Page History

The standard_surface shader is a physically-based shader capable of producing many types of materials. It includes a diffuse layer, a specular layer with complex Fresnel for metals, specular transmission for glass, subsurface scattering for skin, thin scattering for water and ice, a secondary specular coat, and light emission.

This shader models a material consisting of ten components that are layered and mixed hierarchically as illustrated in the diagram below. The properties of individual components can vary across the surface.

Material Types

By default, the parameters are appropriate for materials such as plastic, wood or stone. By setting a few key parameters to 1, different types of materials can be quickly created:

• Metalness: gold, silver, iron, car paint.
• Transmission: glass, water, honey, soap bubble.
• Subsurface: skin, marble, wax, paper, leaves.
• Thin Walled: paper, leaves, soap bubble.

Parameter values between 0 and 1 may be used to create more complex materials that are a mix of basic material types.

Energy Conservation

Standard Surface is energy conserving by default. All its layers are balanced so that the amount of light leaving the surface does not exceed the amount of incoming light. For example, as a surface is made more metallic and the specular layer contribution is increased, the diffuse layer contribution is reduced accordingly to ensure energy conservation.

The base color weight.

The base_color sets how bright the surface is when lit directly with a white light source (intensity at 100%). It defines which percentage for each component of the RGB spectrum does not get absorbed when light scatters beneath the surface. Metal normally has a black or very dark base color, however, rusty metal's need some base color. A base_color map is usually required.

The base component follows an Oren-Nayar reflection model with surface roughness. A value of 0.0 is comparable to a Lambert reflection. Higher values will result in a rougher surface look more suitable for materials like concrete, plaster or sand.

The specular_weight. Influences the brightness of the specular highlight.

The color the specular reflection will be modulated with. Use this color to 'tint' the specular highlight. You should only use colored specular for certain metals, whereas non-metallic surfaces usually have a monochromatic specular color. Non-metallic surfaces normally do not have a colored specular.

Controls the glossiness of the specular reflections. The lower the value, the sharper the reflection. In the limit, a value of 0 will give you a perfectly sharp mirror reflection, while 1.0 will create reflections that are close to a diffuse reflection. You should connect a map here to get variation in the specular highlight.

The 'microscopic' features of a surface affect the diffusion and reflection of light. This 'micro surface' detail has the most noticeable effect on specular reflections. In the diagram below, you can view parallel lines of incoming light commence to diverge when reflected from rougher surfaces when each ray hits a part of the surface with a different orientation. In summary, the rougher the surface becomes, the more the reflected light will diverge or appear 'blurred.'

The brightness of the specular highlight is automatically linked to its size due to the standard_surface shader's energy-conserving nature. In the example below, all of the materials are reflecting the same amount of light, but the rougher surface is spreading it out in multiple directions. However, with low amounts of roughness, the surface is reflecting a more concentrated amount of light.

To get variation in the highlights of the surface, a map should be connected to the Specular Roughness. This will influence not only the brightness of the highlight but also its size and the sharpness of the environmental reflection.

The IOR parameter (Index of Refraction) defines the material's Fresnel reflectivity and is by default the angular function used. Effectively the IOR will define the balance between reflections on surfaces facing the viewer and on surface edges. You can see the reflection intensity remains unchanged, but the reflection intensity on the front side changes a lot.

Specular IOR with Transmission

The default value of 1.0 is the refractive index of a vacuum, i.e., an object with IOR of 1.0 in empty space will not refract any rays. In simple terms, 1.0 means 'no refraction'. The standard_surface shader assumes that any geometry has outward-facing normals, that objects are embedded in the air (IOR 1.0) and that there are no overlapping surfaces. 

Anisotropy reflects and transmits light with a directional bias and causes materials to appear rougher or glossier in certain directions. The default value for anisotropy is 0, which means 'isotropic.' As you move the control towards 1.0, the surface is made more anisotropic in the U axis.

Anisotropy is suitable for materials that have a clear brush direction such as brushed metal which has tiny grooves in which form a 'stretched' anisotropic reflection.

