About
SkinVue6 is a VuePython-Powered, integrated application that performs human skin rendering and runs on the PC  and Mac.  It works by adding a custom, fully adjustable, skin shader and eye shader to your imported Poser characters.  SkinVue6 also contains specially built atmospheres optimized to produce vivid human skin renderings.  The process of adding the SkinVue6 shader to your Poser characters is fully automated, taking only seconds to inject the SkinVue6 materials and shader functions into your Poser materials.  SkinVue6 plugins currently support DAZ and Poser 6 characters.  All of the skin shading variables are fully adjustable, providing maximum flexibility to achieve the look you desire.  SkinVue6 contains 3 base shading modes: Enhanced - for photo-real rendering using your Poser texture maps, Procedural - highly realistic skin rendering using no texture maps, and Toon - a cel shading, cartoon skin renderer. 

What's New in SkinVue6

SkinVue 6.0

  • Mac compatibility

  • Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS)

  • Supports operation in Vue 6's Connected or Unconnected Poser import modes

  • A number of enhancements to the SkinVue materials which improve realism and ease of use

  • The ability to randomize skin dirt and skin wetness settings

  • Skin tone warmth and saturation adjustments to correct undersaturated or oversaturated texture maps

  • The ability to modify lip and nail colors

  • The ability to automatically modify bump depth settings for SkinVue materials.

  • Greater control over Iris and Eyewhite parameters

  • All new atmospheres optimized for skin rendering including several new spectral atmospheres.  A lighting setup information window provides insights on adding Fill, Key and Rim lights.

  • A more streamlined workflow and updated user interface with ease of use improvements to allow quickly going from one tab to another without having to reselect the figure

  • A new character plugin architecture which expands the list of characters that can be used with the DAZ and Poser plugins.  Both new and legacy characters are combined into each of the plugins

  • The ability to load and save presets for Skin and Eye materials

  • Render Filters for creating Colored Pencil and Vargas-like art renderings

  • An automated product installer

SkinVue 6.1

  • New DAZ plugin support for V4 characters with custom SSS material maps

  • New Poser plugin support for Terai Yuki 2, G2 male, and G2 female characters with custom SSS material maps

  • Bonus V3 and V4 character sets from Illusions Designs

  • Added Scenes tab for loading SkinVue6 High Ambience scene files

  • Enabled bump setting support from SkinVue GUI

  • New wetness maps for vertical and horizontal drips/drops with new wetness scale adjustment

  • Added EyeWhite noise parameter adjustment to eye shader - the extreme setting on this will produce bloodshot eyes

  • Improved Eye Shader to allow a wider range of eye adjustment settings

  • Improved atmospheres which incorporate High Ambience settings for softer shadows

  • Improved installation support - all SkinVue files are now located in a single folder

  • Several workflow/usability improvements - automatic tab selection to Skin Modifier after swapping - selecting Skin Modifier update options will now display the currently saved parameters for the body part option

  • Saving skin and eye presets now saves all material parameters

SkinVue 6.2

  • Added automatic Male Genitals support for DAZ and Poser characters

  • Fixed bug in Terai Yuki II swapper (Poser Character Plugin)

  • Added support for ApolloMaximus (DAZ Character Plugin)

  • Added Face Room material support (Poser Character Plugin)

  • Added automatic material preview refresh following a swap

SkinVue 6.3

  • Added Ray Traced highlights option for eye speculars

  • Improved Eye Shader

  • Added new eye reflection maps

  • Added graphical popup menus for selecting wet maps and eye reflection maps

  • Improved Skin Bump calculation - uses the combined grayscale noise of the color channel or a custom bump map

  • When rendering, the SkinVue pallete screen will hide itself until the render is completed

  • Recalculation of material previews is now optional

  • Added material swapping support for Apollo Maximus character (DAZ Character Plugin)

  • Added Generic Character Material Swapper plugin for custom characters (Generic Character Plugin)

  • Fixed Vue material suffix naming bug when importing with grouped figures option

  • Added new scene files - Portrait Studio, Tropical Shore

High Fidelity Human Skin Realism

The SkinVue6 Shader System was developed to provide fast, high quality human skin renders using E-On Software’s Vue 6 Infinite (V6I) graphics software.  It works with both DAZ and Poser-based characters.

Fully Integrated Application

SkinVue6 is a fully integrated, VuePython powered application with its own cross platform wxPython user interface which runs on the PC and Mac.  It's tabbed dialog style walks you though each of the major steps necessary to create beautiful human skin renders. SkinVue6 fully automates the process of swapping Poser materials to SkinVue6 materials and retains your original texture and bump maps. The SkinVue6 Modifier Tab, allows you to adjust any of the skin variables including Fresnel, Skin Spots, Veins, Skin Warmth, Skin Dirt, Skin Wetness,Cel Outline Width, Specular Intensity, Specular Edge, and Specular Feather.  You can selectively adjust any or all of the SkinVue6 materials. 

