What's New in SkinVue

SkinVue 8.0

• New shader materials combining Enhanced, Procedural, and Toon skin options

• New Texture Maps Tab for adding or replacing texture maps (Color, Bump, SSS, Specular, Wetness)

• New SmartSets Tab which will load lighting and atmospheric setups and automatically adjust the lighting for the character

• New SkinVue Injector which combines Poser and DAZ character material swapping

• The SkinVue Injector will now capture lip and nail colors when swapping

• User-defined Default presets for automatic skin and eye settings when injecting SkinVue Support for new Poser 8 characters

SkinVue 7.2

• Added Skin Layers Tab for adding and adjusting SkinLayer effects materials

• Enhanced plugins to allow Collada import from Poser and DAZ Studio

• Separate installer/updater for SkinVue and wxPython

• New GR atmospheres 

• Updated and improved scene files with lighting setups

• Introduction of SkinVue Pro and SkinVue Artist Products

SkinVue 7.0

• 64-bit support

• New wet/dry skin specular model

• Added skin tone and tint adjustments

• Added "splotching" skin adjustment

• Enhanced Eye shader

• New HDRI Atmospheres

• All atmospheres re-calibrated for new Vue 7 GI lighting model

• New Meta-Node based material layers to add blood, bruises, chain meshing, robot and reptilian skin styles

• Added material swapping support for M4 (DAZ Character Plugin)

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 palette 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

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 6.1

• 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 6.0

• 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

High Fidelity Human Skin Realism

The SkinVue 8 Shader System was developed to provide fast, high quality human skin renders using E-On Software’s Vue 8 graphics software.  It works with both DAZ and Poser-based characters imported from either Poser of DAZ Studio.

Fully Integrated Application

SkinVue 8 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. SkinVue 8 fully automates the process of swapping Poser materials to SkinVue 8 materials and retains your original texture and bump maps. The SkinVue 8 Modifier Tab, allows you to adjust any of the skin variables including Fresnel, Skin Spots, Veins, Skin Warmth, Tone, Splotching, Skin Dirt, Skin Wetness,Cel Outline Width, Specular Intensity, and Specular Shine.  You can selectively adjust any or all of the SkinVue 8 materials. 

Platform Support

SkinVue 8 runs on both Windows and Mac and supports all 32-bit and Windows 64-bit platforms (XP, Vista, and Windows 7)

Three Skin Types To Choose From

There are three base skin texture options to choose from including Enhanced: standard SkinVue 8 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.

WetSkin Shader

SkinVue 8 includes a completely revamped wet skin effect shader that has been generalized to work with all character types.  It includes a new specular highlight model that adds much more vivid realism for producing skin wetness that ranges from slightly moist to drenched.

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.  SkinVue 8 accomplishes SSS by manipulating the luminosity and color material channels via a luminosity map.  As a result, SkinVue 8 SSS is very fast while delivering very realistic results.

Skin Adjustments

SkinVue 8 contains a number of adjustment dials to allow full customization of the skin appearance.  Skin adjustments include:

• Fresnel
• Warmth
• Tone
• Tint
• Subsurface Scattering
• Spots
• Veins
• Splotching
• Dirt
• Toon Edge Width
• Specularity
• Wetness
• Bump
• Lip Gloss
• Lip and Nail Color

Skin Shader Effects

SkinVue 8 contains materials that can be layered on top of the base skin to produce a wide variety of effects such as blood, bruises, wounds, chain mesh clothing with displacement, robots, and reptilian skin. 

Custom Eye Shader

SkinVue 8 contains a powerful eye shader to add vivid realism, particularly for close-up portrait renders.  Eye warmth, luminance and reflection variables are fully adjustable.   Luminance, Saturation and Tint can be set for both the EyeWhite and Iris.  Also, an Eye Glint shader is used in SkinVue 8 which supports both Ray-Traced and Reflection Mapped eye highlights.

Supports Poser and DAZ Studio Imports

SkinVue 8  will work on characters imported into Vue from either Poser (Using Vue's Poser Importer) or DAZ Studio(using Vue's .obj or collada importer).

Optimized Atmospheres

SkinVue 8 contains 20 atmospheres which have been optimized to produce vivid skin renderings.  All of these files are accessible through the SkinVue 8 interface or the standard Vue interface.  Included are 8 HDRI atmospheres.  All atmospheres have be re-optimized for Vue 8's indirect lighting models.

Character Plugins

Included with SkinVue 8 are two comprehensive character plugins - DAZ Character Plugin and Poser Character Plugin which automatically inject the SkinVue shader into the Poser or DAZ character.  The plugins are also platform independent so they will run on either the PC or Mac. The DAZ and Poser plugins work with the entire family of characters for each respective vendor:

Fully Integrated Help System

All of the SkinVue documentation is fully integrated into the SkinVue 8 application including context sensitive help. Read the SkinVue 8 User Guide here:

SkinVue 8 User Guide