What maps do you need for a realistic face?

[detonum]

I usually make 3 maps - diffuse, bumb and specular.

And if you dont have a renderer that can do sss or transluency you could fake some with a self-illumination map.

[leigh]

Reflection maps are fantastic on skin as well :D

I usually have colour, specular, reflection, gloss and bump maps at least, and sometimes also translucency and diffusion maps too (but not always).

We have a great thread going on in the LW forum on skin texturing, check it out here :) (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63930)

[JonasNoell]

Thanks a lot you two! This really helped!
And now I also know, why Leigh is/was(?) called Texturing Goddess ;) Great thread!

[detonum]

While on the topic - I was browsing Julian_J's website and he had a couple textures for show. There was four different maps - one seemed weird for me:

http://www.vi2.com/getFile/174915.jpg

What kind of map is that? (bottom right corner)

And another question - how will gloss map affect the texture?

Thanks!

[JonasNoell]

Great this helped me!

First one should be diffuse map, second bump map, third specular map and third I don't know either. Perhaps dirtmap or something like this? Anybody knows the answer? ;)

cANt

[EricChadwick]

Ulf Lundgren had an example on his site, looked similar to this. He said it was a "Reflectivity map," for XSI.

http://www.lost.com.tj/Ulf/artwork/3d/steven.html

I can't get the site to load. Saved it as a IE .mht file, if you want it. Email me.

[EricChadwick]

Oh, gloss map traditionally affects the width/strength of the specular highlight.

[detonum]

Thanks for the info posm!

If its a reflection map..How do the colors affect the texture, why is it not a b&w map like bump map?

[EricChadwick]

I don't know XSI, but perhaps the luminance controls amount of reflection, and RGB affects the color of the reflection?

Pure speculation...

[detonum]

Would be pretty odd if the face would mostly reflect purple, tho (/me thinks)

[EricChadwick]

Yeah, seems odd. But his renders certainly are impressive.

Here's what he said on his site:

A Speculare / reflectivity map is also created to decide what parts of the face needs to be differently shiny. This map doesn't need to be all to accurate but it helps if there's a lot of noise and variation in it to break up the reflected highlights as much as possible.
To avoid the traditional CGI look with round phong highlights I create an environment with high dynamic range images that model reflects to create bright outdoor looking highlights.
Just as in real life skin should have a slight reflectivity (that is a couple of %). The reflectivity is not strong enough to pick up much of the normal colors of the environment but picks up bright shiny parts of the environment.
Since XSI doesn't support importing High dynamic range images I simply create them directly within XSI instead by adding together different environment images in the render tree. Using a normal environment map (stuck on a grid) and then adding a image with a separate sky *5 and separated sun on top of that, the result is a map where the ground want reflect all to much but where the sky will pick up a lot more and the sun burns out relay crisp highlights. This is the same way as a map would be used to light with using FInal Gathering but due to a already quite slow render I decided to only go with traditional spotlights for lighting.

[leigh]

The purple coloured map is a reflection map. As far as I can guess, the reason for it being purple is probably to tint the reflection slightly.

Detonum - the gloss map tightens the specular highlight. The smaller the difference between the spec and gloss amounts, the tighter the highlights will be. Gloss (in skin texturing) is great for using on areas that need to appear slightly wet :)

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