Skin Shader Development

[animate1978]

As the code for the addon has mostly been figured out, as much as possible by myself at least... I focused on the shaders, trying to get them ready for the upcoming release.

First off as the skin shader is based off of a previous version, had to do some work to get the shader to look acceptable as "skin". I disconnected the procedural skin pores and stuff, it did not look good and it was more of an experiment in doing such a thing, one that failed. So the bump map for the project remains. Though I may have to do some work to it. Not sure how at this point.

I also made separate Cycles and EEVEE shader outputs, each with it's own network but still using the same maths, maps and so on... I spent a lot of time trying to get the two to look as close together as possible. Before there was a noticeable shift in appearance when switching so this was not acceptable so I conjured up a solution to use two PrincipledBSDF shaders, each with it's own skin oil settings similar to the Cycles shaders.

Here is a Cycles render.

And the EEVEE version.

There still is some difference in the two but... not bad either way. I still need to adjust the skin oil settings to be a bit less glossy but this shader is getting close to being done. Well at a "production" standpoint that is.

So that got me thinking about the skin shader and how dependent it is on Blender and not so much other engines, aside from game engines of course... RenderMan, RedShift, VRay, Arnold... which is not a BAD thing really. Probably not good either. I am not sure at this time but being that I work on different render engines per project at times it becomes a chore to port over things such as shader networks. I suppose this is why Principled shader was invented in the first place?

Then of course there is USD and MaterialX... so I have been looking at these projects as well.

Nothing to really change about what the shader in MB-Lab is right now but something to ponder in the future.