Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cycles

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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby jujube » Fri Apr 28, 2017 9:52 pm

blindsaypatten wrote:I'm afraid that I don't understand the thinking about MHX2. If you told me that three or four months from now MHX2 will stop working and I'll be limited to creating static characters in the default pose and rendered with the internal MH renderer from then on, I would walk away without looking back. Lucky for me, I know that at very least the option is there to just not upgrade Blender. I haven't tried the Blender alternatives so I don't know whether, if a virus/worm destroyed every trace of Blender out of existence, whether I could just start using something else. I'm only guessing that if there was something equivalent that I would read more about it here


You can still pose your characters with the other file formats (I usually use .dae), you just have to assign the materials every time. It's inconvenient but still usable.

Personally I'm interested in stuff that lets advanced users who know what they want to be able to work things out to minimize the number of clicks. So I wouldn't mind having more MHX2 material export options.

But hearing this does make me glad that the principled shader is being added to blender before 2.8...

(And now that I think about it, the "why doesn't it work like you expect it to by default" is a problem with blender in general, really. Or with being new to 3d in general, not sure. But you have to look around a while to figure out stuff you expected would be simple like "how to make a falling object stop passing through the floor". )

And ManeulLab seems to be designed more along the lines of what you said, with multi layered skin texture and optional studio lighting on startup. You just don't have as much creative freedom, like making mixed race or androgynous characters, because what kind of crazy person would want that??? ....Thats, uh, of course not a jab at you if you turn out to prefer ManeulLab. Just me being mad at an (otherwise promising) app for removing a feature I liked that its predecessor had.

PS. Maybe you're also used to using mxh2 for the exchange from blender to makehuman, which in that case, I know nothing about, since I never found out where that feature is or how to use it. I just heard it exists I think?

......OH. It's because you can only use inverse kinematics with MHX2, isn't it? Unless there's a way to use it with the other file formats that I don't know about, of course.
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Postby DredNicolson » Fri Apr 28, 2017 11:19 pm

Unfortunately, user friendliness is inversely proportional to total design space and options. Think paint-by-numbers watercolors vs. professional oil paints you mix on the palette board. Blender's UI has improved a lot since 2.49b (the version I started with), but its design goals still favor oil paints over watercolors, so to speak.

My Blender learning didn't really start until I set aside whatever expectations I may have had, and made the effort to figure out how Blender does things. Things that felt weird at first now feel indispensable. (More apps need right-click-to-select, not less!)
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby loki1950 » Sat Apr 29, 2017 1:33 am

(More apps need right-click-to-select, not less!)


I find myself doing the right click in quite a few apps after I finally got used to the blender way :lol: it really does become indispensable.

Enjoy the Choice :)
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Re: ---

Postby blindsaypatten » Sat Apr 29, 2017 5:13 am

DredNicolson wrote:Unfortunately, user friendliness is inversely proportional to total design space and options. Think paint-by-numbers watercolors vs. professional oil paints you mix on the palette board. Blender's UI has improved a lot since 2.49b (the version I started with), but its design goals still favor oil paints over watercolors, so to speak.


I'm not sure this is always true. Being able to import an MH character and get default settings that look good without mods doesn't mean that you can't mod them to your heart's content.
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby blindsaypatten » Sat Apr 29, 2017 5:57 am

jujube wrote:You can still pose your characters with the other file formats (I usually use .dae), you just have to assign the materials every time. It's inconvenient but still usable.


I didn't know that, thanks.

When I said: " If you told me that three or four months from now MHX2 will stop working and I'll be limited to creating static characters in the default pose and rendered with the internal MH renderer from then on, I would walk away without looking back."

What I meant was: " If, hypothetically, you told me that three or four months from now I'll be limited to creating static characters in the supplied poses and only rendered with the internal MH renderer from then on, I would walk away without looking back." This is just another way of saying that, for me, being able to use the generated character outside of MH is important, so having a bridge to the environment the output will be used in is important to me.

In my opinion designing software that produces output that has to be fixed before being used isn't desirable, and producing output that gives superior results by default is a virtue if it doesn't limit you from getting even better results by doing additional work. I guess there is always some tension between modularity and integration. I can see the virtue of a stand-alone program that can be used with multiple other applications, I don't yet understand why good middleware isn't desirable.

To date I haven't used the extra features in MHX2 at all, I have only used it as the pathway for moving characters from MH to BLender. Some of the extras do seem like they could be useful if I get to the point where I want to do stuff like lip syncing or IK.
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby blindsaypatten » Sat Apr 29, 2017 6:18 am

wolgade wrote:
blindsaypatten wrote:when you click the render button in MH a Blender window opens up with nothing but an UV/Image Editor pane visible and your character getting rendered with no interaction with Blender required from you. So you get all the rendering power of Blender without any need to know how to use Blender.

This requires MH users to have installed Blender.


Allow me to correct myself: "when the user clicks the Blender Preview button in MH a Blender window..." With the caveat of course that this only works if they have Blender installed. This was just intended to address the concern that the MH user couldn't see the effect of using the "best attempt at photorealism" option. My other suggestion was just to have a representative rendering that illustrates the effect, just a higher resolution version of the role the thumbnails play.

It would be nice if there were some path whereby your procedural technique could be used to add the generated textures to the skin images to create a non-procedural skin that could be used in MH.
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby wolgade » Sat Apr 29, 2017 8:49 am

blindsaypatten wrote:It would be nice if there were some path whereby your procedural technique could be used to add the generated textures to the skin images to create a non-procedural skin that could be used in MH.

You can bake procedural textures or a mix of procedural and image textures, but you'll have to use very large images. Another problem: The default uv layout is unevenly scaled. Level of detail would change at seams.

I had two goals when I decided to mix image and procedural textures:
  1. Get away with low res image textures
  2. Constant level of detail over the whole body
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby blindsaypatten » Wed Jun 14, 2017 10:22 pm

Now that I understand what Blender "baking" is, rather than try to specify in MH that a procedureal skin should be used, would it make sense to bake some 4k skins for people to use when they want more resolution than the currently supplied skins? I created one and it looks pretty good in MakeHuman.

I haven't totally grokked how the distribution of freckles works, is there a way to parameterize the density/number of freckles?
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby wolgade » Fri Jun 16, 2017 7:15 pm

blindsaypatten wrote:would it make sense to bake some 4k skins for people to use when they want more resolution than the currently supplied skins? I created one and it looks pretty good in MakeHuman.

I guess most people will like it a lot if you share stuff that looks pretty good.
blindsaypatten wrote:I haven't totally grokked how the distribution of freckles works, is there a way to parameterize the density/number of freckles?

Good question. Most probably the answer is no. To change the density you have to scale the noise textures that generate the freckles. This will also scale the size of each individual spot which is not what you want. To compensate for that you'll have to adapt the color ramps.
screenshot.png

This is a guess. I haven't tried this.
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Re: Create a modular (almost) procedural female skin for cyc

Postby blindsaypatten » Sat Jun 17, 2017 12:01 am

wolgade wrote:I guess most people will like it a lot if you share stuff that looks pretty good.

I posted one 4k diffuse image I baked on another thread. viewtopic.php?p=39851#p39851
I don't know if others will think it looks pretty good, esp. the skin tone. I didn't bake the displacement, I guess I should, although baking a random image seems wasteful. I should also figure out freckles before generating more.

Are freckles sort of the tips of the highest peaks in the generated texture?
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