Graphics PIDI : Advanced Skin Shader 2

This asset has been released, you can get it here

Hi there,

We have been working really hard on a full revamp for all of our tools as 2020 approaches. At the moment, we are finishing the last features for the major update to our PBR Skin + Eye Shader asset which will be renamed to the Advanced Skin Shader 2, with a huge amount of brand new features and improvements over version 1.x


Here is an early WIP video (with some more recent and easy to spot footage) showing some of the features :

And some screenshots :



On the left, Unity's Standard Specular shader for comparison.









Our system for dynamic wrinkles can be set up in 3 easy to follow steps :

• Assign a normalmap that mixes all the possible wrinkles of the character and its corresponding occlusion map
• Perform the "3 clicks setup" to generate the reference data used to generate the tension map
• Adjust the vertices detection threshold to adjust the intensity of the transitions to your particular mesh

This will allow the shader to generate a tension map on the fly and make the corresponding transitions between the different normals and occlusion maps, generating believable and high quality results within seconds.

The translucency and scattering parameters are fully adjustable as well, and special care has been placed on every single PBR parameter of our custom lighting algorithms to ensure that the results look great in any lighting conditions and on any device, from lower end smartphones to high end PCs with as little compromise in quality as possible.

We will share more progress about this asset as we approach its release as well as between the different updates after it is released.

At the moment, there is no ETA since there have been some technical issues on the Asset Store that are delaying new releases, but we are targeting a mid-late October release.

The price has not been set up yet, but it will be higher than the current price of version 1. Owners of version one will receive a considerable discount when upgrading.

There will be a Lite version with less features but at a very accessible price.

There are no plans to support HDRP officially at the moment, at least not until said pipeline is marked as stable and more thoroughly documented.

We hope you will find this early WIP interesting, and please feel free to post your questions and opinions below

Have a great weekend!

 

This looks amazing. Can't wait to use the newest version of the wrinkle system. Question about skinned decals: Does the decal system apply across the skinned mesh, or just the part that uses the PIDI skin material? Skinned decals are kinda sparse in the asset store at the moment and it would be neat to have something that worked across a model.

Thanks for all of your hard work!

 

Hi there!

The decal system we are implementing is based on the one we included with the first version, so it is closer to a multi-layered overlay system entirely driven by the skin shader.

However, due to the requirements of our own in-progress game, we are researching different methods to make a far more comprehensive decals system for skinned meshes (that due to the same requirements of our project should be able to mix well with all of our tools), so if our internal decals system makes good progress and we can find a way to make it easy to use outside of our projects we may put it in the store as well

Unfortunately, returning to your original question, at the moment at least the decals included with this asset will be more simple and limited to the skin materials.

We hope this helps and thank you so much for commenting !

 

Here are a few screenshots showcasing different lighting setups using the skin shader and ACES + HDR color grading. We are still tweaking some values, adjusting and exposing some internal settings (to allow as much fine control as possible) but at the moment we are quite happy with the results and the accuracy of the PBR skin for version 2

Have a great week!

 

Despite its considerable limitations, we are currently halfway done with the port of our Advanced Skin Shader 2 to the LWRP and Universal RP pipelines and we are quite happy with the results, especially after successfully porting a simplified version of our lighting algorithm











Over the course of tomorrow we will be adding translucency and attempting to port our tension maps system to these pipelines to ensure that the package retains as much of the quality and features as possible.

A few considerations to have :

- The shader is more demanding than a standard PBR shader for LWRP / Universal RP due to the additional lighting pass
- Due to the use of custom functions to achieve the lighting, LWRP and Universal RP support will be limited to Unity 2019.2+
- The quality of this port (as well as the deferred port) will be slightly inferior to that of the Standard Pipeline on forward mode, due to the limitations on lighting pass customization compared to Standard+Forward.

Have a great day !

 

And translucency is working now on LWRP, as well as a multi-light setup + point lights support :











These screenshots were taken in a ACES + HDR setup to better showcase the translucency effect

 

And the tension maps + dynamic wrinkles are now ready and working on both LWRP and Universal RP :

 

Here is a small comparison of the deferred version of the shader (running on Unity's standard deferred pipeline, no need for any changes) with the approximated Scattering + Translucency :



and forward, showing very little differences :



Just a small comprobation that the shader is indeed working in deferred mode :

 

For an easier comparison, on the left we have the forward version of the shader and on the right the deferred one :

(translucency in Deferred is a simplified approximation due to the lack of access to the lighting pass)​

We have been working as hard as we can to reduce the visible differences between both pipelines as much as possible. Here, both materials are using the same settings but we believe that some additional tweaking for deferred might give you even better results

Again, the deferred shader just works "out of the box" without requiring any changes to the deferred pipeline, nor any external assets (such as Uber, Lux, etc). Just assign any PIDI - Advanced Skin Shader 2 material, set up the lights that you want to affect the scattering and translucency in deferred through the tool's UI and that's it.

