[LEGACY] PIDI - Realistic PBR Skin + Eye Shader for Desktop, Mobile & Lightweight SRP!

Patch has been sent and will be approved (hopefully) in the next 24 hours

In the meantime, for any person experiencing the GetPropertyBlock/SetPropertyBlock error simply follow the instructions above (changing the 2017 for 2018 on any #if UNITY_2017_1_OR_NEWER line) and it will be fixed

Hope this helps!

 

Alright, thanks for the fix. Worked just fine. I just scratched the surface of what is possible with this skin shader and it already looks so much better than standard PBR:



This purchase was totally worth it. The tessellation is epic in my case.

Also I'd like to mention that the documentation is really good structured, detailed and well written.

The only things I am a bit struggling with is generating the different textures needed like the Skin Data Map. I think I will get this at some point but as I am no artist I will need some time. Is there any trick to generating these from existing maps? Could you maybe show a video on how to create them or point me in the right direction? Or just tell me that I am doing everything right by trying to paint them myself in Photoshop.

Never the less you really did a good job for this asset. Anyone who doesn't know if you should purchase this: do it! It's worth every dollar. Will leave a rating soon after I figured out the advanced stuff.

Regards,
Wurlox

 

Thanks!

I am really glad to hear you are happy with the results of the shader (and it looks really really cool on your character! ) and also thank you for your kind words towards my work

The Skin Data Map is indeed a bit complex to make (since it packs a lot of data) but there is an easy way to do it :

• Paint in Photoshop or any other image editing software (me personally I use GIMP for mostly everything ) a grayscale for the translucency of your character. The darker areas will be less translucent while the whiter ones will be more translucent.
• Make sure your Ambient Occlusion map is another grayscale
• Paint a third grayscale depicting which areas will have a stronger specular and which ones a lower specular value.
• Finally paint a four grayscale that defines how strong will the micro - details of the skin (the pores and small dots and imperfections from the Micro Skin texture) will look over the skin surface.
• Import these four maps to Unity. Make sure that all of them have the same size. Mark them all as "Read/Write" textures in the import settings.
• Go to the Window/PIDI - PBR Skin/Utilities/Skin Map Generator menu and this will open the Skin Map Generator window.
• Assign your 4 grayscales in order in the 4 slots and click on Generate Map.

• Done! You will have a ready to use Skin Data Map

If you prefer to use Photoshop you can paint the 4 grayscales as layers and then compose the 4 layers into a single 4 channel (RGBA) png file and use that instead as the Skin Data Map

The depth/translucency map is usually the one that people have more troubles to understand, but it is only a simple grayscale that you can paint by hand, no need to generate it from any actual mesh data nor with any complex process

I will indeed record video tutorials during these weeks and start uploading them soon to Youtube, but it will take a little while for them to be properly recorded and edited so for now, I hope this explanation helps!

Again, thank you very much for your support and for recommending this tool, it is very appreciated, and I hope it will keep helping you a lot with your project !

PS: All the data maps included with the package were painted by hand with GIMP except the normals and occlusion maps, which were baked in Blender and the diffuse map which was created with Substance Painter 2018


EDIT 1 : The Skin map Generator is the right utility to use to generate skin data maps or any other of the needed textures using existing ones as inputs, as it will let you choose which channel take from each texture to pack it as the translucency, occlusion, specular or mirco skin strength parts of the final map and also let you create the normals+wrinkles maps and the facial regions definitions

Everything is explained in more detail in the Advanced section of the manual but of course, if you need more help, you just need to contact back here and I'll try to explain in more detail!

EDIT 2 : Also if you need even more control over the smoothness of your character, the alpha channel of the diffuse map is used to control it on top of all the other settings available to, for example, make some characters have more glossy lips

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I was just wondering if I did it the wrong way as I was already painting the Grayscale textures inside Photoshop for each Channel. But I see now that this is the right way to do it. It is just a little tricky and needs some trial and error to get it look just right.

It's nice that the alpha map controls the smoothness areas. This comes in handy for things like the lips. I will test this and see what I can come up with.

Thanks again.
Wurlox

 

The patch for the SetPropertyBlock/GetPropertyBlock error has just been approved
It should be available to download in the next couple of hours!

