Discover - Unwrapped Multi-channel faces

[widgetic-before-and-after id=5ba0b7abecb2a118098b4567 autoscale=on width=990 height=343 resize=fill-width]

In 2015, we released our first generation of surface skin maps. At the time, only a few Artists were “On a quest for realism” by paying attention to life-like pore details in their artworks, probably because it’s a time consuming and tedious process to sculpt everything by hand, but also the resources available online were very limited.

A few years later, Texturingxyz maps are without a doubt the first choice of major studios and most Artists when it comes to creating believable characters and especially realistic skin. We also introduced a workflow that involved RGB / channel packing where all channels stored a grayscale image which could then be projected. The Artist had full control over all aspects independently in their renderer, that became almost instantaneously a new standard workflow for everyone using our maps.

Here, at Texturingxyz we have created a new collection of pre-unwrapped textures with matching albedo and displacement, that will, once more, facilitate a Character Artists workflow, and produce stunning results in very little time.

Using our new ear to ear face capturing system, we manually unwrap the textures thus creating maps with no artefacts. Since we don’t use 3D baking, the textures contain true detail, and do not rely on the number of polygons but rather on high quality images.

Thanks to this technology that we have developed, we have managed to stack the albedo and displacement maps and make them match perfectly with one another. You can now use these packs as reference to compare the albedo with the displacement, and to understand how skin structure works. this is great for Artists looking for more control over their projects. The displacement map contains three levels of detail: secondary, tertiary and micro combined into the RGB channels of a single texture for ease of use, this can be used to create believable looking skin and highly detailed renders.

What to expect in each pack:

In the past our UHD Displacement packs have included separate secondary, tertiary and micro displacement textures.
Now, our packs consist of the raw albedo (with occlusion), cleaned albedo (delit), channel packed displacement (Secondary, tertiary, micro) and a utility map (Hemoglobin, melanin, specular).

The RAW and Delight albedo can be used for renders with or without automatic ambient occlusion.

Channel packed displacement for control over all aspects of the skin. dial your preference of secondary, tertiary and micro displacement.

The utility map could serves as base for grading, adding, modifying color in some specific areas, but also to derviate it to a specular intensity map.

To summarize, you can create incredibly realistic faces. In No Time.

Artists can spend most of their time working on the primary and secondary forms, likeness, shapes, being creative, flexible and apply the final touch for realism with these maps.

Using the channel packed displacement map, you can dial and balance weight at your convenience to get the skin feel you are looking for directly in your renderer. It’s efficient and incredibly fast. You are not driven by a 3D model with baked scan data, where it’s hard to control displacement details independently or artistically. Moreover, you can use these maps as a base for your detailing process and polish the sculpt directly or in the texturing software of your choice.

These maps can also be mixed with our other full face displacement textures to get a lot of variations and achieve even higher detailed assets than ever before.
We believe in creativity, and we want the Artists to be the master of their own creations.

These skin surface packages can also be mixed with scanned data, using photogrammetry that contains good enough primary and secondary forms but it needs that last touch to make the skin feel believable. Mixing and blending 3D scanned data with these maps could really help to visually improve the overall aspect of the project.

Also, we asked our friend Richard Trouve (Artstation | Mail) to write a tool for us to speed up the XYZ maps integration inside of Maya 2017+ and render engines (Arnold / Vray / Renderman are supported), It's now as easy as pie to integrate the maps and set up your displacement ! Watch the tutorial and get the script here

We work hard to provide high-end assets with valuable quality for everyone and having displacement layers matching with the albedo is a great step forward for us, we are actively working to provide more and more skin related assets for the future. So stay tuned for more.

WORKFLOWS

Introduction Video: