Course on creating skin textures
karlsfriend_f7ccaca9e2
Posts: 73
I've been wanting to try to create different skin textures for characters using Photoshop. I see brushes you can buy for photoshop. The problem is I'm not sure where to begin.
Does anyone have any recommendations? Is this a fools folley?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you
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Usually we create skin textures with Adobe Substance Painter, Blender, etc. then refine the maps with Photoshop, or directly use Skin Builder. If you create skin texture from scratch in Photoshop, personally I don't think it's a good idea....
So I presume you actually want to retouch the existing skin texture maps in Photoshop rather than create brand new maps... Is that correct?
For color maps, you can use photo projection of photographs in something like Substance Painter, Blender, Mudbox, etc. Or use existing skin materials, like Substance Painter materials from their library or 3rd party materials. Or use other resources like body scans, wrapped to Genesis figures. Obviously with anything you don't create yourself, you need to check license. Most photos and substance painter materials would be useable as a Daz skin under license, but body scans likely will not be.
For things like Spec map, Bump Map, Displacement Map, Normal map, it might be best to start with sculpting. E.g., sculpting a very high resolution scullpt to the level of detail of skin cells, pores, wrinkles, creases, then can export/derive maps from the high-res mesh for all of the aforementioned. Of course there are probably other methodologies to fake such details (see Materialize) rather than deriving them from a high res sculpt.
As for where to begin? I guess typing "how to ____" into google/youtube is a good start, since there are new tutorial makers coming out every other day so hard to really say. Outgang has some good tutorials on some things, but they are often aimed at intermediate level people.
Wow! Really appreciate it. I was thinking about doing it from scratch. I realize now that might be more than I can handle. I'll look into one of the software options.
Thanks for the help!
Hello! Do you have any tutorial for creating DS skin with Substance Painter, please? I would like to create a skin for G8M and I just got Subtance Painter, I am a bigginner with it.
Thank you in advance!
Im not aware of any tutorial, and would be reluctant to trust anything that is made specifically for Daz Studio. Substance Painter is an industry standard, so any video about Substance Painter and making skin should be useful, if such exist.
In Substance Painter, you can go to the Bake Mesh Maps section and bake out the following from a high res sculpt:
Those can be edited and used in various ways to construct necessary maps. Obviously you would need to have had a high res mesh to bake out those maps.
Dont have a high res sculpt? Maybe use Materialize instead of Substance, as I recommended above, to generate the maps needed.
Making the base color map is probably the hardest. You may need to pull in a lot of different resources to make it from scratch.
Congrats!
There are many free tutorials available as well as many more for sale.
YouTube is a good place to start:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=substance+painter+tutorial
In the Daz3D store, there are some for sale. These have likely been around for awhile so "might" come on deep sale prices sometime before the year is out. [next month is the membership anniversary sale month]
https://www.daz3d.com/next-generation-texturing-for-daz-studio-or-poser
https://www.daz3d.com/substance-painter-workflows
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-and-substance-painter
https://www.daz3d.com/detailing-with-decals-essential-workflows-for-realistic-texturing
There may be more but these are the ones I found tonight.
There are also tutorials as well as supplies available for free and purchase at ArtStation. [read the fine print, not all brushes work in all programs]
Thank you very much! I will look at it! I saw that there is a "Skin Human" brush in Substance Painter, do you think it would be a good idea to use it?
Yes, use what you have and see what it does.
Adding [slowly] to the collection, experiment and develop the skins how you want them to be.
Making skins is not a fast project, I'd recommend ending sessions on a 'happy note' [when something worked as desired]. Also check the work on the model in DS. Some corrections can require starting over and that's okay too.
Those you are refering to are most likely not "brushes", they're materials.
Making good skin maps is not as simple as layering a bunch of the default skin materials from the Substance library and exporting, but i suppose it might be a good idea to start with them if you lack any better ideas for now. It will take a lot of time to make a good map de novo from Substance library resources. Most texturing artists would project photographs or scan images at some point to add in realistic details.
