/3/ - 3DCG

>>494671
The most important maps for skin (besides the normal) is the roughness and the base color. (and subsurface map, but it can depend on how your shading works.)

To get the base colors, I just do it manually with the standard brush in zbrush, messing with the focal shift to get different edge sharpness. Color spray is used to get subtle high frequency detail in the albedo map. Then I take it in substance painter and use the skin material to get the base roughness / spec values. I also add another really low opacity overlay or color layer above the albedo color (in substance, again). This layer has blueish, yellowish, and redish colors based on where stuff tends to have less blood flow, bone poking out, or lots of blood flow to get some more coloration in. Then I tile in a detail normal / skin pore roughness / spec /diffuse map, which is in the SkinRendering content examples in Unreal 4. Poke at the material graph for those materials and it's a good start for how to shade it.

Realistically, skin pores are a lot smaller than how I shaded it, but depending on how close your camera gets to the skin you might want to make it slightly bigger to have it read better. Don't make it too big obviously. Also realistically, there are several kinds of skin pores depending on how the skin deforms in that area or if it's pink flesh like lips or eyelids. If you can get that realistic it's something you want to keep in mind. Use photorefs.

If you don't want to do base colors manually you can bash in a photo for the colors and fix it or whatever.

It's also useful to look up how movie make up works to enhance some of the forms, like subtly darkening the side planes of the cheeks to get the forms to read even in darker lighting.

For skin, I might give the roughness map a manual treatment later for stuff like the lips, where a lot of the detail is defined in roughness as opposed to normal map.

>>494671
Skin feels pretty straightforward to me because I paint a lot and my skin isn't that detailed.

To get the base colors, I just do it manually with the standard brush in zbrush, messing with the focal shift to get different edge sharpness. Color spray is used to get subtle high frequency detail in the albedo map. Then I take it in substance painter and use the skin material to get the base roughness / spec values. I also add another really low opacity overlay or color layer above the albedo color (in substance, again). This layer has blueish, yellowish, and redish colors based on where stuff tends to have less blood flow, bone poking out, or lots of blood flow to get some more coloration in. Then I tile in a detail normal / skin pore roughness / spec /diffuse map, which is in the SkinRendering content examples in Unreal 4. Poke at the material graph for those materials and it's a good start for how to shade it.

Realistically, skin pores are a lot smaller than how I shaded it, but depending on how close your camera gets to the skin you might want to make it slightly bigger to have it read better. Don't make it too big obviously. Also realistically, there are several kinds of skin pores depending on how the skin deforms in that area or if it's pink flesh like lips or eyelids. If you can get that realistic it's something you want to keep in mind. Use photorefs.

If you don't want to do base colors manually you can bash in a photo for the colors and fix it or whatever.

It's also useful to look up how movie make up works to enhance some of the forms, like subtly darkening the side planes of the cheeks to get the forms to read even in darker lighting.

For skin, I might give the roughness map a manual treatment later for stuff like the lips, where a lot of the detail is defined in roughness as opposed to normal map.