Anisotropic reflections are suitable for brushed metal effects such as in the example below: 

The rotation value changes the orientation of the anisotropic reflectance in UV space. At 0.0, there is no rotation, while at 1.0 the effect is rotated by 180 degrees. For a surface with brushed metal, this controls the angle at which the material was brushed. For metallic surfaces, the anisotropic highlight should stretch out in a direction perpendicular to the brushing direction.

It is possible to assign textures to the rotation. When doing so, it is advisable to avoid texture filtering. This means disabling MIP-mapping and disabling the magnification filter, which by default is set to "smart bicubic." One way is to set the mipmap_bias of the image node to a strong negative value, like -8, which means "use 8 MIP levels higher resolution than usual".

With metalness 1.0 the surface behaves like a metal, using fully specular reflection and complex fresnel.

The metal appearance is controlled using the base_color (facing) and specular_color (edge tint) parameters. These are automatically translated to physical η and κ values, to achieve the same look but with easily tweakable and texturable colors. Some examples of real-world values for metals can be found below.

		Base Color		Specular Color
Aluminium (Al)		0.912 0.914 0.920		0.970 0.979 0.988
Copper (Cu)		0.926 0.721 0.504		0.996 0.957 0.823
Gold (Au)		0.944 0.776 0.373		0.998 0.981 0.751
Iron (Fe)		0.531 0.512 0.496		0.571 0.540 0.586
Lead (Pb)		0.632 0.626 0.641		0.803 0.808 0.862
Mercury (Hg)		0.781 0.779 0.779		0.879 0.910 0.941
Nickel (Ni)		0.649 0.610 0.541		0.797 0.801 0.789
Platinum (Pt)		0.679 0.642 0.588		0.785 0.789 0.784
Silver (Ag)		0.962 0.949 0.922		0.999 0.998 0.998

Metalness values between 0.0 and 1.0 can be used to texture surfaces like rusted iron, where different areas of the surface can have more reflective clean metal and more diffuse rust. PBR metalness maps from applications like Substance Painter can be connected to this parameter.

The transmission allows light to scatter through the surface, for materials such as glass or water.

This filters the refraction according to the distance traveled by the refracted ray. The longer light travels inside a mesh, the more it is affected by the transmission_color. Therefore green glass gets a deeper green as rays travel through thicker parts. The effect is exponential and computed with Beer's Law. It is recommended to use light, subtle color values.

If this value has a color and shadows tinted with that color are required, then disable opaque for the mesh that has been assigned the standard_surface shader. In the example below, you can see that with opaque enabled the rays cannot pass through the sphere. Whereas with opaque disabled, the rays can pass through the sphere and absorb the color set by the transmission_color, thereby creating the effect of colored shadows. 

Controls the depth into the volume at which the transmission_color is realized. Increasing this value makes the volume thinner, which means less absorption and scattering. It is a scale factor so that you can set a transmission_color and then tweak the depth to be appropriate for the size of your object.

The effect of increasing transmission_depth can be seen in the animation below. Note that a transmission_scatter color has also been used in this case.

Transmission_scatter is suitable for any liquid that is fairly thick or where there is enough of it for scattering to be visible, such as a deep body of water or honey. If you have a glass of water, there is not that much scattering, however, for an ocean, it is required. Other examples include materials like ice, opalescent glass, or milky glass.

The directional bias, or anisotropy, of the scattering. The default value of zero gives isotropic scattering so that light is scattered evenly in all directions. Positive values bias the scattering effect forwards, in the direction of the light, while negative values bias the scattering backward, toward the light.

Specifies the abbe number of the material, which describes how much the index of refraction varies across wavelengths. For glass and diamonds, this is typically in the range of 10 to 70, with lower numbers giving more dispersion. The default value is 0, which turns off dispersion. The chromatic noise can be reduced by either increasing the global Camera (AA) samples or the Refraction samples.

Adds some additional blurriness of refraction computed with an isotropic microfacet BTDF. The range goes from -1 to 1, where 0 means no roughness. It is computed as 

transmission_roughness = specular_roughness + transmission_extra_roughness.

Negative values result in a lower roughness for transmission than for reflection.