 

Quick roadmap for v 1.22 (minor update) :

• Improved per-instance management of the skin. The main textures, normals and other properties will also be adjustable per-instance/character allowing you to greatly reduce the amount of materials by being able to share the same skin material with different configurations across different characters
• Eye-tracking script and eye shader variation for easier workflow.
• Improved decal/overlay system to allow for different mixing modes (overlay/additive) to easily add transparent overlays such as water and tears that should modify the specularity and smoothness without modifying the color

It will be a smaller update, but there are other major features currently in research
As soon as they are more usable and out of the experiments table I will share them with all of you.

Still, hope some of these upcoming smaller features will be useful!

 

Unfortunately I didn't have much time to finetune the textures yet, however what is achievable with only minor setup is already really nice. Here a little Video of the current status: https://drive.google.com/open?id=18ZxB4AHq30LsmcbrN-ELDL9zIRosMFNA

I still have to properly setup all textures but I wanted to share what I got so far because I think this skin shader is the best solution on the asset store at this moment. The eye shader is also very nice!

I will post again if I have the model properly setup.

Regards,
Wurlox

 

It is looking great! I look forward to seeing it once it is all setup and ready

Thank you very much for your kind words, I am glad to see the shader is being useful to your project. And now that the skin shader has been improved and polished up, next updates will polish up the eye shader too and add more game-oriented features to the shader

Thanks again for your feedback and for sharing your results, they look great and I am sure it will only look better once it is finished!

 

Hi, I've just purchased this -- mainly for the eye shader, but figured I will probably need the skin shader sometime in the future too. But the eye shader won't compile (it's the only one; all the skin shaders do compile) -- it's listed in the Failed to Compile section of the Shader pulldown list on my eye material. I'm using 2018.1.2 on Mac, with Metal Editor enabled.

Also, is there only the High Quality version of the eye shader? Will the be too demanding on low-end PCs and mobile?

thanks
Dave

 

.
Hi there, and thank you for purchasing this asset
The first version of this shader is indeed aimed towards higher-end PCs but I will try to get it fixed as quickly as I can

If you can please tell me which errors do you see on the shader compile errors? I do not have any mac so I cannot test it with metal right here, but if you point me to the errors you see I may be able to give you a quick solution

EDIT : I am testing it right now on Unity 2018.1 to see if I can compile it under a lower pixel shader version to send it to you under similar settings to the skin shader for mobile, please wait just a moment and I PM you with a test version

EDIT 2 : the shader is aimed towards higher end PCs but it should work with any pixel shader 3 level hardware (post 2009-2012 PC)

 

I just PM you a reduced version of the shader with some of the highest requirements disabled so it could compile to pixel shader 2 level hardware. I recommend you to first reimport the original shader since sometimes unity throws compiler errors when it can't find the CGinc files and this gets fixed with a simple reimport. The smaller shader, however, is already there as a PM in any case

I hope it helps!

 

Reimport worked -- whew, thanks! And thanks for the simpler version, I'll try that too.

Very nice controls over the eye effect, it looks really great!

 

I have a question how does the eye shader work?
Do the eye map have to be setup a certain way or special maps required?

 

Hi there,

For this first version of the eye shader yes, the texture needs to be setup in a special way (the albedo texture must have the iris region set with an alpha of 0 to let the shader know that this zone must be able to change colors) and the pupil, occlusion and some other properties are defined in a secondary map. This allows the shader to control eye color on a material basis without requiring multiple textures, to have occlusion without additional meshes (eye direction is defined with a vector instead of turning the eye mesh in this first release of the eye shader) and the pupil to be dynamically closed and opened

This setup is not too difficult and example textures ready to use are provided (for a human-like eye). It is also well documented and, on top of it, if you have troubles while making the textures or adapting existing maps, you can just contact me and I will try my best to give you some guidance to set them up

I hope this helps!

 

ok great, on elast question regarding adapting to a existing map. Does it matter if the eyes are on the same atlas map as the skin or should the eyes have it's own separate map?

