Plugins Skin Micro Detail & Tessellation Plug-In

[northern.shikima]

northern.shikima submitted a new resource:

Skin Micro Detail & Tessellation Plug-In - Better Skin Material - Make skin look detailed even at extreme closeups!

In modern skin rendering, micro detail normal maps are a common feature to make skin look much more detailed in close up shots. They are usually small (512x512) normal maps tiled over a character and blended in with the regular normal maps. Because of the extreme tiling, they look detailed even at close ups angles!

This script switches character skin to use the GlossNMTessMappedFixedComputeBuff shader that was already built into VAM and exposes the Detail Map and Tessellation...

Read more about this resource...

 

[virtamater]

I recently got a member email from Andrew Price at Poligon.. it was about ditching pngs for exr files as they hold more data, are smaller and load faster... would this help with with aiding in higher resolution stuff too? I was curious to see on my own if I could save some of my skin files in krita to exr files to see if it would work in VaM.. any thoughts on this??
I have been using jpgs that have thier resolution scaled down some. I'm curious after reading this article if saving them as exr with a higher quality would still look better and still be friendly to my computer... the girls in my christmas clothes media suite have these skins I'm referring too.. I'ts the riddler and RenVR originals I use..the Victoria skin is the one I use most often. If it does seem to be better with exr.. I'm wondering tho if VaM can use them tho as Ive never saved anything into that format...

The unawareness of PNG and EXR — SCIENTIA

Avoiding PNG in professional imaging pipelines and the benefits of OpenEXR.

skientia.co

 

[northern.shikima]

I recently got a member email from Andrew Price at Poligon.. it was about ditching pngs for exr files as they hold more data, are smaller and load faster... would this help with with aiding in higher resolution stuff too? I was curious to see on my own if I could save some of my skin files in krita to exr files to see if it would work in VaM.. any thoughts on this??

I think the main benefit of EXR if support for high dynamic range of color/light detail and saving multiple render layers in a single image. It's useful for folks doing 3D renders and then using those renders in compositing or saving the raw/lossless data but I don't think it will help here.

When you load image files (png, jpg, bmp, dds, exr, hdr, etc) into a game engine, they are converted to special GPU-compatible compressed texture formats (DXT, BC7, BC6H, etc...) automatically so it won't make a big difference. 4K, 8K or larger textures are still going to eat up the same amount of VRAM despite the format you pick.

 

[virtamater]

Thanks for saving me a lot of time re saving some skin files lmao

 

[brynhildr93]

There's a chance that this might be made compatible with HuntingSuccubus SSS plugin in the future? Because having the two of them together would be great, since imho the base skin without SSS kinda looks.. flat

 

[northern.shikima]

northern.shikima updated Skin Micro Detail & Tessellation Plug-In with a new update entry:

Bug Fixes

Fixed bugs where settings would not restore correctly when changing person, appearance or loading a scene that already has the plugin.

You should now be able to save scenes with the plug-in and use this plug-in more reliably.

Special thanks to @everlaster for helping on discord!

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[PixelPorts]

Is there a way to add my own micro detail textures?

 

[VamTastic]

northern.shikima updated Skin Micro Detail & Tessellation Plug-In with a new update entry:

Bug Fixes



Read the rest of this update entry...

thanks shikma ,works perfectly . the saving and loading of the scene plus the skin to a change of character appearance .
i too was wondering about adding custom skin textures. if its possible to allow a texture search in vams directory custom/atom/person/textures.
i managed to get it to work ,by editing the script and creating a folder MicroSkins, to search for the Microskins folder and putting the textures in that folder
with a couple of my own.

 

[northern.shikima]

thanks shikma ,works perfectly . the saving and loading of the scene plus the skin to a change of character appearance .
i too was wondering about adding custom skin textures. if its possible to allow a texture search in vams directory custom/atom/person/textures.
i managed to get it to work ,by editing the script and creating a folder MicroSkins, to search for the Microskins folder and putting the textures in that folder
with a couple of my own.

Oops. I'll take a look later today, definitely meant for folks to be able to browse and use their own textures too.

 

[northern.shikima]

There's a chance that this might be made compatible with HuntingSuccubus SSS plugin in the future? Because having the two of them together would be great, since imho the base skin without SSS kinda looks.. flat

That would be the dream!

I think HuntingSuccubus plugin uses a custom skin shader that they wrote and my plugin works by using a different shader. So not easily unless I had access to Hunting's shader code.
Unfortunately their plugin is not free or open source so there's nothing I can really do.

The best thing to do would be if you're a member of Hunting's Patreon, encourage them to add the same feature to the SSS plugin. If they are comfortable with shader code, it's actually not very hard to add to any shader. It's just a second normal map, scale the uvs and then blend the two maps together.

 

[northern.shikima]

Is there a way to add my own micro detail textures?

I meant for you to be able to but I might have made a mistake with the settings on the file browse dialogue. Will look later today.

