Hey Everyone

I thought I would start a little thread here to share some Xoliul 2.0 settings that I use, and hope they are useful to someone!

I plan to do a bunch more, and expand upon this current set which is super bare bones.

These are just base settings, sans any textures, and all settings are default except the flat diffuse color, colored spec, half lambert value, shaded hue value and soft reflection adjustments for a rim light.

No sorcery here!

EDIT: I use a dark but saturated red ambient color for pale skin tones (I'm going to play with this a little more over teh coming weeks) and a dark green for the darker skin tones, as it adds that subtle awesome olive feel to the skin.



Next up I'll add some normal and spec stuff with some more breakdowns, and then after that add a diffuse map in there.

Once its all done I might just make some presets and share those, but for now tweak away!

pretty awesome Haz, thanks

Awesome! This will be a huge help since I haven't used Xuliul shader since last version about 1-2 years ago.

Thanks man, I really appreciate everything you do for the community =D

sweet!- thanks for sharing.

Geez Haz where were you when I could have used this yesterday?

On a more serious note, I'm curious about your skin, when you are setting it up for characters do you apply any of these settings to your entire model or separate the skin portions out? I haven't fully been able to figure it out by looking at your stuff yet (though maybe I'm not looking hard enough!)

Thanks for sharing, this is really helpful!

Originally Posted by Alemja

Geez Haz where were you when I could have used this yesterday?

I'm from the future, I'll always be one step ahead!!! :P

Originally Posted by Alemja

On a more serious note, I'm curious about your skin, when you are setting it up for characters do you apply any of these settings to your entire model or separate the skin portions out? I haven't fully been able to figure it out by looking at your stuff yet (though maybe I'm not looking hard enough!)

Yeah all my recent models have the skin broken away, skin is one of those things that its good to have seperate control over to all other materials, you want seperate specularity controls, different level of half lambert for skin than you would metal or leather etc.

I guess its like looking at your artwork in a more cinematic way, recently for personal work, I prefer to break things down into materials and have the freedom to have each material look awesome.

Nice thread. I do a very similar setup to yours. But it never occurred to me to use greens for the darker skintones. I'll have to try that next time.

It would be awesome if there could be a special Skin version of Xoliul with some SSS solution in it. Hopefully mimicking unreal's.

Though unfortunately I can't get Xoliul to work correctly in Max2013, so I stopped using it

thanks for sharing your knowledge Haz. Looking forward to the further breakdowns

This should be on the wiki, I don't know why the wiki is not getting any love.

Hey haz, this is what preset files are for man! Unless you don't want to share those, but people can get a 1-1 copy of your stuff with that.
Anyway, great that you are posting this, I've been hoping for a long time you'd do this Thanks!

Originally Posted by Hazardous

Looks good Haz; I think your dark skin is really weak atm. The specular range on brown skinned peeps (such as maself) is higher. Super dark people are often quite 'shiny' on appearance because of the way taught skin reacts to light.
Example:



I really like a lot of stuff you're doing with the shader, I kinda went for a different approach than you did for my last model:



Once I get a chance I'd love to throw up my settings too and maybe I could borrow some of your ideas to experiment with it.

hey this is pretty helpful, thanks bud

really really awesome del she has so much character.. o.O

Originally Posted by Del

Looks good Haz; I think your dark skin is really weak atm. The specular range on brown skinned peeps (such as maself) is higher. Super dark people are often quite 'shiny' on appearance because of the way taught skin reacts to light.

Yeah this is something we observed while working on UFC. Good looking caucasian skin relies heavily on subsurface redness, but the darker the skin tone gets, the less it relies on subsurface stuff the the more important specularity becomes.

Cool stuff though Haz!

Thanks for the help . . . now if I could just get my xolilul working :P

Glad its useful guys

Xoliul: Presets just dont work for me man - it only saves some of the settings not others. ( will pm you a breakdown ) Plus im old fashioned , get in there and get your hands dirty is always better :P

Del: Thanks bro, good point! Yeah post up some of your settings when you can!

I added a couple more, and tweaked a few values, also dropped a generic head in there to get a better idea than just a sphere.



I'll add some textures to these next!

noticing your going for a blue spec. I keep going round in my head what colour spec on skin should be, currently going for more a yellow but I'm not convinced. Also do you guys consider changing the spec colour depending on the skin type?

This is pretty cool... I wish I could contribute something constructive xD

Originally Posted by Ikosan

noticing your going for a blue spec. I keep going round in my head what colour spec on skin should be, currently going for more a yellow but I'm not convinced. Also do you guys consider changing the spec colour depending on the skin type?

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64286

^- really usefull that, makes sense now although i swear the only time you post on these forums is to prove me wrong :P

Originally Posted by Ikosan

noticing your going for a blue spec. I keep going round in my head what colour spec on skin should be, currently going for more a yellow but I'm not convinced. Also do you guys consider changing the spec colour depending on the skin type?

Good question, my answer is probably quite unscientific in the fact that i tend to always strike a balance between warm and cool, in a rough complimentary/triad palette.

So in the case of skin being generally warm tones, I'll always have a cool fresnel and vice versa for most materials tbh. So often i see warm on warm, and that combination *usually* looks really bad.

Is this realistic ? maybe under some circumstances, but definitely not all, but I think it helps to always try to apply some form of basic color theory to what im working on.

I think those kind of things add that extra dimension to folio pieces and really make them stand above the norm.

The "scientific" reason for blue spec is this:



In my shader, if you use gamma 2.2, that isn't required anymore though. But you can still do it for artistic effect, which is what Haz is doing.

Awesome break down Haz and Xoliul. Pricless info

Wow thanks a lot Xoliul ! This was my 1 million dollar question I never been able to answered until now !
Thanks to Haz aswell, there's some nice info there ;)

thanks for those explanations guys, these posts have been really helpful