Mac Compatibility

SkinVue6 now runs on the Mac (OSX 10.4 or greater).  The interface is nearly identical to that of its PC cousin.  The only difference is that the help menus are accessed by right-clicking

Three Skin Types To Choose From

There are three base skin texture options to choose from including Enhanced: standard SkinVue6 skin using the imported Figure's texture and bump maps, Procedural: fully procedural skin using no texture maps, or Toon: cartoon skin with texture maps.

Automated Material Swapping

SkinVue6 completely automates the process of injecting the skin shader materials into your imported Poser characters.  The SkinVue6 Material Swapper in conjunction with the SkinVue6 character plugins, analyze and convert your Poser materials into SkinVue6 materials in seconds -- requiring just 3 mouse clicks. 

 

Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS)

Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) is a phenomena which causes thinner parts of skin to appear more translucent.  There are three components of the SSS phenomena: shadows which appear more red, thin skin parts (e.g. Ears, Nostrils) appear brighter and glow red, and reddish shadow edges.  The red tinting is caused by the underlying skin layers and blood to show through slightly.  SkinVue6 accomplishes SSS by manipulating the luminosity and color material channels via a luminosity map.  As a result, SkinVue6 SSS is very fast while delivering very realistic results.

Skin Wetness and Dirt Randomization

The Enhanced and Procedural skin types allow the addition of dirt and water to be overlayed on the skin.  Each of these variables are fully adjustable to customize the amount and coverage of dirt and/or water to be added to the skin. With SkinVue6, these effects have been enhanced for added realism.  In addition, the dirt and water patterns can now be randomized with the click of a button.

 

New Skin Adjustments

Several new skin adjustments have bee added to SkinVue6 including:

Warmth:  The ability to control the saturation level of the base skin color.  This is very useful in many cases when using oversaturated or undersaturated Poser texture maps.

Specular Eccentricity:  Adds noise into the specular highlight channel to make specular highlights appear less uniform

Lip and Nail Colors:  You can now modify Lip and Nail colors directly from the SkinVue6 GUI.

Skin Bump Depth: Bump depth levels can be adjusted from the SkinVue6 GUI (note: this feature is not yet implemented - waiting for VuePython call)

Custom Eye Shader

SkinVue6 contains a powerful eye shader to add vivid realism, particularly for close-up portrait renders.  Eye warmth, luminance and reflection variables are fully adjustable.  In addition, users can change eye color to one of 6 colors or optionally load in a new eye texture map.  SkinVue6 now uses a two piece eye material to allow independent adjustment of EyeWhite and Iris parameters.  Luminance, Saturation and Tint can be set for both the EyeWhite and Iris.

 

 

Supports Vue6 Poser Connected or Unconnected Modes

Vue 6 now supports Poser connected mode operations for material shading and re-posing.  SkinVue6 can interoperate in both of these modes.  So you can use SkinVue6 to shade skin materials in Vue while allowing re-posing.  Or, you could use SkinVue6 to operate only on the skin materials while retaining the ability of Poser to render procedural materials such as clothes, hair and props.

Optimized Atmospheres

SkinVue6 contains 16 atmospheres which have been optimized to produce vivid skin renderings.  All of these files are accessible through the SkinVue6 interface or the standard Vue interface.

When you load an atmosphere, a brief description will appear in the information panel describing the features of the atmosphere along with any tips and suggestions for lighting setups.

 

 

New Character Plugins

There are now two comprehensive character plugins for SkinVue6 - DAZ Plugin and Poser Plugin.  Each of the plugins are now sold separately allowing you to choose which plugin best meets your needs.  The plugins are also platform independent so they will run on either the PC or Mac. The DAZ and Poser plugins will now work the entire family of characters for each respective vendor:

DAZ Plugin:
M1,M2,M3,The Freak
V1,V2,V3,V4
Stephanie Petite
David
Aiko
The Girl
Millennium Kids		 Poser Plugin:
Jessie
James
Ben and Kate
Judy
Don
Will and Penny
Miki
Laroo
Sydney
Simon
G2 Males
Terai Yuki2

 

 

Render Filters

Render Filters are post processing utilities that are applied to an image immediately following a render.  Currently, SkinVue6 contains 3 types of filters:

Pencil: Produces a colored pencil type sketch.

Toon: A quasi cartoon-like effect

Vargas: A filter which produces a pinup, Vargas-like effect.

 

 

Fully Integrated Help System and
Quick Start Guide

All of the SkinVue documentation is fully integrated into the SkinVue6 application.  Read the Quick Start and User Guides here:

SkinVue6 User Guide

SkinVue6 QuickStart Guide