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As the title says i'm experimenting a bit with skinshading in Maxwell Render and this is my first testresult. There should be more and better results coming if all goes as planned.



/ Magnus

excellent;) can you give an insight as what layers you use and how you mimic subdermal shadings etc?

Thanks Aniki i used a single layer, two bsdf material with 3 textures to simulate the effect of subdermal scattering. It still needs lots of tweaking and testing and probably a new texture for the subdermal layer but this was rather quickly put together.

These are the textures i used for my test, the skincolourmap was included with the mesh, the two other maps i have extracted from that first colourmap.



/ Magnus

I think this is really good considering the scattering is fake. It's mapped in the "right places" so far.

The skin seems a bit excessively oily?

Maximus have you tried real SSS? You could map it so that it only shows up in the ears and nose, to avoid calculating SSS for the entire surface.

Very nice, Max. The JPEG blocking in your output ruins the presentation though...

So you will apply a sss density map as well? Custom roughness, spec etc?



really excited where this is heading.

The scattering is not faked, it uses the densitymap to control the distribution of the scattering. That's the way you normally do it when you work with heads as you otherwise get a very weird and unrealistic subscattering on the skin. It will look more like a wax figure if you skip the densitymap.

JPEG compression can be blamed on the image hosting site i uploaded this to, sorry but not much i can do about that now as i have no other hosting to use.

The oilyness could be toned down a little, but making the skin too dull looking will make it flat and feel fake, it's not easy weighting it properly but i'm trying. It's still just a early experiement so i'm working on improving all areas of this test.

/ Magnus

Maximus3D wrote:JPEG compression can be blamed on the image hosting site i uploaded this to, sorry but not much i can do about that now as i have no other hosting to use.

I'd strongly suggest PNG and hosting them on http://www.minus.com

thats what I meant, as you didnt show a density map yet;)

Thanks Tom i will try that one next time and see if it works any better.

Aniki, i didn't show my densitymap as it's something i'm constantly adjusting to get the look and feel i want.

/ Magnus

no problem, relieved to know you are using them and looking forward to your progress;)

Thanks, yep i'm using them. but i have to admit i am a bit rusty when it comes to 3D and Maxwell, it's been a few years since last time i fired up my applications so i need to get my brain back on track again. It takes a while.. but i will get there soon.

/ Magnus

I think you have too much scattering "built in" to that map to be able to judge what effects the Maxwell SSS itself makes. Look at the map around the ears for example, it's already heavily tinted red - don't know if that's from the photos used or if you've added more red there in PS.

Yes there is a bit reddish tone in the colourmap but it's not too much, the real skinglow comes from the subdermal scattering via my own map as can be seen here in it's latest revision. This is just a quick render of it on the mesh as it scatters light inside the mesh from the lightsources in the scene.



/ Magnus

I think your workaround is very clever. You only need to improve some parts of those maps and it will look better.