Procedural Skin Material (Blender Tutorial)

so recently i've been getting multiple tutorial requests in the comments of my videos and people have been wanting me to create a procedural skin material so that's what we're doing in this video so in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to create this procedural skin material in blender now before we start just a quick disclaimer if you're going for realism then using a procedural method really isn't the best way to create it because different parts of skin on the body look different for instance on the hands there's little fingerprints and also on different parts of the hands there's little wrinkles and for instance the skin on the forehead looks different than the skin on the eyelids so if you're going for realism then it would actually be better to texture paint the skin and texture paint it correctly for the different parts of the face but maybe you're not going for realism maybe you're going for like a stylized character or a cartoony character or you just want a simple basic material that you can slap on a character then this material will work great so i will be doing this tutorial in the cycles render engine because it is more realistic but you could also do this in blender ev as well here it is in eevee and you can see it looks pretty good in eevee as well now something else that you could do if you wanted it to look a little bit more realistic is you could just texture paint the skin color but then use procedural methods for the bumpiness of the skin now if you're going to texture paint a color map for the skin then it wouldn't technically be procedural anymore but you could do that if you want to get a little bit more realism so just to show you i did some very basic texture painting so i just texture painted the lips here kind of made some dark areas in the crevices and also did a little bit of painting on the cheeks and also made a little bit of a darker area right there above the eyes and so now if i take this color and i put this color into the base color and then let me just preview the final thing you can see that looks much more realistic because the lips are a little bit more of a pinkish color and so it just looks quite a bit more realistic and you can see i think that looks pretty good and eevee as well and this was pretty easy to texture paint so if you'd like to learn the basics of texture painting in blender then i will have some links in the description to some tutorials on texture painting that i've created but this is a tutorial on procedural skin so in this tutorial i will just be using this color ramp here with this noise texture to create a little bit of variation in the skin color now just a couple quick things before we get started if you'd like to help support me and this channel then you can purchase this procedural material on my gumroad store and you also get access to it on my patreon page and you can also check out my blender procedural material packs if you'd like to purchase more of my procedural materials or if you'd like to learn how to create all of my procedural materials then you can check out my blender procedural material playlist on youtube all the links are in the description alright so let me just show you what i have in the 3d space so this was a head sculpt that i sculpted a little while ago and so i just imported this head sculpt into this blender file to just kind of see how the skin would look on a character's face and then for the lighting i added in this plane right here and i gave it a subsurf modifier and that way it is round and then i just gave it an emission material with a strength of 50 just to give some nice bright lighting on the objects and if you're using blender eevee then the emission shader won't actually emit light so in blender ev you could just press shift a go down here to light and just add a normal light and then just to help us get a little bit more realistic lighting right over here on the world i added in this machine shop zero two 1k hdr and this is from polyhaven.com so the links in the description if you'd like to download the same hdri that i'm using and then i will also be using the nodewrangler add-on to preview the different nodes so if you don't have that enabled just click on edit and go to the preferences and then over there on the add-ons tab you can search for the node wrangler and just check mark the node wrangler add-on so let's create the material now so i'm going to click on new here and i can just call this procedural skin and then i'm going to click and drag and drop this material onto this object as well all right so let's press shift a now i'm going to go to the search and i'm going to add a noise texture because i want to make a little bit of variation within the skin color and then i'm going to click on the noise texture and i'm going to press ctrl t that's using the feature of the node wrangler and that's going to add the texture coordinate and mapping now we don't really need the mapping so i can just click on the mapping and press x to delete it and then let's take the object and put that into the vector and then using the other node wrangler feature if i hold down the control and shift key i can select different nodes and that is going to preview the node so i want to take the factor and i'm going to put the factor into the base color and then i can control shift and select the principled bsdf now this doesn't look like skin at all so i need to change the colors so to change the colors i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go to the search here and i'm going to search for a color ramp node and let's just drop the color amp node right in here between the noise texture and the principle so now we can use this color ramp to create the skin color that we're going for and if you'd like to use the exact color that i'm using then you can click over on the hex value and you can type in a hex value of e7 8a 6a so that is the exact color that i'm going to be using and then i do just want a little bit of variation in here so i'm first going to click on this black tab and then i'm going to click on the minus here to get rid of it and then i'm going to hold down the ctrl key and click right here and that's going to add another tab and i'll just bring this tab over to the other side and then i'm going to make this tab just a slightly different color than this one so i'm going to click right here and then click on the color and if you want to use the exact same color that i'm using over here on the hex value you can type in c27a63 so those are the colors that i'm going to be using so it just adds a little bit of variation there in the color so i can just ctrl shift and select the principle to preview it now to really make it look more fleshy and to really make it look more like skin we need to add some subsurface scattering so subsurface scattering is going to allow a little bit of light to go through the material so if you've ever taken a flashlight and you've shined the flashlight like through your hand you can see that there's like some red color coming through your skin and so that is subsurface scattering so to turn on the subsurface scattering we can just change this value right here so i'm going to change this to a value of 0.07 i don't want to turn it up too high so i'm just going to add a really small value and then we need to change the subsurface color so if i just make this a little bit bigger you can see it says subsurface color and i found that a red color is going to look best so i'm going to change this to a red color and to use the exact same color that i'm using you can go over here to the hex and you can type in e7312e so now if you