Thanks everybody for the crits and comments. I really appreciate critical comments because they help me keep a fresh eye on my work.
Another progress picture from far away and a close up. The chest area is showing off the shader alone. No maps have been applied to anything but the head area.
Cory Redmond
Originally posted by ivo D
[B]oke…all you advanced people/one offtopic question here srry…
caus you all know the answer ,and read it to i hope:)i have a head to… and want to unwrap…
i use max
i have relaxed the ears…relaxed the nose… than cylindre uvw map… unwrap… etc… but still… it stretches at some parts…and i just cant get it out… :(…
so how do you guys do it?
could i detach the side of the head… relax it till its flat…and do the same with top back and front?
and than ad a planar map and unwrap… will that work… ?
and than put it on the copyd mode… with planner… or cyl? i dont know:*(
plz give me a hand out [/B]
Take a checker image and move the UV around in the unwrap editer untill you get the results you want. I wrote a 3dsmax V5 script that may help.
credmond:
Sorry, I will not cheat any more:) Any way, I am working on improving the model, I have been pretty successful with the nose, but that damn cheekbone is making me crazy.
Also, I am looking for good materials for the textures, like hairs, and small skin parts, no one knows a site with such contents? And I don’t mean “those” kinda sites… 
I think the simpler the better…
Human skin is very difficult to achieve so if you don’t have the right tools such as a very good SSS shader plugin (like the one they used on the gollum in LOTR) and if you don’t use radiosity to light it… I’m sure your character/skin won’t look very realistic.
I’m also pretty sure that those gradients on luminosity, color, translucency,… to fake the sss effect don’t work at all.
I personally think that if you go for realism, you first need a good character model… if your model doesn’t look right people will easily notice something wrong whatever lighting textures you have, then I’d really recommend to use an HDRI/Enviro mapping with radiosity to light this character cause that’s the closest way to reality… usually the skin colors/variations come from the environment… that’s what you’ll get when using that kind of lighting.
Another thing is that when you use radiosity with more than on bounce… you can use extra color cards to give some mood to your Lighting and make it more accurate for compositing with your background layers.
However in some cases, that won’t be enough and you’ll need to add some others lights such as Key, Fill, Rim… I usually use spotlights for these extra lights.
Now for those who are using LightWave and G2… I did quite some tests with G2 and I’d really like someone to show me a very realistic skin shading accomplished with it.
Besides if you use G2 with SSS and its skin shader, area lights… renderings are slower than radiosity.
Even with 150 % shadow quality and 100 % shading quality, the result is still grainy!
Here’re some examples of tests I did… I don’t know about you but I think the those with radiosity look better than with area lights and SSS.
I’m not finished yet with the character model/textures btw!
That’s only my opinion of course 
Sorry for my bad english but I’m from Belgium.
Beautiful work, as always. You continue to be my Gold Standard, Ripper.
There’s an issue with area light shadows and G2 - it’s been discussed in the Worley newsgroup. Worley says it has to do with Lightwave not giving certain info to plugs…I don’t know anything about programming.
What I do know is your work is good, no matter what language. 
I recently used low intensity Backdrop Radiosity with my area lights simply to get shadows with G2.
Have you done any animation tests with this model? I was just curious if your setups are designed primarily for stills or are viable for animations.
I’m curious, Ripper, have you tried combining the radiosity and the SSS at the same time rather than the area lights? I find that SSS is too over emphasised in a lot of the renderings I have seen which are supposed to depict the human skin, and normally SSS in my opinion only presents itself in strong lighting conditions anyway, i.e. if standing in front of a strong light and holding your hand up to it, or standing in front and seeing the ears showcase the SSS effect, right now, people are using it as an interesting shading effect to add to their models, but not essentially using it as intended, I like the look of SSS and hope to use it within some of my characters, for istance see this example (albeit wax like) : -
Now, I quite like that, but it appears waxy, but that’s probably the original authors intent to showcase his plugin, what I do like most about it, is the ‘softness’ it could bring to a character, something which I’d like to utilise myself. I like your renders and models, your textures and so on are spot on, I’d be curious to see them with SSS combined in the way it’s meant to be using your regular radiosity technique at the same time, to create an overall ‘softness’ to the character too.
Keep up the good work, and keep posting, I like reading your insights.
Regards
Mr Ripper,
I’ve found area lights don’t work too well with G2’s SSS at all. They seem to penetrate too evenly and get the results you have found unwanted.
Give spinning shadowmap spots a try. I’ve found that to be much more satistfactory and predictable.
My technique is to use HDRI for the majority of the lighting and put in a few spots with very low intensities (eg. 5%) for the SSS in relation to the hotspots on the HDRI map.
In G2 I set the SSS value pretty high - as much as 700%.
The SSS is pretty subtle even with these low values but it adds a nice warmth to the light terminator.
