F0Star

New Skin Material research

Added 2018-09-15 19:20:02 +0000 UTC

Sup dear gentle patrons F0 here!

It's been a while since I refurbished my materials, especially the skin shader v. IIX which I use for all the renderings you saw within the past and this year.

I'm constantly researching for the best possible way to create a material that works well with low poly video game characters without wasting performance while rendering.

However this is not easy if you compare this to rendering solutions like SFM or Blender since SFM is no PBR (physically based rendering) or ray tracing at all. KeyShot is very basic when it comes to materials with sub surfaces and scattering - it also lacks many features which would be useful when it comes to character customization - all of this makes it a true challenge to create something new.

If you only use KeyShot for CAD and product design you're fine - it has everything on board you'll need to get a quick and nice looking render done.

It also depends a lot on the lighting how a material will be represented - rim lights look always nice in pictures but also tent to make the pic look like it was made in a "photo studio" which in my mind isn't very realistic at all...

By speaking of realistic did you know what the IOR (refraction index) of real human skin is? Well hehe thats a good question.. Nobody knows it exactly but experts are saying it has a wide range between 1,2 up to 1,45 depending on age and other aspects. I guess if you're an artist you may never heard about this stuff in general but when you want to make something like a high complex material from scratch you'll need to do a lot of research to get the basics right.

Alright thats a lot text up there whew :P Now for the final part the changelog:

- IOR set to 1,4 (before 1,43)

- AO mapping mixing with diffuse color (adds more details such as wrinkles)

- Skin normal map now blends together with diffuse color

- new specularity index (generated by spec map of the model)

- roughness is now controlled by micro skin texture

- lables on top which can simulate sweat/water drops on the skin surface (experimental feature)

Ok thats the changelog for first, a lot of stuff happend here and some features still need extended testing before I'm going to use them in a final render.

So as a little bonus here 5 pictures of our good ol' buddy Logan who was the nice test model for this material research experiment.

The following 2 pics are 4K resolution (low sample count) first picture is without KeyShot post processing (bloom filtering, gamma correct and chromatic aberration)