MB-Lab
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animate1978
New Realistic Base Mesh & Shader
Preface
A Big issue with MB-Lab is Licensing Concerns of the base mesh that manuel bastioni has created, which splits the license into two separate parts, GPL for the Code and AGPL for assets created, what intend to do is to help bridge this division of licenses and bring forth more realistic characters as well as take advantage of Teto's New Features. I intended to open this up as i started working on it but i didn't want to make an issue of something that wasn't remotely done so I will try and Update things as time goes on.
Base Mesh
For the New Base mesh i sought out free base meshes for use in zbrush and ultimately decided to use Javier Zuccarino free base meshes he published in 2017 on gumroad. Unfortunately only the female body was fully sculpted while he had both male and female heads available. So the solution i found was to sculpt the male body from the female body using multires. The base mesh has about 20K Faces which is slightly more than the original but should have a minimal impact on performance. Both the male and female base meshes have the same faces but they are sculpted to create things like a less arched back, less wide hips and pectoral muscle instead of breasts. The results are far from perfect but that is the reason i chose to use multires and allow changes to be reverted at any time. And things like teeth in the mouth are missing. I feel like facial features are quite extreme.
Male (Matcap)
Female (Matcap)
Shader
The Shader is culmination of more than 2 months of work between me and SopitaFria on MB-Lab's Discord. The Intent was to create a Procedural Skin Shader with lots of Customizability much more than the original Base Mesh's Shader, Most Focus of Development went into a good face shader with the rest of the shaders being based off the one decided for the face mostly due to the fact we wanted a good face shader before moving onto making amazing shaders for the arms, legs and torso, however they are not often updated to have remotely the same amount of features. This Also is the same for Eye Shader which is entirely procedural with no masks but lacks necessary details. We haven't implemented a shader for the Mouth yet however there is existing Uv's and Material for it. But Keep in mind it has no teeth and leaves a lot to be desired
Download
Note: Do not use Optix for Cycles because we use Ambient Occlusion for realism Because the Shader is Procedural with some exceptions, the base meshes are in total less than 50mb: Google Drive
Quick answer about something I read somewhere a while ago (and I didn't think to save the link, sorry). It's related to this topic but not about your work, which is great.
I was of the guys, years ago, who was thinking that the MakeHuman model was too low poly to be really useful for something else that game character (for a game where photorealism is not important). I wanted more vertices/faces. Since then, MB-Lab was released with slightly more polygons. But I was thinking that more is better.
But, I read, somewhere, few months before I started to help here, that in fact models must not have too much polygons, for a good reason. Their behavior in animation. Models don't react well, when you have to deform faces in order to animate them. Shrink, expand or deform faces work better when there is space between vertices.
My remark is just about that : High poly is good but not so much.
I've just watched the new model : it's good, but I think that we can't go further (about faces number).
Updated the Download to Include A Mouth Material and cleaned up the Female Model, Material Wise
@TetoTheSquirrelFox the Number of polygons increased from the original mb-lab base is marginal so it shouldn't matter
I have been following your progress and it does look good. These models, as long as they are licensed properly should be good candidates.
Right now I am testing a toon girl model for the process of adding a new character to MB-Lab, once that gets hammered down well and released this could be the next addition.
The reason for this is not to exclude your work but to go through a testing and development phase, I have been working on the toon girl model for some time, is properly licensed and am halfway finished with development.
The development of this is half Blender side and the other half MB-Lab/Dev side. there is a lot to cover on both to make the models compliant with MB-Lab's code and workflow.
The toon girl development is simple in comparison to development of realistic human models, even though the mesh is well done (at least from what I have seen), the shader work is kind of weird (more on that at a later time)... in all things would need to be worked on for both toon and realistic models.
This is not to say that your work in this has been discounted, it just might take longer for it to be added simply because users of MB-Lab expect things like morphs and expressions, things that are not present in both this and the toon model. Much needs to be done before anything is released to the public as "official" as it may.
i'm fine if it isn't the biggest priority but i would like it to be tackled after the toon model. i'm not perfect with sculpting or material creation and i have laid out what is wrong or missing with various issues which i would like to see fix before anything is done to integrate it. (Ex. Male Anatomy, More Neutral Facial Features and expression, Better Shaders), I was planning to integrate to rigify's meta human rig due to the fact it is easier to pose and and has issues in things like game engines/external tools and is more universal
Updated Lip Color and Color Variation and a marginally improved torso shader, though it needs to be overhauled to have the quality of the face shader just like the arms and legs as well, the eyes should also be tackled at one point or another
Updated Sculpt and Shader, you can transfer the updated shader to the old sculpt if you want, i just wanted to have a more androgynous base mesh so that more gendered features would be handled through morphs
Diffuse
Gloss
No Multires
Updated
Edit: Fixed Oversight with Roughness NodeGroup
Improved Skin Shader, Overhauled Eye shader, and Improved Sculpt.
