Skin Making Toolkit

Hey , I am currently making some skins in Photoshop CS3 but I wondered what other tools are needed to make very high quality skins (aside from time , patience and effort of course).
I have heard of the term 'texture baking' using Maya and wondered what implications this would have for skin making.
If I create skins in Photoshop , can I view them in Maya on a 3D Mesh model and view how the skin 'stretches out' and perhaps play with the lighting to see how it looks under different environments , is this helpful to skin makers?

I appreciate all your help.

That depends on your definition of "need". You can certainly do the whole job from start to finish using just Photoshop, so in that sense, you don't really "need" anything else. But other programs can certainly be helpful.

I'm sure lots of skin makers will chime in to pitch their favorite tools. You'll find that in addition to 2D paint programs like Photoshop, 2.5D and 3D painters like Zbrush and Deep Paint 3D are quite popular.

Maya has built-in 3D painting tools, as you probably know, but they're not that great. I really wish they'd get around to improving them. They've been the same for at least five years now. I wouldn't recommend them for trying to make realistic skins. You can, however, make great looking skin procedurally in Maya, if you know what you're doing.


Basically, to bake a texture means to use a 3D modeling/rendering program to create a texture that has the look of lighting, shading, and/or other effects, painted right into it. Instead of rendering a still image or a video clip, you render a texture. Maya's a great choice for this, but there are countless other programs that can do it as well.

For skins, as well as for all other textures, this can be extremely beneficial. There is one catch, though, where the lighting of skins is concerned. The avatar mesh is of fairly poor quality. You need to clean it up quite a bit, and reshape it some (without messing up the UV map), if you want it to get really good bake out of it. Otherwise, the lighting and shading will be in accordance with the default shape, which won't necessarily be terrible, but won't be very good either.

The subject of how best to optimize the mesh is a large one. To have an intelligent discussion about it, all participants must be reasonably well versed in the basics of poly modeling, UV's, lighting, and rendering. It would be great to have a thread on it some time, but I think the topic is probably bigger than what you wanted to talk about here. (Plus, it's been a long day, and I'm just too tired to get into it right now. But maybe someone else will have more energy.)

Avatar-specific quirks aside, baking itself is no small subject. In order to do it well, you'll need to know how to create and manage shader networks, you'll need some experience with making both raster-based and procedural textures, you'll need to know what you're doing with lighting, and you'll need to know your way around your rendering software of choice.

If Maya is what you've got, then before I go any further, I should mention that everything I'm about to say is only fully relevant if you have a licensed copy of the program. If you have the free Personal Learning Edition, it's not going to be useful for baking. PLE watermarks all renderings, including texture bakes. You can certainly use it to learn the how-to's of baking, but all your textures will end up with the watermark on them. For un-watermaked results, you'll need a commercial version of Maya.

For Maya, the best renderer available for baking is Turtle. It's actually the only renderer on the market specifically designed for baking, and it's very, very good at it.

But if you don't want to spend $1400 on a renderer in addition to the $2000 you already spend on Maya (assuming you have a licensed copy), then Mental Ray is the way to go. Don't use the Maya Software renderer. It's not very good at this sort of thing. Be forewarned, it's kind of a pain to set up Mental Ray the right way, but once you've got all the T's crossed and the i's dotted, you can get great results with it. It just takes patience and dedication.

One of the primary advantages of Turtle is that it puts everything you need all in one place. With Mental Ray, you need to hunt in a lot of different locations to get everything set the way you need it.

This tutorial offers a pretty good start, if Mental ray is what you'll be using: http://fromthehill.nl/tutorials/bake/index.html. I don't really like the way the author suggests lighting the scene, but from a "what buttons to press" standpoint, he's got the bases covered.

If you plan on getting Turtle, the maker's website (illuminatelabs.com) is loaded with good tutorials.


Sure, you can definitely do that. It can be very helpful.

You might also want to consider upgrading your Photoshop to the extended version, which allows you to preview your textures on the models, right inside Photoshop. It's well worth the extra cost, if you've got the money. It saves a ton of time.

Texture baking isn't particularly useful for skin making, for a couple of reasons. As Chosen pointed out, the avatar model lacks anatomical detail. There's no musculature or bone structure to influence highlights and shadows so to get them looking realistic takes as much effort as if you just painted them by hand.

Second, skin doesn't react to light the way a solid material does. Light penetrates and scatters through the top layers of skin. Highlights and shadows generated by a solid material will make a baked skin look like plastic, or ceramic, or wood, depending on the material properties, but it won't really look like skin. Modern renderers can simulate the way light penetrates materials like skin, wax, and similar translucent materials, using a technique called subsurface scattering, but it's an effect that's camera dependent - meaning it's calculations depend on there being a single specific vantage point. Such techniques don't work when doing texture baking (depending on the renderer), or they're calculated based on a specific camera or active viewport. You'd need to do many different render passes and then blend them together to get something that would look realistic from all angles.

Generally speaking it isn't worth the trouble. You can get much better results much faster just painting shadows and specular highlights.

Thank you both Chosen and Chip Midnight , your replies were very insightful and interesting , I will definetly take on board the suggestions you made , thank you very much!