[meta] Body Deluxe released & making of skin (Patreon)

I have unveiled [meta] Body Deluxe, which integrates [meta] Body Skin and body related content released so far, and adds some new items into one package.

Download Link：
[meta] Body Deluxe ver1.07  

09.05.2020 --- ver1.07 update 

Please read the included Readme before installation.
LRE+IBL or 4K Diffuse environment is required for installation.

Contents Info:

[meta] Body Deluxe includes the following content:

• Detail map (zara), Normal map (Bump) Specular map, AO map for basic body are all updated.
• 5 Body Skin
• 5 Body Detail
• 12 Nipples
• 2 Veins Tattoo 
• 3 Sunburn
• 10 Pubic hair (Supports both SBX and GCHAOS mesh)
• 6 Pubic mesh hair items for studioNEO
• 7 Liquids and 4 Sweat that can be worn on gloves, pantyhose and socks.
• Further improved basic head Details map (zara), AO map and Specular map.
• Mesh data with improved body / head boundaries (Provided by KoramaAnte)

-- This article can be difficult to read because there are still machine translations in some parts. --

Skins 01-04 have been modified & updated from what was included in the [meta] Body Skin and a new Skin05 has been added.

The HS basic body details, bumps, specular, etc. are all new, and I think they look better than the previous skins.

12 variations of nipples are included. They range general from to slightly unusual.

Veins and Sunburn maps are available for the same tattoo and tanning categories.

There are 5 types of Body detail, including those for THICC type and those with veins popping up, and those that can control the strength of Basic Skin detail and bump.

pubic hair includes 8 types of texture types that can be selected by the character maker and 6 types of mesh types that can be used as studio items.

These can be used together to create a realistic pubic hair. Sample scene data is also included, so you can use it as a reference.

[meta] Liquid items are also included, with updates & new additions.

only Sweat 02 is a seamless map, so you'll be able to represent unique water droplets of sweat.

[meta] Body Deluxe changes not only body but also basic face materia.
I spent a lot of time adjusting the specular, so the balance between lip gloss and skin luster looks great.

Explanation and Example

My recommendation for skin settings is to minimize the luster Intensity. As I raise this value, the texture becomes closer to that of metal, so I usually keep it around 5-10.
If this value is high, it will cause metallic shading when lit with Studio NEO, increasing the difficulty of lighting.

When the Skin shine slider is maximized, the specular map effect is maximized. Only when you want more luster than this, activate BodySlider (Plugin) to increase softness. At a value of 200, the specular map effect is no longer relevant and everything will be shiny.
By using IBL Reflection in this state, it is possible to reflect cubemaps on the skin.

The specular map of the new face has been adjusted to make the lip more glossy. Move the slider of Skin shine to the right a little to make the lip appear shiny, and if you make it stronger, the lower eyelid will appear shiny.
From around the center of the slider, the gloss is emphasized centering on the T zone.

Body Detail 04 and 05 can control Detail and Bump of the basic body.
If you set the slider to around -30 as in the image above, the skin details will completely disappear.

If you want to emphasize your hips, use 05 to adjust the slider.

After the last release of [meta] Body Skin, I received a lot of reports that the position of the  pubic hair was laterally displaced.
This was due to a user having installed a mod called [GCHAOS] Pubic Hair in the past.

This [meta] Body Deluxe uses this GCHAOS mesh as a basic specification. Both are natively supported, so if the pubic hair position does not match after installation, please install the additional data of optinal Files by overwriting.

Since the mesh version  pubic hair is made of a fine mesh,jaggy may occur due to insufficient screen resolution when the camera is zoomed out.
IBL users can work around this issue. If you use IBL's SMAA and set it like the above image, it will be improved, so please try it.

 EXAMPLE 

Body detail 03 is a design that makes the new blood vessel tattoo map look three-dimensional.

Body detail 01 will match skin Body 03.

Sweat can use the same thing in the glove, pantyhose and sock categories, so different types of It is possible to use things in layers.

If you want to reduce the amount of sweat, use the Renderer Editor to control the Cutoff value.

In addition, only Sweat02 has a seamless map, so you can adjust the size of water droplets by changing the number of X and Y repeats of the texture in Renderer Editor.

Sunburn is ideal for partially changing skin brightness.

I think that there are various other combinations, so please give it a try.

By the way, when you load the data that you made up the characters in the main game into StudioNEO, you'll be able to see the following. Have you ever felt like you have a different impression of something? If that's what you're feeling, then do your character makeup in StudioNEO whenever possible. I recommend that you do this. (If you're a frequent user of StudionNEO, not the main game.)

As you can see from the image above, I always use Studio NEO's Body Slide to create my character. I only fire up the main game when I'm thinking about coordinating my accessories and outfits.

The important thing is to make the character in the scene you use often.

BodySlider can't edit only Tattoo items for some reason, but this is solved by installing the hsClothingmenu plugin.

--- The mods supported by [meta]Body Deluxe are SBX2.5e, [GCHAOS] Pubic Hair Package, [nyaacho & honey D] LRE Skin, and [Joan] 4K Diffuse & LRE+IBL. I may not be able to deal with problems that occur when using mods other than these. ---

making of Body Deluxe

A year ago, when I made the [meta] Body Skin, I realized again that the most basic expression of the beauty of a material is not the material itself, but the shader and lighting that draws it.
This law is the basic principle of 3DCG, and it was a result that clearly appeared in HS, which can only express graphics in the previous generation.

