— Pete is a Character Artist based in Los Angeles where he works at Treyarch on the Call of Duty franchise. He has experience working in both film and games. Pete is also passionate about mentoring and educating others. He teaches courses with CGMA and mentors artists through The Mentor Coalition. In his free time he enjoys creating high quality characters to experiment with new software, techniques and technology. He uses Maya, Arnold, Mudbox, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Marmoset Toolbag and Photoshop for his work.

Hyperskin and the need to reach a new level of realism.

Peter was part of the beta phase of Hyperskin, and thanks to his hand-sculpted model, Jafar the villain from Aladdin, we were able to test the accuracy of our technology.

A fully crafted hand-sculpted model is what could be the most challenging asset to work with, the data provided aren’t based on any scan data, and the renders still have to be hyper realistic at the end.

Getting a realistic skin while being able to spend more time on the primary and secondary shapes, that’s what we offer with our service on demand Hyperskin. 

"The creative part and pre-detailing pass was done by Pete, the tedious part was handled by both our team and our unique technology." 

The consistency and quality of the output will always be similar, that’s key when you offer something like that as a service.

Let’s have a look at the data we got from Pete :

• A sculpted model | model with Uvs | 36 000 points for the basemesh | 1 tile
• An 8k displacement map that was extracted from a sub1 to sub4, about 2 millions points.

Hyperskin - It’s time to show what you can do!

• Hyperskin doesn’t work in UV/2D space, meaning that there is no problem with UV tiles having multiple seams and with UV shells with dramatically different texel density. 

• Hyperskin technology doesn’t use texture projection either, in other words, there won't be any pixel blending or distortion issue like you would have by rotating, scaling and projecting a map onto your model. “Isolate features to match” and not “blending” is essential.

Using traditional techniques such as projection mapping or manual sculpting, you always have to work in a consistent way. Something almost “impossible” to do by nature in CGI for skin detailing. Especially for a head where every single pore is physically different ;

— The skin structure varies a lot based on many factors, the age, morphotype, ethnicity to name a few, but we could also talk about how the person's health (smoker, alcohol, acne, skin disease...) changes the skin’s aspect as well.

Being able to Art-direct and match references is a central part of our philosophy.

 

Having to think about every single aspect of the person’s skin and making sure to produce an accurate output can be really difficult - At least, it will be really hard to get something consistent and convincing on the full head.

Hyperskin pre-process steps help to analyze the input data, and tries to identify and isolate different skin features. It's a crucial step and this will help Hyperskin to provide the best output possible, especially when it comes to “uprezzing” an asset that has a lot of details already there.

From there, the team was able to work on every single aspect of the model and calculate heavy data to generate the final output, a fully calibrated displacement map ;

• A 16k (~200 millions pixels) floating point 32bit EXR map with a midpoint value set to 0, meaning that the only thing needed is to plug this map into the displacement shader. It’s gonna work directly, no further tweak needed.
• Visually speaking, all the pores are very well defined, unique, consistent, producing a physical roughness with a displacement map only.

From The Artist:

"This has been a really fun collaboration with TexturingXYZ and I was amazed when I first saw the before and after images. Having realistic pore details and skin microstructure bundled into one extreme high-quality map is a game-changer.

Hyperskin really helped me on this project because it allowed me to focus my attention on the primary and secondary forms. High-quality pore detail will never save a poorly crafted model. Hyperskin allowed me to focus my attention on crafting the primary and secondary forms and it gave me confidence that I can get extremely high-quality details on the skin after the model is processed by TexturingXYZ The big benefit of Hyperskin is quality! The process of doing pore detail is extremely important but also very time-consuming. Skin has very different details depending on the region of the face. The pores and microstructure of the skin play an important role in skin reflectivity as well. The value of Hyperskin is that you're able to get the correct details in each region of the face, they transition beautifully and the reflectivity off the skin just works. Hyperskin in a production environment will be invaluable due to consistent results and simplified shader setup. It will be easy to implement into a pipeline because the Artist can focus on primary and secondary forms and then pass the model off for a Hyperskin pass. They will receive back a high-quality displacement that can be used immediately." — Peter Zoppi

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Why is it so important to have a good displacement map for skin rendering? Why this could drastically improve your renders? Everything is explained in our article...	What's 𝙃𝙮𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙠𝙞𝙣? Why we built it? Why offering this as a service? Everything is explained in our article: 𝙃𝙮𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙠𝙞𝙣 - 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙌𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙊𝙛 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙢...	Learn more about our Technology Hyperskin - Our on-demand service for studios...