How To Make A Versatile Skin Shader (Blender 2.91 Tutorial)

okay so today we're gonna make this skin shader the skin bsdf um blender doesn't have one built in just like it has all these other shaders uh there's like a hair shader i don't know you would think there might be a skin shader because there's a hair shader but who knows maybe there'll be one in the future i kind of find it fun to actually make my own but i'm going to show you how to make your own and once you build one of these you shouldn't need to make them anymore because i'll show you how to actually like put it in your asset library and and um just bring it in every time you need to use it so let's start here here we go so skin bsdf you're going to build this shader i'm going to show you how to create a skin tone slider that will go anywhere from very fair skin to darker black skin and i also implemented a sweat sweat slider because skin is not always uh you know rough and soft like this sometimes it's it's a little bit shinier and glossier so depending on how much you have this and you can actually turn this up too however you want to do and also finally we have this secondary color secondary mix which basically just says hey this is cool and all but maybe i want to make something like an alien or some different creature that doesn't just have typical uh skin tones so you can change the secondary mix so 0 meaning well i'm going to use the skin 10 slider up to 1 meaning i'm gonna just use whatever whatever color skin i would like to have so say my character has purple like purpley pink skin you know or they have green skin and it doesn't have to be used solely for this it can also be used as again just a mix so so say uh you want to stylize and show my character is really angry you can make this like red skin and just give it a little bit of the mix and then you have a character blushing or um your skin tone is more more red and it's all controlled by this bsdf okay i'm in a brand new blender file and i just set up a quick little shape nothing crazy right a beveled cube and i took everything out of the scene no no camera no original light and i added in two of my own lights here just some area lights to give it a quick little lighting setup just to have something more interesting also just so you know what's going on as i have a hdri here from hdr haven of course and just to give it some a little bit of directional or a little bit of ambient lighting going on and i just have this turned off just so just so we have something a little more visually visually appealing to look at one other thing i'm going to do here is i'm just going to add on just because this is roughly low this is generally low poly i'm going to add on a subdivision surface here just at one level that's fine just to give it a little more a little more geometry to work with all right clean slate no texture let's get started so shader editor let's go so first some housekeeping stuff let's just talk about uh the properties of skin so we are going to pull up here a skin chart that i downloaded okay so i have i downloaded the skin jpeg and i'm not sure where i got it but i'm not you can you can search for similar charts on google images if you want to find something like this but what's important here is just just this shader here um this sort of think of this like its own color ramp and we're going to sort of create this as a color ramp just i'm going to use this bottom one down here we're going to implement this into a into a color ramp so that'll be the first step so let's do it add in a color wrap and we're going to go from left to right so click on your little slider here and then you can click down in this box to bring up the color you want and we're just going to start pin dropping colors so we're going to go from the farthest left which will end up looking really fair under light it'll look really really white and then the farthest one we can just click over here and we're starting to build this out um you don't have to use all all the tones here but uh the closer you can get the the more it's going to help and really you don't have to like three or four you're you're already getting to pretty good so how i did this is how i had another one here is you just click this little plus button so click right there you have one right in the middle and it tells you the position right here so just like we did before just going to go down and start clicking them and the more you add them the more it'll sort of fill on this gradient here i'm going to add one at 0.25 which will be the position so it'll be 0.25 across this spectrum so click there again i'm going to just click something that's roughly in the 0.25 section and i'll add another one and as you can see it starts adding these like it has 1 then 0.5 and then 0.25 and then 0.125 it keeps dividing by two so if i were to keep on like adding more of these in it'll continuously work its way down to zero like an asymptote would i'm just going to get rid of these and for now i'm going to show you how to do this so okay so as opposed to sort of jumping making its way down to zero i'm just going to add another one and then with this selected you can actually just type in this box 0.75 and it will change that to the position which would be three-fourths of the way the crossed or 0.75 and again you can just eye drop this color right about there i'm going to choose this one just because i i think it we should can get a little bit of darker tones going on because it tends to it tends to veer onto the on to the wider side if you just keep going over here so it's good to have darker tones i'm gonna pull this down just a little bit okay so we have generally a color spectrum here a quick tip here if you want to stay organized if you have a node selected if you just hit f2 on your keyboard you can rename it so they don't all just say color ramp so i'm just going