Click for bigSo 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).