Realistic human skin - Post yours - discuss

[JHarford]

post your skin shaders.
hi all again - i ask you to post your skin shaders, or models you have made skin for.
looking for the best way to do skin for a model i have in progress.
if there are any brazil users out there, please join . as ill be using it for this.

here is something THAT IS NOT MY WORK > its by THE RIPPER -
but you can see its very well done - and the skin is very realistic.
i ask for tips on how many maps you normally paint.
i think bump spec color diffuse and reflection.

remember this IS NOT MY WORK

lol

[DramaticDigital]

I was working on a skin shader a while back. I didn’t use Brazil because it was in Maya and was before the Mental Ray days. Once I get a chance to post something I will (I'm at work now). My maps consisted of a color, spec, bump, diffuse, reflection and translucence map. They were all basically the same map manipulated to serve different purposes. BTW, who’s THE RIPPER and what’s his web address?

[JHarford]

thanks for the imput , look forawrd to your post -
the ripper is what he goes by, the webby is on the image.
very good artist.

[arshlevon]

skin is hard.. even in that pic you posted the shin dosent really look like skin, but wax.. african american skin has purples and blues in shadows more than red.. and the specular isnt strong enough.. one of the best explantions of skin i have seen is from
Mr.Stalburg, and can be found here..http://www.optidigit.com/stevens/shadetut.html

to get the right hightlights you need two specular maps.. skin looks different when light hits it from the side.. i use a falloff map in the specular.. the first is a light shadow.. then in the light paramater of the falloff i use another falloff.. a distance or a frensel.. so the highlights in the front you can make how you want but the falloff will make stronger highlights when the skin is lit from the side.. also its good to make the specular color blue..

here is some of the best rendered skin i have ever seen..
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/close-ups03.htm
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/close-ups06.htm
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com/various03.htm

for more great renders check out the gallery at
http://www.this-wonderful-life.com

if you are using brazil i would try the skin shader they started including it in the 1.0.14 relase (i think).. i have seen some great tests done with it.. i just cant afford brazil..

[TheOne]

i think the skin of his body looks great only prob is the skin of his face... looks a bit like plastic...

[DramaticDigital]

Hey arshlevon, the skin shader I created was based off of Mr.Stalburg and other shaders combined together. I basically followed this tutorial then modified it from there until I liked it

[MrArmless]

arshlevon, thank you so much for that link! It's just in time for the project I'm working on!

[DeepFish]

wow, what a great timing of this post for me. I'm done with modelling my character and are in process of riggin it, however i dont have skin shader for him.

I'm just wondering, can any of your throw a couple of links with skin shader creation tutorials for Maya?

I played a little bit with different setups, but im still not getting that soft transition of colors and shadows. sort of that waxy(translusent), silky quality. Also i'm interested in creating a shader that wouldnt require anything other than regular Maya renderer.

[Rych]

Hey guys i will tell you i am working hard as hell on a skin shader, I can get it looking good on a sphere but when you place it on an actual model it doesn't quite give the same effect, but this is what i have so far



Rych

[juan]

this is not an exelent shader but is one that i made and used on a character i made , i used bump, color, dif, and specular . it is made in maya and was rendered without mental ray

[DramaticDigital]

Hey everyone! Well, when I went back an was looking at the skin shader stuff that I was working on a while back I quickly remembered that I hated the model I was using and hated the textures even more. So, this weekend I made a new model, new textures and started my skin shader over again. Here is what I have so far. I’m going to work on it here and there as I get time and hopefully on Tuesday I will get time to throw Mental Ray into the picture and see what it provides. The reason the texture looks funny is because I’m lazy and only painted it for half the face.

Hey Rych, I had the same problem. I started out with a procedural fractal pattern on a sphere that looked great. The problem turned out to be that I needed to paint some good textures. There are a lot of painting tutorials out there and their all good. Just follow one and then develop your own technique from there. Once you have some decent image maps to play with then start tweaking your shader.

This texture consists of a color map, and a generic grayscale map (the color map desaturated) applied to the bump, defuse and reflection channels. There’s facing ratio gradient applied as an alpha channel to the incandescence channel and another blue gradient to the color channel.