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I need some artistic advice on human skin


ohiovr
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I've got a make human head that I want to re texture. Make human's textures are pretty good (so far hugely better than my own) but I'd like to make higher resolution textures that feature beard stubble and other imperfections.

With a little sub surface scattering make human's textures are nice.. here is a render of it out of the box with lightwave's fast skin material:

fastskin_makehuman_original_texure.jpg

My strategy has been to take pictures of my face with my 4 megapixel camera with flash lighting in multiple angles. With those pictures I find dissimilar areas of similar luminance and construct seamless textures. The area around the nose has a different look than the area around below the eyes. All in all I was able to make about 10 different textures from my photos. I adjusted each texture a little in hue, saturation and luminance so they blend well with each other with no striking boundaries. I then made bump map textures from the color textures ad hoc and not too carefully.

So I got all my materials ready and as I start to paint them onto my make human head I'm startled as to how wrong the color is. It was all pink. This might have been because I had just washed my face to get rid of the oil that was reflecting light back from the flash before taking the source shots. So I got stock photography and tried to salvage my textures by using the match color feature in photoshop to try to get the colors looking more natural. That didn't work, the textures were too orange.

Strange to me is that I'll wash my face, look in the mirror, and I'm not bothered much by any redness or pinkness in my skin.

Coincidentally there is a material in 3dcoat that is just a picture of a mans face. I tried painting a little from a wide area of it onto my head model and the result from that looks all wrong too.

I'd post the results but I'm embarrased by them and threw them away.

I hope I'm not out of my league even trying to paint skin. Is this something a novice can hope to achieve with some persistence? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Hi there,

here is a quick 10 minutes skin setup test using 3dcoat cube mapping(3dcoat's powerful filing) ----read about filing in manual

and a cheap occlusion made with zbrush(I'll test 3dc occlusion soon)

I used a very cheap lowres skin sample of about 200x200 and I played with the anisiotropy and scale settings.

Filing with cubemapping is awesome and really a good start to baking shaders because it somehow conform to the highpoly version of the model.

After I made my filing in 3dc I made a fast very blasted occlusion in zbrush and merged them in overlay mode.

it's a quick test so the map is exagerated and a lot of part are off but it gave me a good idea of the possibilities

note that what is displayed is the texture without any shaders (the lighting is in the map),which mean that it would still look like this even on a lowpoly ingame model.

This was the main purpose of my test.

maybe this will give you ideas.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I've got a make human head that I want to re texture. Make human's textures are pretty good (so far hugely better than my own) but I'd like to make higher resolution textures that feature beard stubble and other imperfections.

With a little sub surface scattering make human's textures are nice.. here is a render of it out of the box with lightwave's fast skin material:

fastskin_makehuman_original_texure.jpg

My strategy has been to take pictures of my face with my 4 megapixel camera with flash lighting in multiple angles. With those pictures I find dissimilar areas of similar luminance and construct seamless textures. The area around the nose has a different look than the area around below the eyes. All in all I was able to make about 10 different textures from my photos. I adjusted each texture a little in hue, saturation and luminance so they blend well with each other with no striking boundaries. I then made bump map textures from the color textures ad hoc and not too carefully.

So I got all my materials ready and as I start to paint them onto my make human head I'm startled as to how wrong the color is. It was all pink. This might have been because I had just washed my face to get rid of the oil that was reflecting light back from the flash before taking the source shots. So I got stock photography and tried to salvage my textures by using the match color feature in photoshop to try to get the colors looking more natural. That didn't work, the textures were too orange.

Strange to me is that I'll wash my face, look in the mirror, and I'm not bothered much by any redness or pinkness in my skin.

Coincidentally there is a material in 3dcoat that is just a picture of a mans face. I tried painting a little from a wide area of it onto my head model and the result from that looks all wrong too.

I'd post the results but I'm embarrased by them and threw them away.

I hope I'm not out of my league even trying to paint skin. Is this something a novice can hope to achieve with some persistence? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Well, think it needs a slightly different approach.

It really is a mix of how things are physically, and the way you would paint (canvas, pencils/bushes, brain :) ) a human skin.

A lot of different facts determin how your skin will look.

You might want to consider (just a few examples)

- the thickness of the meat under the skin >> with bones tightly under your skin you will have some blue in your base color

- the looseness of your skin - folds not only have highlights/shadows, but a very different "hue" then the unwrinkled parts

- skin that is stretched over bones - again a different hue.

Then you will might want to add unregularities like pores, your hair stubbles andwhatnot.

What helps - have a look at some paintings, portraits and the like - really learn from the "old masters".

Knowing a bit of the way how the muscles under the skin are oriented will help as much as the knowledge of general anathomic things (bones).

You might spend some time without the machine - good luck!

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