Human Skin WIPs and Tips (Everyone feel free to post your own skin WIPS here too)

#561

Just wondering has anyone managed to get the subscatter material on http://www.lightengine3d.com/ working? Are there any tricks to it? I tried the Maya Demo but couldn’t get it working. Or is the mental Ray version easier to use?

#562

Awesome work, as always m@! The dome of his head is a little smooth right now, but otherwise that is looking damn cool. Once you get some translucency happening in there, that is going to totally kick ass!

That’s looking totally awesome, Sasquatch :thumbsup:
Looks just like a real carnie! I’ll be sure to check out your entire thread as soon as I have a chance… Keep up the cool work!

HapZungLam - for starting off skin textures, I usually paint them from scratch, using LOADS of reference.

kfc - you are using photos on that, yes? It looks a little strange because there are shadows in there that shouldn’t be there…

Well, here is yet another addition to this thread from me… I rustled this guy up last night as an example to show my class that I was teaching today - their current project is head texturing.

His name is Henry. He’s not supposed to look Matrix style - that is purely coincidental. I rendered this in 2 passes - one normal one, and then an extra one with shadows. The normal one was using the G2 plugin, which makes shadows a little too light for my tastes, so I rendered a seperate pass with the object set up using shadow density as its alpha. Then I just comped the two together in Photoshop - voila!

#563

nice…nice…may be a bit too "bumped " for my taste… but niiiiiice…
:beer: :applause:

#564

Thanks xtrm3d :beer:
I agree about the bump actually - it’s too strong on the forehead :wink: I’ll change that…

#565

Leigh: He’s kinda bumpy and hard looking, but he looks good otherwise. Could you explain your process a bit more? The shadow density alpha pass…

#566

Certainly, Zarathustra :slight_smile:

Basically I set up the scene in Layout, and lit it the way I wanted and set up the shading I wanted with G2, and then assigned textures and tweaked until I liked the look of it.

Then I rendered it out, and it looked cool, but the shadows were just way too light, almost as if the skin was self-illuminated. This is partially due to the strong backlighting on the skin which is rather translucent.

So I saved the object and scene under a new name and switched the G2 on the skin surface OFF, and went to the Advanced tab in the Surface Editor. I then changed the Alpha Channel setting there to Shadow Density. Basically what this does, is it uses only shadows falling on the surface in the alpha channel - everything else on that particular surface is excluded from the alpha channel.

So bascially when I use that alpha channel, I have only shadows on the surface visible. I then simply composited that over the “normal” render to create deeper shadows in the image :slight_smile:

Make sense? This is the same method that you use when creating dummy objects for stuff in a live action plate that is going to be composited with CG. You use this to have the CG stuff appear to cast shadows on the live action plate correctly by making rough objects that match the footage, and then setting them up so that only shadows cast onto them are in the alpha channel. So you can then composite those shadows onto the footage along with the CG passes (characters or whatever), and everything looks right! :slight_smile:

I’ve fixed the bump mapping on the forehead now - look better? I prefer it like this.

#567

way…way… way better :slight_smile:
:wavey:

#568

leigh: I always love your work :love:

only a few crits… I think the translucency works a bit too strong around the mouthcorners.

The bottom of the nose looks too bright… maybe too much selfillumination or reflection?!The shadows under his nose could be a bit lighter

But looks great so far :thumbsup:

#569

Leigh, interesting shading. Looks very artistic to me, nice!

#570

@ Leigh: That looks awesome… There’s only one tiny thing that looks a little bit off - still the forehead: there’s a tad bit of “metalic-ness” (what a concept…) going on there just above the eyebrows and upwards in the middle of the forehead. A sort of purple specular/reflection that looks a few notches over the top - it’s really just micro-tweaking here, but make that a bit less shiny and the whole thing just takes off!

#571

Here is my attempt, the skin is a bit more stylized then the other examples.
Made with Max 5 (with a skylight with 2 bounces and a orange groundplane, does miracles on the skin)

jimmy_jimmy_a.jpg600x600

jimmy_jimmy_b.jpg600x600

I painted some self-illumination (=incandescense) maps for the ears. There is also some illumination going on with falloff maps based on the ammount of light the material receives (a sort of SSS fake).

Stahlbergs tip to give the skin material a light-blue highlight is very good. Blue might sound strange, but with the red of the skin you’ll end up with a less saturated color in the highlights (more white-ish)

Sasquatch, would you be willing to give me the exact color you have used with the negative HSV trick? I tried building Stahlbergs skinshader but I couldn’t get nice results out of the negative HSV.
Your challenge image is amazing!

#572

Marcel:

H:206.55
S:1
V:-0.3

I’m not sure if these are completely correct as Maya doesn’t like displaying the negative value, but it’s what I wrote down when I made the shader.

Hope it’s of use.

#573

Brilliant, I’ll play around with those values. Thanks a lot! :slight_smile:

#574

This IS an AMAZING thread!!! exactly what i was looking for :slight_smile:

Ripper.-
Your work rocks!!! 2 questions: You dont use areashadows (do u use any kind of shadows?)?
and how did u make that nice reflection on the eyes (reflection map?)?

Leigh.- The same question i made to Ripper: How do u make the nice reflections in the eyes? any tip will be very appreciated :slight_smile:

sorry about the n00b questions :blush: , but im very unexperienced on this subject and just now im making my own character that i will post soon.

Keep this thread alive as long as possible!!!

Excellent works you are showing guys, keep up the good work!!! :thumbsup:

#575

Marcel - that’s a beautiful colour map you’ve made, nice work :thumbsup:
Your shading is looking a little hard though. But I am sure you’ll fix that soon enough!

RenderFX - the trick to getting the eyes right is in the modelling. Model the lens seperate to the eyeball, and then create a layer around it that you texture like glass, the same with the lens. The eyeball you apply the colour map to. Then just give it something to reflect! :smiley:

Thanks for the comments from everyone else too - I’m working on them to get them better. Thanks to Grugi for the crit :wink:

#576

Two new characters from me…

This one is an Egyptian.

And this one is a Ghanian. His name means “passionate soul” :smiley:

His bump maps need some tweaking, as you can no doubt see…

#577

WOW Leigh!
Nice dudes u made. i love the textures.
Where do u put the reflection map, in the specular channel or do u just apply a general reflection to the hole model?

#578

RenderFX - I use specularity maps and reflection maps :wink:
I find that skin benefits a lot from a bit of reflection. I also have an HDR environment that it is reflecting (although I am not using the HDR for actual lighting).

#579

man i have seen some very high quality stuff on here. i’ve only been dealing with 3d for a little over 3 weeks. i’ll be posting stuff in the near future. i thought that you all might want to check this guy out.

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=456739&Form.sess_id=3792745&Form.sess_key=1063077254

#580

That image was done by another CG Talk user, jugalo180. It’s somewhere on the CG Talk gallery, a very cool piece.