Xoliul 2.0 Skin Shader Stuff
polycounter lvl 17
Hey Everyone 
I thought I would start a little thread here to share some Xoliul 2.0 settings that I use, and hope they are useful to someone!
I plan to do a bunch more, and expand upon this current set which is super bare bones.
These are just base settings, sans any textures, and all settings are default except the flat diffuse color, colored spec, half lambert value, shaded hue value and soft reflection adjustments for a rim light.
No sorcery here!
EDIT: I use a dark but saturated red ambient color for pale skin tones (I'm going to play with this a little more over teh coming weeks) and a dark green for the darker skin tones, as it adds that subtle awesome olive feel to the skin.
Next up I'll add some normal and spec stuff with some more breakdowns, and then after that add a diffuse map in there.
Once its all done I might just make some presets and share those, but for now tweak away!
I thought I would start a little thread here to share some Xoliul 2.0 settings that I use, and hope they are useful to someone!
I plan to do a bunch more, and expand upon this current set which is super bare bones.
These are just base settings, sans any textures, and all settings are default except the flat diffuse color, colored spec, half lambert value, shaded hue value and soft reflection adjustments for a rim light.
No sorcery here!
EDIT: I use a dark but saturated red ambient color for pale skin tones (I'm going to play with this a little more over teh coming weeks) and a dark green for the darker skin tones, as it adds that subtle awesome olive feel to the skin.
Next up I'll add some normal and spec stuff with some more breakdowns, and then after that add a diffuse map in there.
Once its all done I might just make some presets and share those, but for now tweak away!
Replies
Thanks man, I really appreciate everything you do for the community =D
On a more serious note, I'm curious about your skin, when you are setting it up for characters do you apply any of these settings to your entire model or separate the skin portions out? I haven't fully been able to figure it out by looking at your stuff yet (though maybe I'm not looking hard enough!)
Thanks for sharing, this is really helpful!
I'm from the future, I'll always be one step ahead!!! :P
Yeah all my recent models have the skin broken away, skin is one of those things that its good to have seperate control over to all other materials, you want seperate specularity controls, different level of half lambert for skin than you would metal or leather etc.
I guess its like looking at your artwork in a more cinematic way, recently for personal work, I prefer to break things down into materials and have the freedom to have each material look awesome.
It would be awesome if there could be a special Skin version of Xoliul with some SSS solution in it. Hopefully mimicking unreal's.
Though unfortunately I can't get Xoliul to work correctly in Max2013, so I stopped using it
Anyway, great that you are posting this, I've been hoping for a long time you'd do this
Looks good Haz; I think your dark skin is really weak atm. The specular range on brown skinned peeps (such as maself) is higher. Super dark people are often quite 'shiny' on appearance because of the way taught skin reacts to light.
Example:
I really like a lot of stuff you're doing with the shader, I kinda went for a different approach than you did for my last model:
Once I get a chance I'd love to throw up my settings too and maybe I could borrow some of your ideas to experiment with it.
Xoliul: Presets just dont work for me man - it only saves some of the settings not others. ( will pm you a breakdown ) Plus im old fashioned :poly124:, get in there and get your hands dirty is always better :P
Del: Thanks bro, good point! Yeah post up some of your settings when you can!
I added a couple more, and tweaked a few values, also dropped a generic head in there to get a better idea than just a sphere.
I'll add some textures to these next!
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64286
Good question, my answer is probably quite unscientific in the fact that i tend to always strike a balance between warm and cool, in a rough complimentary/triad palette.
So in the case of skin being generally warm tones, I'll always have a cool fresnel and vice versa for most materials tbh. So often i see warm on warm, and that combination *usually* looks really bad.
Is this realistic ? maybe under some circumstances, but definitely not all, but I think it helps to always try to apply some form of basic color theory to what im working on.
I think those kind of things add that extra dimension to folio pieces and really make them stand above the norm.
In my shader, if you use gamma 2.2, that isn't required anymore though. But you can still do it for artistic effect, which is what Haz is doing.
Thanks to Haz aswell, there's some nice info there
i have a good white paper at work with real skin brdf values which i can grab the link to if you want...message me and i will get it to you...
theres some usefull info in these too, if you havent already read them.
http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/t.weyrich/projects/phd/weyrich-2006-phd-lowres.pdf
http://people.csail.mit.edu/wojciech/FaceAnalysis/FaceAnalysis.pdf