Friday, 18 July 2014

Subsurface scattering with misss_skin_shader

Epidermal & subdermal textures painted in Mudbox.

The epidermal layer (outer skin) was painted using the projection tool with hand reference shots. This layer needed a lot of adjusting and patching due to uneven lighting in the shots. Some areas had to be cloned as they were not visible in the shots.

Before connecting to the epidermal channel it needed a lot more contrast (in photoshop) to compensate with the detail lost in the mix with the other layers.

The subdermal layer (fat, veins) is a flat pale pinky/yellow with some blue squiggly lines drawn on with the paintbrush tool and then blurred. These only show up at certain angles but add a lot of realism.

To take it further I would need a bump map for the pores, veins etc, maybe some hairs  and a bit more detail around the finger nails, I may experiment with doing the finger nails via the diffuse channel (normally for make-up, tattoos, stains etc).

Most of the difficulty is getting the weight balance between  the different layers and resisting to go really heavy on the back scatter (creates red glow in thin areas when back-lit to simulate blood under the skin). The algorithm control is useful too, use the scale conversion to compensate for scene scaling in order to get accurate back scatter etc.




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