Tomorrow we will work on the "CGI Style" or "Stylized Skin" shader as well as on its own character model as well as on a potential alternative for the wrinkles system, more similar to the one included in version 1.x and which, though considerable more complex to set up than the new tension maps system may allow more accurate control over every transition. After this, only the documentation will be left before we send the asset for approval to the Asset Store

Have a great weekend!

 

The stylized character and shaders are now ready, we are currently making extensive tests over the whole asset and iterating over the UI to ensure that the workflow is as easy and flexible as we possibly can. We are also going to add the UV based decals / overlays support in the upcoming days to send the asset for approval very soon

Have a great weekend !

(WIP, character not fully textured nor set up)

 

Can't wait to get this new version! Do you have a planned ETA?

 

Hi there and thanks for your comments !

We are currently implementing a few last minute additions to the shader to ensure it comes packed to the brim with new stuff (and working really hard on a possible auto-update feature which is taking longer than expected due to the many MANY improvements made between versions) but if everything goes well it should be available in early-mid November

Some emphasis on "If everything goes well" since the Asset Store has been really unstable in the last two months for us as publishers with some considerable down time that prevents us from uploading anything or that gets assets stuck in an infinite queue (it delayed our latest release of another asset by almost ~12 days) but again, if everything goes as expected it should be sent for approval next week and be ready to download in mid November.

We hope it will really be useful for your projects, so thanks for asking and for your interest !

 

Yes, I'm using v1 and I plan to do something like a character editor, where I can change base skin texture, but also add beard, tattoos and such. And I would prefer to work directly on top of v2

Good luck with the release, waiting anxiously.

The screenshots so far look impressive

 

We are currently finishing both the Decals system and the secondary wrinkles system (this one might be pushed for version 2.1 in order to get to the early-mid November release)



This secondary wrinkles system will be similar to the one found in version 1, where bones and blendshapes are tracked to detect changes in their position and generate transitions between several normalmaps through the use of a facial regions map.

While the tension maps method will be the default, preferred solution to use wrinkles with the system, this alternative method is currently in development and will be included as an alternative that offers more control over the whole process (again, it may be pushed back to v 2.1)

We will be showing the UV based overlays/decals system very soon and we expect to send the asset for approval this weekend

Have a great week !

 

The new overlays / decals system is finally ready, and it allows for many different and interesting effects :

Masked blending between the 2 textures



Additive blending :



Multiplied blending :



And a mixed setup, with the first decal being additive and the second being masked :



Each overlay texture can be set up on either the UV0 or UV2 channel and have their own scale and offset. Each overlay texture can have their own specular color and gloss values as well.

We are considering adding more parameters to these values as well as some integrated effects such as rain, but these may come as part of a future update so we do not delay the release of the asset

Have a great day !

 

The Advanced Skin Shader 2 will be send for approval during the weekend, as right now only the documentation and promotional materials are left to finish

The wrinkles systems we have introduced in this version have very different workflows and many different advantages for their own unique use cases. These systems are the Tension Maps and the Regions Maps approach.



Tension Maps :

• Automated transitions between the standard normal map and the wrinkle maps.
• Easy set up ready to use in just 3 clicks.
• Due to its automated nature, results may not be as accurate nor customizable as with the Region Maps approach and the amount of poses with accurate transitions is limited
  
• Supports transitions between rest pose and wrinkle pose normal maps and occlusion maps
  
• GPU based, extremely efficient.
• Compatible with LWRP / URP

Region Maps :

• Manually set up "pose snapshots" used as references to calculate wrinkled areas
• Use region maps to define up to 4 blending areas (per pose) to precisely blend in the wrinkles map
  
• More involved set up requiring to manually place the character in the desired "pose" both with blendshapes and bones before taking a "snapshot" of it. More flexibility and control = more time required to set up the wrinkles.
  
• Allows for a very high amount of normal maps and region maps to be used at once, to create all kinds of wrinkles for any amount of poses with great precision.
• Does not support (yet) transition between different occlusion maps
  
• CPU based. Becomes more expensive the more poses you use and the more blendshapes / bones you track
• Does not work on LWRP / URP, only in the Standard pipeline

 

The asset has just been approved and released on the Asset Store !
You can find the brand new thread for the asset here or get it directly on the Asset Store right here

 

Looking forward to check it out, looks amazing! Just one question, you didn't include eye shader to the asset like in a previous one?

