I've turned to the dark side of the pov... my hobby is finally costing me 
money (unless you count all the PC bits I've bought over the years). This 
guy & his textures come from http://www.daz3d.com, which is a rather good 
website if you want realistic people but haven't the time/skills to make 
them yourself.

Anyway, the one thing I can't get from daz is nice looking pov finish 
settings. So I've been playing with a variety of lighting and material 
setups to try and get a nice effect. The skin material uses Daz's normal and 
colour maps, in a rather elaborate 5-layer material.

The most novel effect is fake sub-surface scattering, achieved by blending a 
red material with brilliance 1.5 and a cyan material with brilliance 2, then 
applying the colour map as a filter on top of that. The difference in 
brilliance values adds a slight red tint at small angles to the light, which 
looks sort of like the sub-surface behaviour of skin (and is way cheaper to 
render than doing it properly!).

The source is pretty short, so here it is:
#macro Skin( colourmap, normalmap)
 texture {
  pigment { rgb x*2 }  //fake sub surface, red has different brilliance
  normal { normalmap }
  finish { brilliance 1.5 }
 }
 texture {
  pigment { rgb (y+z)*2 transmit .5 }
  normal { normalmap }
  finish { brilliance 2 }
 }
 texture {
  pigment { colourmap }
 }
 texture {
  //gamma correct by filtering over itself, my scene uses assumed_gamma 1
  pigment { colourmap }
  normal { normalmap }
  finish {
   specular .3 roughness 1/300 //sharp highlight
  }
 }
 texture {
  pigment { rgb 0 transmit 1 }
  normal { normalmap }
  finish {
   //small-angle sheen, metallic on black material controls falloff of 
specular
   phong 1 phong_size 20 metallic 1
  }
 }
#end

This is still pretty early so I'd appreciate any and all comments :)
-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

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