When enabled, transmission will pass through AOVs. If the background is transparent, then the transmissive surface will become transparent so that it can be composited over another background. Light path expression AOVs will be passed through so that for example a diffuse surface seen through a transmissive surface will end up in the diffuse AOV. Other AOVs can also be passed straight through (without any opacity blending), which can be used for creating masks for example. 

Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) simulates the effect of light entering an object and scattering beneath its surface. Not all light reflects from a surface. Some of it will penetrate below the surface of an illuminated object. There it will be absorbed by the material and scattered internally. Some of this scattered light will make its way back out of the surface and become visible to the camera. This is known as 'sub-surface scattering' or 'SSS'. SSS is necessary for the realistic rendering of materials such as marble, skin, leaves, wax, and milk. The SSS component in this shader is calculated using a brute-force raytracing method.

SSS is important when replicating realistic materials such as plastics, for example:

The 'blend' between diffuse and subsurface scattering. When set to 1.0, there is only SSS, and when set to 0 it is only Lambert. In most cases, you want this to be 1.0 (full SSS).

The color used to determine the subsurface scattering effect. For example, replicating a skin material would mean setting this to a fleshy color.

Info

Skin Color Generally, you would connect a color texture map to the subsurface_color, and set the subsurface radius to a value appropriate for skin (mostly a higher value for the red channel assuming red mostly comes from blood). The radius can also be textured if desired. Veins would be part of the color texture map, and that not only affects the color but also how the subsurface scattering behaves. standard_surface has a mix between base and SSS. It is your choice if you want to use diffuse with skin. It can be used to e.g. mix in a different texture with a mask for e.g. face paint, or to vary sharpness by connecting the same texture to both the base_color and subsurface_color and changing the blend factor.

The approximate distance up to which light can scatter below the surface, also known as “mean free path” (MFP). This parameter affects the average distance that light might propagate below the surface before scattering back out. This effect on the distance can be specified for each color component separately. Higher values will smooth the appearance of the subsurface scattering, while lower values will result in a more opaque look.

The lighter the color, the more light is scattered. A value of 0 will produce no scattering effect: 

Increasing the radius value can radically change the appearance of the material, from looking like leather to marble. SSS is very scale-dependent. You will need to adjust the radius multiplier depending on the size of your model. If you were to render using the default SSS settings, you might get something that does not look correct. Alternatively, adjusting the scene scale can have similar results.

Instead of distributing all of the colors with the same amount, you can also choose different radius values for each of the RGB colors. For example, a material like clay or skin should have a higher red radius than green and blue.

The images below show the effect when increasing the red color of the radius. Notice the colored 'fringing' effect around the edges of the circles. The same effect occurs when Gaussian blurring the red channel of the source image in a compositing package.

Controls the distance that the light is likely to travel under the surface before reflecting back out. It scales the scattering radius and multiplies the sss_radius_color.

Henyey-Greenstein Anisotropy coefficient between -1 (full back-scatter) and 1 (full forward-scatter). The default is 0 for an isotropic medium, which scatters the light evenly in all directions, giving a uniform effect. Positive values bias the scattering effect forwards, in the direction of the light, while negative values bias the scattering backward, toward the light.

Diffusion

With a single layer, it can capture both surface detail and deep scattering. Designed to closely match the characteristics of the full Monte-Carlo simulation, while remaining an approximation that's much cheaper to evaluate than a full randomwalk.

Randomwalk (default)

Unlike the empirical BSSRDF method based on diffusion theory, the randomwalk method actually traces below the surface with a real random walk and makes no assumptions about the geometry being locally flat. This means it can take into account anisotropic scattering like brute-force volume rendering and produces much better results around concavities and small details. It can also be substantially faster for large scattering radius (i.e. large mean free path) compared to diffusion. On the other hand, randomwalk can be slower in dense media (i.e. small mfp), may require redialing materials to achieve a similar look, and is more sensitive to non-closed meshes, "mouth bags", and internal geometry potentially casting shadows.

