Skin shader mk2 - preview pimp

[urgaffel]

You evil bastard! You tempt us with such a nice preview image and then you tell us we can't download it? What the hell? :D Awesome work, really looking forward to playing with this shader... Your last one was pretty dang sweet so I have high hopes for this one. Any idea when we might get it or is it done when it's done?

[SHEPEIRO]

ew that looks good cant wait to see it moving

[eMPeck]

Is it possible to make this shader compatible with XSI?

[jistyles]

cheers!

hope to get a release of this one out by the end of next week. That's the hope, but we all know how lazy I am, so realistically maybe 2009? 2010? ;)

In regards to compatibility, I can only give a hazy answer - if a programme supports hlsl (which XSI does, and by the looks of it better than max) then it shouldn't be a huge headache to get it working -- with that said however, this shader has been written with a few inputs I believe are specific to max so there may be a bit of translation needed... all depends I suppose :) On that note there's at least two companies I know of that've sourced my shader for their game engines, so it seems like it's an easy transition to other platforms. Again, looks like it all depends. I guess the answer is "yes it should work, if not straight away, then with minimal changes to input names that the host program puts out."

[eMPeck]

"yes it should work, if not straight away, then with minimal changes to input names that the host program puts out."
Nice, all I have to do is to learn HLSL programming :argh:

BTW - amazing job here (I should write this previously)

[SquirrelyJones]

Awsome work. I'd like to get into hlsl myself, do you recomend any reading material covering the basics to the advanced, I know about the Graphics Gems books but they cover a bit more than I want to know. I was able to make a lttle bit of headway changing one of the max shaders to support an actual light and not default lighting but I wouldn't know where to start writing a new shader.

[ArchangelTalon]

Very cool stuff.

If I were to pick faults, the micro-detail normal map has a strange diagonal pattern to it (mostly obvious on her chest in that pic) and I think it might benefit from being a little smaller.

Also a wee bit too shiny, I think.

[jistyles]

Squirrely Jones: I'm not sure if I'm the best to answer that question as I've just blindly hacked away until it makes sense :scream:

My learning process has been ripping apart the shaders that come with max, then doing the msdn tutorial shaders and making them work for max. Then I combined different things which gave me a better understanding of syntax and how to pass data around. Only then did I start reading up on online tutorials and looking at books. I still make a huge mess of functions and I'm sure it could be optomised a huge amount, but at least I know that :thumbsup:

ArchangelTalon: Cheers - I agree on your points, the micro-detail map is based off the cross-hatched micro wrinkles which I've used here since they're a good average to small details over the whole body -- they're most easily seen if you relax your hand with your fingers out straight and look at your knuckles. This however doesn't work for every part of the body of course, so I'm looking into using the alpha channel of the base normal map to make a mask to overlay two different micro-detail maps. On one end you'd have micro-wrinkles, and on the other you'd have smoother pored skin. Something to look into?

hehe yeah, you caught me... my excuse for shininess is I'm lazy - haven't made a specular map on that mesh so it's all solid - hence not shiny enough on the lips and too shiney on the nose and cheeks :eek:


Here's a question for people:
One other area I'm looking into is a fuzz/hair shader specifically for skin. It won't be included within this skin shader so it'll be driven off another mesh and based off extruding hair shells. Optomise it so it's only drawn at close distance, and with a back lighting light model. Driven off a mask for density, an alpha for layering it on in shells, and a colour map for defining the soft light hairs on the face compared to dark coarse hairs on the arms. My question here, do people think this is a worthy topic to look into, or not worth it at all?

[ArchangelTalon]

Hehe, the micro map looks good, I wasn't saying otherwise.

I get the skin detail it was trying to convey, but it seemed a little bit too big and maybe slightly too obvious.

[jistyles]

released an initial version
grab it off my site under the hlsl area
http://www.jistyles.com (http://www.jistyles.com/)

copy+paste: Just a note too, the micro detail map is a tileable normal map, but with the blue channel taken to 50% so the overlay works. Just the same as doing a photoshop layer overlay for a normal map.

I'll probably get another update soonish with source files for a head or a chest or something, just for example settings.

[erilaz]

Very nice indeed! I'm amazed at how many Australian developers like yourself keep popping up on cgtalk. It's very encouraging! :D

Thanks for sharing Joel.

[SuperOstrich]

This is looking awesome! I'll be sure to give it a try.

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