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Theseus: Reaaliaikaisesti renderöidyn 3D-hahmon ihon teksturointi

If you read this far, thank you so much! The full thesis can be found here, although it is unfortunately only in Finnish. urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:a...

urn.fi

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I wanted to create a dynamic skin shader now that I had found a 3-dimensional skin color lookup table. For this I used Unreal Engine 4. The shader samples hemoglobin and melanin from the lookup table, and uses hemoglobin blend masks so you can change the blush patterns for different emotions

The lookup table by Donner et al. however didn't take into account different blends of melanin. So the ideal skin color lookuptable would have 3 axes: hemoglobin & melanin amounts, and melanin blend. Djelly did just that with a simulation based on measured values: half4.xyz/index.php/20...

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In the paper A Practical Appearance Model for Dynamic Facial Color Craig Donner and others explored this idea of a lookup table for skin tones, based on measurements of hemoglobin and melanin amounts in skin. This was an excellent reference for painting skin. reality.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/ski...

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I painted rough blend maps for hemoglobin. At this point I started to wonder about choosing skin tones, and if there exists a physically accurate color palette of all possible skin tones with different hemoglobin and melanin combinations. Turns out others have also thought about this problem.

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In Substance Painter I worked in steps corresponding to the physiological structure of skin, with hemoglobin, melanin and absorption layers. I tried to do as much as possible with procedural noises and masks, but some hand painting was inevitably needed.

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The different tertiary details were all on separate layers so I could adjust their strength during the sculpting process. Once the sculpting was done I exported the layers as displacement maps. With a bit of editing in Photoshop I had usable height maps for texturing, with details on separate layers

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Nearly all of the surface details were sculpted in Zbrush, with the aid of the noise generator and an alpha for pores. With the help of morph target and morph brush I could paint in the noise patterns only where needed.

Since my thesis was about texturing and creating the shader I decided to use the demoHeadFemale model from Zbrush as a base, instead of sculpting everything from scratch. I did modify the model a little bit, such as editing the topology and breaking symmetry hear and there.

Kontio @kontio.bsky.social · 13/02/2024

I graduated this year, and this was the project portion for my thesis. After my previous character project I wanted to dive deeper into creating believable skin. I wanted to learn more about physiology as well as sculpting and texturing. www.artstation.com/artwork/m8A0xd

Close-up render of a 3D character's face.

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Absolutely gorgeous! I need more vampire art in my life 🙏

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For the concept I researched a lot of old norse clothing, jewellery and everyday items.

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I tried to lean more towards historically accurate clothing, weapons etc, even though in the end the character is just a figment of my imagination.

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I wanted to create a semi-realistic imagining of a valkyrie, as in, what would actual Norse people have imagined a valkyrie to look like 1000 years ago?

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My second character project, done last year. This time my goal was to learn the full pipeline of a high quality game character, so a lot of new tools and steps in the workflow to learn.

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I explored different ideas for the silhouette but ended up using a very simple one.

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I also learned to use Zbrush to sculpt this character.

Here's my very first character project. My goal was to learn the process of creating a stylized character from start to finish.

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