New Skin-Workflow with vertext-colors

goekbenjamin

I try to understand that skin workflow:
https://twitter.com/Intervain/status/1163587249856012290

when using vertex color in Maya

you can only apply color to a vertex only right?
 so we are painting on a low-poly head right?
how can we fine-detailing that paint like in that video?!

What do you think about that workflow?
It is a little bit unclear how that all fits together, but it looks somewhat promising no?

rollin

Imo it's not very fine detailed. And the lowpoly shown in the video is already quite high res

Point is the magic happens in the shader which is using the vertex color map just for masking.

Imo it's nothing else as what level artists are using for years to blend materials.

oglu

Yes but those color is RGBA. That are four channels.
You paint a grayscale map for each of those channels and compose those back.
You could also paint a texture first and bake those into vertex colors.

We used those "splatmaps" all the time for terrain texturing.

Noors

Which means you don't need an enormous map per face to reach that resolution, you can re-use your tiling maps on every faces, don't have to sculpt/bake the details every time... in exchange for a more complex shader (so computing time).
Well it's a fine workflow if you have to produce several highly detailed faces (or any asset, whatever), tho nothing technically new.