OK so it may be an issue with my system but the shaders do not compile well for EEVEE, at least not on my end.
They work fine for Cycles though.
Must remember that people expect EEVEE now that it has become a standard for Blender 2.80+...
from my experience on my machine it works with eevee it's just a bug that you sort of have to figure out for me it was messing with group outputs and stuff especially related to normals
Updated Base Mesh, Would like if someone could massive fix the anatomy of this mesh as it's a biggest issue i have with it so far, as for the shader i did some improvements across the board and tried experimenting with Vertex Colors for Dirty AO
But i cannot stress enough that i'd like to see fixes to the anatomy as it bothers me greatly,face also needs some improvements but less so
I also tried to make a Muscular Base Mesh
However the results anatomy wise still leaves a lot to be desired, it's imperative we find a solution for the male base mesh's anatomy. I used Mike Freeman Base mesh and shrinkwrap with vertex groups and used multires to sculpt to normal proportions it would be nice to see a solution to this issues sooner rather than later
so i would probabbly say this is my last revision until the times come for a new shader and base mesh to be actually implemented. i hope this has been useful so far
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14SY6pGT1B2SY0-i6YfXPQVpnoruxkdct/view?usp=sharing
New Mouth Model you can try and replace base mesh's mouth, i just redid the uv's and materials from the current base mesh and shoved into the existing mouth so the results are not that great but it's okay for now Download
Update - (August 15th)
New Approach
So this approach is actually the same as the current mb-lab shader, however it is intended to be more dynamic and to use less maps.
Download Substance Painter File
The Approach is to have 2 Color Maps for Light and Dark Skinned Characters and to interpolate intermediary skin tones
The Image Maps were painted in Substance Painter using a mix of texture maps and smart materials, and AO from High Poly Displacement meshes, this approach is compatible with both Optix and CUDA
Download Substance Painter File
Download Final Blender File
The Shader is basic in terms of customizability but that is to be added as time goes on
Updated Sculpt
Download Sculpt Blender File
Improved Female Sculpt to be more feminine, the eyelids aren't perfect though
Update - (August 28)
Skin Shader Updates
Download Substance Painter File
Download Final Blender File (Exported Textures)
Download Substance Painter File
Sculpt
Reduced Shoulder Muscles to be more congruent with the rest of the body type
Download Sculpt
Demonstration
Wonderful work....I myself was trying to create high res albedo maps in texture paint....I have come wonderful cg artist named chamberasu in sketchfab....He shares his project free..He has made shaders for cloths as well as skin and shares them in patreon...Link https://www.patreon.com/chambersu
Also can you explore luxcore render engine for skin as I feel it creates more realistic look compared to Cycles..
New albedo map in texture paint..
Lux Core skin shading
I am thinking that we should sculpt the models with multires and add details such as pores and wrinkles and bake the diffuse map in exr format.. along with normals and rest of the maps will be procedural.. No need for hair r beard as same can be achieved with particle systems..Or we can share two version of maps one high res and low res and give the users choice that what they want to use in their projects..
https://blenderartists.org/t/fully-procedural-skin-shader/1226438 ' This is an amazing procedural texture.. Sadly the nodes are not readable..
https://blenderartists.org/t/human-progress/1143224
This is also amazing work by Chris Jones... All the textures were hand painted..No photo scanning
@HarshEcka the model i used was made by Javier Zuccarino and it seems to fit the needs of this project although i had to sculpt the male version a lot as for the textures, i do not know how Chris Jones painted his textures but i am quite happy with mine so far, i've considered using multires to sculpt high poly versions but i feel currently like it's unnecessary and doesn't quite fit with my workflow using substance painter to make bump/displacement maps As For using Luxcore, The Shaders can be retargeted for use in Luxcore but we would like to keep it in a plug in play state for most blender users, as well as that cycles has been adopted and used in much more productions, it has a wider audience and doesn't interfere with other add-ons
Ok. Thanks for the reply.. I will try to create shaders for luxcore. Have you considered looking at the Chambersu work.. he has used MBlab models as base mesh. He has shared his project blend files in is patreon page.. Without being patreon we can access his work. His cloths work is awesome. His skecthfab pages for final results are https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/head-ring-jewly-hair-pin-retopo-and-hairstyle-09294cb14a404d77ad3db9ff6ab49179 and his project files are in https://www.patreon.com/chambersu
@HarshEcka it's nice to see someone use mb-lab in production but it is obvious they are going for a stylized approach which conflicts with my goals. if you have the skills to texture in substance painter or create shaders be my guest. i've provided my assets in this thread
i Have tweaked the original shader along-with new albedo map... Give your reviews regarding the skin..
This is the old shader with albedo map
the results look very vibrant but not sure how it would apply to my shader https://archive.org/download/base-mesh-mb-lab/BaseMeshSubstancePacked.blend try this mostly because it's a complete overhaul of everything regarding shaders and textures that comes with the new base mesh