The Mhteam is proud to announce the release of the first version of the human skin shader for MakeHuman. The shader uses only standard Renderman instructions, therefore it will be compatible not only with ?Pixie?, which has been used for the test phase, but also with other compilers. The code has been carefully optimized as much as possible, and has been tested extensively with various significant conditions of illumination.
The shader has many parameters, to control every aspect of human skin, ranging from the basic (color, rough, spec, alpha) to the specific (hi-res details, hi-res alpha, veins, pores, sweat, ambient light, melanin, and the Pixie specific PixieAO), providing a highly customizable result.
The main features are:
* The light is reflected in an anisotropic way: it is greater in proximity of the areas tangent to the observer's eye, and gives rise to an increase in brightness.
* The skin loses saturation as the brightness is approaching the point of maximum reflection.
* The illumination is spreading away from the tangent line to the rays of light. It's an old idea already experimented originally in a python script for Blender and later, a year ago, in a first experiment of Renderman shader
* The light changes colour with the varying of the observer's angle of observation.
Certainly the shader can be improved and optimized, and a porting for Aqsis is already planned , but for the next release of MakeHuman we decided to stop at this level for now. The results are sufficient for the purpose of our software.
A complete description of the shader can be found [url="http://makewiki.aleppax.it/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/User/MHskinShader"]HERE[/url] pdf version [url="http://www.dedalo-3d.com/public/dev/articles/06_07_14_MHskin_shader_for…"]HERE[/url]
The download page at Sourceforge is [url="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150931&package_id…"]HERE[/url].