Wow, dburdick, just wow!

Of all the procedural shader solutions I have attempted, there are two that have completely and totally stumped me. One is generic procedural tree bark. The other is water droplets on human skin. Oily/damp, no problem. Droplets on glass - no problem. But actual droplets on human skin - this is frigging hard.

First, none of the built-in 3D pattern generators are right for making the droplet geometry, either as a bump or as a displacement.

Second, I can't find a way to get the proper reflect/refract appearance without using a second surface. Any attempt I make to do a dual-mode shader directly on the skin geometry seems doomed to failure.

I revisit this every few months, only to be thwarted again and again. I can't tell you how many beautifully detailed "diseased skin" shaders I've produced instead of proper droplets.

I worked on it again yesterday. Here's James with a single-shader solution. This time, I tried using a variation of my "random polkadots" shader to produce the droplets. They are tiny distorted half-spheres. I made "layers" of it, each at different scales. The distribution is not sufficiently random, and you can see some gridlike regularity to their placement. I think I can solve that problem. But the general appearance is just wrong.

By the way - just to give you a sense of how complicated this is, my shader is 105 nodes.

Were you going to do this procedurally? What are your thoughts on how to generate the geometry, and how to get the refracted look without actually using a second layer of geometry and using real refraction?

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)