More or less, as others said, making skin textures is a different thing from making good / realistic skin textures. I suggest you firstly watch this video on yt: https://youtu.be/s0DhvFML7oM?si=q1fWduzOTxOP8XDM
You can understand lots of thing rather than simply start learning how to use SP as well the skills ~~
Thank you very much!
so if I understand well, in this tutorial, he uses a HD character to get its normal map, and set it to another character, is it that? Is it not a problem if the both characters have a different shape?
Yes (by HD character, I am referring to his own high resolution sculpt that he did in Zbrush, not a HD Daz Character)
No
He had baked the normal map in Zbrush (off-screen) from a high-res sculpt of that specific character. He then imported his Normal Map to Substance, and generated the other maps from the Normal map. The normal map has the high-resolution detail baked into it. He did that process in Zbrush off-screen, but you can bake from high to low in Substance Painter as well, which he mentions in the video (but doesnt show).
Although he had a high-res sculpt of his specific character, and thus his normal map related to the specific character's high res sculpt, you can nevertheless use a normal map made on one character on a different character. It's not a 'problem' to generate maps from normal maps. But will the details of the normal map be sensible for every single character? Probably not, hence why most characters come with distinct normal maps. Only you can say if it's a problem when looking at it with your eyes, as you as an artist should be bestowed with the capacity to critique your own work.
Ah, ok, thank you very much!
I have not Zbrush, so I guess I have to create the normal map by Substance Painter too (or maybe by Blender?). For now, I tried to follow the tutorial without having normal map; is it a problem or can the normal map be added in course of procees? Do you know some tutorials showing how to create a normal map by Substance Painter, please?
I have another question: is it possible to work on several material groups at the same time? I tried to select the head, ear and lips together, but when I added layers, they were added only on the face group... (sorry, it's a lot of questions...)
Thank you in advance!
You can probably find one here
Dont export your obj with Surfaces, then it will load into Substance as one texture set.
Thank you very much! Is it a problem if I export it without the eyes and mouth since I want to texture only the skin?
Not a problem in the programs I use.
Tha,k you vzery much! And if I don't export the surface on the obj, will Substance Painter yield one map by group (one for the face, for the torso, etc), or will all the groups be on the same map and it will be necessay to separate them later?
Thank you very much! And if I don't export the surface on the obj, will Substance Painter yield one map by group (one for the face, for the torso, etc), or will all the groups be on the same map and it will be necessay to separate them later?
Substance Painter added UDIMs several years ago.
If you dont export Surfaces when exporting the figure as obj from daz, then the obj will load into Substance as a single Texture Set with multiple UDIMs.
You can control layers (material fill layers, paint layers) to apply to specific UDIMs.
When exporting your final textures, Substance will make a map for each UDIM.
Ah, ok, i will try, thank you very much!
Hi, I searched for a tutorial showing how to create the normal map directly in Substance, since I have not Zbrush, bur I have founnd nothing very clear, almost all the tutorial say to use Zbrush... The only tutorial that could help would be this one, around the time 4:30, when the lip details are created:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bs1OECgwFo
But iI don't understand how it works: I setted the fill layer to the heigh mde, and tried to sculpt the lip with same brush that is used in the tutorial, but it didn't work, I obtail only white part on the lips, not any heigh effect... I guess I misunderstood hox it works. Could you help me, please?
Thank you in advance!
Im not going to refer to your video linked because that video looks annoying and would not really call a sped up video a tutorial. But I will point out that your question is asking about how to make a normal map and yet you then start talking about a problem you experience when manually painting height maps. Perhaps there is some confusion in your thinking around this... A height map is not a normal map, although i suppose you could make a hieght map and then convert it to a normal map if you really thought that was worthwhile.
But i will say that without zBrush, common options to make normal maps are:
1.Substance Painter: Bake normal map from High Res sculpt in the Bake Mesh Maps section.
2. Substance Painter: Stamp normal map detail manually (this method is stupid)
3. Substance Painter: Convert Height Map to Normal Map
4. Materialize: Make a fake Normal Map from color map
5. xNormal: can do 1 and 3 above
6. Blender: can do 1 and 2 above
plus many more
If you want me to search on your behalf for a relevant video explaining one of the options above, I can. For example, for option 1 you can look at this which i found by typing "baking normal maps in Substance Painter" and clicking the first thing that showed up.
