Rebel Hill

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Heres the scene setup itself... as you can see, Ive got 3 area lights, the big one being a low intensity key (a real important light I find for getting depth in your lighting) and a single photometric to simlate one of those ceiling sunk halogen jobbies.

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And so here's a further test... I simply took my existing setup and surfaces, and just added on SSS for the skin, and turned on a low level, multi bounce final gather. The top image is the raw render (taken as .exr) with the lower showing the results after a bit of 32bit colour and contrast arsing about.

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So here we see the final workup of the bump and normal.... these renders show just the bump and normal components at work (with a lil specular obviously), but no actual geometry displacement... since most of the detail that will really impact is in the bump, I generally tend to get this aspect finalised first.

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So here we are coming close to the finished thing... Ive finished up the various colour, spec, and adjustment maps and got busy tweaking his skin shader, adn setting up his displacement. So this is pretty much finished as far as texturing goes, though I will tweak the odd thing here n there just a lil bit once I get him in the main scene, just to make him sing as best I can in that particular lighting... as for the displacement, you can see on the WF where Ive used good old adaptive subdivision to spend polys where the need is greater and details finer.. Ive forgotten now just how many polys it works out at.. if memory serves it was around the 750K mark which, given the level of detailing, I think is quite economical (feel free to disagree, I would).

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So heres the main set of maps Im using... reading L>R.... Main colour, Subsurface colour, Bump, Normal, Specular, Gloss, Subsurface Visibility, Poisson, and Eyeball.

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So heres the node network for the skin shader setup... self explanatory enough (for those used to using nodes in LW), its not a particularly complicated setup, but a couple things Ill mention incase anyone finds 'em useful.

First, the gloss map. Im wiring it through a colour tool, as this allows me to alter the brightness and contrast of the map, I often find that putting a given surface in different lighting conditions can often yeild results that look quite different, and one of the culprits is often the amount of spec and gloss... so having this setup lets me tweak things for different scenes, without needing to use different maps.

Im also doing the same thing with the subsurface visibility, and wiring that result through a multiplier, again, cos different lighting situations, can often use a tweak of this setting individually, scene by scene, or angle by angle.

For my subdermis colour... rather than waste time painting on a bunch of lil underskin veins, then having to check and recheck, change their colour in photoshop, etc... I just use the IFW procedural... OK... it looks a bit procedural, and cartoony... but as a slight lil variant, blended in, as I have it, via an alpha over the painted map, it works pretty well.

And then the good old bump... One of the images in the set was Poisson... this is for putting pores onto the skin. Pores on the skin form a very distinct distribution pattern, so when painting them you cant just dot them around all over, any old how, it looks wrong, also... it takes frikkin ages to do, plus u need to vary their size and depth across different areas of the face, so there can be a hell of a lot of back and forthing between LW and PS... You could of course add them procedurally, but sadly there isnt a good prcedural (either in LW, IFW, or DP-RM collection) to do them. However... some years ago I saw where some clever person, or persons, had developed renderman shaders to mimic this pattern using Poisson Distribution [like this], and somewhere, I forget where... I found a lovely little mono image of this shader... so I pinched it, and I use it as though it were a poisson procedural, modulated, as it is here, with turbulence shaders, and weightmaps... Im also using two instances of the poisson image at slightly different scales for use on different areas. One of the reasons I use weightmaps rather than image maps to blend the two scales, is because i can use the map sharpness and select/select by value/inverse tools in modeler to make sure that the different scae areas dont overlap each other incorrectly.

Lastly with the bump I add in a coupe of instances of the ever reliabe crumple, and the main image maps, adding them a together with the 4way vector add node... which IMHO really lays the different bump layers together properly without them seeming to affect one another (as you would get if you used standard layers and either downed opacity, overayed, whatever).