Eve everyone, well it is evening here in Oz lol! I hope everyone is keeping safe...fucking Coronavirus. I remember when Corona was a weak as piss Mexican beer, but enjoyable enough really cold on a hot day with a slice of Lemon lol! Too soon for corona jokes ?
Anyway, if there is anyone left alive still enjoying Makehuman - Animation is at least a safe form of content creation lol! - but for anyone still interested, I've been busy experimenting away with the skin shader Joels, the guy who seems to the honcho around here, demo skin shader. You can find it in the download section of this website and in the mis category I think. I didn't quite know where to post this, because there has been a lot of discussion regarding skin pores and a more realistic skin.
The good news is, the skin shader does work really well for skin pores, and probably a more realistic skin. The issue is without better instructions, on what each parameter actually does - the process is very random. I also had to re-wire the shader into the Blender Cycles pipeline, taking the place of the original. The alpha wire (off the top my head) needs to go into mix amount socket. I will have to check this though. If you don't wire the shader properly - the skin becomes lighter.
You also have to know how to light a scene well (tri-lighting), and on top of that a basic understanding of photography/cinematography. Oh, and using the World tab which means you've got to set the tri-lights first (this is how I get the best results), then use a HDRI image for the overall light...again this is how I got the best results. Firstly, before you bring the World lights up, you turn the ambient occlusion on...turn down to the desired effect...pretty low because you're going to introduce the overall lights. Then turn up the world lights. Make sure you feed the enviroment node into a background node which gives you control of the brightness. I only ever used a 0.300 setting...but it is enough to put highlights in hair and the like. Just like photography, you might want to put some shading above the characters head.
I've attached two example images, to show the skin shader in effect. Both images were rendered with 1000 overall samples, 10 max samples and 6s, 8s, and 2s for the rest of the lighting. I will have to a proper tute on this. I'm working on getting a second computer for this.
I've just remembered - I turned the sub-surface modifier on at least the Trump image lol. I was experimenting, due to the fact skin can sometimes not be to smooth. Maybe...I'm a mad scientist!
Image one is indeed a model I did of Donald Trump. This model is for the Gay Bar (song) cover I'm looking at doing after my Stand Deliver cover...again with Trump as The Highwayman!
The second is Udo Kier as one of the scruffs The Highwayman will rob in the animation of Stand and Deliver lol.
Hope this helps some of you and who have been interested on this topic.
I will post the Overture of my animated Star Trek symphony in a few days.
Stay Safe and Don't Panic!
Actually image one is Udo and image 2 is Trump lol. The pore definition is better on Trump. The issue is 8-bit jpegs. I do all my animations at 32bit Open EXR. I've got to upgrade mu photo editing program!