Wetness
tring01
Posts: 305
I'm looking to dabble in editing the skin for Victoria 7 to see if I can get a wet effect. The only product out there is for G2. Is this something that's just impossible, or can it be done?
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you could use the same techniques we have used historically. You don't need a product for this, they just make it easier.
Many of the products simply change the specular maps of the figure to have areas that are more reflective than others. YOu could create this yourself in photoshop or a 3D painting program.
You can also adjust the reflective options for the materials, without adjusting the actual images.
"Wet" is just "Reflection" and "Shine", with less "Diffuse". (Diffuse = to scatter the light. Water stops that, because it intervenes and reflects it before it becomes scattered by the porous skin.)
Playing with the colors will alter the intensity too, and the "bluish" tints that volumeized water seems to reflect. (Not too blue, like one micro-value of blue. Or just remove a micro-value of red/pink tint from the model.)
Additionally, wet things have slightly stronger intensity/gamma, from the sheeting-prism effect of translucent/transparent volumeized coatings. (Look through a sheet of glass, look at the same thing without the glass, everything is slightly darker and blacks are more contrasting.)
Just don't go chrome! Clear-coat-wet... Like how cars are painted... That just looks fake, unless you dipped them in clear-coat and rubbed them down with microscopic glitter... (I can think of one place where that is not abnormal, but you have to be 18+ to go there.)
thing about it, I am sure they want the wetness to be uneven. Like water droplets. So that is very hard to do without making a map. If they are uniformly wet, it tends to look like plastic.
The products for the older figures typically help you with water droplets and beads of water.
Oh, dripping-wet, not just wet...
Bumps help there... easy mod, just dab sharp gradient circles randomly... The "bumps" cast the "wetness" reflections. Specular-matched images will help that too... removing the "diffuse" on those water drops in the matching bump.
Does photoshop have multi-layer brushes? Would be nice to paint specular, refraction, reflection, and matched bumps and matched textures all in one shot...
Thanks for the pointers! I can tell this will be a challenge. I can see if I want to get really customized images I'm going to have to learn to edit the specular maps anyway. Might as well start here.
I would not be surprised if there was a plugin for that, but I just make my own variations when needed. or use substance painter depending...
That is the right mentality. I don't think it will be too tough. Start simple and just try one area first.
There's wet, and there's wetness. Wet by water droples really needs a texture. If it's just an overall wet look, then adjusting top coat reflectivity/roughness may be all you need.
Assuming you meant you wanted the skin to look like water drops, as noted above get a water droplet brush assortment (Daz sells some, but you can also find some okay sets for free), make a copy of your G3F textures for safe keeping, and start painting. If you're looking for closeups, and the droplets need volume, then that's a tougher job. I would actually add that in post. These use a brush for the droplet, and a style for the lensing effect.
Basically, I'm looking for ways to make someone look appropriatley wet while coming out of the water onto a beach. The skin part is first. I will eventually have to figure out what to do with the swimsuit. I imagine that I will likely be able to handle that using the surface adjustments noted above. Of course, I have no idea what if even if anything can be done with the hair. For now lets assume she swam without getting her hair wet. LOL!
Wet sheen you can do with top coat or glossy layer. Since the settings are texture- and lighting-dependent, you need to fiddle to come up with something you like.
Another method, more involved but more flexible, is to add a geometry shell to the character, and adjust the mesh offst to something very small. Turn off all but the skin parts. Apply the Iray dispersive water shader to all the skin shell parts, and dial down the index of refraction to nearly nothing - 1.05 or something. The opacity of the shell (water) is set with Refraction Weight. Then tweak for the amount of wetness you want on the skin. You basically create a wet shell around the character that can be as shiny or dull as you want, without affecting the actual skin surfaces. Because of the dispersive water shader, the Abbe value is set high, and you get subtle rainbow effects, if the lighting is right.
This technique, while adding flexibility, can greatly add to rendering time. I don't suggest it unless your graphics card has some spare CUDA cores.
Wet hair is pretty easy in Iray: most hair shaders for 3Delight look matted and wet when rendered as-is under Iray. You don't have to do anything extra!
Anyhow, I've attached an example G2F with geometry shell and a very light touch of dispersive water. It shows up more on closeups, but also creates a nice rim lighting effect if you've got a side or back light.
Great tips, thanks!
I wonder, might the thin film water shader work better than dispersive? The name suggests it anyway.
Try them both out and see which you like better...because it is a matter of what look you are trying to achieve. I personally think the dispersive looks more 'oily'.