Is it Me..Or are there 2 Types of Skin Textures?
404nicg
Posts: 270
When shopping for characters I noticed that some skin textures are so detailed and realistic that no matter what shapes or morphs you apply to the head, it's like the person will always have the same face essentially. For instance I have alot of Raiya's characters. Those are some great textures and highly realistic. However it seems that there's no way you can put 2 characters into the same scene using the same textures because your characters are going to look to similar.
On the flip side there are other textures that seem to have a more "digital(?)" look. They are not as detailed and not as realistic out-the-box .. but they seem to be more flexible and versatile. I'm still trying to get the hang of lighting and surface shading and all of that so I know that there are steps to bring any texture up to make it the best it can be in your particular scene..but there seems to be different levels of textures. Also if I feel like when you use one of the ultra-realistic textures, they pretty much set a standard for your other characters. You can't have one character looking uber-realistic and then the other characters looking "digital".
Is it my inexperience showing? Is it just that some characters have better presets that bring out more realistic qualities than others? Or are some textures just "better" ? Are all textures created the same way or are there different ways of making skin textures that account for different outcomes?
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Comments
I would start with checking the specularity maps. Some have really dark maps so you get very little specular in a scene where some tend to have brighter maps which work in low light but tend to look plastic or too bright in high light. Make sure the specular maps are somewhat close to the same brightness and that should help some.
Some textures use lots of SSS which can look realistic, but also can look rubbery or like latex depending on the lighting. some do not.
I'm usually preferring the less rubbery texure and look. But lots of people like to see light and color shining through skin.
Lighting is critical with the SSS textures or you get that weird red face because of the way the scene is lit.
If you do find that the specular maps that come with the characters are dark how do you fix them? In a software like photoshop or GIMP?
I'm think Subsurface shaders are starting to rub me the wrong way lol. Especially using AoA shader I just find it adds so much more time to the render for only maybe a slight improvement. I switched to Amazing Skins shader and as I understand it doesn't use ACTUAL sub surface shader but it attempts to mimic it and i've been liking the results.
I think it's a stylistic difference rather than a question of quality - some textures have a lot of details, some are more stylised and painterly. As you say, they can't - certainly at the extremes - really appear in the same scene, but you also need to take account of other scene elements - a high-detail, realistic or even hyperreal in some cases, skin with clothes and props that are more stylised can look a bit odd -at best like one of the those real actors in a cartoon world styles (which may be desirable), at worst just plain wrong.
You could do that or you could take the brighter one and tone it down by messing with the color. Putting a grey in the color bar next to the texture will make it darker. Sometimes spec maps are too dark so I put in the bump map instead and tweak the color.
I think you're absolutely right. I think this kind of changes things--I feel like from now on maybe I should only buy one or the other (stylized or realistic).
I think I've encountered that before where I have characters with realistic skin but the environment looks cartoonish.
You could do that or you could take the brighter one and tone it down by messing with the color. Putting a grey in the color bar next to the texture will make it darker. Sometimes spec maps are too dark so I put in the bump map instead and tweak the color.
That's definitely good to know. I will keep that in mind, thanks.
Yeah you're totally right, there are two main types of skins.. but there's also a 3rd, the toon type, which is much less represented. I much prefer the painterly type as it looks nice but doesn't get so close to the uncanny valley. My favorite characters are by Fred Winkler, almost all of his fit into the painterly category. My favorites for generation 3 and 4 were always by Art Colab, they are painterly leaning towards toon.. I wish they still made characters.
This really opens my eyes now. I need to pay more attention to the "style" of characters I'm buying. Having a scene where one character looks really realistic and the other characters look painterly looks...weird. So people who render out of Octane or use Reality in an attempt to get hyper-realism, they tend to avoid painterly style textures?
Not necessarily, I've seen some amazing results with Fred's characters in Octane, it just depends on what style you're going for with your final render. You can get hyper realistic out of 3Delight or Firefly if you know how to use them, and you can get good looking toon out of Octane/Lux/Iray if you know how to use them. They're all tools just like anything else... Z-Brush is the king of displacement painting but Hexagon can do it too, half the time I don't bother saving out my obj and taking it into z-brush, I just use Hex' tools 'cause I'm already there and I like the interface better. (Assuming Hex doesn't crash... I just bought Silo today, gonna try it out, Smith Micro had it on sale for $100.) Marvelous designer is the king of dynamic cloth, but it's a lot of jumping through hoops (and programs) afterwards to make a good looking model that will take sub-d and morphs smoothly, sometimes it's faster and easier to make a base model in Hex with all the polygons/edge loops in the right places, nice and even and consistent, and then drape it using Poser's cloth room.
I admit I prefer the painterly type skin texture. It just suits my style of art.
I think a lot of it is preference.
I only really have one elite skin texture set and that is Reby Sky. Through the use of morphs I can get a different look even with the hyper realistic skin. I don't think it would be a terrible problem to use multiple versions in the same scene.
So, here's one that uses the Reby Sky figure and maps, and one that uses the Like MM figure morph from ShareCG, and the Reby Sky Elite shaders. Even though they're not in the same scene, I think there are enough differences in the face and body type that if they were in the same scene you wouldn't be able to tell, unless you started comparing skin blemishes.
Not too fond of the Reby Morph actually, and my image with it certainly does nothing to help. ;-)
Wow now those look like 2 completely different textures. Great renders btw. The first one looks realistic, while the second render looks painterly.
I think these two demonstrate how much of a huge difference lighting can make.
I had mistakenly assumed that every texture(except for the toon style ones) was striving to be as realistic as possible. It never crossed my mind that not everybody is looking for that.
What made the Reby Sky texture set so good was the quality of the 'technical' maps, specular, bump, SSS strength and color. The quality of these maps seems to be more important in IRay than in 3Delight and I am afraid a lot of Studio vendors are not going to be up to the challenge.
They're very important in Carrara as well, although the maps for SSS don't work in Carrara's SSS shader channel. You can fake it though and save a huge chunk of render time.
I'm think Subsurface shaders are starting to rub me the wrong way lol. Especially using AoA shader I just find it adds so much more time to the render for only maybe a slight improvement. I switched to Amazing Skins shader and as I understand it doesn't use ACTUAL sub surface shader but it attempts to mimic it and i've been liking the results.
You're right that's it, in Amazing Skins there is another simplified SSS approximation - a mimic as you say.
Thanks for this feedback!