're probably a tad new to this and a lot of newbies tend to forget that the viewport itself doesn't provide an accurate reflection of your character, scene, yadda, yadda yadda.

Third, don't forget you CAN change that character's shader type.  They (the AD CG characters) download as Phongs and that's usually good for most purposes, at least as a starting point, but don't be afraid to play around with changing it to a Blinn or something else.  If I'm not terribly mistaken, you can even apply that texture to X shaders and such as well (assuming you're doing a Mental Ray render at least).  In short, the shader, whichever type you use, is simply attached to a .jpg file.

Good luck!

[Judith.Hageman]

Hi @j.walczak1,

Thank you very much for your contribution. You are right, human skin has some "shine", so completely at 0 will look strange.

I am some sort of newbie, an Inventor user trying to learn to render our designs in Max, and still wrestling with the incredible amount of possibilities there are in Max. In this case the problem is based on my rendering and not on my viewport.

Your third comment is the most valuable for me. I have done an AD tutorial with Phongs and Blinn some months ago but completely forgot it.

Never worked with X shaders (yes, I am doing a mental ray rendering), but will look it up and give it a go.

Thanks again!

Judith

[bodonnell]

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out when I get a chance.

We created more of an illustration based animation vs going for realism. The solution was a quick answer to solve the problem within our production timeframe. I made the mistake of taking the CG view render sample as "just a sample" and not how the character would render in scene. We rendered out 2 animations before noticing the high shine on the character - specifically the clothing. They were set in camo and it rendered out like polished plastic.

Its been a while since we've used the program and we were playing catch up while trying to produce some animations. Always fun. I should probably do something in it every day or at least once a week to keep up with it. I forgot half of what I learned.

Thanks for the input.