 

That's right. The eye shader in the previous version was included as a last minute extra during the initial release at a moment when we thought it could add some extra value to the package but for this new version we wanted to focus on the main product itself, the skin shader, and try to make it be the best we could.

Having both an eyes and a skin shader (which attracted quite different users with different needs) as part of the same package and trying to support both while providing patches for only one or the other got confusing for many users and increasingly difficult to maintain on our end (especially after the release of the SRP versions).

So for version 2 we did a bit of rebranding, changing the name of the asset to better reflect what it is and decided to remove the eye shader. At some point in Q1-Q2 2020 we plan to release version 2 of our eye shader as its own product (with a very considerable discount for owners of the original PBR Skin + Eye Shader) in order to make support, patches and updates for both of them much more efficient and in the end offer a much more stable, improved and valuable product for all our users

Thank you very much for your comment, we hope you will like the new version and look forward to see what you can do with it !

 

Oh, thanks a lot for such a detailed answer! Can't wait to put my hands on the eye shader as well. Keep it up, great assets!

 

While this is still a very early WIP and should be considered experimental, our first tests with an HDRP version of our Skin shader are being quite promising !

​

While the basic features are working without any issues so far, this is the first asset we attempt to port to HDRP and we are still learning and exploring the capabilities of this pipeline, which may open the door to new features or more advanced rendering.

Because of this, HDRP support won't be available in the asset until next year, once the core features and additional stylish / cartoon shaders are added to the existing workflows (Built-in & LWRP/URP) and we have fully explored the possibilities of HDRP, which we will most likely finish until after the holidays.

Still, promising results and a quite nice quality boost for a very early WIP, so we are looking forward to what this new pipeline can offer to our asset.

Have a great day!

 

Hey there, I was excited to come across this when I saw it had an SRP edition as trying to use the default Sub-Surface Scattering for skin just looks... bad, at least in my trials/tests. I then saw it was only for LWRP/URP so far, unfortunately. : ( Good to see that work is being done for HDRP though as per your post above. I will definitely keep an eye out for when that update is released, but until then it won't do me any good really as HDRP is all I am using at the moment.

Side question, are you planning on releasing HDRP editions of the fur package that you guys offer as well?

Keep up the great work,
-MH

 

Hi there,

Thanks for your interest in our tool !

Yes, we are working hard on the HDRP port of some of our tools and we expect to have the first "Experimental" release of the skin shader for HDRP early next year.

However, in the case of XFur Studio, we are working first on the release of version 2 which should come in early Q1 2020 as well. After that, we will indeed work on SRP versions of our fur shader and that will include (hopefully at some point in Q2 2020) a port for HDRP.

We hope that the pipeline is more mature by then since we do want to wait for it to be more stable and production ready before developing a variant for the pipeline in order to reduce the amount of support requests that come from bugs in HDRP itself.

So again, while at the moment we have nothing in the works for HDRP support with XFur Studio it is something that we have planned as part of our roadmap for next year

Have a great weekend and again thanks for your comment !

 

Does this require special talents to use or as a non-artist could I take an existing character such as from Mixamo Fuse and generate the necessary maps for this to work?

 

Hi there,

If you intend to use the wrinkle maps then unfortunately yes, you will need some mid-level knowledge about modelling / sculpting, normal map generation and texture baking in order to produce high quality normal maps that contain the wrinkles information. I am not sure if you have access to this within Mixamo Fuse or if Fuse can export facial wrinkle normal maps at all.

If you do not plan to use wrinkle maps and will use the shader "as is" in its basic form (in which case I would recommend you to get the lite edition rather than the Standard one) then no artistic abilities are required since the shader expects and works with standard PBR maps (albedo, normals, specular-gloss, occlusion) and the only special map needed, the translucency depth map, can be easily created on any image editor such as GIMP as a simple grayscale.

You can read the online manual in order to see how to use this shader with a character to see if your working pipeline meets all the requirements

We hope this helps !

 

Thanks for the quick response. I am definitely interested in all features, but no the Mixamo Fuse character I have cannot be used in the latest version of Mixamo Fuse and I doubt that tool exports wrinkle normal maps. I'm considering learning some basic Blender modeling. Would I be able to do wrinkle maps from there?