 

[northern.shikima]

northern.shikima updated Skin Micro Detail & Tessellation Plug-In with a new update entry:

Fixed issue where you could not use own textures

Fixed a bug where you could only browse textures that were included in the .var file.

I recommend putting textures somewhere under /Custom/Atom/Person/Textures/

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[northern.shikima]

thanks shikma ,works perfectly . the saving and loading of the scene plus the skin to a change of character appearance .
i too was wondering about adding custom skin textures. if its possible to allow a texture search in vams directory custom/atom/person/textures.
i managed to get it to work ,by editing the script and creating a folder MicroSkins, to search for the Microskins folder and putting the textures in that folder
with a couple of my own.

Is there a way to add my own micro detail textures?

Fixed the issue with browsing textures, please try V3 and let me know if still broken. Thanks!

 

[VamTastic]

Fixed the issue with browsing textures, please try V3 and let me know if still broken. Thanks!

browser is working fine ,Thank you for the updates.

 

[TRSD]

This is great stuff. Would it be possible to get more control over what areas it's applied to? An alphamask perhaps?

Fixed the issue with browsing textures, please try V3 and let me know if still broken. Thanks!

Working!

 

[Gabberjaw]

nice idea but:
zooming out makes the model skin very noisy and grainy like, white noise... looks real bad...

also: on seams, the normal maps change orientation and the seams are quite visible

 

[TRSD]

nice idea but:
zooming out makes the model skin very noisy and grainy like, white noise... looks real bad...

also: on seams, the normal maps change orientation and the seams are quite visible

Big collision trigger parented to the person that reacts to the camera rig -> Turns off the plugin on exit, enables on entry. ?
(I haven't actually tried this)

 

[northern.shikima]

nice idea but:
zooming out makes the model skin very noisy and grainy like, white noise... looks real bad...

also: on seams, the normal maps change orientation and the seams are quite visible

Unfortunately both limitations of using VaM's built in detail map shader.

For the noise you can tweak the Diffuse and Specular Bumpiness under VaM's "Skin Materials 2" tab. The noise is going to be mostly visible on overly glossy characters where the specular bumpiness is cranked too high. If you're cranking up the glossiness, bring the specular bumpiness down to compensate. Other skin shaders also often blur normals more than VaM does.

Usually games that use this technique also seem to use things like TAA to hide the noise. You'll notice the same thing with VaM hair- VaM hair looks so much better and less noisy with a TAA enabled (With TAA anti-aliasing in the Post Magic plug-in for example), but TAA also makes VR blurry and is best left for desktop.

The seams issue could also be fixed really easily with triplanar projection, which I've implemented in a shader before. I want to eventually write my own skin shader for VaM but there are challenges with applying your own shader in VaM - more reverse engineering necessary.

 

[northern.shikima]

This is great stuff. Would it be possible to get more control over what areas it's applied to? An alphamask perhaps?


Working!

I would love to add that, but it would also require a custom shader. Still trying to figure out how to use a custom shader in VaM and not break things.

 

[northern.shikima]

Big collision trigger parented to the person that reacts to the camera rig -> Turns off the plugin on exit, enables on entry. ?
(I haven't actually tried this)

If people really want I could add a few lines of code that adjusts "Detail Weight" based on player distance from Atom.
Basically a clamped lerp. If greater than distance threshold, only use base normal, as you get closer it would gradually increase the blend and add more detail normal.

I dunno - is the noise bothering anyone else? If so maybe I'll look at in the future.

 

[TRSD]

If people really want I could add a few lines of code that adjusts "Detail Weight" based on player distance from Atom.
Basically a clamped lerp. If greater than distance threshold, only use base normal, as you get closer it would gradually increase the blend and add more detail normal.

I dunno - is the noise bothering anyone else? If so maybe I'll look at in the future.

Personally I don't mind it so much. But it would be pretty pro if it faded out when you're too far to properly see the details anyway.

 

[dio]

If people really want I could add a few lines of code that adjusts "Detail Weight" based on player distance from Atom.
Basically a clamped lerp. If greater than distance threshold, only use base normal, as you get closer it would gradually increase the blend and add more detail normal.

I dunno - is the noise bothering anyone else? If so maybe I'll look at in the future.

U can make it toggle option, so people can decide. The noise is strong in vr.

 

[CheekiBreeki]

If people really want I could add a few lines of code that adjusts "Detail Weight" based on player distance from Atom.
Basically a clamped lerp. If greater than distance threshold, only use base normal, as you get closer it would gradually increase the blend and add more detail normal.

I dunno - is the noise bothering anyone else? If so maybe I'll look at in the future.

Yeah, the noise is pretty distracting at a distance. Fading it out sounds like a good option to have.

 

[brynhildr93]

Despite what the V3 changelog says, I still can't browse any other texture outside of the folder

 

[VamTastic]

Despite what the V3 changelog says, I still can't browse any other texture outside of the folder

for Version 3 , hope this helps.