Pharr Skin treatments

[robcat2075]

Here are some experiments with different skin shading

These are all from my Ground Hog Day scene. They are all rendered with a slightly blue AO light and an orange-ish Sun light.

This is a simple pink color for the Skin group...

 

Same as above but with white Specular color. Width 500%, Intensity 60%...

 

Same as before but with Specular Intensity down to 40%

 

This next one uses the Pharr Skin diffuse plugin shader (Just "Skin" in A:M). The Pharr Skin Shader tries to reproduce some of the nuance of Sub Surface Scattering without the huge rendering time.

Short version: instead of merely darkening a color as the illumination on it decreases, it increases the saturation of its color. I have it set for a very slight effect here but it helps reduce the gray-ishness of default CG shading. You'll detect a bit more red in the areas that transition from  highlight to almost-in-shadow.

Specular is 0%

 

This adds back in A:M Specular highlighting...

 

This is the same but I have added slight Roughness. The change is barely visible at this res...

 

There is also a Pharr Specular plugin shader meant to be used with the Diffuse shader. When I put that on it did not work well with the orange sun light. This adds the Pharr Specular shader, with the sun light only slightly tinted orange

 

The above had no Roughness. This adds it back in.

 The Pharr Specular shader is producing over bright highlights on small features, but perhaps that could be controlled with a Specular intensity map that reduces the level on places like the fingers and arms.

But I find the Pharr Skin shader to be quite promising.

 

[robcat2075]

Here is a turn-around. I keyframed the settings of the skin shader about every 90° of the turn of the light to approximate what I imagined skin would look like in that environment.

Some moments look quite good. Others might be improved with more experimentation.