 

Hi again,

Blender is indeed an option to create wrinkle maps, since wrinkle maps are only normal maps created from a high-poly sculpt that shows the wrinkles. The demo characters included with our asset were sculpted with Blender, then posed into the different expressions, re-sculpted to add the details and wrinkles of each expression, and then these sculpts were baked into new normal maps.The whole process (except the texturing, which was done in Substance Painter) was done entirely with Blender

Then, the shader controls all the transitions between the "resting" normal map and the different "wrinkled" normal maps.

We recommend you to search Blender tutorials on :

• Mesh sculpting
• Retopology
• Baking textures and normal maps

We hope this helps as a small introduction on some of the topics that you may need to understand in order to sculpt wrinkles on your mesh, bake them into normal maps and then using them with our shader

Have a nice day!

 

Hi,

i am a little confused by the Asset Store description.

We have the

• BuiltIn Render Pipeline

and the SRP´s

• Universal Render Pipeline (earlier name : LWRP)
• HDRP

Do PIDI Advanced Skin Shader 2 works on BuiltIn Render Pipeline, too?
You wrote often Universal Render Pipeline and LWRP in the description. What ´s the same.

 

One moere question.
Bakery can now bake Skinned Meshes.
Does Pidi ASS2 works with Standard Unity Lightprobes and Lightmaps?

 

Thanks for all the info. It's quite overwhelming to me, but maybe I'll give it a shot someday. I think maybe the Lite version might be enough for our current project anyway. I'll consider purchasing soon.

 

Hi there,

Yes, the asset works with the standard pipeline (built in) and both lwrp (2019.2) and universal rp (2019.3) with hdrp support coming next year. Universal RP is an evolution of LWRP but internally they are not the same and many shaders are not compatible between them, so we provide specific shaders for each.

Since unity by default doesn't support lightmaps over skinned meshes (and we won't make at least for now any integration with third party tools such as bakery) baked lightmaps won't work directly, but light probes and any other default workflow in unity will work with our shaders without any issues

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks for the fast answer.
Do you think the shaders are easily extensible to take a lightmap into account.
The visual quality would be improved because our charakters live mainly in car car interiors. They are baked to.
Theres a big difference in lighting between legs and face in a car sitting position.

 

Hi again,

The shader is a surface shader so I do not expect it to be too difficult to implement. However, modifying the shader in this way would limit the technical support we can give (we can't guarantee the tools functionality nor compatibility if it has been modified), but yes, if it doesn't work with your setup it shouldn't be too difficult to modify in order to add this feature.

We hope this helps

 

No problem, we are glad to help and hope that the Lite version will be a very useful addition to your project if you decide to buy

Have a nice week!

 

1-Hello guys or girls xD, first of all congratulations, nice tool.
2-i ll buy it for sure when come the hdrp version, hope soon.
3- also its possible to add this to your tool?

its make a huge difference for closes on skin.
4-Do you catch freelance projects? i was searching someone to convert the shader from old hair tool to hdrp for me, or maybe hair composer.

 

I just bought a full $50 Advanced Skin Shader just to realize it's not a regular unity's shader/material solution. Material itself does not have any exposed property, instead I need to control it with some additional scripts attached to model. It doesn't fit the regular unity's workflow and it's totally unusable with the convenient character creating/editing solutions. I'm disappointed and upset, you should have warned people in the asset description that it's not a regular unity's Shader/Material solution! I'm sorry to say that, but it's useless for me and I want to initiate a refund.

 

Hi there,

We are sorry to hear that you are not satisfied with your purchase, but we also want to be clear that your assertions here are both unfair and unfounded. We never implied nor said that the solution was a material-only solution nor should this have been expected since in order to setup region maps, tension maps, patch the mesh and actually use most of the shaders features without requiring additional extensions for the default unity renderer a simple "drag and drop" material solution will not be enough. A dynamic wrinkles solution that requires custom made normal maps, just like any other high end / high quality dynamic normal maps system will not adapt easily to existing character creation systems, nor we implied at any moment that our asset did.

Furthermore, we have been open in this forums for all kinds of questions and have encouraged all users to ask any questions they have before buying our products. The videos, pictures and other promotional material released both here, in our other thread and in the asset store itself clearly show the UI and the script being used to set up all of the shader's parameters and these are not exposed in the material since, without the script, most of them are useless and leave you with a basic Unity material. The previous version of this shader worked in a very similar manner, and this asset is an evolution of our previous workflow and brings it closer to how our other tools, such as XFur Studio, work.