 

Hi again

Since skin and eyes pack a LOT of information on each of their own sets of maps (and the color channels for each are used for different things) it is highly recommended that they are on different texture sets. If you are using very well defined UV Layouts it might be possible to pack both on a single set of textures, but I highly recommend that you split them so it is easier for the shader to do its job and for you to generate the necessary maps

Besides this, the included texture packers and map generators are designed to work with separate sets of textures, so in the end it will be better to split them.

I hope this helps

 

Version 1.22 (relabeled 1.25) is almost ready, targeting a mid-July release

• Improved per-instance management of the skin. The main textures, normals and other properties will also be adjustable per-instance/character allowing you to greatly reduce the amount of materials by being able to share the same skin material with different configurations across different characters
• Eye-tracking script and eye shader variation for easier workflow.
• Improved decal/overlay system to allow for different mixing modes (overlay/additive) to easily add transparent overlays such as water and tears that should modify the specularity and smoothness without modifying the color
• Alternative eye shader with a static occlusion map that stays static as the eye moves and turns ( through the transform component)
• New eye masks and textures for monster/animal eyes with vertical slit pupils and other unusual shapes
• Early implementation, might be dropped and saved for 1.3 : pupil dilation responding automatically to lights
• Early implementation, might be dropped and saved for 1.3 : support for rain effects over the skin

Besides this, heavy work on the clothes and hair shader has already begun with some interesting video-demonstrations coming in the following months. This will be, however, a separate asset, though both the cloth & hair package and this skin shader will be available on a Character Shaders package with some discount for owners of the PBR Skin & eye shader package

There will be more news soon!

 

That's exciting news, and I see myself purchasing these assets. Is the hair package going to be very similar to the XFur?

 

Hi there!

Since human hair in games is quite different to animal/creature fur, the hair package will be quite different and more oriented towards the "flakes* technique.

However it will be similar to xfur in the sense that, by the time it's done, I'm hoping to provide with it most of the tools people would need to make and style the hair and hopefully some solution for long hair and it's physics along the way

I hope this helps!

 

Hi there!
First of all thanks for your work, a really amazing shaders pack!

I have an issue when using the deferred rendering path (on unity 2018.1.4f1)
My char has 5 skin materials (it comes from Daz3d) and I set the light, translucency color and the smoothness for all of them inside the Skin Shader Manager.
But It seems that the translucency color is not updated with the light direction, and sometimes it glitches, I made a little scene with a sun, you can check a video here: http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=01440255995950018865
I also edited the Skin Data Map, everything works fine except the Alpha channel, it doesn't seem to control the Microskin intensity.

Thx

 

Hi there,

Thanks for your kind words, and also thank you very much for purchasing this package

I am sorry to hear about the issue, but don't worry, I will take a look at it and try to reproduce it on my end so I can get back to you ASAP with some more information and if needed a small patch through a PM.

Watching your video I am thinking the main issue is the five materials since the skin manager will update only one material slot on the instance at a time (rather than the original material itself) this is most likely the issue. In the current version, the most probable fix would be to assign one Skin Shader Manager component per material (if your character has 5 materials, that would be 5 components stacked next to each other ). If your character's five materials are indeed different materials with different textures etc, you will need the five skin shader manager components.

If all 5 material slots are sharing the same material and textures however, then please wait as I might be able to provide a better solution through a small patch and send it to you in a PM.

In any case, I'll get back to you with more information ASAP

I hope this helps!

 

The issue reported above was indeed that 5 Skin Shader manager components were required. A new version of the skin shader with better support for micro normals (and the lack of micro normals) will be sent as part of the upcoming update

If you are using several skin materials in the same object as described in the case above, please make sure to have a Skin Shader manager for each one of them stacked next to each other.

In a future patch (probably for the end of July or early August) the need for multiple components will most likely be removed, but for now this is the correct setup to make everything work as intended

Hope this helps anyone else with this issue!

