I’m always searching for more free skin textures, and for some reason this particular thought never occurred to me. Not only are most decent skin alphas only for sale, I’ve even tried looking for an orange skin alpha (would be similar to human skin in some ways),and even the images of oranges aren’t free. So I decided to try an AI image generator. While not perfect, the final result isn’t too bad. I obviously will need to try and refine my prompt.
Minus the pores, which could be added with a separate texture, here’s the current results with a bit of smoothing.
To start with, I was using deepai.org. Doesn’t seem to be the greatest in a lot of areas. It just happens to be one of the first that came up when I typed in AI Generator. Just haven’t spent time looking for a better one yet.
I think I just put in orange skin texture. Half the time it told me it detected unsafe content and try again (I couldn’t get anything worthwhile with human skin in this one). That one seemed to possibly be usable, so I tried it. It’s not the worst in the world, but it seems to about the best it can generate. So now that I think about it, I don’t need a better prompt, I need a better generator.
I use both as alphas with the regular Brush tool set to Lock + Radius. I usually keep the strength really low for the skin texture (between 2-5), and a bit higher for the pores. Not as fast as using Dot with a higher stroke spacing, but is a lot more specific for different areas. Color, specularity, and SSS are another matter entirely after getting the alphas laid down.
Found this on my HD, I must have made them aroubd 10 years ago, but never really used them
Free to use for all and everything… Although the larger one is probably a bit too large.
