Thanks. I like words like awesome and fantastic.

Actually, I've published "how" to do this for years. My very first gallery posting was about procedural skin.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1051057

I'm not too proud of that skin anymore, but I was at the time. What I'm doing now is pretty much the same as then. The difference is largely how many of these effects I include and in the numbers I use to control the effects.

It is an endless task to guess whether a particular Spots node Softness/Threshold should be .5/.6 or .54/.59 or what? If you assume only two digits of precision matters, there's still 10,000 ways to configure one Spots node. Then there is the question of what color to make them, and again even if there are only 10 meaningfully different values of R, G, and B for that, you get 1,000 colors to choose from. Combine that with the 10,000 values for the other two parameters, and a Spot effect runs into 10 million combinations. Which ones work and which ones don't? Endless experimenting is required, as well as tons of staring at reference pictures.

Now that I have a really good digital camera, I've improved my ability to "see" reality. My D90 is 12.5 Megapixels. I don't have a macro lens, but even with my regular 18-105 mm zoom, I can get in close to see a lot of detail. It has helped my understanding of materials immensely.

Reference pictures I find on the net are helpful, but it is much more helpful to take a photo of something, like my hand, examine it, and then decide to take another from a particular new angle or with a particular change in the lighting. This helps me answer questions that I don't even know to ask until I start seeing pictures.

The quality of this procedural skin has improved largely because of my camera. I've only had it a month. I've compiled a bunch of interesting pictures of various things I plan to use in the future for more procedural shaders.

The 18-105 mm zoom is ok, but it doesn't let me get closer than about 18 inches, which means I'm limited in how much I can magnify something. I borrowed a Nikkor 60 mm f/2.8 D macro lens last week from a friend. That lens is ridiculous - it is sharp as hell and I can get to within 1 inch of something, producing a 1:1 image size ratio. For example, I can photograph a penny and it fills the image. The photo of my eye I posted earlier was done with that lens. I want to go to there. I had to give it back,

I learned some amazing things with that lens. For example, I've not successfully generated a believable blue-jean material, and now I know why. When I shot a macro of my own pants, I couldn't believe what I saw. I have to change how I color the threads - the dye is missing from the top of each hump in the thread, where one crosses over the other. I never would have guessed that.

 

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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)