Skin Rendering

[Tugpsx]

@tonysculptor This is very impressive work. thanks for sharing your techniques and materials with the community, we all appreciate and welcome your generosity.

[gordonrobb]

Having looked at your textures, I have a question.

How did you create the colour/diffuse map? Is it painted by hand or spotlight from pictures or something? Any and all tips welcome?

Then, same question about the gloss/spec map - did you use the colour diffuse as a starting point? or was it done separately?

Last one is more an Octane question. Your roughness map looks a lot like the gloss one inverted or altered in some way. If it is, could you do that in the node set-up and therefore only need the gloss map?

I'm looking forward to putting this set up to the test, but only have other peoples models and maps, so going to do a selfie as a first test.

[tonysculptor]

Color map was hand painted in ZBrush. As of yet, I have never used photos for my textures.
Gloss and Spec were painted in ZBrush as well.
You can usually get away with inverting your gloss/spec map for roughness, but I usually like to tweak the roughness in areas like the lips. It depends on the subject. So you could just duplicate your gloss map, set the invert flag and feed it into the roughness pin.

[NVN]

Hi tonysculptor,

first thanks for ur outstanding Shader!
I have a Question.
where should I do my maps purely? like my Colormap etc.

Maybe u could some images in your shader like icelaglace sss shader?

[tonysculptor]

@NVN: Im not sure if I understand the question, but if what you mean is where to plug in your textures in the macro, you may have missed this image higher up in the thread...

[hibingo]

Is there any chance we might get a listing or screenshot of your preview kernel settings? I think I might be doing something wrong, but using this material more than doubles my render times. I'm getting about .31 Ms/Sec.

[tonysculptor]

This is a complex material (4 layered materials) so I would expect it to be slow. On my next project I will work on a simpler, more performance friendly version. Below are my render settings...

[face_off]

Regarding your render settings Tony, you skin material is very much different to what I've used in the past, so this may not apply....but I found that a maxdepth of 16 was a little high and tended to bounce the light around to much so you end up loosing contrast (maybe my material reflectivity was too high). For for human figure renders I tend to drop the maxdepth back to about 6 or 7 (but as I say, my skin material is probably not setup as well as yours).

Also, I've found increasing the caustic_blur provides a quicker render for very little "blur" cost.

[tonysculptor]

I was experimenting with some settings, and have found that when absorption values are higher, it renders faster. At first, I thought that to be odd, but perhaps there are less rays to scatter when more light is absorbed.

[gordonrobb]

Thought I'd try it in Standalone before converting over to LW. Should I be able to plug in the images as you've shown and it'll work, with some tweaks to get the look I want?

My model just shows up very very dark. Wit whatever kernel I try and with sunlight.