Hello my keyshot folks. Looking for some guidance and or direction to render realistic skin material. I have an avatar I am trying to use and I believe I have all necessary maps to plug into a shader. Just trying to see which material I should use or settings to start off with.
I'd use the Translucent material. They already have some Human Skin materials in the presets that you can use as a base to plug your maps into.
Hello TGS,
Thank you for the reply. Going to jump into Keyshot right now that my kid is asleep and play around with your suggestion. Appreciate the initial steps.
so this is where I am at. using a model that was purchased to do some visual testing for some garments I have built. These are the maps that came with the model and I am trying to figure out the best approach and where to plug what in. Would it be possible to get some guidance on what yall think? Am i headed in an ok direction? Should I adjust anything? Open to some feedback. Again, model was purchased and just looking to see what the best workflow to achieve the most realistic look for what I have in order to apply to future works. Thank you all for the time.
back at it here. Thought about this last night to add some more info and see if the gurus could help out. I added a box to the scene that encompasses the head and here are the measurements that come up. Is the scale for the translucency ok or should I lower it or increase it. I understand that scene scale makes a big differrence on how the SSS and translucency is represented. Just trying to wrap my head around this. I did read majority of the posts by evilmaul and the results he has been able to accomplish are amazing. Would be awesome to see his process and share some knowledge with the community. Anyhow, i appreciate everyones time and input on this. Going to keep playing with it and see what comes of it.
Give the Translucent material a try instead of the Translucent Medium.
Ok TGS,
Switched over to the Translucent and here is what came out of it. I think something is happening. What are your thought my wonderful people?
Did an additional test after I did a bit more of a deep dive on focusing on TGS suggestion and playing with the translucent material. The surface color i made it almost pure white as to not influence the overall texture used for the diffuse/color map. The subsurface color made it a darker red and I changed the translucency value to 80mm for my scene. I think it better represents the SSS and translucency of the skin. I might be wrong but maybe someone in the community can help. I took my specular map and inverted it with a color to number node to plug into the roughness slot as to not use a solid color value for the roughness. I also ticked on the the GI button on the translucency material as I think it looked better than having it off. What do you all think? Better? Worse? Its my first attempt ever at something like this and I am trying my best to come up with a workflow and knowledge on this matter so I really do appreciate everyones time.
Heres another question, what would a radius map be used for in rendering skin. Its one of the maps that came with the model. Looks like this:
Did one more render going back to the translucent medium and attempted to use all the maps provided. Here is a comparison of both. Would really like to see what you all think. Thank you again.
so trying to really understand this concept and I am figuring out more and more than some things are up to preference and direction. I understand that there are some things that you just cant technically get away from and I am ok with that. Its just nice to see what small changes happen when you are testing things out. Would really like some feedback if yall have a few minutes. Ended up using a preset from the library, human skin sand 50mm, and made small hue changes to fit my scene. Did a test with the translucent material and also the translucent medium and here they are side by side. The shaders have the color map in their respective slots and also the normal map. All other color blocks are default. Setup the translucent material then switched over to the medium version with the same settigns and rendered. Crazy the difference you see. What do you all think?
Regardless of the material, make sure you have a decent (3-point/studio) lighting setup in place. Using the photographic vs. basic image style will also give you a more realistic look. The environment you're using now looks to be the default one and will give you very flat lighting, which makes it hard to judge the SSS.
RRIS,
Thank you for joining the conversation. I guess this is whereI should add that I am not trying to create any type of portrait render. I was trying to understand and better familiarize myself with how keyshot works and also just get more knowledge on what it takes to create a realistic looking skin material. The work or visual representation I will be looking to achieve will be full body models with the garments I created and the garments would be the interest pieces. We would never get this close to an asset (avatar) and showcase it. The lighting setup would be that of ecommerce and I know that type of lighting is very boring sometimes as it cant detract from the garments.
That being said, i have learned so much from these past posts that I am truly taking everyones suggestions into consideration. I will rework the lighting for this example to see if I can get some more feedback from more knowledgeable artists. Just wanted to share that the final look layout I am going for is more like this example.
still on the grind. I did 3 additional renders in order to see how much more I could push what I have. I added the eyes and tweaked them as well as they looked creepy with the skin material. Also, did a quick additional lighting setup as recommended to see something less flat. Here are the renders I worked on:
v01= Translucent material, with 90mm translucency value, contains spec, normal and displacement map.
v02= Changed to translucent medium, with 90mm translucency value, contains spec, normal and displacement map but added the color map into the subsurface slot.
v03= Same as v02 but attached the color map to a color adjust node, made the color slot slightly red and plugged into the subsurface slot
v04= Changed to translucent medium, with 90mm translucency value, contains spec, normal and displacement map and used a red color into the subsurface slot. (this is producing fireflies in the render, not sure why?)
What do you all think of the combiinations? Its been nice to see what each effect does on the render.
This is tricky... I'm no expert on skin. The main thing that's most stand-out to me is each of these show splotches of either red or gray or yellow. To my eyes (I am colorblind, so take with grain of salt), none of these blend the colors terribly well. I think from the last set, the translucent is the best. Maybe try desaturating the subsurf colors a bit? Maybe back off on the transparency distance? Not quite sure what the best option is, but hope that helps.
Hey Will,
Its always a treat when we post and we have a reply from you. I will give all of those suggestions a go and see what comes out of it. Currently battling Covid, this thing sucks, so I will be offline for a bit. I will post my findings after I recover a bit.
PS: maybe a future tutorial for your YouTube channel jajaja. Not sure how many times I have watched the videos on your channel.
SO, I took the last suggestion Will gave out and gave the render one more go on both materials. I desaturated the SSS color by about 70% and backed of the translucency value by about 30%. Here is the end result with a translucent and a translucent medium render.
Nice!
To my eyes (again, take with grain of salt), the 2nd one Translucent Medium produces better results. I think the face looks pretty good there. The skin below the neck looks to be lacking though. Maybe it's got something to do with the detail in the skin on the face vs lower? I think the translucent one looks far too soft.
Again, splitting hairs here, and not sure what else I'd do to improve it, but I'd say that bottom one is quite nice.
Will,
Well you are the master of disaster jajaja. I agree with you brotha. I do like the medium translucent a bit more. The body, i believe, will be ok as I will be simulating garments from CLO on it. Love the help I have received here. I will push forward and see what else I can achieve in Keyshot. Thank you again for the assistance.