Following is a quote from an article about creating Young Will Smith, (thought that it might be an inspiration) "3D World Feb 2020, The Weta Issue"
“That’s the way we were planning to do things on this show, too,” adds Williams. “What changed was that one of our team members in the shader department said, ‘I’ve been thinking about thisproblem and I think I might have a better solution…’”
That solution was to create a system that eschewed the life cast approach and instead accurately simulated – or, more correctly, synthesized – the pores. A life cast would provide an accurate representation of the pores on top of the skin, but not from a 3D point of view. It also depended on scanning detail. A synthesis approach, in which the pores were effectively ‘grown’ using flow maps,
was used instead to get extra detail. “It was a system set up in Houdini with several steps,” details
Williams. “One step simulates the pore size, another step modifies the existing model to create the
shapes of the pores, another one creates the furrows, and then yet another step actually starts
applying all the displacements into the surface – the furrows and the microtextures into the surface.
It also takes in the granularity of the surface so that when you go to simulate the surface, it knows what
it’s doing. “Once the high resolution mesh is created we use that persimulation, but after the simulation
we take it down into a texture map for render points. Otherwise we have to try to figure out how to
mesh a nine million tetrahedral mesh into the already existing high resolution model.” The benefits of doing this work were two-fold. Firstly, it provided a set of pores to use as a base shape. Secondly, the process gave the exact shape of each individual pore in depth, i.e. in Z. “We’d previously gotten the
X and Y of the pores correct because we had it from a scan, but the flatbed scanner doesn’t understand the height of a pore,” notes Williams. “What it now gives you is this beautiful curvature of
every pore so that you actually get much more interesting highlights on the skin. “Then, as we are animating the face and skin, you get the correct response in the simulation, particularly when the skin is
compressing. In other words, the skin folds and collapses, and it folds and collapses along certain lines on the face. This was something that we couldn’t achieve any other way.”
Tension maps can be used for so much more than just wrinkles on a fleshy character, though!
I think it’s damning for the potential of some projects that there’s so little intersection between mesh deformation and materials. Tension maps would open up a whole world of effects, like quickly using them to generate foam on the wake of the surface of water that was deformed with dynamic paint.
If they could generate quickly enough to be run realtime, there’d be WAY more insane uses than just wrinkles.
If anything, wrinkles are the added bonus of a proper implementation of tension maps.
But even still, it’s pretty damn demoralizing. I’m working on an animated short with three semi realistic human characters right now. There is no way in hell I’m gonna be able to generate the sheer volume of assets necessary to copy Chris’s workflow for wrinkle maps in a viable timeframe. The guy who made the tension map addon sorta up and dropped it. Sucks.
The two wrinkle maps are baked from separate sculpts made in Blender.
Not my best work… I haven’t properly investigated the new sculpting tools yet, and it was only a test after all.
I tried three methods for baking the height maps: Bake from Multires, a trick that uses Shrinkwrap, and the old Blender Render baking in 2.79. 2.79 did the best job, followed by the Shrinkwrap technique. Bake from Multires on its own was not good at all.
Well technically it is a regression (as is baking by the looks of it…), but I wouldn’t want to nag, as I’m sure their hands are full with with higher priorities.
Better would be for the limit on the number of Vertex Colors to be removed. Better still would be tension maps.
Well, I caught a glimpse of it working in the few moments before my GPU remembered it’s not really compatible with EEVEE, threw a panic attack and crashed Blender… so I would say yes.
Thanks for sharing - I’d like to try creating the skin procedurally one day (which I’m already doing simplistically for the high frequency bumps), but in the interim I have an idea that including stretched versions of the pores in the wrinkle maps and dissolving them with the general skin texture might be enough to create the impression of animated pores stretching, from a distance at least.
How do I make someone fat/ skinny? All those shapeshifting things you show in the video, I have no idea where to find that.
When do you think you can post textures? I would really like to get the full package
I only have the main body rig, if I get the face rig as well do I still have to merge everything like in that tutorial?
Great work overall! I would be open to helping with the documentation if you like as soon as I figure out how to do this. This could be a real step forward for Blender as a whole, characters are the last important part missing in my opinion.
If this somehow turns into an addon, I’ll gladly buy it. I figure this could be paired with characters whipped up in Daz or CC3… I’d be eager to see it all combined in Blender =o
Hey Chris,
Out of curiosity. How many shapekeys should a face have to nail realism. Ive heard its 52. If so.How can i find/know them? is there some sort of website or guide that can help me? please…
Not sure yet, I need to progress the project further to see what makes the most sense in the longer term.
You can change the length of the limbs and other body parts using the proportional controls (see the chart) and use sculpting to refine the shape.
