Research Assignment - Realistic skin sculpting

Yoyoyo want to sculpt realistic skin? check this out. For this tutorial I am using Jhills skin brushes and textures, these brushes are really good and I used them for pretty much the whole tutorial. Definitely recommend them. This tutorial also assumes you have a basic understanding of morph target and layers so keep that in mind. This is pretty much just to give you the gist of the workflow for how to construct believable skin.

 - Disclaimer - I figured this out by just watching Jhills videos on detailing skin in zbrush so big shoutout to him. If you are a character artist you should really watch his videos

If you want a much better understanding of the process watch this

 https://youtu.be/HlHoIGE2Ocs

And if you want the brushes you can find them here

https://artofjhill.com/store/AROb/skin-details-kit

here are the brushes I am using.

First things first, have a head ready to be detailed. You should have something that more or less looks like above. Basically - just have all the primary and secondary forms locked in. 

Store a morph target and create a layer. I named mine base pores. What we are doing is setting down a generic bed of pores as a base. Also just keep all your layers at 1 strength for now you can change that later when you are tweaking values and adjusting things. ALSO its good practice to store a morph target for every new layer you add so you can tweak how it meshes with the others.

Next, go to surface and check noise. Then go to edit.

this is the noise menu. In the bottom left corner hit the alpha box and put in a pores texture in there. in the menu for options you can mess around with alpha scale to change the size of the pores. I used a size of 0.39 for my guy but it varies from character to character. Women also tend to have smaller pores so also factor that if you are making a female character.

Now you have a bed of pores to work off of. You will encounter pores being stretched because the projection of pores is based off of the orientation of the object. This is where the morph target comes into play. Simply use the morph brush to get rid of all the stretched pores. Now All you gotta do is rotate the object to whatever angle (side, top, bottom, etc) so its facing the "front" - in other words the little head in the top right is front view. Then once you do that you can rotate your head back to where it was originally.

Because of the issue above you are gonna have areas where you had to take away pores due to the pore stretching and overlap from projecting pores at different angles. go ahead and make a new layer for manually placing pores to bridge the areas and start placing some pore clusters down. You can adjust the pore brushes size and intensity so it blends better with the surrounding areas.

Next you are gonna want to break up the skin to add some imperfection and blemishes. Create a new layer, get the standard brush, set its brush pattern to color spray and its alpha top alpha 45 and start spraying the pores over the face, I kept a lot of mine in the forehead and cheekbone areas. I hid the other layers so you can see the blemishes better. Your best bet is to add variation is size and intensity

Now you are gonna wanna add some micro wrinkles. If you don't have any brushes for creating human skin microdetails I would try using the dam standard. but for this tutorial I used Jhill's mirco wrinkle brushes. you typically have micro wrinkles in places like the lips, eyes and large skin folds like the nasolabial fold. Of course make sure to do this on a new layer. 

Ok cool now we gonna add even more breakup and bumpy imperfections to the skin. For this I used another jhill brush called Skinsurface. Again its mainly to add a bunch of breakup in the skin. Its all subconscious detail you dont notice but ya brain do you feel me?

Add some forehead wrinkles now. my guys and old fart so he super wrinkly, if you got a beautiful lady than take it down a notch! Anyway make a new layer and add thems wrinkles. I used a brush called Fineline in jhills kit. for larger wrinkles I recommend doing a crosshatch pattern along them. Human skin usually tends to have a crisscross pattern running along wrinkles. Check out the palms of your hands, that's what I mean.

For the nose, typically the pores aren't as strong compared to the rest of the face. You usually see a lot of clogged pores / blackheads in there. Areas around the nostril and underneath the ball of the nose are noticeably smoother but again a lot of the depends on the sex and age of the character. Anyway smooth that shit out and then manually place in individual pores.

Ok now lets do some lips. Basically I used a mix of the fine wrinkle brush, fine line brush and damstandard. I would add some form breakup with the dam standard, starting from the inner part of the mouth. dont go to crazy deep, just some slight form change / bumpiness. then I would go over that in a vertical distribution  with the fine wrinkle brush. Then you can accent a lot of the creases made by the damstandard and finewrinkles with the fineline brush. It may take a few trys and experimentation but yoy will get the hang of it

Badaboom badabing look at that skin. 

After you do that hit ok and then back in the surface menu and hit