ghostship2 posted at 5:05 PM Sun, 16 April 2023 - #4462383

@FVerbaas bump maps SHOULD be derived from the skin texture maps. Otherwise you just have that fake concrete look to the bumps. I never could stand the look of procedural bump maps for skin.

The two main problems with generating bump maps from skin texture are (1) If the diffuse textures are blended poorly, the skin detail will be flat in spots; and (2) there are a lot of older textures that didn't bother to invert body hair and eyebrows, so the hair goes inward toward the skin instead of outward.

Better solution is to get some really good skin detail alphas and detail the skin in ZBrush.Time consuming, but results are so much better, and you have ultimate control of the result.

Load the base OBJ, subdivide the mesh 6 times (that seems to be the max), sculpt the skin detail on the subdivided mesh, and then use Multi Map Exporter to generate displacement and normal maps. 

While these aren't exactly the maps I use (I probably wouldn't be able to link to those), it is a good overview of how it's done. Wish there were similar tutorials for the entire body.

Skin Detail