This is basically a mutation of materials, between Poju’s Fathead & phil’s seemingly aborted yet excellent attempt. I started on this exercise by trying to get phil’s material working with raytracing. I [may have] solved the problem by turning down the size value of the toon diffuse area quite significantly to cancel out the artifacts, using Poju’s specular settings as an example of the direction to go about smoothing things out. I’m not certain if I’ve ruined the effect or not, but that’s why I’m here posting my progress.
edit: Above comment is outdated, I am now taking a different approach to shading.
I’m still fine-tuning the shading & need to go back in at the textures. I’m also trying to see what more I can incorporate from that maya tutorial on skin shading.
A larger render to see the texture closer up would be nice.
From what I can tell though, it looks very pale. It almost because of the bluriness looks like she’s getting sprayed with a very fine coat of white spray paint. There needs to be more red/darker tones to really look great.
Thanks for the crits, I’m re-rendering larger right now & will have one with better balance eventually. The paleness is due to the exposure & range settings being maxed out, I did so to get a clear impression of the shader’s components & to make sure this will hold up [technically] under harsh lighting & won’t have to be hidden in tastefully done lighting. Of course, that’s where this will all ideally lead in time.
When I go back into this heavily I’ll give some closer inspections of the texturing, it only has the originals from phil’s at the moment; they will be changed, though I’m sticking to phil’s ideal of keeping said texturing quite subdued. I’ll likely be sticking with procedurals since I’m trying to find as many uses for them as possible.
I hope you continue to follow along, I’ll likely need a keen eye as I go into texturing.
IMHO, the shading never was quite right, but the actual texturing, i.e. veins, etc., was very good. You may want to contact him and incorporate his work as well.
The only way to get realistic skin imo is UV mapping. the inside of the hand has more blotchy red tones for example. then there is the chill factor which makes the cheeks and ears and nose red. the knees and elbows also have differing tones, as do the feet, the lips, etc. also that translucency shader is awesome. the result you got looks good though. very close.
Actually, for that kind of stuff, I’ve had good results vertex painting my mesh. You can put a slightly more bluish tint on the arpits, inner thighs, anywhere the veins are closer to the surface; put more red on the cheeks, ears, chin, where the wind hits, etc. You use it as a base color and mix in others on top of it for your actual procedural veins and stuff.
Knees are a bit bulgy and the bottum (or underside) of her breasts are too flat and level, make it more curved and fleshed out.
Study some nude pictures.
Why, that’s what I do on my spare time!
EDIT - Other than that, it’s fantastic :o
EDIT2 - Oh, and the lips are way, way too big. Tweak the chin a bit, and check on the ear/s. But still, it’s nice, and a WIP at that, so I’m sure it’ll be great.
No updates to this project yet, just posting some responses:
Drevay: Just to clear things up, this is only a modified makehuman base mesh, so no congrats go to me for that. All focus is on getting a good material at this point, so this is just a stand-in right now. I’ll take your crits to mind when I inevitably pull this back into makehuman though.
Modron: I’m hoping I can get good results with translucency. Also, I’m still debating how much detail I’m going for, but I think I’ll be able to gel procedurals & vertex painting to get adequate results. You see, I’m trying to work this as a sort of generic base material for use with models of varying geometry, so UV mapping is out of the question.
harkyman: I’m working on trying to add that warmth you find the material lacks right now, it’s especially noticeable with less extreme lighting. I agree with you on shul’s work, though I’ll mostly be working with Poju’s fathead textures as a guide, they seem to be a good fusion of the different approaches I’ve seen.
Great tutorial! I learned a lot from it, thank you. Glad I hadn’t progressed very far into texturing yet. I’ve never thought to use the Dvar slider before & your use of a Base texture is very interesting.
Here’s a test with your texturing, and the shading I’ve been working with - changed the lighting setup as well. The Nor textures have been toggled off for now because the bump mapping was too pronounced & gave the skin a wrinkled/aged look. Not necessarily a bad thing, just not what I’m going for.
I’ve ended up completely “turning off” the size settings for the toon shaders. There are artifacts now showing that weren’t noticeable in my original light setup & I’m doing this as a last resort. Will post updated renders soon, first the close-up & then a full view shortly thereafter.
Thought I’d post this before someone else pops in & points it out.
I’m getting fairly good results here but the bug with the toon shader is a bit oppressive, leading to a lot of sidetracking & fine-tuning of all the wrong things. And at this point the material won’t work outside of a highly controlled environment, which is far from my goal. I saw phil submitted a bug report & this’ll likely be fixed sooner than later, making any further progress to work around it - DAMMIT - kind of futile.
I’ve done some tests with different shaders & reworked the textures a bit. Render updates are in first post; no time for AO renders, so they’re a bit dark.
Any C&C on the new shading or anything? I’d like to know if anything looks off to anyone, I’ve been staring at this for over a week & my judgement may be impaired. %|
edit: Does anyone know what format is lossless & web-friendly? PNG seems to lose some color & definition that is there in the raw render, even at 100% quality. I’d go with BMP, but the file size is ridiculous. Any suggestions?
The shading actually looks pretty good, but at this point it’s hard to tell from a realism standpoint. Have you added texturing, like the subtle, diffuse vein web you see on most people? I’m not sure if I see it very subtly in your latest, or if it’s just my imagination.
To be able to really judge how it’s coming along now, I’d really need to see the texturing more prominently, including variation in the skin tone over the surface (bluer around eyes/armpits, redder on cheeks and chin, etc.), and the speckles and spots that everyone has. I’ve never seen someone without all this, and I’m not quite sure what that skin would look like.
Of course, that’s where this will all ideally lead in time.