I’ll post and example later if can drum up the courage - my attempts are still in no way comparable to yours.
I whish I had G2, really cool stuff there Ripper.
Anyway, a little update of Hugo Weaving, it’s hard to get the skin to look super real, maybe I try that HDRI thing.
Zara - remember that the lights are set very low, about 5% for the brightest hotspots, so 700% of that… well, you get the picture, it basically doesn’t equate to much.
Sadly G2 doesn’t take the radiosity into account with it’s SSS, they are both very seperate - it needs proper lights to key off of. So those low power spots are purely for the SSS and essentially have little effect on the overall shading.
I’ll post an example or two when I get home. They by no means look as good as Rippers stuff but hopefully the subtle effect might be interesting.
Ripper: Man, thats scary how real it looks. I’d like to see your color map and specularity map if thats possible? Would be very good for us others to study it. Keep it up, dude! :buttrock:
Excellent work (as usual), Ripper 
I’m really interested to see what your colour map looks like, because I am wondering how much of the colour on the face is coming from the environment. Would you consider posting a small shot of your colour map here? Go ahead and watermark it and whatever, I am just really interested in seeing it
Also, I’d be interested in seeing what your actual light settings are - that’s a really awesome mood you have in the image.
Great work!
Holy Crap! This is one of the most informative, plain old kicka$$ threads I’ve read in a long time!!!:buttrock: :buttrock:
RIPPER: Granted, I’d like to see the color, spec, diffuse, etc. But I’ve got an even weirder request than that. I’d like to know what you’re using as the HDRI image. I use a couple that I found around the net here and there, but whenever I see an image like yours, I can’t help wondering what the background image looks like complete and unblurred. That, and I’m currently working on an African American(very pc) character, and my tex’s look nowhere near as good as yours. Any tips? Do you just use the same colors as Caucasion skin just darker, or do you use a completely different palette? Oh, yeah, and I also think that your techniques deserve their own tutorial. 
Leigh: Are you still working on Aragorn? I was looking at it the other day and I noticed that the bridge of the nose where it connects to the brow doesn’t quite look right. Your model has sort of a T look to it, whereas in the pics I’ve seen of Viggo, it tapers out more like a V. I’m not at my own computer right now, but maybe later I’ll put up a pic of what I mean. Whenever I’m doing a model based on a character I put a pic of my model on top of the photo in Photoshop, drop the opacity so I can see through it, and then adjust whatever doesn’t quite match up. Can’t wait to see it when you finish it!!!:applause:
How do you think they went about doing the skin on the armies in LOTR? Sub surface scattering is far, far too time consuming. I know most of them are dark so they can get away with a lot, but still it does need something.
VERY nice image by the way!
[QUOTE]Originally posted by The Ripper
[B]I think the simpler the better…
Human skin is very difficult to achieve so if you don’t have the right tools such as a very good SSS shader plugin (like the one they used on the gollum in LOTR) and if you don’t use radiosity to light it… I’m sure your character/skin won’t look very realistic.
[/B]
The SSS technique that G2 is based on, aswell as the one used for LOTR is very fast. It’s not noticeably slower than rendering with it than without it.
Other things such as diffuse reflections is very slow, but they’re probably just using good ole specular for that.
So do you think SSS would not make a significant difference in render time with 200-1000 objects (and I am being conservative here) at 2K full app (2048x1556)?
Unfortunately I do not have Lightwave and G2 so I cannot test it myself.
Simon
Yeah, it might make a difference then
I only read that they used SSS on Gollum. It would seem kind of pointless using SSS on an army of 10,000, each ork(thing) not much bigger than a few pixels even at that res.
Out of interest I used G2 on a big field of wheat recently, G2 did add too much time to the render that I had to light it traditionally to get it done on time. I guess that’s not incredibly different to your scenario as far as shading time goes.
Another progress picture.
Skin is tough stuff. I agree with Ripper’s comments above and think that the modeling and lighting and shading that goes into the skin development is very important since skin is very responsive in very subtle ways to its environment. If you miss the light-skin interaction the skin seems lifeless and if you overplay it the skin seems alien and strange. So its a delicate and hard to find balance there.
I think Ripper’s example shows rather powerfully just how important the lighting and modeling and skin-environment interaction is to the skin. However, if you look at Steven Geisler’s work
he seems to place a stronger emphasis on the texturing (and lesser on the lighting) than the Ripper has so far with his example. I wonder which do you guys think is better or more realistic because one method seems to emphasize the “light” qualities of the skin while the other seems to empasize the “grittiness.” I think we would all agree that both obviously are very capable, I am just noticing that there are two different and two very capable schools of approach to the skin (that aren’t exclusive necessarily, just that people tackle the problem emphasizing one or the other usually). Anyway, just some rambling on the topic of the thread.
Cory Redmond