If you have a specific question about painting height maps manually, then post screenshot of what you are doing. You might not have the height channel on your layer. Or, if you are viewing only the height channel in your viewport, you will only see height map information, which will necessarily be white, gray, or black. If you want to see effect of a height map on your material, then you have to be looking at the full Material channel, not the height channel. In the video they are just using black/white alpha texture as a brush to paint on the mask of a Height fill layer. The white will add height.
I will also comment that painting height maps and normal maps might not be the best process. Usually people would sculpt a high res sculpt and then bake height and normal maps from the high res sculpt (baking mesh maps), and then use painting only to fix any issues with the baked maps.
Thank you very much!
Ah ok! Indeed, I think it was not clear for me...
Do you know if it would be possible to sculpt a high resolution character (with skin pore, etc.) with Substance Modeller? I obtained it at the same time as Substance Painter but I never used it yet. I searched some tutorials about that, but they always stop after modelling a base resolution character, they never show how to sculpt the high resolution...
By dint of searching, I finally found how to apply height effects in Substance Painter, and for know, I used a fill layer with the Plasma texture to create the skin pores:
If I understand well, you mean that Substance Painter has a tool to convert it into a normal map, after baking it as a high map, is it that? (I don't know if the plasma texture is the best one to create skin pore, for now, I am just testing...)
If I would want to sculpt the high resolution mesh with Blender, is there a brush in Blender to create efficiently the skin pores?
Or (maybe simpler?) I found a tutorial showing how to create skin pores on the Blender material, so I guess it should be posible to bake it as a normal map (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2tz_738GQ). However, I am not sure how to do with the different material groups: should I remove the material groups on the obj when I export it into Blender, and then, create the material on the entire body? If I do it, will I still get one normal map by template?
Sorry, it is again a lot of questions...
https://www.daz3d.com/handspan-studios
Skin details on sale today :-)
Oh, [bother]! I saw your message too late, I have the impression that the sale is over today!
Thank you, anyway.
If I understood well, this kind of skin details items can also be used in Zbrush, so, do you think that they could also be used in Sunbstance Painter directly? I am not familiarized with it, so I don't know well how it works...
I have another question about Substance Painter: I just tried to use a G8M character without the material groups on the exported obj file (I haven't tried yet when I sent my previous post), and I applied the plasma texture to it, but it doesn't react as the same way depending on the part of the body:
I tried with different textures and different settings, but it is always weird and it doesn't look like a coherent whole. Could you help me to fix it, please?
Thank you in advance!
Yes you have discovered uvmaps lol ...
Resize the brush ;-)
Or, ? if Substance can do this 'cause I don't have that, use a setting that permits the program to paint using its own settings for uv purposes. I use an old copy of 3DCoat which can paint evenly all over the model.
Ok, I will try, thank you. Here, I didn't paint, I just filled the mesh with the texture in the height section... I hoped to haven't to paint by the hand, because it would take much more time than just to fill...
When I fill the texture on a mesh with the material groups, it works correctly excepted it seems not tiled:
I will see if it is possible to tile it in the settings (here I kept the default settings), but I am not sure that it would be possible, because I am already using the tile scale...
Even if I change the size, we can still see an issue on the tile:
Further, even if I could fix that, I worry about the different maps, I wonder if it could be correctly tilable between the diffenrent maps, if I fill them one by one instead working on the entire body directly...
paint = fill Basically the same thing, one is getting the information put on to the model. One has more control with painting, flood fill is certainly the fast way to coat the object.
Seams ... if the brush does not tile, it does not tile. Options include getting another brush to use. After filling as you've done, use a brush over the seams, painting over the seams to make it look correct.
I would think you have options also for adjusting the edges and opacity of the brushes. To paint over the seams, feathering {or whatever you want to call it} the brush edges helps it to blend in. Check also for other options in your program that are like cloning, smudging, etc. {like are found in image editors}.
By the way, while "making a skin" is your goal, you might consider learning how to use the program with a much simplier model. Practice with cubes, spheres and planes, etc. Even the most complex models you will find, started off as cubes, spheres and planes, etc. ;-)