Photorealistic skin?

Hmmm... I'm not a skin creator so can you please tell me how is photorealistic skin and a normal skin done? How can photorealistic skins incorporate your RL face? Does it need manual tweaking or just plaster your RL face on Photoshop and it's all done? Please enlighten me all about this type of skin. I'm actually using a photorealistic skin and I prefer them over the common (not newbie) SL skin and now wondering how they are done. ^_^

Photoreal skins are created from photographs. The techniques used are quite different from painted skins. Usually people license photos from places that create sets of photos specifically for use by 3d texture artists, or they shoot their own. You need photos that show all parts of the body in fairly high resolution with nice even lighting and minimal shadows. The photos are carefully fit to the avatar templates using one or more of several viable techniques, like using morphing software, liquify or smart objects in photoshop, custom uv mapping and texture baking in a 3d app, and so on. Once fit to the templates they're all blended together using over-painting and cloning to create a finished skin. It can be far more work intensive than doing a hand painted skin, and there are a couple of notable downsides - the biggest being that if you don't shoot your own source photos there's only one primary place that everyone licenses photos from so your skins may end up looking very similar to ones already offered by many other skin makers.

Well, it's maybe a bit more complicated than simply "plastering your RL face on photoshop" as you put it, but that is the gist of it. You need to get a photo of your face to line up properly with the avatar UV map.

It's always interesting to see what people mean when they say a "photorealistic" skin. Clearly, none of the skins are truly photorealistic in that they do not look like photographs. At least to my eye, most of the skins out there that claim "photorealistic" don't even make the attempt, it's simply marketing speak.

Oh, and I'm going to need to disagree with Chip. A Photorealistic skin does not need to be photo-sourced. That is simply one way to obtain a reasonably realistic result.

I would agree with this, for the most part. I think the term "Photo-sourced" is what best describes the techniques, of which there are photo-morphing (a term coined by Pacific Data Images), photo-projection, and photo-compositing. One or all of these techniques are usually employed to create a contiguous skin texture for a 3D model from multiple photographs of one or more live models. These effects are well within the reach of hand painting too, and hand painting is probably used quite a bit along side all these techniques to fine tune problem areas.

Even the very best realistic looking skins in SL fall short of looking photorealistic because of the low poly models, the low resolution textures, and the less than satisfactory rendering (compared to what we are used to seeing in other computer modeling). It is simply beyond the reach of SL's laws of physics at this point to create a skin that rivals a live model. It's like asking anyone in RL to breach the light speed limit.

Chip has been using the term "Photoskin" from day one to describe the look of his skins. He should probably put a little TM next to it .

hehe, or I should ditch the term altogether because it's probably not helping my search ranking any.