Randomwalk v2

This method scatters more accurately and deeply through highly-transparent/optically-thin objects, which produces SSS with more saturated colors around fine surface detail and heavily backlit regions of an object. Note that renders will be more costly and noisier than with the original method since randomwalk will be on average longer and more random.

Thin_walled can also provide the effect of a translucent object being lit from behind (the shading point is 'lit' by the specified fraction of the light hitting the reverse of the object at that point). It is recommended that this only be used with thin objects (single-sided geometry) as objects with thickness may render incorrectly.  

Thin_walled is ideal for thin (single-sided) objects, like bubbles for example.

Thin Walled Translucency

The appearance of this effect is like a thin sheet of paper letting some light through to the backside.

Connect a normal map here (usually exported from Mudbox or ZBrush).

The tangent map. Together with the shading normal, it defines the tangent coordinate system that the input vector applies to. If available from your sculpting tool, you should connect here the tangent map that the normal map relies on. If 0, the shader attempts the following actions to build the frame:

1. Look for vector user data named "tangent" and "bitangent."
2. Use the UV derivatives.
3. Build its own local frame.

This attribute is used to coat the material. It acts as a clear-coat layer on top of all other shading effects. The coating is always reflective (with the given roughness) and is assumed to be dielectric. Examples would be the clear-coat layer for car paint or the sheen layer for a skin material. For example, for an extra oily layer or wet skin. Other examples would be objects that have been laminated or a protective film over an aluminum cell phone.

Coat can be used for materials such as metallic car paint, the reflective coating on a balloon, or a bubble for example.

This is the color of the coating layer's transparency.

In the example below, the red coat_color acts as a clear coat layer, tinting the specular reflection underneath.

Texturing Example

In the example below, a blue and white checker texture has been applied to the base_color and the coat_color has been changed to yellow. When combined, the yellow clear-coat layer on top of the base color gives a green tint similar to a semi-transparent layer of paint or lacquer.

You can also define how the coating affects the underlying base_color by connecting a texture map to the coat_weight.

Coat_color can also be used to layer a stencil texture. In the example below, a type image has been connected to the coat_color, and the coat_roughness has been increased. Notice how it appears unaffected by the specular highlight that appears to 'sit' underneath it.

Controls the glossiness of the specular reflections. The lower the value, the sharper the reflection. In the limit, a value of 0 will give you a perfectly sharp mirror reflection, while 1.0 will create reflections that are close to a diffuse reflection. You should connect a map here to get variation in the coat highlight.

The IOR parameter (Index of Refraction) defines the material's Fresnel reflectivity and is by default the angular function used. Effectively the IOR will define the balance between reflections on surfaces facing the viewer and on surface edges. You can see the reflection intensity remains unchanged, but the reflection intensity on the front side changes a lot.

Anisotropy reflects and transmits light with a directional bias and causes materials to appear rougher or glossier in certain directions. The default value for anisotropy is 0, which means 'isotropic.' As you move the control towards 1.0, the surface is made more anisotropic in the U axis.

Anisotropy is suitable for materials that have a clear brush direction such as brushed metal which has tiny grooves in which form a 'stretched' anisotropic reflection.

Anisotropic reflections are suitable for brushed metal effects such as in the example below: 

The rotation value changes the orientation of the anisotropic reflectance in UV space. At 0.0, there is no rotation, while at 1.0 the effect is rotated by 180 degrees.

It is possible to assign textures to the rotation. When doing so, it is advisable to avoid texture filtering. This means disabling MIP-mapping and disabling the magnification filter, which by default is set to "smart bicubic." One way is to set the mipmap_bias of the image node to a strong negative value, like -8, which means "use 8 MIP levels higher resolution than usual".

The coat_normal affects the fresnel blending of the coat over the base, so depending on the normal, the base will be more or less visible from particular angles. Uses for coat_normal could be a bumpy coat layer over a smoother base. This could include a rain effect, a carbon fiber shader, or a car paint shader where you could use different normals (using e.g. flakes) for the coat layer and base layers. 

Coat_normal is suited to situations where the layer may be uneven, for example, an oily or wet layer, rain on streets or glazing on food.

