Quote - > Quote - Nice work Baggins, I am sure that no living person on earth can make a better procedural human skin texture. But I have a question. Ideally, in the dreams would be if you could blend together your proc texture with the original mats, and set the percentage for both, how much each will influence the final result.

Is that possible to do?

Absolutely possible to blend between procedural bump and mapped bump. However, you would do that if the mapped bump was actually a bump map and improved things by representing the small-scale height of the skin - pores and wrinkles. If instead it is, as usual, a gray scaled copy of the color map, which has brighter areas exactly where the burned-in-specular highlights are, not exactly where the skin is higher, then this is not such a good idea. When you use the locations of specular highlights as if they are heights of skin, instead of a properly heighted skin, you get a diseased skin.

Same with the specular map. I could blend the procedural specular modulation with the map, or I could use the map alone. But the map is not a specular map - it does not indicate where there is more shine or less shine. Instead, it is a gray-scale contrast adjusted copy of the color map. As such, it is showing where the specular highlights fell from the point of view of the camera taking the reference images at the time and place that the photo was taken.

Burned-in specular highlights to do not directly represent the allocation of oily versus dry skin. Rather, they incorporate local bump, angle and strength of light sources during photography, and the position of the camera taking the photo. The resulting "map" is not a specular map at all - it's a manipulated photograph. It looks pretty weird when you use it to drive real specular effects. (Unless you happen to recreate the original situation where the reference photo was taken - then it's perfect.) Using it a little bit (blending it with procedural) is a way to make your render only a little bit bad, instead of very bad.

How difficult would it be to create a bump and specular map that would add something beyond the procedural? The tutorials I have found seem to be about the simple way of a few filters and one-click modifications of the color map. Isn't this basically about a relatively simple bit of painting over things like dimples and eyebrows in the greyscale image?

I have seen maps that look like the color map was indeed just flipped to greyscale and blurred, and some others (e.g., Danae's London) that look like they have seen some additional manual work. However, even those seem to be a combination of modified details (pores, eyeybrows, hair, etc.) on a background layer of the greyscale photograph.

Would it not be possible to use the procedural for the "background" in Poser, and blend it with bump -and specularity that only modify those details? I.e., a neutral monotone-grey map with some bright and dark spots for pores and dimples + bright (bump) or dark (spec) hair painted where it occurs?