with a view to updating the blender mateials library (well overdue I know), I’ve been trying to come up with some realistic skin shaders in blender. what do you think? It’s all done with native blender material and texture settings.
I’ll reveal how the ‘subsurface scattering’ was achieved when I have completed effective caucasian, asian and african skin materials, but until then I’ll leave you to guess. answers on a postcard please…
i think this can be improved further, but here is what i have done so far…
sophisticated rendering techniques use ‘subsurface scattering’ to simulate the behaviour of light as it is reflected within a translucent substance like skin or wax. Blender can’t do this alas, but the result of all this bouncing light is to add extra ilumination to the most translucent areas (those that are closest to right angles to the viewer). To try and emulate this the skin material has a blend texture mapped to the z-normal (in the same way as used to create glass), but instead of effecting the alpha channel, its mapped (added) to spec and spec col, and subtracted from the hard value. The result is softer more pronounced specular highlights on the parts that are at a tangent to the viewer.
I’m sure that ramble explains things terribly, eventually I’ll post some files.
Hi!
Good work.
Initially, for MakeHuman model, I’ve try a blend texture too, but I
must abandon this method, because blend texture don’t work
good with multiple material index.
I.E. in my model I’ve 2 main materials: front and back (to use
a simple bitmap texture with UV map in color channel).
If I use a blend texture, I’ve a problem in the transition zone front-back:
the color maps of both have the same color, but the blend texture
have different effect, and the result is a sharp separation line from two
materials.
If you want, I can test your material on MakeHuman model…
Sorry for my english…
if you would like to try them. I see the problem you would have with multiple material indices though…
have you thought of creating ‘make skin’ as part of the ‘make human’ project? with base materials for caucasian/afro-american/asian etc a user could select pre-set materials or chose 50% afro-american/50% cacasian and have the script calculate suitable values. You could even have alien type skins if you wanted I guess. Anyway, just a thought…
what is up with the bluish viens that are over the skin texture.
other than that i reckon that it is almost perfect.
p.s. there seams to be to much light=ing on the make human models.
and also have you considered making it about 0.200 EMIT this will help make the skin in the shade look more realistic because of ambient lighting (but perhaps not!!!
In the first test I’ve used the IainH material without modify it, simply
to test the effect on MakeHuman mesh. If you take a look on my previous work, you have a notice that I use a emit value…
Hower, the emit make a good effect, but it’s a problem with shadow,
or a scene with a little light. This is my last experiment: no emit here, but I use the IainH method to fake the surf scattering.
… can we see more?
:o