Center
Image rollover 0 mud-coat_normal.jpg 1 mud-no-coat_normal.jpg Rollover image (left). Puddles are created with a glossy texture map connected to coat_normal via bump shader (right).

When you specify a coat_normal, it affects just the coat, and none of the layers below it (diffuse, specular, transmission). In the example below right, the rock material appears to have a clear coat layer, when a bump texture is connected to the coat_normal.

In the real world, when a material is coated there is a certain amount of internal reflections on the inside of the coating. This causes light to bounce onto the surface multiple times before escaping, allowing the material's color to have an enhanced effect. An example of this is varnished wood. This effect can be achieved by using coat_affect_color.

This causes the coating's roughness to have an effect on the underlying layer's roughness, simulating the blurring effect of being seen through the top layer. In the example below, a checker texture has been connected to the coat _roughness with Metalness set to 1.0. When set to 0, the coating is unaffected, whereas at 1 the coating_roughness is apparent.

Controls the amount of emitted light. It can create noise, especially if the source of indirect illumination is very small (e.g. light bulb geometry).

The emitted light color.

Controls the degree to which light is not allowed to travel through it. Unlike transmission, whereby the material still considers diffuse, specular, etc., the opacity will affect the entire shader. Useful for retaining the shadow definition of an object, while making the object itself invisible to the camera.

This switch in the standard_surface shader specifies whether specular or transmission bounces behind diffuse bounces are enabled or not. As caustics can be noisy, these are disabled by default.

To control noise from caustics, the global indirect_specular_blur setting may be increased, which blurs out caustics to reduce noise at the cost of accuracy.

Notice that the areas in the scenes below are darker inside the glass. This is because the illumination inside the glass is essentially all caustics. Enabling caustics for the glass shader fixes this issue. 

Unchecking internal reflections will disable indirect specular and mirror perfect reflection computations when ray refraction depth is bigger than zero (when there has been at least one refraction ray traced in the current ray tree).

In the right image below, the sphere appears black because internal_reflections is disabled in the standard_surface shader assigned to the sphere.

This will cause the standard_surface shader to trace a ray against the background/environment when the maximum GI reflection/refraction depth is met and return the color that is visible in the background/environment in that direction. When the option is disabled, the path is terminated instead and returns black when the maximum depth is reached.

The amount of diffuse light received from indirect sources only. 

The amount of specularity received from indirect sources only. Values other than 1.0 will cause the materials to not preserve energy, and global illumination may not converge.

Specifies how to resolve overlapping dielectrics into a well-defined medium, so that higher priority (higher number) dielectrics override lower priority ones which are effectively removed. This is used to correctly set up cases with adjacent dielectric media such as a glass of water with ice.

It is possible to tag multiple objects as belonging to the same SSS 'set' so that illumination will blur across object boundaries. A common use-case might be blurring between teeth and gum geometry. It is enabled by adding the constant STRING userdata sss_setname to the same value on the objects in the set.

Lets you specify a custom tangent for specular anisotropic shading. For example, if the mesh has tangent user data, that could be linked here.

Defines the actual thickness of the film between the specified min and max thickness (0 to 2000 (soft min/max)). This affects the specular, transmission and coat components. Normally this would be something like a noise map to give some variation to the interference effect. If the thickness becomes large like 3000 [nm], the iridescence effect will disappear, which is physically correct behavior.

The refractive index of the medium surrounding the material. Normally this is set to 1.0 for air.  

The color used to be output in AOV id (1-8). Connect a shader or texture here and it will be saved to the similarly named id AOV. AOV ids are useful for creating mattes to be used in compositing.

An energy-conserving sheen layer that can be used to approximate microfiber, cloth-like surfaces such as velvet and satin of varying roughness. Sheen is layered onto the diffuse component and its weight is determined with this attribute. Sheen can be thought of as the density or the combination of the density and length of the fibers. 

As well as fabric, sheen can be used to simulate leaves, fruit, or the peach fuzz on a face (best when viewed from a distance).

The color of the fibers. Tints the color of the sheen contribution.

This modulates how much the microfibers diverge from the surface normal direction.