Full Guide to Create Realistic Skin Shader in Blender (Killer Workflow)

so you saw that killer workflow on the thumbnail and probably be like again with this lame boring clickbaits man but i can assure you it's not a clickbait actually it's a legit workflow used by many pro artists in the industry and they call it this exact title but the sad part is they don't use blender and i wonder what you think of that i was very sad to see that those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough no i i wish they would come and visit for this workload they used zbrush and xerap to wrap those faces around the mesh and then bake it onto the mesh so i was wondering how to skip zbrush and do it all in blender then i came up with this method that might be actually easier than z-wrap as always if you want to support the channel or download the practice files in real time videos you can check out my gumroad and patreon page link in the description before we start you need to have few scan maps like diffuse normals or displacement maps that you can find on the internet i think the best one is texture xyz that i'm pretty sure it's in this there's standard by now since i've seen many pro artists use their maps but basically anything you find on the internet should work if you don't want to use textures at all you have to manually sculpt all that little pores and wrinkles on the face which requires a bit of a skill and ton of brushes let's go first bring your character make sure you unwrap the uv's properly if you don't know how you can find the tutorials on youtube because i don't want to make this video longer than it should be select your character shift d to duplicate and escape to play set back we're gonna keep one of them for the last select one of them and go to shading tab shift edge to hide everything else add a new material shift a and add image texture open the albedo slash diffuse map then connect it to the base color you will probably see these huge lips on the skin that's because our map is not matched with our ue to fix that go to ui editing tab press tab to go to edit mode press a to select all then s to scale up on the right window hold z and go to material preview if the uvs are stretched like mine press s then x or y to stretch it on this axis until our use is fairly matched with our face turn off show overlays to see better enable proportional editing by pressing o in the edit mode select the faces and drag it until the uvs is matched with the image remember to look at the right side as well while proportional editing is on and you're dragging the faces you can scale up or down the circle of the proportional editing by scrolling up or down on the mouse the bigger the circle is more faces will move with your mouse so keep it at a reasonable size keep doing that as much as you can to get a clean matched uvs the most important ones you need to keep focusing on is the lips eyes and the nose [Music] you can use the relax tool to smooth out the uvs use the crab tool as well [Music] in the shaving tab duplicate image texture and open the displacement map shift a and add a displacement node connect the displacement map to height and displacement to displacement now you should have the skin details on the face if it's too intense lower the scale just a bit now go back to the uv editing and start fixing the uvs again with the displacement map enabled we can see the details better look for any stretch parts where you think the skin pores or details are stretched especially on the cheeks and the parts close to the nose and try to fix that in the uvs also don't forget to use the relax tool for the parts you think is necessary it might be one of the most important parts of our workflow so really take your time on this one before taking the next step [Music] the ears area is a bit tricky it might not be fully matched with our model but try your best to get it close as possible we're gonna fix the problems later on [Music] do [Music] okay we're done with this one go to file export obj enable selection only and export remember we made a copy of our model at the beginning of the video that one has the default uis that we didn't ruin select the original model go to shading add a new material shift day and add image texture ignore these other nodes i got here you just have to have the principal shader click on new put the generated type on uv grid and increase the resolution we made this one to see our uvs with checkerboard to fix any issues with our uvs connect the image texture to base color now when you go to material preview we got the checkerboard and the face if you have the node wrangler addon enabled while selecting the image texture press ctrl t in the mapping increase the scale you see on the nose and the mouth area the checkerboard is a bit bigger and a stretch that causes problem in our texturing if yours is perfect skip the next part if not go to ue editing in the edit mode press a to select all choose the relax tool and start relaxing the use until it gets better and gets closer to the size of other grids on the face also use the grab tool and drag out the uvs to get the squares a bit smaller [Music] do [Music] it is still not perfect we can work more on it but i'm gonna move on for now before we get to the next part to clear out any confusion we got two models now one with the stretch ewis that we match with our skin maps and the one with the good uvs that we've been working on just now in this part we're going to bake the face maps from the first model to the second model select the one with the good uv go to file and export as obj enable selection only and export okay for this one you need to download this small free app named xnormal i put the link in the description they use this in this workflow as well once you installed it open it and you'll see this it looks like an app from 90s or something not gonna lie it's kind of ugly but i don't care since the software itself is great while you're in high definition meshes right click on this one and click on add meshes now open the model that we match with our face maps now right click again and click on the base texture to bake then open the diffuse or albedo map select the low definition meshes right click again and add meshes this time open the second model with the good uvs now go to baking option turn off everything on the list and only enable bake based texture increase the size to 4k or 8k i went too far with it don't do it like me you can put in this number but your pc will explode on the next step trust me so keep it at a reasonable size but lower the size meaning less details on the skin increase the anti-aliasing and put these numbers on edge padding and bucket size i forgot to rename it but you name it diffuse or albedo cause this is gonna be our base color for the face now generate the maps view warning pops up just ignore them it's nothing now wait a few minutes to render the higher the size is the more time it needs to render once done you should have something like this close it back to high definition mesh right click on this one and base texture to bake this time select the other maps like displacement map go back to baking option and name a displacement then generate the map once done in the high definition do the same thing and add other maps like normals roughness or utility whatever you have rename and generate over and