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SkinVue6 Wet Skin Tutorial |
This tutorial explains how to use the wet skin features of SkinVue6 to give your character renders a wet look which can range from oily/moist skin to soaking wet skin.
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| Oily Skin using Specular Adjustments | ||
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| Drips and
Drops using Luminous Wetness |
For a more drenched look, SkinVue6 provides the ability to add luminous wetness to the skin by utilizing luminosity maps to create the effect of water drops and drips. The luminosity maps are essentially combined with the base skin texture map in the SkinVue6 material shader. There are 5 different types of luminosity wetness maps available in SkinVue6 each with a vertical or horizontal orientation variant to produce the proper gravity flow of the drops and drips based on the orientation of the figure.
By using a combination of specular highlight adjustment and luminous wetness, you can achieve an almost limitless variety of wet looking skin.
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In order to achieve a reasonably convincing looking wet skin effect, it is essential to have the proper lighting and atmospheric setup. In SkinVue6, there are a number of empty scene files and atmospheres available which have been optimized for character rendering. They all employ "High Ambience" atmospheric and light settings which help to produce softer, less saturated shadows - ideal for wet skin rendering. In some cases, it may be necessary to add an additional point light to enhance skin speculars for oily looking skin.
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Oily Skin |
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Oily looking skin, the kind that looks like it has been covered with suntan lotion, is achieved entirely by using the SkinVue6 specular highlight adjustments. Set specular intensity to a value above 50, and increase specular shine (highlight size) to a value above 50. If you want to add more realism to the look, increase specular eccentricity to value of 30 to 50 in order to add some noise into the specular highlights.
To get the highlights to appear in the proper location, play with the angle and location of the dominant light source. It's important to note that when using highly ambient atmospheres, you will not achieve high levels of speculars using only indirect light. You must use an additional light source in the scene to bring out the speculars. In this example, an additional directional light aimed slightly above and to the right of the figure was used.
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| Luminous Wetness |
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| Luminous Wetness Patterns |
Adding wet drips and drops to the skin is achieved by using the SkinVue6 wetness controls. Here are a few tips on using the wetness controls:
1. Don't overdo it! A wetness setting of between 30 to 50 is acceptable for most images.
2. Turn down the speculars since there will be some specular contribution already coming from the luminous wetness maps.
3. Make sure you choose the right wetness pattern orientation. Vertical (V) for upright figures and horizontal (H) for non-upright figures (e.g. those laying down).
4. Play with the scale and randomness controls to tune the look of the wetness pattern.