Characters to Include a No Eyebrow Option
nicstt
Posts: 11,715
Would make customisation much simpler. Especially as they diffuse, spec, bump etc would all have no eyebrows.
Post edited by nicstt on
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I'm considering doing this with the twins I'm working on, since the skins I'm using as the base don't have eyebrows to start with.
all my future characters include a no brow option. They should be hitting the store soon!!
This is something I have wanted see happen ever since Studio added LIE.
Good news :)
Please.:)
I'd love to see this too. I can have all the light haired people I could ever dream of....but they're all going to look like dye jobs due to the perma dark eyebrows.
I'd like to see as part of the base Genesis ## Essentials all the base characters' textures and maps completely hairless and every bit of hair either a set of overlay textures and maps or meshes. In particular if you try to reuse a male texture they are so quickly and easily identifiable and not a good basis to customize your own work with. You have to throw them out and teach yourself how to texture and map from the beginning which for most people will be a manual process of pixel by pixel editing when we have no access to the 3D scanners businesses have access to.
Also, there is still a habit of including glossiness, shadow, and very specific to individual mole, suntan, sunburn, 'dark sleepy eyelids from lack of sleep', freckles, and other such patterns. Those aren't thing one includes as a base resource to begin to create characters with.
Yes, there are individual differences in pore patterns and typical human skins textures but they aren't the type of things that we tend to notice between different people like those other features listed above that does individualize the resources used.
I've bought various merchant resources intended to remedy these things but they suffer from the same problems as the DAZ resources or where a couple of DAZ resource problems were solved the merchant resources introduced other problems.
Yes, but the fact is that as a basis for creating characters there should be as part of the essensials a set of textures and maps that actually are a basis for creating characters.
Knowlege of Gimp or other image editing programs or as an alternative a hair mesh creation in a 3rd party program would still be needed beyond that but the time spent removing a non-relevant set of characteristics from a set of base images would not be needed.
It isn't difficult, but it does take a while, as the SSS, Bump, Spec and Normals may all need processing too; sometimes just the SSS is sufficient, but it can also depend on close up, and of angles and lights. So it takes time. I'm presuming the creation process, involves adding eyebrows on the textures; although if they are using photos then probably not.
If someone does not add gen textures, then it is a way of adding value in comparrison to those who consistently include them.
I have no clue how to remove eyebrows from normals in any skillful way.
This is why I often use parris' Macroskin ( http://www.daz3d.com/macro-skin-for-genesis-and-genesis-2-female-s ), which has a nobrow option, and Skin Builder.
I'm hoping Mec4D's PBS vol 4 makes this a moot point.
I would be very surprised. I think there's always going to be a big need for skin area maps of some kind for really good skin.
That said, there's a lot of room for nearly good enough skin, particularly with clothed characters. The big problem is the lips and area around the eyes, and palms for darker skinned characters.
Yeah, I'm not thinking it Mec4D's package won't be perfect but I've tried other 'Generic Skins' products and found them lacking because they paint/photo to many details in the diffuse part of the texture. Like you said it's mostly a problem arounds the eyes and lips. However, that's mostly for the female characters, for the male characters the shaved head, face, body hair, and the distribution is also a problem.
If Mec4D's PBS vol 4 is not sufficient, I'm satisfied enough with the Ryder character textures & maps with some careful editing for a generic base set. Given that I'm not even that interested in creating realitic characters well...I don't know why I'm messing or investigating these methods and products except to learn a bit.
Actually, reflecting on it, I'd love a simple eyes/lips/palm map that modifies some otherwise generic skin for specific zones.
I've had tolerable results with procedural skin shaders in the past.
Some of my experiments:
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Decal-skin-test-598229418 (uses a simple tiling skin texture, with a little bit of a cheat for the lips, and good HD morphs to add critical details)
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Procedural-skin-test-G3F-585457142 (there's a bunch of things wrong with the eyes and hair, but if you look at the skin, the texture passes at least a cursory glance over test.)
I should make another attempt at a procedural skin. I've been considering revisiting my procedural shaders and trying something more expansive, particularly if I can figure out how to get Normals to work properly.
Those are both pretty decent to my eyes. OK, the guy's veins are a bit much even for a roided out body builder but I have seen some guys with similar just not as high. The only reason after first glance they fail the reality test is lack a variance in skin tone and texture.
I think if you can change the pattern for the eyelids (hardly any oil or sweat glands because you need to see (eg sunblock dripping in eyes) and so less light reflects back plus being shaded by the brow), forehead, cheeks, lips, elbows, palms, soles and different adult hair distributions and I think you'll have it.
I think you can extend surfaces to make special surface groups for those areas, when they don't already exist.
I was thinking this is what Mec4D is doing but I may be wrong.
Yeah, the vascularity is overdone. Very experimental. ;)
And yeah, the core problem is that, well, the body just isn't homogeneous -- at some point you need some form of map, at least at close range. At medium to far range, of course, you can start cheating more, but who cares. ;)
HOWEVER, these approaches to procedural or otherwise artificial tiling of certain things (particularly bump and normals) can help provide details that a skin texture may lack. In one of the skin threads folks mentioned something along these lines to create very fine pore structures.
I change normal maps the same as any other; sometimes it can take some serious tweaking or multilple attempts to get it working right. It can cause problems editting normal maps though.
Way back in the 2nd half of the 90s I remember a business that was making compressed images via fractal equations. And I remember fractal equations can create slightly different variations of a equated pattern so I although I think maybe the cpu requirements to do that are a bit high I do think it's not that outrageous to be able to randomize such patterns.
I think though you'd need to further refine the way the surfaces are handled in areas of the body down to hands, fingers and even finger segments and create identifying equations for each type. Just as the bones in your body are all bones that do different jobs so has the skin on your body different characteristics meant to do a slightly different job than the skin areas with other characteristics so that's why the PBR fails here. PBR needs to be extended to allow mathematical descriptions of living surfaces and then things like skin and wood become less problematic.
I'm not a subject matter expert on fractals or numerical analysis and it's been many just since I graduated with the basics in those, but roughly speaking, I think you'd clamp down the unique characteristic skin or wood pattern you see with a unique set of equations and then repeat those equations fractally for the effected areas. A bit like that instancing thread elsewhere in these forums. LMAO, ignore the preceding sentence and I think it's better that someone with a advanced degree in Applied Mathematics and biology specilization derive those equations with state of the art research not bit and pieces of memory since childhood in different scientific disciplines.