Higher Resolution Textures please

[ZPhugeFan]

Ok I'm working on a character in Blender for a Youtube video that I made with MakeHuman. The default skin textures I've noticed are not high quality enough. It's unnoticable from a distance, but if you look in closely you quickly notice it's blury
I checked the skin texture and it's 2048 by 2048 which isn't small really so I was surprised it's blury, but I guess what I really need is at least 4096 by 4096.
Tried enlarging the image, but it's ineffective. If the original image lacks detail, it can't be put in magicaly by resizing the image.

So if someone out there, icluding the MH team themselves, have larger images for the default skin textures that they can provide, it would be great

[RobBaer]

... The default skin textures I've noticed are not high quality enough. It's unnoticeable from a distance, but if you look in closely you quickly notice it's blury

I checked the skin texture and it's 2048 by 2048 which isn't small really so I was surprised it's blury, but I guess what I really need is at least 4096 by 4096.
Tried enlarging the image, but it's ineffective. If the original image lacks detail, it can't be put in magically by resizing the image.

So if someone out there, including the MH team themselves, have larger images for the default skin textures that they can provide, it would be great

First, "high quality enough" is a value statement. Art appropriateness is context specific. I would have been more pleased if you had said, "not suitable for my needs" .

Second, I wasn't able to figure out exactly what you meant by "blury", so I decided to render a model I had hanging around as a facial close-up in Blender with no special attention to anything lighting-wise or composition-wise:

close up

Based on this test, my guess is that you would want to add a bump map to get the result you desire in such close ups. I doubt very much that 4096 x 4096 or even 8092 x 8092 texture could ever increase the realism in your (as I'm guessing) sense of the image being blury. Did you try adding a bump map? I don't think the texture is deficient, it is that you need addition info to convey realistic light scatter. If you meant something else by 'blury', please share an image identifying the problem.

To answer your question directly, I'm not aware of larger texture images anywhere. That said, there was an interesting discussion on procedural skin on the forum not long ago: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=14174&p=39110&hilit=procedural+skin#p39110http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=14174&p=39110&hilit=procedural+skin#p39110

[ZPhugeFan]

I don't know how to make it any more specific- they are blury!

the navel here is blury, don't you agree?

Basically you can't discern where the toenail begins and where it's still just the toe.

That's blury, right?

Anyways. The model doesn't come with a normal map, so to add bump I had to use the regular image texture.

it gives some skin effect but doesn't help with what's already a problem.

Thanks for the other thread. While I don't think I'll go that route they do gave me an idea of how to maybe add the lost detail I need.

[RobBaer]

It's helpful to see what you see, and to know what areas of the human are interesting to you when you say 'blury' I think there is more than one thing going on here, and some of it happened after Makehuman.

The navel geometry for Makehuman is fairly simple and probably not suited to close-ups without doing some additional multi-res modeling to create normal and bump maps to fake this lack of geometry.

The fingernails are another story. It looks to me like something has happened downstream to the geometry of your fingernails. Did you inadvertently do some smoothing on the nail beds? Although I agree you might have applied a Gaussian blur filter to your texture image, you also seem to have lost some underlying geometry along the way.

Here's what I see in Mh and I think there is clear loss of detail in your images:

mh n

MH hands

fingernail 800x blowup

MH Toes

Perhaps you corrupted the textures during your workflow. You could try downloading them again.

[ZPhugeFan]

I suppose I should have mentioned I use a custom topology to give the character muscular look, so it's not the default one. Maybe that causes simplified bits in some areas. As for the texture, yeah, i edited it in photoshop, but that shouldn't reduce it's quality. But still just to make sure I replaced it with the actual default non-edited skin and it's the same. It's not just in Blender, too, the skin looks just as blury in MakeHuman as well.
I don't really care for the toenails and the navel, though (they will be covered by clothes anyway), I simply used them as a strong example of what I meant. I'm concerned with the face actually. When I try to paint on the skin to achieve a specific look this made up person's face has, it comes off blury/pixelated on a 2048x2048 canvas when I look really close with the camera.
So now what I think I would do is instead of adding new info on the defailt image (2048x2048), I will instead paint on a larger one (4096x4096) with alpha transparency and hook it up to the nodes. That should fix the problem. I suppose it won't matter if the same uvs use different size textures at the same time.