 

A small tease of the new blending modes for the skin decals in blended overlay mode :



And the new additive mode :



Additive mode should be used for sweat, tears, rain effects etc. Currently I am also working on adding more decal slots so we can reach 4 slots total instead of the current 2, but that will come in a later version as it is still early in development

 

New version (which will be sent to store for approval this weekend) also includes improved translucency management for deferred :



As you can see in the ears of the orc model, the translucency method used in deferred has been improved and now works better with lights using shadows

Forward rendering is still the preferred rendering mode, and because of this I am also working on a small fix so people using deferred can force the skin shader to render in forward even while the rest of the game uses deferred

Besides this, a new shader with specular and occlusion inputs that more closely resemble those of Unity has also been included and the new per-instance parameters have been extended from just color and decals to all the textures :


If no Main texture/Normal map or Skin Data map have been assigned, the ones from the original material are read instead. I hope this update will be very useful for all of you!

Remember, it will be sent this weekend so it should go live by next Tuesday/Wednesday !

 

The eye control script is ready and it is fairly easy to use

If you are using the standard eye shader which manages the eye direction through a vector and is in this new version labelled as "Static" you just assign the Eye Shader Manager component to it :



Set the eye motion type to Shader vector motion, and assign either a transform as the target or define a global position, either on its inspector or through script. The script will send the appropriate information to the eye to make it track the target within reasonable limits to avoid deformations. (the UI of the component might be different upon release as I am working on it right now)

Here it is in action :

​

The second eye shader included in this version is designed to be used with third party Eye movement systems. The eye adjust the occlusion parameters themselves rather than the eye direction. To use the eye in this way you assign the Eye Shader Manager component and select Transform Direction Motion as the Eye Motion Type. This time, you will leave the Transform target and Point target slots empty as it will be a third party tool the one that will define the movement (or Unity's own IK system).

The field that you must type in is the original Euler angles, this is, the original "Resting Pose" local rotation of your eyes as placed in the head of your character. This will tell the shader which is the "default" position of the eyes so it can leave the occlusion and other effects static as the eye moves around.

Here is this new shader in action, keeping the occlusion in place as the eye is rotated by hand :

Of course, occlusion can be set to 0 and then all need for the Eye Shader Manager becomes irrelevant while all the other features of the shader stay intact

I hope you will find these updates useful and don't worry, everything will be covered in detail in the documentation, this is just a small tease!

 

New version has just been sent for approval. However, Unity has made changes to our publisher portal and to the submission guidelines so approval may take longer than expected. It should go live next week.

I hope it will be useful for all of you!

 

Version 1.25 of the asset has been approved, with the new eye tracking and eye color component, the improved translucency algorithm and the brand new additive blending mode for decals!

I hope it will be very useful for all of you!

 

Wanted to show some progress with our character and PIDI Skin Shader.

Its still wip but comes along really nice in my opinion. We are very pleased with PIDI Skin and eye shaders.
Now the only thing missing to push this to the next level would be hair shaders

Edit: Improved the eye textures a little:





Regards,
Wurlox

 

It is looking really great!

And the wetness effect is looking very natural (the sound helps quite a lot to make everything fit)...I look forward to seeing it once it is finished!

I am very glad that the shader is working well for you and to hear you are glad with the results, and hopefully the future updates with improved wetness effects and decals/overlays will be very helpful for your project too!

About the hair shader, it is in the works though unfortunately with no ETA yet since there are many smaller tools and side-code that needs to go along with it so I am taking my time to make sure it has as many features as possible right from the start

Again, thank you very much for sharing your work and for supporting my assets. Have a very nice weekend!


EDIT : The eye textures you are using look really awesome! I really like the level of detail in that close up pic you added

 

Thank you. I will post more images once we finished the setup and are satisfied with it

If your hair shader will be as amazing as the skin shader you already have a buyer. Looking forward to that.

Regards,
Wurlox

 

The PIDI PBR Skin + Eye Shader is now available on itch IO with a launch discount of 20%. Get the full asset with the same quality, features and support for only 28 USD!

https://irreverent-software.itch.io/pidi-pbr-skin-eye-shader


This discount will be available until August 31

 

Update to our character using PIDI Skin Shaders:

- Improved skin data map
- Improved specular map
- Improved eye data map

We still get some shadow artifacts due to normals. Once thats fixed it should be close to finished.

Everyone still considering a skin shader should get it while it is on sale

 

The mobile version has support for VR and Wrinkle maps?

