Blood layer for Enhanced Eye Shader

[cgvirus]

Hello, I was enhancing the enhanced eye with a blood layer. IDK how to PR it as there is no shader to replace in the script anywhere. So here is the raw blend file. The blood amount slider is at the bottom. 0 will make the pure white as before. 1-10 will make the eye bloody with veins. If it can be inserted in the enhanced eye shader, that would be great! Thanks!

Enhanced Eye With Blood.zip

[joepal1976]

Thanks. I'm working on a version 2 of the eyes, which will be PR:able. This contains a blood vein layer, but I was never very satisfied with it.

I'll see to getting the sample blend file under version control, and see if we can merge the versions there. It'll take until tomorrow though.

[cgvirus]

Actually I was wondering what if we could make blender shader as another standard besides mhmat like make materal does. We could

• make them
• share them
• import them with json or directly from a blender file from the addon.
• JSON is not viable in this case actually.

I am trying to understand MPFB2 design decisions. So, this is what came to my mind. Makehuman is a little different than usual apps.

My plan for near future:

• I want to make my own shader and planning to share it as CC. Makehuman shader is very limited to basic (only a diffuse, spec and normal).

• I want to make the simplest pbr shader with highres PBR base textures so that we can create, share and load them easily in Blender. This will have the PBR maps modern games use today. And as a base, it can be tweaked, repack, modified easily as well. For baking I always use principled baker addon for blender. This can be exported directly to game engines.

• Procedural shader is super slow, bulky, very limited when comes to natural look. Very hard to maintain and create. The more options, the more user will be confused.

[joepal1976]

I very much doubt there will ever be a superior one-size-fits-all material model. The procedural skin shader is a good fit for my own use cases atm, but is obviously a horrible fit for use cases involving exports to other applications. I have no problem supporting multiple parallel material models, each geared for their respective use case.

So I'm all for adding another standard shader that solves additional use cases.

There are several reasons for not using blend files as backend for the materials. One is that it is very cumbersome to handle blend files in version control. You can't diff them or make viable PRs. I wanted to keep tight source code control and the ability to unit test all aspects of the shader, which makes serialization to a text-based format appealing.

There must be better exchange formats than using opaque binary blobs, but so far I have not seen any kind of standard for this arising in the blender world. So best I've been able to do is JSON + images.

MHMAT is a truly ancient format, which has been around for close to two decades. It is not quite as limited as you say, but it is not far from the truth (for reference, there's a spec at https://github.com/makehumancommunity/community-plugins-makeskin/blob/master/README.md). Right now it is there as a baseline, as all available assets use it and it is the only available shared standard usable by both MakeHuman and MPFB. But it is by no means an end truth which must be followed. It is a bit too limiting to think all future assets would need to adhere to this standard.

[joepal1976]

I've put my current experimental next eye shader in a git lfs repo at https://github.com/makehumancommunity/mpfb-eye-model-v2

As said, I was never very happy with my current eyewhite/blood solution there, so at some point I would take a swipe at merging your solution as a replacement.

I will be traveling a lot for the next two weeks though, so it might take some time until I get around to it. If you want to play around with the v2 model before then, you're be welcome to.

As a general note about the status of the v2 model: It is quite far from finished. The outer transparent layer is in a flux where I am trying to solve the problem with the transmission solution in the v1 model ending up way too dark, but in the v2 version I've lost Ior which isn't optimal either.

[cgvirus]

Got it, After experimenting the developer tool yesterday, I get the power of this pipeline. It is very good and efficient. I will start observing the patterns it takes to create a material today. I may need some suggestion later to understand the pipeline well. I think I can make a easy to digest tutorial series on mpfb2 soon. What you have made is a hidden gem. Thanks for the addon!

[cgvirus]

This will help to make PBR proper https://github.com/makehumancommunity/mpfb2/issues/124

[cgvirus]

Closing this issue as the subject is out of this issue. Created new one instead