Well I've spent a huge amount of effort trying to achieve realistic skin in P5, and had some success and some difficulties. Some points....

1. Textures are of very little importance. The image above was done using the standard V3 hi-res maps. Most of the texture packs I've seen give worse results than V3 standard maps.

2. Lighting is also relatively unimportant for skin realism (but critical for the image as a whole). If you use 1 spotlight, the image will render like a photo that was taken with a flash. If you use one of the many GI light sets, the image will look like a photo taken outside. As a rule, I use 1 main light (like in the image above) and a filler light. There are good websites describing 3 point lighting which is useful.

3. I played around with the skin node in P5 (stewer's suggestion), but couldn't get any decent results with it.

4. The secret to realistic skin from 3d apps (IMHO) lies in the tinting of colour of the skin depending on the angle of the camera. There are huge discussions on the topic at www.cgtalk.com (see Steve Stahlberg's theories) - but implementing them in P5 is challenging. The other facet is getting the specular light right. There are all sorts of tricks for this, but I find the neatest is to use Blinn specular, with the bump map plugged into the input colour. Another neat trick is to set ambient value to 1, and set the ambient colour to (r=20, G=0, B=0). This makes the skin glow a touch in the darker areas - adding to the realism.

Message edited on: 09/08/2004 09:09

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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