Ive seen great images of real looking skin on characters and wanted to know how to make real looking skin myself.

It's not easy. Essential materials include: A good seam guide. SnowSultan is the Guru of seam guides. Search Freestuff and DAZ for them. High quality high res photos. You can either buy a good digital camera (most point & shoot models aren't much use) or buy photosets of skin. www.3d.sk is a fantastic resource for skin textures. A good graphics package such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. I prefer Photoshop but either will do. There are several other good ones out there. Patience, skill and time. All the tools in the world won't help unless you're prepared to put the hours in and work hard. There are several tutorials around, some for free and some in the Marketplace. I bought btsculptor's tutorials when I was starting out. They relate to Victoria 1 & 2 but the techniques involved are the same for any model.

Attached Link: http://www.users.on.net/~pkinnane/RealSkinShaderTutorial.html

Here is "What you would need for getting truly real skin": 1. A Descent 3D model (The ones with Poser are quite good enough though the lo-res ones ain't) 2. A good UV-Mapping Prog or Texture Map Templates for the character 3. A really very good bump map (This is the most important and the hardest to make map) 4. A colour map 5. A specular map 6. Map to Fake SSS or else a Renderer which has SSS 7. A good light setup, get yourself an LDRI of the place you want your character in 8. Decent Working knowledge of Materal Room ...but this alone won't get you going. You see skin has a lot of components whih are light dependent, the amount of transluc showing up, the freckles visible, etc etc. Stahlberg's tut on www.androidblues.com is a good place to start. Alternatively if you are script-happy, Face_off's Real Skin Shader is worth the buy, but the sort of results you can get by manuually setting up your mats can be atleast as good if not better. Read face_off's tut if you may. And there is a loooong sking shader thread at CGtalk.com, take a look if you wish to. The link http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=145071 LOL

but the sort of results you can get by manuually setting up your mats can be atleast as good if not better Perhaps you could point me in the direction of an example of better skin than that achieved using the RSS or the Realism Kits...

"but the sort of results you can get by manuually setting up your mats can be atleast as good if not better" Yep, I'd like to see an example of this too LOL, and then I'd like to know how long it took to set up, compared with a few clicks for applying face_off's kits. Sure, you can make your own plywood by first cutting down a tree..., or you could buy a sheet of plywood and have time to sit under the tree.

there's a very good skin tut in 3D World #65

I actually started looking for tutorials on this topic last night. Spending the time tracking the tutorials down was harder than making a decent skin texture after I found them. (And decent is good enough for me- I have never needed to do an extreme close up.)

This tutorial is very old, but is an excellent start-up guide.

This one is a good help with skin tones.

And this was a nice find for a technique to use shaders to give extra texture in rendering. Though I wouldn't follow the instructions in this tutorial exactly, it gave me excellent insight on some more things I could do in the material room.

<~loves pauls unimesh realism kit...its awesome!

bookmark

LOL, Soory...I had an Exam at College. And as for the Real Skin Shader, Yes its quite good...but Yes...Yes & Yes, I have seen people getting better results, more real skin that is by setting up their mats by themselves. I have exams going on now...but next month I'll post a few renders to make the point. I'm sorry, exams are on..can't do it now. Soory for that. Didn't mean to be a baddy. Face_off's kit is real LOL good...but you can get better results yourself...It takes time ..yes. If you are looking for a few clicks and quick yet good results ...face_off's kit wins.

I hope you are not going to throw Maya or 3ds max renders at us - LOL. I want to see Poser 5/6 renders where the skin is more realistic than what you can get from one of the shaders.

Ashish, just so we have a baseline, the skin has to be /better/ than the skin in these renders....

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=967825
http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=937834
http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=872225

(all are P5/6, no postwork, using skin realism scripts).

Message edited on: 06/30/2005 03:15

PLOP <--- sound of gauntlet being thrown down, methinks ;o) Paul, in that image called "hunter" is the stubble in the tex or is it a masked shader?

Message edited on: 06/30/2005 03:49

I gotta see this. LOL

its the texture map

Like Dave-so said - texturemap obm.

tbird - nice - I like the "milky" look. Have you got AO on? There seems to be some excessively dark areas on this render (the groove of her butt, her left hand wrist).

ooo nice. I'd flick the FastScatter. The issue you've got here is that you are getting too much glow to the right of her face, and on her nose, yet no glow no some areas where it should be (for example, between her breasts).

the light on the right is set very brightly to achive the strong highlight which is what i wanted , what i have noticed though is if i move the front on light (there are 3 lights in the scene) to the left of the character the midtones (terminator) becomes very orange as yu can see in the far right picture gonna try to darken the skin texture a little more to see what that does .iam having fun with this .:-) ~sss my new favourite toy~~

Yep - FastScatter is awesome for some nice effects. But she has ended up a little see-through in the renders above. IMHO, skin realism comes mainly from skin tone and highlights. Other things like definition, wrinkles, etc help, but the skin tone is the biggie, and highlights are critical. Skin tone is largely dictated from light travelling through the skin and exiting somewhere else (ie. subsurface scattering) - but it's the front-facing sss which is important. Backfacing sss is more for the "glowing ear" look. Front facing sss is light coming from roughly the angle of the camera, going through the skin and popping out elsewhere (often in a shadowed area - coloring it red). Thus...the importance of some sort of fake front-facing sss - and the tutorial provides a method of doing that (although I'm sure there are other methods - I just haven't seen any yet that work well with Poser).

"High quality high res photos." Just a quick "word of warning" for people who might consider using their own photographic textures in 3D... The problem with simply using photos for textures, instead of hand-painting you own, is that photographs of skin have most of the elements we're trying to achieve in 3D captured in the image. A photo of a face, for instance, already has the skin's SSS and specular properties captured in that image. So using it as a texture, you would think, is going to give you more realism with less effort? It definitely can, in certain simple lighting situations, look very real. However, it will start to fail miserably when you get into more advanced lighting or animation situations, because the specularity of your materials and scene lighting won't match up correctly with the specularity that was already "baked" in the photograph that you're now using as a texture for your character. The same with darkened areas that may have been present in a photograph of someone's face, for instance... it may not correspond with the shadows in all your scenes, and believability will totally fail. Most of the top texture creators for Poser are starting to realize this, thankfully, and are now preparing their textures more carefully by removing as many of these troublesome elements from their textures as possible. Still, some others continue to cater to the Poser 4 (and earlier) mentality of texture creation, and make textures with highlilghts on them, which then become totally useless if you're scene lighting changes in a way that no longer matches up. You can see it in the galleries, most often in the form of skin that looks "lighter" in areas that clearly aren't lit by the scene lighting. It can sometimes make the character look as if they are suffering from some rare form of skin disease. ;-) So be careful of this when you're creating your own textures, some of the "older" texturing tutorials out there do not account for it in their process. Using the airbrush and/or clone tool in Photoshop (or some similar program) could help you greatly in reducing unwanted FX from your photo textures.

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