over until we got all of our maps baked and ready to go back in blender while selecting our model in the shading tab shift a and add image texture open the new diffuse or albedo map that we just baked then connect it to the base color on another image texture open the displacement map shift a and add displacement connect the displacement map to height and displacement to displacement go to material preview and as you can see we have our maps back perfectly change the scale if the details are too intense you can use this model on any software or game engine you want but we still got few maps left if you have a specular or roughness map skipped on an export but if you're using texture xyz maps like me you probably have utility map this map contains different channels that we need to extract using photoshop the utility map also used for other things that they explained on their site if you're interested fire up photoshop open the utility map and remember open the baked version from xnormal not the raw version on the bottom right besides the layer we got channels click on it and you'll see this rgb channel click on blue go to image mode click on gray scale and press ok go to file and save as jpg back in blender get a copy of any image texture node you have and open the new map you just saved connect it to the specular shift a and add invert connect the map to invert and invert to roughness change the invert a bit until the reflections are decent now you see we got really nice pores and wrinkles on the face this looks good even an eevee but there's one thing missing you've probably heard of subsurface scattering right if you put your hands against the sun or any light you see something like this it's one of the most important things in the skin shader if you don't use subsurface scattering the skin looks kind of dead and lifeless yeah you can just add a red color to subsurface color and increase the subsurface but that's just give the subsurface to the whole mesh we don't want that in reality some of the parts have more subsurface than the rest like the nose and ears why because it's thinner meaning more light comes through it so what do we do here i'm gonna tell you at the end for now let's fix our maps you see only face area is correct but the face textures kept repeating all over the mesh and we have to fix that select your model lower the subdivision of your character to zero or one this helps reducing the lag while painting in the shading tab select your albedo map then go to texture paint tab go to view disable display texture paint uv so we only see our map press n to bring up the menu in the tool tab scroll down and in the texture section click on new and put the mapping on stencil then go to texture properties and open the albedo map now when you move your mouse on the screen you see this to fix the aspect ratio click on image aspect by holding right click you can move it holding shift right click you can scale up or down the stencil ctrl and right click you can rotate it we only want the face to be on the head and not on the neck or other places so choose an area where it only have flat skin like cheeks and a start painting the skin over those areas just take your time and clear out those useless faces around the head also don't forget to remove the eyebrows and hair because we don't want that either [Music] once done we're left with only one face on the right menu switch up to displacement map and again go to texture click on new and in the texture properties open the displacement map and do the exact same thing as the albedo just remove the other faces remember to do that for other maps like the specular or any other map you have i'm gonna skip this part since you already know what to do with it and at the end make sure you go to image and save if you already have translucency map it looks something like this then skip this part but if you don't you have to do this i added blood and makeup it's not related to our tutorial so ignore it in the shading tab shift a and add ambient occlusion again make sure node wrangler addon is enabled now by holding ctrl shift click on ambient occlusion two times in the render properties choose cycles pull z on the screen and go to render mode now we can see our ambient occlusion turn on inside and only local i'm gonna leave it as it is but if yours is too bright decrease the distance and the ambient occlusion until you got a subtle shadow on the nose and ears now you gotta bake it into the image click on new increase the resolution and click on ok press n and in the image tab with the color space on linear then name it luminance shift a and add image texture click on the image icon on the left and search for luminance to bring it here now it's important that you have your object and image texture selected then in the render properties scroll down and in the bake section put the bake type on emmet then click on bake and wait a few minutes now we got the map in our luminance image texture you can delete the ambient occlusion nav because it's useless shift a and add mix rgb drop it between our albedo and base color put a dark red color on the color too now connect the luminance to the factor shift a and add inverse drop it between the luminance and mix rgb then connect the mix rgb to subsurface color now this is going to be our setup for the subsurface as you can see it's way too intense no one has a face like that so shift a and add color wrap drop it between the invert and mix rgb now by dragging the left handle to the right we can control the intensity of the color it is still too intense on the nose and ears so we have to tone down the white as well click on the white handle and click on the color then give it a bit of gray color now select the color ramp shift d to duplicate and drop it at the bottom connect the inward to the color ramp and color ramp to subsurface this is the important one you can now control the intensity of the subsurface scattering using this color ramp it is still too translucent so i drag the left handle to the right even more i'm using ev right now but remember if you're preparing to render it in cycles tone down the subsurface even more because subsurface is usually much stronger in cycles than eevee you just have to mess around with the both mixed rgbs to get the results you think is more realistic [Music] as you can see right now it's barely having a subsurface in eevee but if you switch up the cycles it works really nice okay that was basically it you can go back and change the settings however you want but i think it came out decent if you have any question or suggestion leave it in the comment section also if you find this video helpful like and sub would really help the channel grow and yeah i'll see you on the next one peace

Channel: PixelicaCG

Views: 111,004

Keywords: tutorial, blender, skin, shader, how to create skin, skin texture, skin modeling, how to texture skin, how to create skin shader, how to render skin, blender tutorial, skin shader tutorial, blender 3, beginner skin shader tutorial, 3d character texturing, stylized character, 3d texturing, 3d art, 3d tutorial, realistic skin, skin details, 3d modeling, face skin shader, create, creating, cycles, head, face, rendering, female, realistic, realism, subsurface scattering, SSS, face wrinkles

Id: CEHXcS0Bv2E

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022