A versatile skin material in Blender

[Bennell]

Is there a plug-in for Blender that’ll allow for the creation of a skin material using texture synthesis and signals? I’m using the paper below as a reference.

Versatile Skin Material.pdf (3.8 MB)

[joseph]

You don’t need a plugin, you could do everything in the paper with Voronoi textures. However, it would probably be easier in Substance Designer

[Bennell]

I believe it would too.

[Okidoki]

IDK… i think the 3D voronoi is quite interesting for this… so you just need some density control… and if you also use vertex painting for this then you don’t need any UV’s at all…

So according to the paper:

We would not be able to paint this complex detail, given our time
and multi-scale constraints.

So the also don’t have time for proper UV-unwrapping… but some vertex painting for example for the darker parts on the top and the back of the necks… respectivleythe the streaks on the backs…

For the density control maybe this could help:

Control Voronoi distribution (cell size) with second texture

Is there a way to use another texture (like noise, second voronoi, musgrave, etc…) for controlling voronoi distibution of cells in such a way that one value gives densly packed cells and no value gives mostly empty space? First picture is a noise texture, second one is a mockup what I want to achieve. [question] I’m trying to step up my shading game, so if there is a way that involves some basic math, I’d be glad for any tip what kind of operation and on what nodes could give that result. I …

[Bennell]

I also need the right pattern and the Voronoi texture node won’t give me that.

[silex (Jakub Jaszewski)]

Just FYI Voronoi just recently was upgraded by @Hoshinova in Blender 4.0 https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/106827
You can control octaves and by that make organic patterns much easily than in the thread @Okidoki linked. I tested it, and it works great, but I haven’t got enough time to pots the results on the forum.

IMO the real power will come from controlling Voronoi octaves with hand painted skin maps (like vertex colors) that determine density and power of skin deformation on micro level.

[Okidoki]

What’s “right” here ?? The pattern showed in the “paper” (with very less info) are mostly the worley pattern used in most fast implementations… and the trick is always to find the wanted color rambs or RGB-curves to transform some 2D ( or 3D ) value info ( → greyscale) into the needed (maybe different) color maps…

In something like substance painter you also often make some patterns in greyscale and then “color it”…
…and if worley/voronoi doesn’t give you what you want…

…there are also dozen of different approaches to solve something like skin… (even painting all the subsurface levels manually…)

[Bennell]

A pattern like the one in the image below is what I’d want. A hexagon-like pattern also.