to hit f2 and rename this to skin tone perfect so now i have a slider that represents the skin tones i'm going to drag the color right into the base color and then also right under the subsurface color and with the with the node wrangler add-on you can just hold shift and right click and drag and you can put these into one little node here that's just gonna be it'll put it into one node which basically says whatever goes in here is going to affect both the base color and the subsurface and we'll get to why that's important in just a minute okay cool so we have our skin tones now we have to start making some of the material so the thing about skin is generally sort of the secret sauce is i keep my roughness pretty high about .85 and i also keep the specular high because think about it the skin is not very reflective but it does bounce a lot of light back so skin reflects a lot of light but it's not very it's it's kind of rough in a way so once you bring up the specular we're starting to look at some decent skin the only thing where we're missing is the subsurface just make this like .125 something like that that'll just give it a little bit of a little bit of that subsurface look um and this also works great with cycles by the way just remember that once you start introducing subsurface scattering it takes a long time to sort of start calculating this light so um we're going to just keep an easy for now all right so we have that going on next thing let's add in a noise texture because this sort of just breaks it up a little bit remember ctrl shift click we can sort of view this okay so i have my noise texture here and i'm just going to give it how i like to make the noise texture i bring the scale down and go to like about two but then i really crank the detail up and then the roughness as well just to make it just to make some stuff happening on sort of a smaller scale but sort of retain a lot of that detail and we can give it a color ramp sure and just crush these a little bit just to bring out some more contrast now this is just going to be a little bit of skin detail that we're not really going to see a whole lot of so we have to think of roughness values here right where it's going to be black will be perfectly reflective and where it's white will be perfectly non-reflective and neither of these are really what we want so remember what we talked about over here with our roughness being around 0.85 we can think of it the same way here but think of it as 0.85 being in the middle and these are like higher and lower bounds so how how hot how rough do we want this to get well i don't ever want it to get to 0.1 so i'm going to say on max it'll go to like 0.95 max and on the lowest bit of roughness i definitely don't want to go to zero so i'm going to say it's going to go like 0.7 maybe and this might be pushing it actually we'll start with 0.65 and you'll be able to see here right away that the actual roughness you're gonna be able to tell right away so once i drag this color into the roughness here and i control shift click back on this you can start to see where like um it's reflective and it just is a little too much just like right off the bat it's like okay that's that's a lot so what we're gonna do is actually bring up this this lower bit of roughness bring this up a little bit here a little closer to one just to where it gives you a little something right a little texture going on the side but it's not it's not overwhelming and this is starting to look like some good skin here all right so we got this so now so we have our skin tone slider which we will activate with a value node so this is going to control the skin tones all right so if we slide this texture left to right from zero all the way to right it'll give us from white skin to black skin and this is a quick way to create this texture all right so now we have the skin tone slider which by the way also affects the subsurface scattering color remember that so we also want to be able to control remember from the beginning we want to be able to control how shiny is your character like sometimes is your character going to be sweaty or are they going to be um not sweaty and not reflective so let's let's create let's let's mix this in here so we'll grab a math node and what we want to do is take all the values here from this color ramp and we're going to multiply them by one so nothing changed right nothing changed at all we're going to give them a slider and this slider is going to go from zero to one to not sweaty so fully sweaty all right it's kind of gross but just hang with me here so at a map range and what this means is we're going to map the range of this value from zero from not sweaty to sweaty so we're going to map the range of zero to one so it'll go from zero from here let's read this the whole way down right from zero to one that's good meaning that from the top so it's kind of an inverse relation right because shininess equals is lower whereas more rough is higher so if it's zero is going to be perfectly reflective whereas if it's one it will be perfectly not reflective we actually want to flip that right because if we're thinking of how sweaty our character is it's actually going to be the opposite if it's not sweaty at all zero that's gonna mean it's fully not reflective if it's making sense to you so that means we have to flip this basically from zero to one is actually just going from one to zero so if i put zero on here this is going to give me an output of one so i could put one here it's going to give me an output of zero there's a lot of ways to get here but this is actually going to help us out because we can tweak these values here in a bit so basically if i connect this in to the multiply we're going to start seeing that if our character is not sweaty with zero it's gonna be perfectly not not reflective if he's fully sweaty our character is