 

Hi there,

The mobile versions of this shader do not support wrinkle maps as this is a very expensive technique for a mobile device. 2 mobile specific shaders are provided for mobile, one with micro-skin details, translucency and full normal mapping and another one with simpler vertex-lit surfaces and simple scattering.

However, if your device is powerful enough then you might be able to run one of the low-medium quality desktop shaders which do have support for wrinkle maps (make sure you use one of the non-tesellation enabled shaders and change the #pragma target to 3.0 so it compiles for OpenGLES 3, which is targeted to high-end mobile)

VR is supported by all shaders since they are not screen projection dependent. The mobile shaders are not 100% compatible with deferred rendering since most mobile devices are not capable of deferred rendering itself.

I hope this helps!

 

Update again:

 

I really can't wait to see the full result, those close ups look really great!

 

Hi again,

we have some trouble with the translucency setup. We are getting strange hard seams on different parts of the body where translucency is visible:



We first thought maybe this is caused by an error in our Skin Data Map. However it seems this also occurs on the Orc Model from your test scene:



Also the results when attaching the directional light to the shader look somehow off:



Left without light attached and right with. We are using deferred rendering and it seems like this still got some issues or are we doing anything wrong here? Would be a shame if we couldn't use translucency with this great shader.

Thanks and regards,
Wurlox

 

Hi there,

I'll look into it right now to see the cause of the issue and open a PM conversation so we can keep track of the support request more easily than here on the main thread

I don't expect this to take too long (it looks like a normals related issue on the approximated translucency I'm using for deferred), so I'll contact you with some more information ASAP.

Hope this helps!

 

Version 1.25 will be sent for approval this weekend to be released next week. Its main new feature is a highly improved translucency algorithm for deferred that matches much more closely the results from real translucency that you can see in forward rendering :

Real translucency (forward) without shadows



Approximated translucency (deferred) without shadows :




Real translucency (forward) with shadows enabled :



Approximated translucency + approximated shadowing (deferred) with shadows enabled :




As well as a highly improved approximated scattering for deferred :



Again, this update will be available next week for the Asset Store and the Itch.IO store!

Remember that you can get this asset on the Itch.IO store with a 20% off (just 28 dollars) as long as you buy it before August 31

Updates are given at the same time (sometimes a little earlier on Itch.IO since that store does not require approval) and support is provided the same here on the forums, on my support email, through the support forms on my website, on the product's page on itch.IO etc. regardless of if you purchased this tool on the Asset Store or on Itch IO

I hope this update will be helpful for all of you!

 

Your images link seem to be broken.

 

That might be a browser specific issue (though I don't know why) since they are visible both on my phone and PC

But thanks for the heads up, I will check on another PC to test it and fix it!

 

Thank you very much for the heads up, I couldn't see it on another PC either, so I re-added the images and re-sent the comment and that seems to have done the trick. Hopefully the images are visible now

Thanks again for your comment!

 

And the new update with the brand new translucency and scattering methods for deferred is UP!

I hope it will be helpful!

 

To celebrate Halloween, PIDI PBR Skin Shader will have a 25% off on ItchIO through October 30 and 31. Get it now for only $26.25 USD!

https://itch.io/s/13768/halloween-special

 

Is this asset still in active development? I guess this is the only one with dynamic wrinkle maps which i was looking for

 

Hi there, and thank you for your interest in this tool.

This tool is in active support and with a few updates planned for next year. The documentation explains in depth how to create the wrinkle maps and control their transitions through blendshapes or bone poses, so it should be helpful

There's no support for automatic wrinkle blending though, it's based on user defined poses and blendshapes.

For support, you can always contact us through email or this forum (though we'll leave for the holidays from December 15 to January 7).

I hope this helps, but please ask any other questions you may have

 

thank you for answer. what do you mean automatic blending? It blends imported different normal + ao maps with predefined gestures right? (i already have facial animations via blendshapes) like in blacksmith wrinkle maps?

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/the-blacksmith-wrinkle-maps-39924


also is it possible to use this with another parts of body? like muscles of body (with your shaders).


if it is, i also would like to combine this with another shader (uber) for clothes. body is ok because it will use your shaders but for clothes with uber shader do you think integration would be easy?
(not necessary but it would be good)
like in this video:

if we work with 4k maps for face, would it kill performance?

and one last question: dll or source code?

thank you. this asset is really underrated. i think its because you used an orc. you really should use a realistic looking human instead.

