I'm always looking for ways to improve the SKIN texturing and shading of my character and I think I found something that works just perfectly!

And I'm going to breakdown the shading/procedural part of what I have figured out with you right now!! Let's go!

So after you have textured your character, either using texture paint or vertex paint you might have a node setup that looks similar to this (I'm using a vertex colors in this instance)

That's fine but we can make it look better!

We need to add some variety to that base color.

Mix an ambient occlusion node with the pontiness input of the geometry node, mixing this with the base color will add some 'weight' to it.

Mix them together like this!

Now we can add some imperfection the the surface of the skin if we use a noise texture to control the bump & specularity.

The final shader should look something like this!

But there's more we can do with this shader, like adding freckles, black spots, etc.

While experimenting with what was possible, I came up with this madnesss of a node setup (I hope you can see this node setup from the image)

Here's what it looked like on my character! (zoom in to see the details, uhh! delicious!)

I've been using this SKIN shader as an asset browser material for some months now & it has been very handy for most of my recent projects!

You can grab the material from my gumroad if you don't even want to stress about skin shading for your characters or feel free recreate the node tree above from sractch!

Have a nice day!

Talk soon,
KennysArts | Kenny

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