Texture

How to design out visually extreme real skin of characters and environments, like that of those games nowadays? And is level of texture affected by software like photograph? Thanks!

A tad necroposting, but wanted to share for anyone stumbling on this...

Yes and no answer. A texture (actually multiple textures) will provide coloration and illumination mattes/alphas for 'skin.'

Yes, you would use photographs. Bring them into photoshop along with the UV map of the geometry you intend to apply a texture to. You would make a skin texture (blood veins, body hair would be visible).. This is your color map. Grey scale photos can be used as 'dirt' maps (alpha mattes for illumination) and other variations that change depending on the look you're trying to achieve.

Unfortunately, texture map is only one part of surfacing photoreal skin.. There are normal maps, lighting tolerance, reflections, subsurface scattering methods, bump maps, color bleed, occlusion, etc that have to be applied for a modern, industry-level skin shader.

Yeah the textures are usually hand painted actually (using Zbrush most of the time cos it can handle millions of polygons --> ultra high detail), then they bake those details onto diffuse and normal, occlusion maps etc. A nice shader is needed too.

Hmmm nice question...Almost facing this problem..

ohh thank i thought there is a problem in my work..