[blindsaypatten]

I think Rob may have been suggesting that the term you were looking for was higher resolution rather than higher quality.

Using very rough numbers, a 200cm tall person in a 2048x2048 image will have about 10 pixels/cm. If you zoom in until a two cm square patch fills 300x300 pixels in your image you are expanding those 20x20 pixels by a factor of 15. Take any image and make it 15 times larger and it will look blurry. Even using a 4096x4096 pixel image will still be zoomed by a factor of seven, so don't count on that being a complete solution.

Here's the approximate zoom you did:

NavelZoom.png (41.94 KiB) Viewed 16221 times

If your character is going to be completely clothed, say except for hands and head, you might experiment with optimizing the UV map so that the parts that are covered take up very little of the image and the parts that are visible take up most of it. In this image using the default UV map all the space taken up by the suit, the hair, and body parts that won't be visible can be shrunk down to a small area, and then the face, neck and hands can take up most of the image. If you do that you can get a much higher resolution face in a 2048 sq px image than with a 4096 sq px image using the default UV. The face is just 450 sq px in the default UV image. Just an idea, I haven't tried it. If you do try it, the UV map you produce would be a nice contribution for the repository!

[ZPhugeFan]

Thanks for the idea blindsaypatten! Also you seem to get me more than anyone
I might try it and see how it looks. I was going to sculpt some detail and bake in on a normal map, but your way might be easier.
Although now that I think about it, I'm not really sure what I'll be doing with my character. She may need to be fully clothed in some scenes (as she is now) while wearing little in others. So if I go with your suggestion, I might need to keep two instances of the character in the file.

[punkduck]

Thanks for the idea blindsaypatten! Also you seem to get me more than anyone
I might try it and see how it looks. I was going to sculpt some detail and bake in on a normal map, but your way might be easier.
Although now that I think about it, I'm not really sure what I'll be doing with my character. She may need to be fully clothed in some scenes (as she is now) while wearing little in others. So if I go with your suggestion, I might need to keep two instances of the character in the file.

Hi, I'm one of the hard-working persons doing own skins. I stopped at a size of 4096x4096. It is a lot of work, but for my models (also for the next one) I always create a skin, but uploading is not allowed ... sorry. How a 4096px texture looks for the face you can see in detail in my "daily life of models" topic on the first page.

Before I created these models I worked with slightly changed skin textures, e.g. tan-lines added to the 2048x2048. And I had problems doing that. The face is more than 2 times bigger than the body! Ever noticed the seam and different blurriness between neck and face? However, when I read the article of the skin shader I tried the method on my old "low-resolution" characters. I will show the results here.

The best thing you can do is to combine a texture and the skin shader RobBaer mentioned above, simply download skins.blend from the thread.
Append the material procedural_skin_v2 from the file skins.blend, then attached it to your skin. Now change the material in the compositor to a simplified version (without the special makeup etc., see picture) using your texture.

For fingernails you should add "real nails" from the user contribution (better geometry). For lips and caruncula lacrimalis (sorry I only found the latin term) you may select all faces and create an own material using the texture and make the skin look wet or glossy.

In the picture you can see the face in different resolutions using texture and skin shader. And the seam between neck and face is invisible. I also rendered the navel section as an example.

There is a disadvantage: it needs more time to render the pictures because of the complex material (for the examples I used 300-500 cycles). You should try it ...

[ZPhugeFan]

Thank you punkduck! I know exactly who you are. Your work in MH contributions is amazing!

[Mindfront]

To make a whole body texture is really hard work and mostly is 4096 enough. I made mine in 8192 but use 4096 or lower most of the time as the difference between 8192 and 4096 is not that notable, only in extreme closeups. With wolgade's procedural setup even 2048 looks good and my 8192 works under an microscope

You can reuse one skin by only change/add some smaller details. I made two high detailed female skins and normal/specular maps and use them as a base to get, to date six different skins, normal maps and specular maps, by adding new details on top like new wrinkles and new navel. To get even more variations I take an original MakeHuman skin and scale it up to 8192 (as I always do all editing in the highest resolution) and mix it with my own,