Well I loaded your mud v2 and boy that's a lotta nodes. Trying to figure out how to integrate it with my skin shader, it looked pretty difficult. So I took it apart and put it back together.

The original shader was hard to understand - a lot of stuff in there was cobbled together in strange ways. I understand you "grew" it, so it's to be expected that it was a little wierd. I even found a section of it that wasn't doing anything, because you had it plugged into an input that was black, which meant the section was multiplied with 0, resulting in no impact on the results.

I reduced it to six nodes with nearly identical results.

Then I integrated the mud pattern into my skin shader, including proper gamma correction and conservation of energy. Then I added some more realistic wetness by including accurate Fresnel reflection. That made it a lot better.

I messed around with color and bump - I think I went too far on the bump in my experiment. When doing this sort of shader, you really need to do closeup renders and full-body renders all the time. I was only doing full body and didn't notice some problems had crept in until I did a closeup. So I'm not publishing my version yet.

But I thought you guys would like to see where I'm at.

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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)