Realistic Human Skin Tutorial

The area of 3d development that I am asked most frequently about is texturing realistic skin.

Using the model above, I have created this tutorial to describe my own personal approach to skin. I hope that that at least one person finds it useful...

For this tutorial I have used 3d Studio Max.

Step 1 - Unwrapping the UVs

The first step is, as ever, the pain of UV unwrapping.

Here's the unwrapped mesh after I've given the head basic cylindrical co-ordinates, relaxed it and tweaked out any overlaps whilst avoiding too much stretching.

Step 2 - Render to Texture

Phase 2 is to do a quick light bake using the Skylight and Render to Texture functions in Max.

Ultimately these shadows will be re-added in when you come to do your render but this technique gives you a nice starting point for painting your diffuse texture.

Step 3 - Painting Your Texture

Phase 3 is the exciting one - getting the colour onto you model for the first time is always a milestone reached.

I tend to use a combination of photographs and hand painting over the light bake to add a bit of definition (keep it subtle).

The important thing to remember when using photographs is to remove ALL the specular from the original image - we're not making PS1 Characters now people :-)

Step 4 - The Bump Map

Bump mapping is less important on characters, particularly young females, as it is easily over-done. However it is still a worthy addition to any shader.

I take my colour map, desaturate it and play with the levels to pick out subtle deatils.

In this case i've kept the eyebrows and lashes bright to give them some extra relief - it helps to keep your layered PSD to hand for this.

Step 5 - The Specular Map

Finally it's the specular map. This is similar in many ways to the bump map except for the areas where you need more/less shine - the lips for example...

Step 6 - Creating Your Material

So, once you made you've got your three basic ingredients it's time to boil the couldron and stir your magic potion together. :)

I'm using the Brazil Advanced Skin shader as it seems to give the best results for my approach. However, these techniques are fundamental to all materials.

I've included details of my settings, any channel not mentioned is not used.

Final Image

So all that's left is to hit render then?

Sadly not.

All I have covered here is creating the shader - a vital but ultimately small cog in the creation a realistic human.

You'll see what I mean if you create this material yourself and render it with default lighting and the scanline renderer - rubbish!

To really get things looking good you need to sort out your lighting. In a nutshell, I'm using Brazil to render, with GI (2bounces) a key light (high and slightly to the right) and a back light (low and from behind).

Well, thats it. I hope this helps at least one person get a better understanding of how i'm doing things.

Happy texturing and best of luck.