The head textures are in a primitive state at the moment, and I haven’t even started on the body yet. I anticipate it will be a big job getting them up to par, so it could be a while I’m afraid…
If you get the face rig I’ll send a code for a free upgrade to the assembled Body & Face Rig.
Thanks I feel like I’m approaching the point where I’ll need to make a workflow tutorial of some sort, perhaps once I’ve finished defining the workflow.
If you mean just the wrinkles, then that might add some weight to the idea of decoupling them from the existing rigs. It would be a node setup though as opposed to an add-on, and I expect it would be more trouble than it’s worth trying to hook it up to another rig.
I think I have somewhere around that number, including L & R sides of the face. My set is a bit different to the standard FACS one though.
Question about the texturing the Eyes, Sorry for the noobish question in advanced but what’s the texturing intent of the external orb around the eyes? It hides all the internal Machinations of the pupil and the Iris but without it the eye doesn’t look right either. It hasn’t got a material er… set for it.
i set one up for myself to be able to texture this
Possibly it’s because I’m using Komikaze Eevee shaders, But this doesn’t appear to work any differently if I set it up for Cycles, The fact that it doesn’t have a Material selection set kinda makes it hard for me to track what it’s doing before I assign the various faces to my created set.
I mean, what I’m doing works but it just feels like I’m dumping the original intent of the eye setup by doing it this way.
It’s made for realistic texturing, with a smooth transition from the sclera to the cornea. To do that it needs to have a single material for the exterior of the eye. You can see how I used a ColorRamp for the transition here.
Since you’re going for something stylised, you might want to just select the cornea and assign a separate transparent material to it so you get a hard-edged limbus, then the iris and pupil will be visible through the cornea.
By the way if you’re using an older version of the mesh/rig then you’ll probably only have an “eyeball” material for the whole mesh - there’s a more recent update with the eyeball split into Iris, Sclera and Pupil materials.
I might be misunderstanding the question though.
MichaelColina
(The "Mr. Polygon Punisher" is your)
911
hey also have you replaced the materials for the principled bsdf already here or you are still using this old school 2.79 setup? i dont know but i think the principled bsdf may have more accuracy in the materials now in 2.8-2.9 (or maybe less depending the case of use)…
hey check also the add-on i left above your post a few days ago, you might need it for the better rigging, i am also working in how to use it to get my desired results as you are as well…
I haven’t touched the eye nodes since that post. Hard to say which is more physically correct after the test I did on the teeth (seems like some of the images and videos are no longer displaying in this thread for some reason… the links to them still work though).
Thanks, yeah I saw that but didn’t get a chance to dig deeper to see whether it would be of benefit now that I’ve already established the main parts of the rig. If it doesn’t require re-rigging then it might be helpful for fine tuning.
1 Like
MichaelColina
(The "Mr. Polygon Punisher" is your)
913
this is awesome, i thought you were more about cartoony animations but it’s nice to see you are going all out for realism.
is your goal eventually to make something like Tissue ? i hope someday blender can equal Tissue in skin deformation simulation.
you’re even including the bone structure which i really like.
i tried shrinkwrapping a head over a skull, and the falloff from skin to skull is always so steep, like it’s sticking out. i wonder if you’ve gotten it to look smooth.
That helps, thanks. If it can do a better job of interpolating between shape keys than my bendy stick* (which doesn’t quite do it perfectly), then that would be a plus. (.blend file)
And if it can do things like activate one shape key with one bone, and a second shape key with another bone, and then a third shape key only if both bones are in a certain position… that would be a BIG plus.
I’m thinking of having a bit of a rest from rigging, but I might see how this pans out and revisit later.
It’s not my goal, and I doubt I could come anywhere close to that level of sophistication, but I’ll be interested to see just how close…
It helps to add a vertex group in the Shrinkwrap properties, although that’s where the problem I mentioned about creases comes in. The sharpness of the falloff is also dependent on the density of the mesh, so you might need to taper off the internal object to match the external one (which is why I sculpted the bony landmarks on a duplicate of the head instead of an actual skull).
Noted!
*BA seems to be having problems displaying .gifs and embedded Twitter videos in older posts lately - can anyone shed some light? @bartv mayhaps?
Can I share or sell my models, rigs etc. if I use RBF Drivers?
You absolutely can! RBF Drivers was designed very specifically to build on Blender's native capabilities and although you need to have the add-on installed to create or edit RBF drivers, once they're running all the data and functions they need are encapsulated in custom properties and drivers, so you can export, link, share or sell your models and rigs freely and they'll work on any compatible version of Blender, whether or not the add-on is installed.
I feel like I’m approaching the point where I’ll need to make a workflow tutorial of some sort, perhaps once I’ve finished defining the workflow.