look closely at the skin you can see it just looks a little bit more soft and a little bit more fleshy now if you really want to see what the subsurface is doing you can turn up the subsurface value and you can see it just makes the material look much more soft and fleshy and you can really see that it's allowing light to go through the material you can see that it's really easy to overdo it so i'm gonna keep the subsurface pretty small at a point zero seven so that's looking pretty cool but i still need to add some bump on the skin to just make it look a little bit bumpy so to do that i'm gonna take this noise texture right here and i'm gonna press shift d to duplicate it and let's just bring it down here and then i want to plug the object coordinates up to this so i'll take the object and put that into the vector and then i can control shift and select the noise texture to preview it so i'm going to turn the scale here on this second noise texture up to like a 25 and then i'll turn the detail all the way up to 15 so it's very detailed so i want to put this into the normal so i'm going to take the factor and let's plug that into the normal but then i need to convert this to normal data because this is just black and white data but this needs to be normal data so to convert it i'm going to press shift a let's go to the search here and i'm going to search for a bump node let's click on the bump node and i'm going to drop it in between the noise texture and the normal and then to actually convert this to normal data we want to take the factor and we want to put that into the height so now if i control shift and select the bump you can see it's actually converting it to normal data and then i can control shift select the principled bsdf now that is way too strong it's really bumpy so on the strength value right here i'm just gonna turn the strength way down to a point zero four so a point zero four and now if i zoom in here you can see it's just a little bit bumpy but it is pretty subtle all right now i also wanna add two more layers of bump so i'm gonna press shift a let's go to the search here and i'm going to search for a voronoi texture let's drop the voronoi texture right down here and then just like all of the other textures i want to use the object coordinates and the object coordinates are going to place the texture more evenly on the objects so i'm going to plug the object up to the vector and then let's control shift and select the voronoi to preview it and then for this voronoi i'm going to click on the f1 and i'm going to change it to distance to edge and then i also want to turn the scale up so i'm going to turn the scale up pretty high to like a 75 so i now want to put this into the bump so i'm going to take this bump right here and i'm going to press shift d to duplicate it let's drop it down here and then i can take the distance and to convert it to normal data we need to take the distance and put that into the height value and then to mix multiple bump maps together we can just take the normal from this bump and we can put it into the normal of the second one so i can now control shift and select this one and you can see there it is and i do want to make it a bit less strong so let's take the strength value on this one and i'm just going to turn it down to like a .03 so it's pretty subtle but you can still see it and then i can also control shift and select this bump and you can see we're mixing those both together and then i can control shift and select the final material now i do just want to add one more layer of bump so i'm going to take this voronoi texture and i'm going to press shift d to duplicate it and let's drop it down here and again just like all of the other textures let's put the object into the vector and then i don't want this one to be distance to edge so let's click on this and i'm going to change it back to the f1 and then i can control shift and select this voronoi to preview it now you can see that this foreign texture when you set it to f1 it just adds a bunch of little dots but i want those dots to be a bit more contrasty so i'm first just going to press b for the box select just box select all these nodes and just bring them up so i have a bit more space so i want to add a color ramp in here to make those bumps more sharp so i'm going to press shift a i'm going to go to the search here and i'm going to search for a color ramp and we can drop the color amp right down here and then i want to take the distance from this bottom of voronoi and put that into the factor and then i can control shift and select this color ramp to preview it now to make the bumps more contrasty i'm just going to take the white tab and i'm going to drag it out and i'm going to bring it about halfway somewhere around here and now you can see that those dots are a bit smaller so i now want to use this for the bump as well so i'm going to take this bump node and i'll press shift d to duplicate it let's drop it down here so just like all the other bump nodes to convert this to normal data we can just take the color and we can put that into the height value and then i can control shift and select this and if i zoom in there you can see there's some tiny little bumps there and i do just want to make it a little bit stronger so on the strength value right here i'll just change this to like a .05 and then to mix this together with the other bump nodes i'm just going to take the normal and we're going to put that into the normal so then i can control shift and select on this one you can see there is two bump maps together and then control shift select this one and you can see there is all three bump maps together so i can now control shift and select on the principal bsdf to preview the final material now as i talked about at the starting of this video if you want to you could go into texture painting and you could just texture paint a color map and then you could add that into the base color instead and so i'll just add that in because i already texture painted this character so i'm going to press shift a i'm going to go to the search here and i'm going to search for an image texture and i'll drop that down there and then i can click on the drop down and i'm going to add the skin color so now instead of using this color map right here with this color ramp i can use this one instead so i'll take the color and i'm going to put that into the base color but i'm still going to use all of the procedural bump and then i can control shift select this you can see that is looking much more realistic because like the lips have a bit of a pinkish color and again if you'd like to learn how to do texture painting in blender i'll have links in the description to my texture painting tutorials but this tutorial is a procedural skin so i'll just take the color and plug that back up to the base color and there we have it so there's the procedural skin material so i hope you found this tutorial helpful and thank you for watching and again if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel then you can purchase the procedural material on my gumroad store and you can also get the procedural material on my patreon page and you can also check out my blender procedural material packs that's another great way to help support the channel and if you'd like to watch more procedural material tutorials then you can check out my blender procedural material playlist on youtube so i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 39,408

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, skin, procedural skin, material, shader, procedural material, skin shader

Id: iDXGPsrO0_M

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022