wolgade wrote:This is a surprise. I never thought of a specular map to have details. I used roughness maps to make lips with lipstick more glossy and a face with make-up (powder) less glossy. It wouldn't have come to my mind in a million years that it's important to modulate this general low-resolution glossyness with skin details. Thanks for telling me this.
wolgade wrote:Well, I didn't manipulate specularity with my procedural node setup. I wasn't even aware that this might be a good idea.
(This is kind of a long reply, sorry, but I think it can be useful)
I have long known that a specular texture is important but not how important and I will try to tell how I came to this conclusion. This has been an on going process and all thing got together when Blender 2.79 came with the Principled shader.
First i made my skin material the old way, a specular texture was to control the mix factor between diffuse and glossy. Then I found a skin material node setup wish used the Fresnel node as mixfactor and that made the skin to look better but the rest of the skin material node tree was a big mess and (at that time) almost impossible to understand.
Then came Blender Guru with the PBR node setting and I redid the skin material and now it begun to look better but not enough. Then came you with the procedural skin, I added it into my new PBR skin material, there I first added the cells as small bumps on top of my normal map, the same cells got on top of my specular map and the colors gave my skin texture some more life. That started to make the skin look really okay as your procedural texture made even the lowest resolution 2048p of my textures to look almost like hires and the skin have suddenly got some nice structure in the specular, but still something was missing, the skin looked like plastic in some lighting, like only a sun lamp. That was highly irritating.
Then came Blender 2.79 and once again I had to redo my skin material, this time it was relatively easy as the most of the settings already was adapted to PBR. (The new thing was to making an own Principled SSS and I think I got it looking relatively okay.)
The skin still looked like plastic in the sun lamp but overall okay. I took a longer pause and made some MakeHuman clothes...
Making textures for clothes is the same as for skin, and there I also had problem with the plasic look on the fabric. And how much I tried to adjust the specular texture it did not look like real fabric.
I begun to look closer at the Principled shader and decided to try my specular texture as both input roughness and specular and yes!!!. The fabric got structure. As roughness still give some shading even on full the specular controls the strengt and black means no specular at all and the fabric finally had those visible fine structure I wanted and looked alot better in almost every kind of lighting. With some color ramps I could controll the specular level and roughness one for each with only one texture. (The Cycles material I have uploaded for my latest three dresses is some examples)
And that made me to try the same on my skin material. I used a color ramp to give your skincells more contrast and added it also to the Principled specular input, the skin begun to look almost okay as your tiny cells gave the specular some shimering and the plastic feeling begun to fade.
Last part
As my first skin specular texture was a strait BW of the color texture I decided to do an High Pass on it to even out the light vs dark areas and keep the fine details and enhanced the contrast. After some fiddeling trying out which shall be the whitest color and blackest color to get the skin not to glossy and not to dull I found an aproximate working level (for this skin). There are still some areas that must be adjusted but I leave for the time being.
So therefore your tiny, tiny skin cells made wonders when used as bump and color, but made almost the whole thing when added as specular and roughness. These tiny details give some longer render times but I dont care as my goal is to do still images even though it would be fun to se my characters in motion.
If I had started today, texturing a whole character from scratch, with all new knowledge I think it would take about a month, if only using free time. As the material is almost finished I dont need to think about that part any more.
wolgade wrote:2018 just started, but I shall propose these words for the Understatement Of The Year Award. The character itself is beautiful and level of detail and realism simply blew me away.
Thank you!!! Ok, I admit this character looks good and I am quite proud of the result, and I am very happy I joined this great community without it this would have taken a lot longer to achive, without MakeHuman impossible.
The actual texturing was finished some week before I joined this community, I only did some minor adjustments after that. Most of the time got at working out a decent looking one size fits almost all skin material enough to look decent in most light condition. And I could not find a solution until a solution was available, the Principled shader with a good specular and roughness texture.
wolgade wrote:Well, I guess it takes more than just a camera to create reference images for textures. You need to light your model very evenly to avoid shadows. The cheapest way to get this kind of light is to shoot outdoors on a cloudy day.
That I discovered when I started texturing with this photos, the photographer missed, like many do, to make the model evenly lighted so I spent most of the time texturing to make toning and color corrections.