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vasilnatalie — General purpose skin shader
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#effect #mmd #shader #mikumikudance
Published: 2016-11-05 14:14:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 3516; Favourites: 75; Downloads: 55
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Description
ArchMageXeno was asking about a general purpose skin shader like the one I used for 0401Bliss. I don't recommend it, but I was able to throw it together very easily, so I did. It took more time to compose that demo pic. (Which uses Murabito124 's exceedingly lovely Haku Bikini B.)Demonstrated in the pic are some of the artifacts you can run into. Notice the stripe on the right? That's a UV seam, where the adjoining islands are at different scales. You're going to see stuff like that.
The other issue is color. This shader does gamma-corrected lighting. But most modellers aren't building textures for gamma-corrected lighting. That leads to a weird, hard-to-define quality. (It's actually easy to define, it's levels, but if you don't already know that, it's hard to put your finger on the difference. The major difference in the 0401bliss hair that makes it stand out from the rest of the model is that the other stuff is gamma corrected, while the gamma on the hair is, purposefully but maybe unwisely, out-of-whack in terms of gamma.)
This shader uses the base texture of the model to give relative agreement in color, but ignores the specular, toon, and sphere of the model. Too many modellers use a black specular, just because way back when, that's what Animasa did for a very, very toony model, and almost everybody just copies somebody else whenever they don't understand something. (Instead of reading about it or experimenting with values.) You need some specular to get some shine.
Oh, and it's Excellent Shadow ready.
www.mediafire.com/file/dfgbc7d…
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Comments: 18
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I thought you seemed familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it until now. It's your communication style. I have read that article but before stumbling onto you here. I've been reading a lot of stuff over there so I'm sure I've read more of yours than just that one. I don't think I would have made the connection if I hadn't come across this.
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Yeah, probably not a lot of people that talk like me 
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It's more complicated than that. Everyone speaks/writes with their own cadence and rhythm. Word choice patterns play a role in that too. There's more involved, but writers call this collection of traits "the writer's voice" and there's a bit of an obsession in understanding it, developing it, and ultimately protecting it as an author. It's what brands you and makes you distinct from everyone else that's also publishing alongside you.
Passive sentences aren't grammatically incorrect, but get flagged because someone made it a writing style rule. The truth is, those style rules mostly apply to the individual that survived the publication process and thus created the rule. Like Stephen King and adverbs being the devil. So if it works for you and your readers understand it, then it's not broken and doesn't need to be fixed. But take my thoughts on the matter with a grain of salt: I've only published a few newspaper articles back in the day. Doesn't make me an authority on writing.
What I'm trying to say is, don't put your voice down because it's easy on the eyes to read. This is coming from someone used to reading legal documents and research papers - probably the two most convoluted writing formats out there. So it's refreshing to me to read something instructional that uses a conversational tone. To me it makes it easier to understand. This is something that makes you stand out and based on the comments I've been reading, I'd say I'm not the only person that feels that way.
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> So if it works for you and your readers understand it, then it's not broken and doesn't need to be fixed
Yeah, I agree in principle, but in that particular case, Wordpress is right. My writing's better with fewer instances of the passive voice. And yes, I have to keep an eye on my parentheticals, and my qualifiers I think, and my Oxford commas. Not because Strunk & White say so, but just because I like my writing better like that. Other stuff is fine, run-on sentences have their place, zero problems with implied clauses
>What I'm trying to say is, don't put your voice down because it's easy on the eyes to read.
Oh, I'm not putting it down, and I take it as high praise if it's easy on the eyes. I think I spent the first part of my life trying to write as if I was a smart professional type, and the second half trying to forget all that because it led to unnecessarily cumbersome writing. The point is communication, you know? It sounds as if you like my voice and that's definitely something I care about, thanks.
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I hadn't intended for it to come across as a critique, but in retrospect I suppose it was. But yes, I do like it. As I said before, it's easy to read and understand. And you're right, it is all about effective communication. I hadn't intended to sound like "oh just ignore the passive voice rule" but rather meant that it has a place. Too often I come across those who think it must be obliterated at all costs and I cringe inside. Rules are there for a reason, but shouldn't be followed blindly.
