I spent all tonight working on my favorite thing ever, making skin look like skin XD, and after delving into nifskopes (as far as i can tell) unused functions, ive come up with the following nifskope screenshots

[IMG]http://i44.tinypic.com/344z81g.jpg[/IMG]


This also gives way to a means of using Ao, not SSao, but OSAO, or object space ambient occlusion, and since it uses a texture, it is much more viable for gaming XD.

okay, I dont know much about what you are talking about....


but that looks awesome

What he said. ^

That is very good. Looks almost real.

ooh ... nice ! Do tell how you pulled it off. Are those all those [changes] texture modifications ?Or are you applying your shader on the model ?

Well, all I really did was take my edited textures, as well as a new one called skin_d (which was used as a detail map, for OSAO) apply them to the model, and than take my knowledge of the body and its different colors and where they are, aka muscle(ambient color) is red, fatty tissues and cartiledge(diffuse color) are generally yellow, than to offset the warm reddish ambient tone, i went in with a blue-ish specular to create a more whitish specular (red plus blue equals whitish).

Thats pretty much it, also remember, the specularity of skin and the way light bounces off of it, cause it to "glow in the dark" as long as there is a light source around, so i upped the emissive to a very tiny amount.


P.s. will be back later with a body test.

Man, that's amazing!
I wonder how it will look on an actual Npc's head.

Me too, Im afraid too look though, OB doesnt have the best transition from nifskope to ingame if you know what i mean, Im gnna wait till we finish with our radiosity, and see if that looks better.

UPDATE:
After reading up on sss in realtime, I discovered a technique where you access the zbuffer and blur the pixels and overlay them back onto the image to create sss. Now, I cannot script whatsoever, so I took this idea and applied it to the discovery of the nifskope "detail map" which allows you to overlay a second texture to your creature or anything, and it looks great, just takes a bit of fiddling, also, detail maps sadly disable normal maps, however it works quite well on faces because vanilla facial normals arent much too look at.

So... are you saying this could be done on a large scale for the NPCs in the game? If so, would it require a lot of work? Because it does look amazing!

Cheers!

cc

Have you gotten it in-game yet? I'm really excited to see this in action.

Nifskope is opengl and the game is a directx renderer. All the render settings are basically close approximations made by the nifskope devs when they first build the renderer. So in other words- they are completely different! do not bother thinking anything will work in game until you test it. it'll be a mistake.
in the game itself, parts of the renderer can actually be removed from the engine altogether. < there are several features that I know of disabled. and several I have heard that are as well. :shrug:

in the gamebryo material, the detail map is supposed to be a an additional texture. Apparently, it is used on a different UV channel, a mask like texture is used in the slot. It modulates the base diffuse map. midgrey does nothing to the texture, lighter greys will brighten, and towards black will darken the base map.

The dark map is the same thing. but only works backwards from white. ie white does nothing, going darker from there will darken the base map. its supposedly used on things where there is static lighting, and creates a faux AO.
Bummer that the game disables the normal map when you use it tho. it shouldn't- but could be tied into that there are only 2 uv channels. 1 for the texures and 0 for vertex colors. ? something to think about maybe. I have heard multiple uv channels do not export with the niftools, and I have heard that multiple UV channels aren't supported in the engine- but have no verification, and I can't remember who actually said that, it might be worth taking it with a pinch of salt.

iirc, I have only seen 1 person use them in their models> you can use the civ4 plugin to export all this stuff- it is pretty much a version of the official gamebryo plugin, with tweaked export scripts that target the civ4 nif version. and includes a version of the gamebryo material.

edit:oh and bethesda has rewriten the shader code for F3. they use a homebrew one, and all of the detail, dark, and decal maps are not used any longer. So I wouldn't be surprised if those maps don't work right in Ob, as they had already made a crap load of in house changes to the engine by then.

I am only understanding about 1/20 what you are talking about, but enough to know you seem to be well informed.

How is that?

Where are you getting your "Bethesda" info from?

:hehe:

I haven't said anything about bethesda that isn't obvious.

its basically a combination of being informed, spotting the difference, and trial and error. If you look at the tutorials, you can clearly see custom code bethesda has made to the engine and the format.
For example in fallout3, they have many of their own types of nodes, specific to bethesda. they all start with the prefix BS.

their own bethesda shader for example, and do not use the standard gamebryo one. the block is BSShaderPPLightingProperty- which I guess is Besthesda Soft per pixel shader lighting property. in terms of usage- anything with a normal map bascially. and is accompanied by a texture set.
they have changed the nitexturingproperty to use a ...PPNolightingProperty. which is often used on things like effects, particles and anything that won't need a normal map.

and so on.

oh and you can just watch gamebryo tutorials, overviewing what comes in the sdk, how the different tools work, and what does what in the official tool set. :icecream:
and you can clearly see that the civ4 plugin is basically the official tool set for max. though there are only scripts so that you can export civ4 only version nifs. If someone wants to go write a new export script a gamesas dev wants to pass me one...(assuming they even use the official exporter at all)