Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: VSS Skin Test - Opinions

bagginsbill opened this issue on Apr 23, 2008 ยท 2832 posts


bagginsbill posted Fri, 19 August 2011 at 7:14 AM

It's not AO. It's burned-in specular in the color map.

The most popular "realistic" skin textures are basically photographs of human skin. I put quotes around "realistic" because I'm being sarcastic. These are the least realistic, except when you literally just render the photo and light the scene ambiguously or light it exactly the same as appeared at the time the photo was taken.

I've been talking about it for years and this community ignores it, except for a handful of users.

VSS is a realism shader in the style of professional work. It does not function as a regurgitator of photographs. It produces a reasonable calculation of the skin's natural and dynamic response to light, particularly for when the lighting is changed dramatically.

In a professional shader, the color map does not contain specular highlights - shiny white spots. The specular highlights are created by the real shader, based on the real geometry and the real position of the light sources in the scene.

Your skin texture there has specular highlights on lips and nipples that have been recorded as part of the diffuse color map. When those colors are then used correctly as diffuse color, they reveal themselves as being artifacts. They don't belong there, and they look like a disease. They do not end up looking like shiny areas that happen to point towards the light, given where the camera is at the moment. Therefore, you notice and object.

The only solution is to use maps that do not have incorrect color data. In this case, you need a map that is the color of nipple, not the color of nipple with a bright light bouncing from it.

I just spoke about this in the Poser 9/PPro2012 discussion at RDNA as well. With the new subsurface scattering capability, the problem with burned-in specular is even more dramatic.


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)