perfectly reflective now again this is way too much right so we're gonna dial this back so zero that's perfect where it's one we don't want it to be zero perfectly reflective let's just give this a little more so let's say it's really going from zero to one but that means it's really going from one maybe to like point eight i mean you drop this down this is like how this is max sweat right like maximum sweat level um and just if you hold shift and click and drag you can go slowly until you find something that's like a nice maximum sweat and yeah we'll stay here maybe go a little bit a little bit lower just to give you a little more control oops 0.4 all right that's cool that's like maximum sweat right there it's a weird way of thinking up but and i'll just bring this back to zero just and this just gives you that control remember the end of the day you're just it just gives you a little more control over over your character and you don't have to ever go up to one but if you want to you have the availability it's really uh self-control you know how much sweat are you allowing your character to have don't ever go the whole way to one do not go the whole way to one okay you can if you want to i don't care but i'm going to keep that back at zero and the last thing we have to implement here with our character is the secondary color option so basically this is going to affect the skin tone right the color so all we this is actually pretty simple we're going to do a mix rgb and we're going to go from we're going to put our skin tone color into the slot 1 and then we're going to add just an rgb so this is just a color rgb is just a color node right and we're going to bring this color into slot 2. awesome bring this over here and then we want one more value node and i'll explain what this is all doing in a second this value is going to be our secondary slider so this is going to control our factor perfect and for now you have to remember that color one equals zero on the factor and color two equals one that's just a that's just a fact here so i'll keep this at zero for now and i'm just gonna take this color output and put it right into here so that way it affects both of them so if i change this slider so it's going to go from one or from zero so when it's zero it's saying hey let's use this skin tone and when it's one it's going to say hey let's use this tone in which we can make anything we want so for the sake of this let's make it like this weird color here and then once we drag this to one now it's using that as the skin tone so we'll keep that at zero for now and look at this our skin bsdf is created so you're done congrats we got here so i'm going to just drag everything that's inside the node these are these pieces here on the left are actually not going to be inside the node they're just going to be there to help you create the node initially and we can delete them later so for now just highlight everything to the left of your material output and to the right of these nodes right in the middle and just ctrl g and you've created a node and let's do a little bit of of housekeeping here with our inputs so make sure you go on the right here to the node the node tab and then we can look at everything and we'll just we'll just sort of you know these all have pretty default names so just go down through and name these how you want them to be displayed so factor this top one this is actually going to be our skin tone so we can just name it right there and again you can check because you can see you can follow the follow the path make sure it's going into the right one say this is it this is our skin tone slider perfect value where is value going that's the second one aha value goes into the map range which we remember controls are sweat so we can call this sweat this is our sweatiness right heck we can call it that sweatiness sure color two aha color two is that rgb we set up so this is gonna be purely the secondary color and finally this factor is going to be our secondary mix because remember again if we follow this out secondary mix goes the whole way to this factor and it mixes in the secondary color how much of it are we using cool and last thing we can do over here is just reorganize this again from most important down actually it looks good i'm just gonna like flip these two with these arrows over here i'm going to put a secondary color at the very bottom and literally that just is like the order of opera the order of these things over here so if i hit tab to go out of this just like just like when you're in 3d view and you go from object mode to edit mode if i just tab out of this we have our node over here and like i said earlier we can just delete these and this is how you create a node which is cool so here's our skin shader and we can go into our properties and then right here just call it something fancy if you want to be real fancy just go ahead and call it skin bsdf oh i can't spell today bsdf perfect and it's going to reflect it right up here and give it a color why not just to help it stand out a little bit something like this yes alrighty so now if you look over here we have a skin bsdf slider and we can pick the skin tone and the secondary mix let's set the secondary mix you want to keep that as zero for now and sweatiness can uh be at zero so you actually can go through and just to save yourself some time if you tab back into the skin bsdf and we grab these group inputs as you're clicking on these you can actually set these default values so at default we don't want our character to be fully sweaty it'll be zero and at default we don't want to use the secondary mix that's also gonna be zero and this the secondary color can be whatever you want i'm gonna keep it red for now just because i want that to be the default color and the skin tone that's actually fine to stay at 0.5 and that's again that's personal preference