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Description
Started from scratch on a skin shader. This time, I completely abandoned everything I had seen done. I started from scratch, looking at some source pics that I would be happy if I could emulate, and thinking about how exactly they were made. How could I make the same pictures. With math, lol. You know I'm a numbers guy. I doubt anybody else keeps Wolfram-Alpha open when making models and textures.

And a lot of things about the way that MMD shaders were written started making more sense. Like how they start with white and multiply and subtract, instead of starting with black and adding. When you think about realism, you start with black, and then add the light that reflects. But when you think about, say, watercolors, you think about successive layers, each blending multiplicatively with the last on a white sheet of paper.

This is two days of work so far, and I'm not done. Explored too many dead ends. I thought, I bet Shirow used a palette, so I learned how to make a palette in GIMP, how to turn that into a tone map for color lookups-- and then didn't use it, too much banding. Tried out so many normal maps, tried to make some from pics of online skin, then ended up with my own ugly, handmade normal map, made with a few dots of a brush. That's going to need some tweaking.

Not planning on going as yellow as that Shirow pic. I am going to have to make an actual texture, though, for noise, for veins, for slight variations in color.

Description
Started from scratch on a skin shader. This time, I completely abandoned everything I had seen done. I started from scratch, looking at some source pics that I would be happy if I could emulate, and thinking about how exactly they were made. How could I make the same pictures. With math, lol. You know I'm a numbers guy. I doubt anybody else keeps Wolfram-Alpha open when making models and textures.

And a lot of things about the way that MMD shaders were written started making more sense. Like how they start with white and multiply and subtract, instead of starting with black and adding. When you think about realism, you start with black, and then add the light that reflects. But when you think about, say, watercolors, you think about successive layers, each blending multiplicatively with the last on a white sheet of paper.

This is two days of work so far, and I'm not done. Explored too many dead ends. I thought, I bet Shirow used a palette, so I learned how to make a palette in GIMP, how to turn that into a tone map for color lookups-- and then didn't use it, too much banding. Tried out so many normal maps, tried to make some from pics of online skin, then ended up with my own ugly, handmade normal map, made with a few dots of a brush. That's going to need some tweaking.

Not planning on going as yellow as that Shirow pic. I am going to have to make an actual texture, though, for noise, for veins, for slight variations in color.