On top of all of this, the full documentation, including a detailed step by step guide on how to use the asset is available to everyone before the purchase and clearly linked in the Asset's description, for people to explore if they can follow the asset's workflow and if they can adapt it to their project without issues before making any purchase.

In the end, if you do not want to use additional scripts which are what actually set this asset apart from any other skin rendering system on the asset store and which give it all of its unique features then you will simply not be able to take advantage of any of them, and we agree, this asset will be useless for you. Not because of the asset itself, but because of a refusal to follow its workflow.

Just like with any software that is more advanced and complex in its functionality, it is expected that users adapt their workflow slightly to fit the requirements of the software rather than to expect the software to adapt to any and all workflows or even worse, in this case, to a workflow that completely lacks support for what this asset does ( just like the Material / shader workflow you expect us to use lacks support for most if not all of the features we offer).

We are sorry if you felt misled or disappointed, but we do not agree that this was in any way something we encouraged or provoked. We ask you to please contact us through the appropriate channels (our support email) with your invoice number in order to review the refund process.

 

Hi there

Thanks for your comment !

To answer your questions :

1 - Guys and thank you, we are glad to hear you are liking the asset so far !
2 - Thanks, the HDRP version is coming in Q1 2020 since we are right now focusing on adding some more urgent features to the asset such as low-end basic skin materials which, while lacking all the advanced features, will be easier to set up and potentially compatible with much, much lower end phones, and a way to expand the amount of overlays / tattoos/ effect layers from 2 to at least 4 or 8. This, and waiting for HDRP to become a bit more stable since even in our preview we've faced quite a few bugs. A preview of HDRP might come in very early 2020 with a more stable release around Feb-March.
3 - This is something we are looking into, but again since these graphical enhancements are not a top priority at the moment they may come until Q1 2020
4 - Unfortunately no, since right now we have quite a huge load of work with both XFur Studio 2 which is our next major release and the first one for 2020 as well as with the development of our own video game, so we are not at a point where we can take more work, sorry.

Again, thank you very much for your comment !

EDIT : spelling...

 

thanks for your fast reply, see you on q1 2020, and if you know someone that are able to accept freelances and know hdrp let me know. ^^

 

How the things is going guys =} ? Still excited to put my hands on it haha

 

Hi there!

We're getting back to work just later today (though we're still far from our main office) so we expect updates and patches to resume development very soon.

The HDRP version of the skin shader will come in the second half of Q1 (ETA mid-late February), since it will enter final development after the basic version comes out in a couple of weeks

Hopefully by then 2019.3 is finally stable and production ready !

 

Mid february looks perfect, thanks guys =D

 

We have decided to move forward the release of the Simple variant of our Skin Shader, which will now be released between this weekend and early next week.

This means that the first HDRP release might be ready sooner as well, with a new ETA of February ~6-10.

Please remember that the HDRP release will be in a beta / experimental state due to HDRP being an "in-development" Unity product, so bugs and errors are to be expected, but we will patch them out as often as needed

We are considering however to raise the price of the Standard Edition to 60-65 USD after this update to cover the costs of development and support for this new rendering pipeline, as well as the inclusion of new features to the shader.

We hope this will be exciting news for all of you working in HDRP!

 

Add microskin and i ll be happy to pay 70 or more =D

 

It s already solved par exellence here....

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/11/2...e-surface-gradient-framework-in-shader-graph/

add microstructure however you want, per bump, normal triplanar or normal uv.

Check the examples. A perfect framework and gamechanger.

 

The source examples from the paper
https://mmikk.github.io/papers3d/sgp.pdf
are also worth a check.
It s far from being limited to the ShaderGraph implementation, It s really flexible.

 

Hi there,

Our tool already supports micro skin detailing and normal map mixing, just not the micro skin dynamic deformation as requested and demonstrated in the videos a few posts above.

Our multi wrinkle normals mixing is not yet possible in HDRP not due to a mixing problem but due to a lack of rendering features in SRPs ( at least at the moment), but we are working on it

However, thank you very much for sharing these resources as they may provide us with additional information for our research and to continue improving this asset.

 

To celebrate the Lunar New Year and our upcoming HDRP update, we're giving a 20% off on the Standard Edition starting right now and until February 8. You can get it now for only 40 USD and receive the HDRP update at no additional cost.

Remember that after the release of the HDRP update the price of this asset will raise, so right now is a great chance to get it

Happy New Year!!!

 

The Link to assetstore in the first post isnt working . But anyway i bought it, very excited to see it on hdrp ^^.

 

Thank you very much (both for the purchase and the heads up about our link),link has been fixed !