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No, you sounded great. And I agree with all that too. I like looking up the right plurals but I'm way past telling anybody else how to pluralize
In college I was a writing tutor. Most of the job was ESL, where I figured my job was to engage in conversation as much as to help with their writing-- which is good, because they were 30-min sessions and I saw a lot of eyes glaze over at the fifteen minute mark, so then I get to learn about Mongolia or Taiwan or what sushi is like in Japan, that kind of stuff. Sometimes they'd ask why a rule was like it was, why we said things this way in one circumstance and that way in another, and usually I couldn't answer, couldn't even figure it out when looking it up later. Just because I guess. If it's too hard to remember, don't sweat it. If you don't use articles right, we'll notice, but we'll know what you mean.
There were plenty of native speakers, though. Community college, so it's not like everybody was top 10% of graduating class. (Some were.) With native speakers, the job amounted to reading what they wrote, saying, "Hmm, I don't really understand what you're saying here. Can you explain?" And they'd explain, perfectly well, much better than they did in their writing, and then they'd ask how they should say that in their paper, and I'd tell them, "You just said it great. Write it like you said it." And maybe we'd go over exactly what was said so they could write it down, and maybe we'd even get to condensing it and making it sound fancy, but not usually. Pretty good work, even considering it was for minimum wage.
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Well that explains why your writer's voice is solid.
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Nursing. Just lucked into that as work-study.
Tutoring was probably a better job than nursing, even if it paid a fraction. I'd do that again in a second.
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So I have found that it works ok on some models. It looks good on Nari's Teto and Kai's Teto models. It really does show you the flaws in some models bodies where the textures overlap or were vertical joined in a lazy manor. Could be a great editing tool for refining models. Some models really don't play well with it, LAT models really hate it, lol. It is a very nice effect tho! Thanks!
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Glad it's useful to you! Yeah, it's something where it wouldn't really be worth the headache with a lot of people not understanding why it wasn't working right. And I think you can see one of the reasons why I like to join models and effects. Knowing how to do one thing really interacts with knowing how to do the other.
You don't really need a tool like this to see problems with UV mapping, though. Most modellers make UV maps that are acceptable for how they expect their models to be used. With most MMD effects, this is just fine. If effects like this one were more common, modellers would pay more attention to their texture mapping.
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The real problem is that a lot of models are created from a Franken base model. Where someone took TDA Miku and striped her clothes then took parts from another model to fill the gaps. Sometimes they have to stretch the parts to fit by moving verticals around. I bet this messes with the UV mapping you mentioned. Probably why some models have that ring around their limbs and torso with this .fx.
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That can mess with UV mapping. But those rings are natural lines for seaming textures. The way that most MMD modellers UV map is via projection mapping, sometimes with some manual editing afterwards. This is fine for the kinds of textures that most MMD models have. When you're using these kinds of flat, cartoonish textures, you don't need a lot of detail, and you don't need to worry about seams. So what people worried about -- particularly ten years ago-- is good use of texture space. In the default pose, when you projection map a model, the limbs stick out and you end up wasting a lot of space. If you cut the limbs off, you create seams, but you can then rotate those limbs around in your UV map to make a much more compact texture. The problem with this is that PMXE and MMD don't really support seamed textures. You have to double up your vertices at these seams. That creates problems with the calculation of normals, which relies on adjacent vertices to determine which direction a face is pointing. So these vertices are often then merged, to simplify the management of normals. That means that the faces including those joined vertices now spread out across the texture. Again, not a problem, so long as you're using really cartoonish textures-- nobody will ever notice.
One of the things to keep in mind is that there's not really any perfect way to generate UV maps. There are a number of goals, and they're often at odds. In addition, it's my understanding that some popular modelling programs make UV mapping more of a chore than it really ought to be. There's no such thing as a perfect model. You can work on a single model your entire lifetime if you feel like it. Part of the trick is keeping focus on what matters for your particular model, and not wasting a lot of time on stuff that doesn't matter that much.
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I think I understood most of that. I really need to look into UV mapping and how it works. I got my hands on blender since its free. Watching tutorials on how it works when I can. If you have any Tutorials that you recommend, please send them my way. I like doing this stuff. It's fun and doesn't really cost me anything but time.
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Yeah, it's fun
I've written several tutorials on learnmmd.com related to blender that are aimed at somebody just transitioning from PMXE to Blender. You might find any of them useful. It's hard to recommend tutorials blind, because it really depends on where you're at. There's years of learning here-- and by the time you're done with that, there'll be something new to learn.
Taking an existing MMD model and remapping it might be interesting to you, now that you have some reason to understand why you might want to. I've actually written a tutorial regarding exactly that process at learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.co… . I think that it should be accessible to you, if you've started playing with Blender at all.
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I'll take a look around on there then! Thanks!
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