Skin Shader - How to setup a Sub Surf Scat Layer for Blood Vessels?

Syrus_Dante

...sorry for double post by quote myself :)

Syrus_Dante

Syrus83227_202e840f4e said:

OK after months of working on my custom character with all the customized morphs and clothing ect. - now I thought its time for a photo session.

So I head forward by focusing on how to setup the lightning, textures and shaders because from what I have heard these three things are essential for good renders.

Yes nobody nor me did miss the fact that Iray is the new big feature in Daz Studio for more realistic lightning effects but right now I dont have that highend PC with a powerfull nVidia card that can CUDA-calculate my renders in short time and good quality. My current PC simply has more CPU than GPU power also for this relatively new feature as far as I understand you have to have a set of these new shaders that are optimized for Iray.

So my goal is to render with the 3Dlight engine.

I allready got a basic understanding of how all the texture maps like diffuse, specular, bump and displacement works.

Also I know how to setup the skin shader and lightning in Daz Studio.

My current choice for lightning is UberEnvironment2 and for the skinshader I use AmazingSkins.

The renders I get with these two advanced features are looking realy great to me once I found the right settings.

But after a few test renders I realized that my character skin is missing some details that would make it a believable human being. The diffuse map is realy a bit boring and flat colored, also the bumpmap dosnt have any fine details.

No problem for me - I see the character preset itself just as a good starting point to customize it and not just in shape. Yes I tried out some other character maps with more overall details but then the face look is that diffrent so it isnt an option for me.

I allready run the maps to a conversion process that involved UV-Map transfer and a diffusemap makeover in photoshop to get the skintone I want.

I am thinking of ways to get more detail into the skin. So first I want to customize the diffuse map and later create a diplacement map or maybe a normal map.

One question in between: Am I right that you have to choose either between bump, diplacement or normal map for the shader system to deform the surface at rendertime?

By researching on how to generate and finetune such maps I found realy usefull programs that could get handy. Just take a look at "crazybump" or "AwesomeBump". Does anyone have worked with these?

Back to customizing the maps in the image editor - I also want to add some transparent layers of texture details and I found nice freebies to stock up my 'merchant resources' for that:

"AJ-Blood-Vessel Textures"

...this is a set for fine detailed blood veins lightly visible under the skin - best applied as a sub suface scattering map.

G3F_Base_Female_noisemaps_4K.zip

G3F_Victoria_7_noisemaps_4K.zip

...and also seamless noisemaps for the "quick and dirty bump or displacement map"

My first question is how you would apply the vessel map that consists of a layerd psd file with transparent layers as a sub suface scattering map - cant find any settings for that in AmazingSkins shader?

My second question is it possible to transfer these transparent maps with daz studio map transfer to another figures UV-layout?

 

mjc1016

First, no, you don't have to choose just one from the bump. displacement, normal maps...you can use all three at once.

Yes, Awesomebump is useful for generating the other maps...but they are still not as 'good' as ones baked from hi-res meshes (normal/displacement especially).

The reason you can't is that Amazing Skins isn't a true SSS shader...unlike the UberSurface or AoA shaders.  Either of those you would add the Aj-bloodvessels to the SSS color slot (at least that's where I put them when using them).

 

Syrus_Dante

Thanks for your reply mjc,

"you can use all three at once"

I wasnt aware of that. So you need to take care of all bump. displacement, normal maps and settings to work together to get the best out of it?

Does this make sense in every combination? I mean bump and displacement are the most common used shader maps I think and  for this new normal maps system I have thougt of would replace the displacement system because of its advantages with the color rages in it that represents the surface deformations much better.

Most Daz characters we get only have a bump and a specular map. And I think this is because the bumpmap "surface deforming system" is the most resource efficient (but face looking at the geometry edges!) shader map system at render time.

Now I want displacement maps for my character - and generating these map out of the bump map I got was my first attempt to do this quick and dirty. Also if I look at the Daz character textures in my library I think the bump and the specular maps are somehow done with tweaking the diffuse map with an image editor. Does anyone know of a tutorial for photoshop for doing that diffuse map to bump / specular conversion?

For the subject of generating maps with Awesomebump / crazybump ect. its totaly clear what "baked from hi-res meshes" means in quality compared to the generated maps. Damn I need a single UV-map layout for genesis 2 so I can paint / sculpt all the fine details with ZBrush on all face, body and limbs 'surfaces' at once. Or is it possible to do something similar in Blender (from wich I know supports diffrent UV-Maps on the surfaces) - I mean sculpting on a high-res mesh and export displacement maybe also normal maps?

As discussed here in section "Did I missed out something? OK yes finaly to your first question":

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/59212/g3f-textures-in-zbrush#latest

I would love to have something like this:

http://www.sharecg.com/v/70652/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/Genesis-1-Single-UV-Maps-and-Utility-Paint-Morph

...for genesis 2 M/F base map UV or Genesis 2 compatible UV-map - Does anyone know of such a "single UV-surface" map or know how can generate it?

"Aj-bloodvessels"

So this is the problem with AmazingSkins shader I should have known this as I didnt find a SSS-Map slot in it.

So you advice me to use "UberSurface or AoA" Uber-Surface / Environment I thought of is an advanced lightning system and AoA "age of armour" I thought of is just a shader system - but now its getting clear to me that every lightning system uses its own surface / skin shaders - sorry im completly new to rendering in DazStudio.

So you also used AJ-Blood-Vessel Textures as SSS color, nice to hear that. Which UV-Layout did you use? Or I should better ask since the set consists mostly of JPGs with white backround is this the neutral color for SSS-maps?

Because until now I didnt know how to setup the SSS-colormap - I allready used it to tweak my flat colored looking diffusemap with it.

For doing that I first had to "Map-Transfer" my texture to the Victoria 4 UV-Layout within daz studios map transfer tool. Once you have understand how to set up templates that can also be saved as presets it very easy to work with. I always set the quality slider to highest 10 and save out PNG and hope that my texture dont loose detail with that method.

With the additional script http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/33957/uv-setter-for-genesis-2-revised-and-updated

you can easily change your genesis 2 figures UV-Layout with that and do a texture conversion to any other UV-Layout you own.

With my diffusemap converted to the Victoria 4 UV-Layout I was able to use the transparent PSD-file layers that comes with the blood vessels set and used the seperated red and blue vessels as overlay layers for my diffusemap im photoshop by setting the layer oppacity to 17%. Then I noticed that the vessels map stucture is simply mirrored in the middle and too pronounced in some areas - so I have added a masking layer on top and slightly faded out these spots I dont like to see also on the outside of the limbs and the forehead. Then I used the clone-stamp tool to break symetry at the center line.

Overall it comes out very well. If I zoom out and compare the original diffusemap with flat coloring with the one I have added the bloodvessels to I can see sligtly more colorvariations from the red and blue tint - that reminds me of a ZBrush tutorial called something like "paint your human like skin" and they say the first painted lowermost layer should be colored in purple thats a 50-50 mix of red and blue isnt it. With this bloodvessels PSD file you can even generate diffrent mixtures of red and blue colored vessels to represent diffrent situations the charater is in - like if its cold the most outer skin is less supplied with blood and pale with more blue - or the other way around with red on a seperated layer.