If I were making a PlayHome Skin that incorporated physics shaders, I would have kept trying.
But in HS, I felt that no matter how hard I made textures and materials, I would never reach my ideal.

So I stopped thinking about skin expressions in HS.
After that, I became interested in creating high-end 3DCG characters and learned a lot about the current trend of skin shaders.

And how do I downconvert these technologies to low-end graphics? I became interested in that.

References Links:
Siren Real-Time Performance | Project Spotlight | Unreal Engine 

The technology for real-time rendering in the high-end realm has evolved rapidly over the past few years, and It's eroding the pre-rendering realm at a tremendous rate. When you see what's happening there every day, the evolution of graphics representation from HS1 to HS2 is no longer the case. It's only a small amount.

However, many artists only focus on the pursuit of photorealism as if they were replicating the real world, and from the perspective of fields that have developed as art such as painting and photographic art, the expression power of CG is It's like a newborn baby.

That aside, Let’s get back on track.
I have found that the minimum requirements for skin expression are the following elements.

The skin shaders used in the high end have more complicated nodes and can be adjusted flexibly, but if you simply arrange the texture maps, you will roughly be divided into such elements.

After actually making all of these myself and understanding what each one does, I started to look into down-converting to HS.

Needless to say, the most important thing for skin shaders is SSS (Subsurface Scattering).
And in the process of searching, I found a clue that maybe SSS could be expressed in HS.

I will explain the results later, but I started by creating new skin.

I created the base textures in Substance Painter and spent most of my time painting in Photoshop and modifying them with Quick Edit of Blender .

At this stage, we first aim to finish the appearance based on physical rendering, and then proceed to the step of down converting.
Down-convert is to adjust for the changes that occur when you import a texture into HS.

For example, Diffuse textures are mixed and rendered with a user-chosen color picker, which loses 50% of the information. The texture will be created by assuming some such changes. 

I decided to pseudo-represent elements that are not supported by HS by baking them into the texture.

I made many variations of specular maps and repeated trial and error.
I thought about distributing it after completion, and finally adjusted it so that it could be used for general purposes.

Regarding the production of the nipple, I first completed it by sculpting modeling, and made it by baking it to the original mesh. However, this was an inefficient way to add variety, so I ended up importing the photo material and We have switched to production by painting.

The reason there are 12 different types is because I have 12 of my own HS characters. I had already imagined a nipple design that suits each character, so the work proceeded quickly.

Video Links:
https://thcf6.redgifs.com/CelebratedMistyAmericanredsquirrel.webm 

I also radically reworked the face-related design. I especially focused on the expression of the lips.

I used Blender, first subdivided the mesh 7 times with the Multiresolution modifier, imported the heightmap I created in Photoshop, and specified it as the display modifier.
This is the state on the far right that was completed by sculpting this on the base. 

The advantage of a non-destructive workflow with the Blender modifier is that you can always return to this initial state from this state.

In addition to the nipples and lips, I used the above workflow to create these body parts as well.

This work was also a practice for sculpting modeling for me, so I dared to sculpt things that would normally end up in 2D paint.

I decided to redesign the veins map as well. The previous Kekkan Tattoo was made from random photos of lightning bolts. I decided to incorporate the actual human anatomy into the study.

I bought some model data for anatomy for this purpose, but it was a good investment for me because I was able to learn not only blood vessels but also muscle structure.

Regarding the essential SSS, I found from the information of HP that Joan's HS Standard Plugin actually has an SSS function called Dedicated Skin Shader.

DedicatedSkinShader = uses the dedicated shader that has SSS (SubSurface Scattering). If you want this to work, you need compatible skins (aka skins that have a "Thickness" map in the alpha channel of their Albedo texture where Opaque = thick and Transparent = thin).

The HS Standard draws beautifully on the surface and shading, but I didn't use it until now because the edges seemed strange when the lighting was backlit. But if this SSS really works, I started to consider switching to HS Standard.

For SSS texture, Invert the Thickness map output by Substance Painter to correct the thickness of the paint. Place this texture in the alpha channel of the Diffuse texture. After that, as described on HP, this function can be used by modifying modprefs.ini.

Video Links:
https://thcf2.redgifs.com/ParchedGlamorousAsiandamselfly.webm 

Now, here is the result of implementing SSS. If you know SSS in 3DCG, it's obvious what's wrong with this.

Although it emitted light as specified in the SSS map, I could not confirm the subcutaneous scatter in the core.(The surface of human skin is actually translucent, and light enters the inside of the skin once, reflects and scatters many times inside, and then goes out.)

So unfortunately this was not the SSS I expected. However, maybe I just don't understand this function and some people may be able to use it well, so I left this map for SSS installed in the distributed data. (LRE version only)

Video Links:
https://thcf3.redgifs.com/LivelyElegantCondor.webm 

This is an experimental video showing the animation of sweat by moving the Sweat texture with the Timeline plugin.

It may seem to work at first glance, but due to the specifications of the UV map, there was a fatal defect that sweat on the arm moved laterally instead of vertically, so I gave up because it was unusable.

Well, in the end the SSS was never implemented and again I never reached my ideal, but instead I tried to include as much content as possible in [meta] Body Deluxe and improve its quality.

There are various things that could not be included this time.
However, at this point I had already far exceeded the time I could spend on it, so I decided to give up working on the unfinished data.

[meta] Body Deluxe is the most time consuming piece of content I've ever spent on. I'm glad that we were able to make this public for the time being.
And I hope this content helps you.

Thank you for reading it until the very end.