Every time I do a side by side comparison with face-off's RealSkinShader I am so blown away. I was test rendering a texture and I just had to post this...wow!

Me too momodot, but now I'm starting to render in C4D and those lovely shaders are lost on scene import.
There's nothing like them in C4D - you have to set it all up manually, which is well beyond me.

C4D does come with BodyPaint 3D which has possibilities in this area, but the C4D learning curve is already making my brain bleed, and I don't recon I'd survive learning yet another program just yet.

I wonder if there's a way to bake face off's additions to the color and bump map so that it becomes part of the actual texture.

I remember a while back someone suggesting to place the texture on a flat plane primitive (scaled way up btw) and applying the shaders then rendering.  I'd imagine if ya messed around to have the lighting directly in front fully illuminating the plane and rendering with no shadows (at a big size I'd imagine) it would be pretty much the same as baked textures when reapplyed to the model....  might try messing around with this on the weekend.....

Gerard

I don't recon that's possible Paloth.
The shaders are interactive with scene lighting.
When applying the skin shaders you need to select a light for them to interact with.
Move the model with baked skin to another environment (C4D) with different lighting and they not really going to work.
But I've been wrong lots of times before.

No just the shadow but the fresnel, sss and probably some other stuff is interactive to the lighting and camera angle... there is a lot of use of edge nodes I think.

The SSS amount most definitely has to depend on the location of the lights. You won't get that smooth two-tone gradient in the right places if you were to bake it.

The spots and stuff can be drawn on a separate color map image and blended with the original skin, if you want spots, moles, and so on.

Let me ask you: can C4D drive a color gradient based on specular information? If so, I can show you how to get 90% of the skin effect with the equivalent of two Poser nodes, which is all you need in a minimal skin shader.

Here's the basic idea of how my shaders work. I use a specular node with a very broad roughness effect to figure out where there is skin facing the light, or more specifically where the reflection angle is right to see the light most strongly on the skin.

I drive that into a blender. The blender has two colors to stain the color map. The first color is for the areas in shadow - this should be a very weak brown or orange. The second color is for the areas in light - this should be a very pale blue. You'll have to play with the colors based on your color map and your lights. Once it is set up, you can usually forget it, even if you move or change your lights.

Of course there is more to it. You really want to use a Blinn specular but I'm going really basic here. Practice getting the overall skin tone right without specular, then add it at the end.

Here is a before/after with James. Click to see full size.

With different light position and strength.

Another light setup, this time with shadows enabled.

Turned off the IBL, changed Infinite to 100% white.

You can also use a Phong node instead of a Specular node to drive the gradient. The difference is that Phong calculation is strongest when the surface points at the light, whereas the Specular calculation is strongest when the surface, if it would be a mirror, would mirror-reflect the light into the camera.

Phong is on the left, Specular is on the right.

Probably the Phong type is more correct, but either works in general. Whatever you have in C4D - if you can use it to drive the diffuse color gradient, do it.

Lit from the close to the front, Phong and Specular are nearly the same.

I occasionally have problems with the Poser Phong node, and since portrait lighting is like this, I use the Specular node.

Quote - I remember a while back someone suggesting to place the texture on a flat plane primitive (scaled way up btw) and applying the shaders then rendering.  I'd imagine if ya messed around to have the lighting directly in front fully illuminating the plane and rendering with no shadows (at a big size I'd imagine) it would be pretty much the same as baked textures when reapplyed to the model....  might try messing around with this on the weekend.....

Gerard

 

It will be close, but not the same in all cases. The reason is that some of the nodes we use for noise-based effects, like Spots, Granite, or Fractal_Sum, are actually driven by the 3d geometry of the figure, and not by the UV map. The figure's nose actually occupies a much smaller area on the UV map than the similar sized sections of chin or cheeks. The reason is that the nose sticks out from the face, almost cutting in half the effective UV resolution. If you used Spots to bake on a plane, they'd all be the same size. But once you projected those baked spots on the figure, the spots on the nose would be bigger. Also, the 3d evolution of the pattern is different than the 2-d cross section produced by the plane.

But for a lot of effects, it wouldn't be bad.

Even better would be to generalize - instead of expecting the color map to do everything, make separate maps for freckles, moles, etc. Then combine these with nodes. If you made nice freckles re-usable then you could overlay them on any color texture quite easily, using Blender nodes or color math nodes.