i just wanted to stay there so if i tab back out of it i have this skin bsdf and it's still in the scene so if i were to just delete this entirely i can actually add this in so by search i can just search skin bsdf and bam it's right here just like you could search any other shader although it's not going to be in this it's going to be down here in your groups just because it doesn't have a natural home just like it would sit in with the rest of the shaders but again you can just add them in here and there it's in your blender file now make sure you're using it so it so it saves but there you have a skin bsdf shader okay cool so we've we've made the skin shader so if you want to take the knowledge you've learned today and hop off this video and go um go implement it or use it as you want feel free but i'm going to keep talking if you want to stay with me and we're going to show you some cool ways to to implement the skin shader and um and how in creating it in its own node like this it can actually help out tremendously organization um making it faster for you in the future to create these shaders and also how you can use these uh with multiple characters so let's let's save this so i'm going to just save this so here's this character scene that i have and it's just like a dude that i made and i have these spheres over here which i'm actually going to go ahead and give these a little shade smooth action all right let's look at it render view right no materials so we're going to we're going to add a quick skin shader to this guy and because we've already made the skin shader it is literally as easy as we will go let's now let's let's bring it in right so you've saved the skin shader it's in your asset library so you're gonna go append going to find your you're going to find your um your directory that you put it in and then instead of bringing in a material you want to make sure you're bringing in the node that we built which will be in the node tree and it's right here that skin bsdf so we'll append that in and now we can just go ahead and start making our start making our skin so so we'll make a new material and we'll call this the skin and then as opposed to using this principle bsdf and delete that out i will add in my skin bsdf or over here in the group it will be over here so you already brought it in once but that's why it brings in a second time as a point zero zero one but you'll just have this so you can just select the bsdf here and just plug it right up and it will start to look good right from the beginning and then you can just go ahead and pick a pick a slider here however dark you want the skin tone to be or however light you want it to be and again say for whatever reason your character is is not a traditional color so we'll just say hey let's uh make a secondary color so we'll pick one and then you can go ahead and pick the pick the color of your character so he's like a green dude from space or something or say your character is blue you know it's whatever you want to do and again you don't have to goes one or zero you can do somewhere in the middle so we can just do like 0.25 and we can say hey this character is a little bit a little bit blushing or something you make the skin character kept your skin a little bit a little bit red um let's look at this i'm just gonna leave it at zero like that and then find just find the skin tone that fits the character that the character needs perfect now we'll apply this to this one let's actually make a new material and we'll call this skin generator perfect and then delete that guy out of there and let's actually apply it to all these materials so i'm just going to go ahead and see for circle select i'm going to go ahead and do a c for circle select just grab all these guys here and then escape and then shift click on this one to make it the active object and then with ctrl l we can link the materials so all these are gonna reference this material and it's gonna they're all using the skin generator so now we'll add in that skin bsdf again for skin generator and work it's really cool is now if we were to use this object node this object info node because it has this random part to this node we can actually randomly assign a skin tone based off of the object id so it's going to give us random skin tones across the board and this is going to be awesome if you're doing like a crowd simulation or just a bunch of random characters or say you just make one character and or i guess say um say you need a crowd or you need a large group of characters but you don't want to make all those assets well you can maybe make one character and maybe make a couple of sliders to do a procedural character and that way you can use something like this to develop a diverse group of uh characters in your crowd pretty quickly so uh there you have it the skin bsdf node right here pretty easy to make and um and again i just want to say that i do read all the comments in the comment section so leave a comment let me know what you want to see your words are heard so i hear what you're looking for i hear what you want to see and i'm i'm trying to answer those questions as i can and make those tutorials for you so leave a comment let me know what you're looking for so thanks again and i hope this helped [Music] you

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 13,426

Keywords: How to make skin in blender 2.91, How to make a skin shader in blender 2.91, Making a skin material in Blender, Versatile Skin Shader Blender 2.91, Skin Material Blender, Skin Shader Blender Tutorial, Blender 2.91 Skin Tutorial, Blender 2.9 Skin Material Tutorial, Blender 2.91 Skin Shader Tutorial, Blender 2.91 Skin Material Tutorial, How To Make Skin Shader, how to make skin shader Blender, blender skin shader 2.91, blender 2.91 skin nodes

Id: 8ae6gm3MZy4

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021