The glowing eyes before the skin had loaded was a bit scary, but overall, good work. However, is it possible to easily disable the heavy depth of field? I feel like that might be exaggerating the quality in a way that wouldn't be realistic for practical use, especially in terms of the hair/stubble over their skin.
Thanks! With it off, I do notice that whatever is making the stubble seem like it protrudes(bump? normal? parallax? Been a long time since I've even thought about this stuff) seems a bit low resolution compared to the skin texture itself, as the light rises with the hair in every single case.
Still though, I'm genuinely surprised at just how well it held up without the DOF. I would've thought it'd be much worse, but frankly it looks great. Great demo.
Yup, bump map is indeed lower resolution (1024x1024) than diffuse skin texture (2048x2048).
It would be better to use higher resolution one, but these were the data I had at hand.
I also made a quick-and-dirty 2K gloss map so it should help a bit with adding surface details even if bump map is lower res.
Gloss variations give surprising amount of surface information - in another demo at one point of time I had bugged bump mapping and it took me a while to realize it was broken because gloss map was working so well.
I see a blue outline on the left of the head and a red outline on the right when I do that. I'm guessing that's some edge case for your lighting model?
You know, some time ago, I half-jokingly put forth the idea to some friends, that chromatic aberration will become the new lens flare, i.e. an effect to make rendered 3D graphics look like a movie shot with a cheap camera by an inexperienced cameraman on purpose. I get really sad each time I see one of these effects - they make the graphics worse on purpose to make them look like a bad movie and it wastes processing power.
If you do want to simulate a camera lens, I'm not going to stop you and wish you luck. However, if you want to render 3D images for humans to look at, I'd suggest putting in effects that are observable with a naked eye and not through a glass lens. Stuff like bright light blinding you, eye adjustment to varying light intensity and motion blur. I realise it's a bit harder to implement these effects, since you can't take a reference photo and compare, but I would really like to see someone try to render images as seen by a human and not a camera.
