Quote - Call me pure.

Call me realistic.

Call me whatever you want, but I never understood why we need specular maps on the skin of a figure.

Skin and light "diffuse and/or shine" depends on the skin and the position of the light.

Skin is skin.
Be it on the arms, or on the belly or on the legs.

And Light is light.

Bump, displacement and normal maps OK.

Specular maps on the skin of a figure however????

 

 

A spec map is quite important if you want to achieve "realism"..and you said you are a "realist.

You have to remember, that what we are working with are not "real lights" and a 3d model is not a "real person"......in order to achieve a realistic look, we have to tell the renderer what to do and how to do it. That is where the value of the maps come in to play.

With the maps we are giving the renderer the specific information it requires to make a real looking render. The reason these programs have all these different nodes is so that we can add the elements needed to bring as much realism as we can. To intentionally NOT use the nodes does not make for a better render, in fact it is giving the renderer less information to work with and as such the quality of the end product will be that much less.

 

All we can do is "simulate" realism with these programs..and to do that we need to give them as much information as we can.