Hi there,
I’m playing around with writing a script to generate high quality (i.e. photorealistic) procedural skin texturing, suitable for use as a bump and diffuse map for cycles materials.
The core of the script is going to be generating a Voronoi texture from a set of seeds which are defined procedurally, and controlled by RGB maps, which can be generated by painting onto the model; for example wrinkle density can be controlled by pixel intensity (pale values mean spaced out wrinkles, dark values mean densely clustered wrinkles). Crucially, I think it should also be possible to use something like a normal map to record the vectors of stress lines in the skin, so that around the mouth and nose you get the voronoi cells stretching to create directed wrinkling - given an input, I know how to do that, although I suspect it will be highly counterintuitive to make the map (a bit like painting a normal map by hand). In principle it should also be possible to procedurally generate freckles, moles, scar tissue and other skin blemishes.
While my intention is to use this particularly with blender, it’s probably going to be a standalone script/program (I’m using using Pillow and Numpy extensively, but haven’t found a need for BPY yet).
My question to you guys is mostly: is there free software out there already that’s doing this kind of thing? To a lesser extent, do you think there’s any point in this? I’m likely to pursue it as a coding exercise anyway, but it’d be nice if you think it’s useful; I’m more concerned that I’m reinventing the wheel, if there’s free, opensource software that does this already.
If you have any questions about the approach, I can elaborate a bit.