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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Attachments:
Download 'skintest.jpg' (82 KB)

Preview of image 'skintest.jpg'

It looks very good, although IMHO the skin is somewhat too red, like he were
blushing, or stayed in the sun too long, or just finished a marathon ;-)
Otherwise, there is great potential there.

Thomas

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"Tek" <tek### [at] evilsuperbraincom> wrote:

> 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.
>

> This is still pretty early so I'd appreciate any and all comments :)

It might be early, but it's still damn impressive, Tek.

I agree with Thomas, the skin is a little too red. And some of the skin
areas (eg the dark side of the neck) are too glossy. These two effects
combine to make him look a bit like he's made of wax.

A TV/movie makeup artist would put a lot of powder on such a shiny face
before letting it in front of the camera! :) Quick powdery effects in POV
can be done using transmit; I expect you'd rather avoid the speed penalty
of using media...

Another idea: I think his moustache & beard areas could be made more
prominent. Blue pigment is used by makeup artists to enhance the presence
of beard stubble.

I hope you find this feedback helpful.

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"Tek" <tek### [at] evilsuperbraincom> wrote:

>
> 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.

I ran into a similar problem just a couple of weeks ago - the skin was
always washed out/too pale. After some playing around, I found that if I
render with an assumed_gamma of 2.2, it turns out much better.
Alternatively, you can change the gamma of the image_maps exported by
PoseRay.  In addition, I always get rid of all the phongs, ambient rgb
<0,0,0>, and reflections in the material.inc file exported by PoseRay.

I've attached my first success with this method.

>
> 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!).

Cool! I'd like to play around with your approach.

Rob.
www.fitzel.ca/dart/

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Preview of image 'london_gamma2.2.jpg'