Well, it was a bit of a long day today, but now that I am off I started with some of the quick pores on him. Could have used a lot more time with some detailing before the higher frequency detail like the pores, but oh well. I kind of did it a bit too quickly, with a beer or two, and didn’t take the time to take some images of the process. Should be pretty easy to explain though as there isn’t much to it.
Here’s where it is currently.
You are going to need to make sure that the model is dense enough to take the alphas first. I subdivided this one once and it put it up to around 2 million.
Most of the pores were done with this alpha. I think I found it on the zbrush alpha library, or could have just been on google somewhere. Pretty easy to create something similar yourself if you wanted, especially since this one really isn’t the best example, but it works for now.
Here’s the zbrush alpha website if you wanted to check out some of what they have.
https://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/alpha/
Once you have your pores alpha, make sure to set your Stroke Spacing (under the Brush Stroke tab) to somewhere near or at 100%. Would be nice if there were a jitter or random option to the strokes, but it still works well enough. I also set the strength way down to around 2-4 percent. What I should have done was to also add another layer to it so I had additional control over the intensity even with the strength of the brush down so low.
If you really wanted to get technical, a lot of pores are a different size or shape depending where on the face they are. For example, the nose usually has larger, more spaced out looking pores sometimes, and often the cheek area and forehead can kind of elongate some of the pores from the skin stretching. Again, these aren’t always the case and can be accentuated or unnoticeable depending on sex or age.
Once you have gone over your model with the different sizes, you are also likely going to want to invert the alpha and go over some areas with some bumps instead of the divots. Usually it’s for areas where some of the hair follicles are more prevalent (beards, arms, etc.). Good to use a mirror, or get some good close up references on google (I say that, but I’m bad at using references myself like I should…lol).
That’s pretty much about it for getting a quick and dirty skin texture. Hopefully it helps at least a little.
Plus a bit of paint and some lights.