 

Hi again,

Thanks for your kind words and for the suggestion about a new demo mesh, that is already in the plans for 2019
Though in this thread there is plenty of demonstration videos with multiple meshes and I plan to use videos from my own game as demonstrations too (though that will need to wait till after the holidays).

About your questions :

- I do not know how the wrinkle solution works on the Blacksmith demo, sorry. It may well be a tension maps approach which is a DX11 level feature. In this case, you compute a tension map based on the distortion on the edges of the mesh and based on that you blend the different normalmaps. This method requires little to no setup since everything is computed in real-time. I believe that's what you see on the video.
- Our solution is NOT like this (at least not at the moment, this may or may not change in 2019 after more updates). Our skin shader has been designed to support wrinkle maps even on very old, DX9-Shader Model 3 level hardware and thus there are no real-time calculations. The wrinkle maps, instead, are stored in a single normalmap along with the standard normals (a tool is provided to combine these maps inside the Unity Editor). Using a small texture map that contains several "regions" you define which zones of your mesh can get wrinkles. Up to 12 different regions per-material (and each one of them with a left/right side definition) can be specified to the shader. Finally, with the included UI, you can define which blendshapes affect which wrinkle regions and how much (or which bone poses). Once you have done this, your character can be animated either procedurally, through the Unity animation editor or in any third party software and our tool will dynamically blend the wrinkles in and out based on all the parameters and poses you defined. Think of these poses as advanced snapshots.
-The wrinkles system is deeply integrated to the skin shader itself, so it wouldn't be too easy to port to other shaders. The included shaders might be a good starting point to roll your own systems compatible with UBER, though. Clothes usually use Anisotropic Specularity, which is not available on this shader. Using a skin shader for clothes may not give you great results especially on shiny materials.
- Full source code for the tool, editors, extensions and shaders is included.
- I have tested it with 4k textures on my own game (on a GTX1050 card, laptop) without any noticeable performance drop other than the one you can attribute to the 4k textures themselves, as with any other shader. These shaders are not much more expensive to render than the standard shader (depending of course, on how many features you use)

I hope this helps to make things clearer and thank you again for your interest in our tool and your suggestions

 

Hi!

I just bought the package and started to play with it. I'm painting new textures for my PBR character and then i'm gonna paint some realistic wrinkles. But first i have some issues.

1. Are you going to improve deferred translucency? Because it still looks unnatural compared to forward one. Forward is ok but my whole project is Deferred :/

2. "Decal texture offset" and an "option for tiling on/off" would be really good. Because sometimes character's uv has body and head together. So it becomes hard to position decals.

3. This one is important. It looks like wrinkle blending is not smooth, especially when glossiness increase. If the material is shiny, it's draws more attention. It's like not blending, just changing one state to another instantly or doesnt respond to light fast enough i dont know. Maybe i'm wrong. To show this i speed up your orc animation and looped. Here you can see better:

I'm gonna create something really beautiful and realistic, i'll share the result in 1-2 weeks but these issues are worries me This asset looks very promising and with some effort it will become greater. Thank you!

 

Hi there,

We're leaving today due to the holidays and will come back on January 7, but I'll try to answer these questions now :

- Real translucency on deferred is impossible if you don't modify the whole deferred pipeline, like Uber does. In this case, while there will be a few updates and improvements coming to it next year, if you need real translucency in deferred then integrating the shader to the Uber pipeline would be the best option.
- We'll look into this, giving more options for overlays projection (since they act like overlays rather than real decals)
- This might be a bug but I'll need to check more carefully once we're back at work. However, after checking it on my end with the blendshapes method (the orc is bone based) I don't see this issue popping up, the transition is smooth. If you will use blendshapes you won't experience this issue. Again, I'll check more in depth as soon as we come back from the holidays season.

Thanks for your purchase and your support to this tool as well as for your feedback, I'll take all of it into account to keep improving the tool

Have a good day and a great holiday season!